I LAND ON ALL FOURS, my hands sinking into the wet, slimy ground. My hair has flipped over in front of my face, a dark, oily mass, which smells too much like my pillow at home—somehow a foreign smell, a foreign object to me now. I feel a burn in my right knee. I must have scraped it on the way down, though I don’t know how because everything here is soft and wet and without edges. There’s a rustle—Jonah. I don’t hear anything behind me—no Hadley.
With a muddy hand, I reach up to push the hair out of my face and stand. My knee is tender, but when I look down, the fabric of my pant leg isn’t torn. Jonah’s in front of me, still on his ass, right where he was before. He has moved, though, because his beer is spilled, fizzing softly onto the ground. He’s leaning back on his hands, blinking rapidly like I’ve just startled him from a sound sleep.
“Hey,” I say. I take a short hopping step toward him, away from the tree, from Hadley, like one of those birds who pretends it’s injured in order to draw prey away from its nest. “I must look a mess,” I say, with my mother’s words, not mine. “I mean, muddy.”
Jonah’s eyes narrow down to a squint. “Evie?” It’s funny. When he says my name, it feels like a promise to me, an intimacy. But really it’s just my name; anyone could say it.
“Yeah.” I take another step toward him.
“Is it morning?” He gazes up at the sky and confirms that it’s not. “Are you . . . ? What are you doing here?”
“I was at a sleepover,” I say, stupidly. But Jonah, I’m noticing, is far stupider than I am right now. He shakes his head, but that’s too much for him, so he raises his hands to his forehead in order to hold his head steady. You’re drunk, I want to say, but how naïve, how lame, to point out something like that. Jonah spreads his knees, aims between them, and hurks a glob of spit onto the ground. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and tips his chin up so that he can peer out at me from under half-lidded eyes.
“You’re hurt.” Jonah points a wandering finger at my leg.
“Oh, I—my knee. I scraped it.”
The truth is, it doesn’t hurt much at all. But somehow, without meaning to, I’ve exaggerated the injury. I was hopping before, I know I was, and now I’ve got my leg hanging limp at my side as if it were broken. To prove that I’m okay, I sit down, right in front of him, and begin to hitch up my pant leg to get a better look. Jonah leans forward, kicking his beer bottle so that it skitters through the leaves like a little animal. He hunkers close to me, so close that I inhale the loamy smell of beer on him and see the border between his pink lip and white chin. He lays his hands—the actual palms of them—on my leg. I shiver straight through, not from fear.
Jonah inspects my knee. Mostly it’s just rubbed pink, but there’re a few dots of blood where the skin has been snagged. It’s not much of a wound, but Jonah places his hands on either side of it, framing the scrape. I try to remember the last time someone touched my bare knee. Maybe the doctor with his practiced fingers and rubber mallet, maybe my mother, after I scraped it when I was little. She would blow on my scrapes to cool them, the wind of her breath causing the pain to dance in circles. That was years ago, though. It seems like no one’s touched me in years.
“You need a Band-Aid.”
“It’s nothing,” I say.
His hands don’t move, but I can feel them all over me, like they’re not just framing my knee, but framing every part of me, foot, shoulder, and chin, framing me like a painting, like a photograph, like a house, framing me like a thought, like an innocent man. Jonah stares down at my knee, at the black beads of my blood, the white lace of my scratches, and I am caught between his two hands. I don’t want those hands to move, not ever, but finally they lift away. I can feel where they were, though, just for a second, the way you can feel the spit from someone’s kiss evaporate off of your cheek.
Jonah stares down at his knees, like my knees made him wonder about his own. Then, without a word to announce it, he lumbers up, kicking grass and leaves and twigs, brutish, clumsy. So I stand, too. He is drunk and, therefore, unsteady on his feet, swaying so slightly that looking at him makes me a little dizzy. He crosses one foot in front of the other, as if he has decided to turn and walk to one side of the clearing; then his knees buckle. I gasp, but he catches himself before falling, only to rise again and take two tripping steps forward, almost staggering into me, his toes digging furrows in the ground. I scuffle away from him but realize at the last second that I’m about to tread straight through Zabet’s patch of mud. I halt at its edge, teetering, trying to catch my balance, as if it were not simply the edge of a mud puddle I’m standing on but the edge of a cliff. Jonah brings himself to a stop, too, his forward momentum still caught in his frozen posture so that he leans up and over me. I imagine what we must look like to Hadley: Jonah towering, leering, me cringing away.
The tableau holds for a quivering second and then it breaks as, with a sigh, Jonah lets his legs give way, and he slumps against me, nearly taking me to the ground with him. I make a noise—“Oomf!”—and try to shore up under him. He’s impossibly heavy. But the cotton of his shirt is soft on my cheek; his breath is warm on my neck. If he were sober right now, maybe he’d whisper something against my skin. I strain under his weight and somehow, miraculously, hold him up.
“Right there,” Jonah says. His head is hanging over my shoulder right over the patch of mud. “She was there.” He mutters something else.
“Can you walk? Jonah. Can you—?”
In answer, he shuffles one of his feet forward, and I shore up under him so that his arm is around my shoulders and my hand is bracing his waist. I steer him back toward the street; it takes all the strength my arms have in them. His head lolls to the side, his cheek coming to rest on top of my head.
“Your hair tickles,” he slurs.
“Step,” I order Jonah. “Step.” He lifts his yellow boots and obeys. I think of the Whisperers right then, their pale, eager faces. It’s almost like they’re sitting up there in the trees, bony legs dangling like creepers, watching us. I imagine telling this story to them in the cafeteria on Monday, their gasps, their coos. This time, I wouldn’t have to make up a single thing.
We limp out of the woods, Jonah and I, and I don’t look back at the tree where Hadley’s hiding. I keep my face forward, my eyes on the path in front of me. I picture her peeking out from behind the trunk, watching me walk away, like all the times I’ve watched her.
When we reach the car, Jonah rouses himself a little. He manages to yank a set of keys out of his pocket and to hoist himself up into the driver’s seat before passing out again, this time with his cheek against the wheel. I stare at him helplessly. I could leave him here. But then I picture the jogging divorcees surrounding his car the next morning like a forensics team, running in place as they peer in at Jonah’s slumped body, jogging back to their pastel kitchens and pastel phones, and lodging their complaints. He’ll get fired if I leave him.
The neighborhood is dark around me, even darker than on winter mornings when I can empty my entire satchel before the sun comes up. All the lights are out in the Hokepe houses, except for one yellow window far down the street.
I climb up into the truck next to Jonah. The floor is infested with beer cans that crinkle and squeak when I step on them, like they’re mice or bugs. It’s almost as grimy in here as it is in the back of the truck. Even in the dark, I can see a sanding of dirt and crumbs on the dash and in the folds of the seats. And there are more than just cans on the floor—wadded-up papers, yellowing T-shirts, fast-food wrappers shining with old grease, and a lone sneaker with quarter-size holes in its uppers like something was trapped and had gnawed its way out.
“Jonah.” I shake his shoulder. “Jonah, hey.” He groans. He’s turned the other way, huddled against the side window, so all I can see is the back of his head, his soft, unwashed hair. I can’t even see if his eyes are open or closed. “Hey!” I smack his shoulder and, when I get no reaction, punch it with a thud. Nothing.
I get out and go around to the driver’s side of the cab, pushing Jonah across the bench seat and out of my way. He flops over, grumbling nonsense, but then relents, curling into a ball against the passenger door. His car keys glimmer in the sea of junk on the floor; I pluck them up and buckle myself in. I don’t bother with Jonah’s seat belt. He’s begun to snore.
I drive us out of Hokepe Woods and then farther. We pass by my house just before we cross out of Chippewa. I spot a beige car in the driveway, Rick-from-the-bank’s. Windows dark, lights out in the house. My mother’s own sleepover. I imagine another Evie awake in her bed, hearing Rick-from-the-bank and her mother’s noises through the wall, thinking of her father, wherever he is, knowing he wouldn’t care. Or maybe that other Evie is not awake, not listening, but is asleep, wrapped in her sheets. Me, someone else, drives by in this stranger’s car, no more than a passenger through the night of her world.
I don’t know where Jonah lives exactly, so I pull into one of the neighbor hoods near the college. Mom and I have rented houses out here before. The rentals are, for the most part, shoddy and ill-used due to a seasonal rotation of college kids who burn ramen noodles on top of the stove, who coat the floors with sticky beer and the window sills with mystic pools of candle wax, who stack intricate structures of lawn furniture and leave them to crack, oxidize, and glimmer in a cocoon of spiderwebs, who adopt pets only to abandon them when summer comes, so that armies of semiferal cats yowl, vomit mouse bones, and die under the grooved wheels of cars that don’t even bother to stop.
I choose a street at random, a little piece of free curb. Jonah is still asleep when I pull over and cut the engine. I can look at him openly while he sleeps, without fear of discovery. There’s a crust of wax in the curve of his ear and the rosy bloom of a coming pimple in the fold of his nose. But I forgive him these imperfections immediately and without negotiation. He is Jonah, beautiful Jonah. And I feel that I understand him, and that he would understand me if we knew each other even a little. I reach forward and touch his shoulder. My fingers rise and fall with his sleeping breath. Beneath them is the cotton of his shirt, beneath that his skin, his fat, his muscle, his bone, his marrow . . . and, is there a center? A core? Something essential? Or do the layers just fan out again: marrow, bone, muscle, fat, skin, cotton, air?
I watch my hand as it moves from Jonah’s shoulder to his cheek. A muscle in his face jumps under my fingers and I gasp, startled, but I don’t pull my hand away. Instead I lean forward; closer, until I can see the smudge of his beard; closer, the pores speckling his nose; closer, the threads of vein in his eyelids; closer, the pumice of his chapped lips. His breath wends from his mouth, rotten with beer and sleep. And, if he were perfect—his lips supple, his breath sweet—I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wouldn’t have felt that I had the right to lean even closer, that extra fragment of an inch, and press my lips against his.
Kissing Jonah isn’t how I had imagined it would be. It isn’t how I would tell it, if I were telling someone the story of it. His lips are parched, flaking, paralyzed by sleep. My lips, his lips. I register this not with excitement or nervousness but with a disinterested curiosity. I release my lips and then press them to his again, just to see, once more, how it might feel.
Is this how it is for Hadley when Garrett smashes his mouth into hers? Or my mother when Rick-from-the-bank smears the perfect crayon lines of her lipstick? Is this the secret of a kiss: not that you feel something but that you feel nothing? I pull away and take a deep breath and then have to pause and fight a giddy peal of laughter that tickles the back of my throat. One more try, I tell myself. And this time when I lean down to kiss Jonah, he kisses me back.
Then we are kissing. Jonah’s hand fumbles along my waist. His lips move under mine like blind things, newborn things searching for light. And all at once, the startling, wet muscle of his tongue is there in my mouth. All my questions about kissing are answered at once, the sum of my hypotheses exposed as false, boxes ticked with checkmarks right down the line. I don’t have to think or worry or be afraid; for once, there is none of that. There is only the ferment of Jonah’s breath, the grit of crumbs under my palms as I lean across the seat, and finally me, perfect me, wondrous me, pushing closer to Jonah, kissing Jonah, when he wakes and opens his eyes.
“Oh,” he says when he sees me there at the other end of his lips. It is not the oh of being presented with a surprise gift, nor is it the oh of finding a spider in the shower; rather, it is the tiny syllable mouthed during the pause in someone’s tedious story, an inoffensive and noncommittal oh, its only purpose to show that, yes, you have been listening to whatever the speaker droned on about. Oh. It says everything.
I wilt back across the seat, my retreat ending only because I’m stopped by the truck door. I slip my hand behind my back, groping for the door handle. Shame creeps from its secret hovels in my throat and eye sockets. This shame presses against me, doubling, tripling, expanding until I might explode into ribbons or confetti. And I will allow it; I will let myself explode, just as soon as I find the goddamn door handle.
Jonah wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. I stare at it. What repugnant cells have you wiped away? I want to say. What slimes have you gotten rid of? Jonah sees the look on my face and drops the hand into his lap, where it twitches. I know he wants to dry it against his jeans; I can as good as see him resist the impulse.
“Oh,” he says again.
I am silent. I am disgusting. I am terrible.
“Weird,” he says next. He fidgets, but sleepily, scratches at an elbow in slow motion. His words are still slurry. “Weird . . . night.”
He waits for a reply, but I don’t have one to offer. I watch him, my hand creeping behind my back secretly, like I’m going for my weapon, the firm, cold handle of the door.
“Back there . . . you fell out of . . . trees.” He manages to lift his heavy eyelids a bit wider and speaks like this was wondrous, not to be believed. “There you were.”
This conversation feels familiar, but I can’t say exactly how. My hand continues its crawl across the truck door, moving over the window crank, the too-small armrest, the tiny metal ashtray, before finally closing around the door handle itself, right at the middle of my back. And just as I take that lever in my hand, it hits me: This conversation is familiar because it’s like every conversation that Jonah and I have had, only backward. This time, instead of me trying to charm and cajole, it is Jonah. Instead of Jonah being wordless and searching for escape, it is me. I pause with my hand on the lever, fascinated, waiting to see what Jonah will say next.
He’s looking at me through his sacrificial-cow lashes, his dumb blink. It’s the kindest look he’s ever given me, right now, when he is rejecting me. A tiny smile touches his lips, and he looks down and back up again, as if preparing to tell me something he shouldn’t.
“I thought you were her,” he slurs. “But that couldn’t . . . you couldn’t . . . you weren’t her. You were . . . you. I just, for a second, in the trees, I thought—”
“Her?” I croak. I press back against the door, the window, on the nape of my neck, damp from the condensation of our kisses. My kisses.
“Her,” he says. His chin begins to drop down to his chest like he might pass out again.
“Who?” I ask. His head dips and then jerks up again. He mutters something, his eyes closed. “Jonah, who did you think I was? Jonah!”
He lifts his head, opens his eyes and says, as clear as can be, “That dead girl.”
And, with that, I lift the door handle and fall backward into the night.
The landing hurts. I hit the road on my back and knock my head against the pavement. I bite down on my lip, through it, actually. When I open my mouth, I can feel my tooth slide up and out of where it was buried in my skin, slippery and metallic with blood. The breath has been knocked out of me. I gasp for air, suck at it, but my rib cage won’t expand and my lungs won’t fill, as if the rules have changed and I’m no longer allowed to breathe. Jonah is saying my name in a tone of dumb wonder, and I can hear him crawling across the seat. It is this—the idea of his pitying drunk face—that makes me stand and then makes me run.
I run until I can breathe again, until I can’t breathe because the breath isn’t enough and my sides are going to pull apart, sinew from rib bone. I cut through yards and dodge headlights, running until I have to stop and cough great gusts of lost breath down at the ground. I spend ten minutes crouched in the corner of someone’s backyard until I’m sure Jonah’s given up, if he even looked for me at all, that is. The dead girl. That’s what he said. I thought he knew her name.
I emerge blocks away from where I started and walk down the road. I blot the blood on my lip and chin with one of my sleeves. Still, I am a zombie, a muddy fright. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I manage to flag down a car, a group of college students—glittered, tipsy—coming back from a party.
“Are you okay?” the girl in the passenger seat asks. “How old are you?”
I know the answer to this one. “Eighteen. Can I get a ride?”
“I’m not taking her anywhere weird,” the kid who’s driving says.
“Please,” I say. “I just want to go home.” So he agrees. And when I get out of the car, the college kids call after me to “be good” and to “sleep it off.” They think I’m drunk, and what else would I be, wandering around in my pajama bottoms and Hadley’s sweater, bloodylipped, streaks of leaf mulch down my front, mud painting my face, and the scent of Jonah’s spilled beer still clinging to my skin? Which is just how Mr. McCabe finds me when he answers his door.