Sometimes Hannah would light a cigarette. She’d hand it to Felice, who held it up between two fingers, admiring the thin white trickle of smoke. She didn’t puff on it, though: Stanley was contemptuous of smokers. She and Hannah lounged on the gray upholstered couch pushed against the wall. One day Hannah talked about her older brother Simon (Semir) who’d killed himself by drinking the cleaning fluids stored under the bathroom sink. She talked about it in a casual way, as if she were describing a shopping trip.
“Why? Why did he do it?” Felice was breathless: she couldn’t imagine losing her brother.
Hannah looked disoriented: she touched her hair, which fell around her shoulders in pieces. Finally she said, “It was years ago. I hardly remember. He kept talking to himself a lot. And not to anyone else. I guess it was sort of like he forgot how to be happy.” Then she smiled briefly and said, “I hope that never happens to me.”
“Me either,” Felice said, chilled and heartbroken for her friend.
Late on a Tuesday afternoon, after class, Hannah told her she had to get home early that day to help her mother “have her usual mental breakdown.” This entailed, apparently, Hannah doling to her mother just the right number of Vicodin. “So she doesn’t go haywire again,” Hannah said, tugging on the sleeves of her thin black sweater. Then she and her mother watched TV together, but when Felice asked what they watched, Hannah admitted her mother generally slept through all of it. “I think the only reason she’s still working is for the drugs.”
Felice had never heard stories like this before. “Aren’t you worried about her? What does your dad say?”
She shrugged and pulled the sleeves over her hands. “They know the deal. I’ve already told them I’m out of here in a year or so.”
“You’re only fourteen years old!”
“So?” Her face was clear and cool. “And they’re a million and I can already do a better job than them.”
“Where would you go?”
“Europe. Spain. Basque Country maybe. You should come with me. We’ll take over the world.”
Felice smiled and her gaze rippled over her friend. But suddenly Hannah seemed to harden, as if she were offended, and she said, “There’s no point anyway. All any of us are doing is wasting time until we die.”
“So there’s no point to doing anything?”
She turned her head. “Doesn’t matter if you’re president or a bum. Not in the end. It all goes back to zero.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Sometimes it was easier to be friends with Hannah when she wasn’t around. There was something perfect about school after final bell — the formal emptiness of the halls. Felice and Hannah had talked about all sorts of plans — how they’d make movies together and see things. But when Felice was alone she could sink into the feeling of the future — the delicious ache of it — just by pointing her thoughts into the distance.
Felice slipped into the music room, evading the custodial staff who sometimes patrolled the school’s east wing. It was silent and the room was full of long shadows. She left the lights off: beyond the windows, she could see rain prickling the cement courtyard. She heard a sound then and, turning, realized that she wasn’t alone in the room.
Two people. They appeared to be crumpled together on the couch. She gradually made out Hannah’s straight, choppy hair, her blouse unbuttoned and pushed down around her middle. Her skin had a bluish-white cast like marble. She’d never seen her friend’s body before. Hannah, for all her ironic, knowing ways, was extremely modest — she refused to disrobe in front of or shower with the other girls after P.E. Hannah’s eyes were lowered, her arms coiled around a man’s bare back — his shirt on the floor, his fly flapping open, though his pants were still pulled up. There was a sound like a sigh and a moan — they hadn’t seen her come in. Felice watched them, frozen. The man released another awful whimper: it was Mr. Rendell. Felice ran out of the room, the double doors crashing shut after her.
She ran down the hall to the girls’ bathroom where she burst into sobs, bent over the sinks. When Hannah came in a few moments later, she could barely look at her in the mirror. She kept seeing the small arc of her friend’s right breast squashed under Mr. Rendell’s chest, the careful, precise expression on Hannah’s face.
“Please don’t report him.” Her voice was trembling; she patted at her shirt, buttoning. “It doesn’t matter at all. It’s nothing.”
“You said you were going home.” This was the least of it, but somehow it was the thing Felice picked to say.
“I know. It’s stupid. He doesn’t even really like me. He just picked me because I’m friends with you.” Hannah’s face looked young and bare and frightened. “But he knew you’d never go with him, of course.”
Felice was shaking all over; she rubbed her arms with her hands; she kept feeling little surges of nausea. “So horrid.”
“I know.” Her voice was high and faint.
Another sort of possibility occurred to Felice then, a chill entering her bloodstream as she whispered, “Did he force you?”
Hannah’s eyes seemed huge in the dim light. “A little, the first time,” she murmured. After a moment, she dropped her eyes and said, “Not really. I kind of was happy about it. I couldn’t believe that he liked me. Even a little.”
“The first time? How often?” she started to ask; she broke off in the middle of often. She wanted to comfort Hannah, to feel sympathy for her.
Hannah started trying to explain to Felice, to give her details, in their old gossipy way. “It was the time you had the dentist, remember? You missed orchestra. Rendell said he wanted to go over a new song with me. Such a skank. He locked the doors that time — but I could tell he liked thinking about getting caught.”
Felice tried to nod and laugh, but then for some reason, Hannah faltered and said, “I’m really sorry.”
FELICE STRIDES AHEAD on the sand and Marren lets her — she knows he won’t let her get too far. At least she doesn’t have to look at him. The moon is burning through the sky and there are gray shadows everywhere. She skirts the Starbucks beach entrance, passes the thick thatches of sea grass — half trampled by tourists, even in low season — and wanders toward the Cove. “Over this way!” she calls, trying to project her voice. She can hear him trudging behind, his breath coming in the asthmatic smoker’s wheeze she knows well — lots of outdoor kids have it. He doesn’t have to be fast, of course, if he has a gun. Felice hopes one of the kids might recognize her voice. Farther back on the sand, away from the water, she senses other forms shifting past them: street kids — staying silent and unseen.
But there’s no sign of Berry or Reynaldo. Of course: they’ll be out clubbing for hours yet. They won’t return till the water starts glimmering. The ocean looks high and white tonight, as if there is a hidden engine churning inside: the waves rumble, a deep drumming, rolling over all other sounds. For years, she’s thought there was a way to stay safe: when bad stuff happened to people, it was because they were crazy or stupid. She’d even thought that about Hannah. As she waits for Marren to close the distance between them, she thinks: There’s no escape for anyone. Felice stops and turns deliberately into the moonlight, tiring of cat-and-mouse play, facing into the glassy darkness between herself and Marren. She feels the ghost of an old age she will never live to see settling over her, oxidation rustling in her bones, catching up with her. Marren moves toward her. The night wobbles over his shoulder, and she sees that she’s walked farther ahead of the man than she’d realized. For a moment, the noise of the surf seems to recede and she can hear his breath, the little huffs, as if he’s already getting winded. “Hey, girlie,” he calls. “Slow it down now.”