I heard a door slam, the stark punctuation of a woman’s shoes. Someone pulled open the door at the end of the hall, letting it slam. For one mad moment, I thought it was Hannah; the slim person walking toward me was wearing all black — a black skirt and short-sleeved shirt, black heels — exactly what she wore the first time I saw her, all those months ago in Fat Kat Foods.
But it was Jade.
She looked pale, gutter-thin, her blond hair slicked back in a ponytail. As she passed under the fluorescent lights the top of her head flashed a whitish green. Shadows swam through her face as she walked, staring at the floor. When she finally noticed me, I knew she wanted to turn back, but didn’t let herself. Jade hated all retreats, U-turns, backpedaling, and second thoughts.
“I don’t have to see you if I don’t want to,” she said as she stopped in front of the flowers and cards. She leaned down and inspected them, a pleasant, relaxed smile on her face as if she were peering in at cases of expensive watches. After a minute, she turned around and stared at me.
“You planning to stand there all day like a moron?”
“Well, I—” I began.
“Because I’m not going to sit here and lug it out of you.” She put a hand on her hip. “I assumed because you’ve called me like some lunatic stalker for the past week you had something decent to say.”
“I do.”
“What?”
“I don’t understand why everyone’s angry at me. I didn’t do anything.”
Her eyes widened in shock. “How can you not understand what you did?”
“What did I do?”
She crossed her arms. “If you don’t know, Retch, I’m not going to tell you.” She turned and leaned down to inspect the cards again. A minute later, she said: “I mean, you disappeared on purpose and made her go look for you. Like some weird game or something. No, don’t even try to say you went to the bathroom because we found that roll of toilet paper still in Hannah’s backpack, okay? And then you — well, we don’t know what you did. But Hannah went from laughing with us without a care in the world to hanging from a tree. Dead. You did something.”
“She signaled for me to get up and disappear into the woods. It was her idea.”
Jade made a face. “When was this?”
“Around the campfire.”
“Not true. I was there. I don’t remember her—”
“No one saw her but me.”
“That’s convenient.”
“I left. She came and found me. We walked into the woods for ten minutes, then she stopped and said she had to tell me something. A secret.”
“Ooo, what was the secret? That she sees dead people?”
“She never told me.”
“Oh, God.”
“Someone followed us. I didn’t see him clearly but I think he was wearing glasses, and then — this is the part I can’t figure out — she went after him. She told me to stay where I was. And that’s the last time I saw her.” (It was a white lie, of course, but I’d decided to remove the fact I’d seen Hannah dead from my history. It was an appendix, a functionless organ that could become infected and thus it could be surgically removed without upsetting any other part of the past.)
Jade stared at me, skeptical. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth. Remember the cigarette butt Lu found? Someone had been there.”
She looked at me, eyes wide, and then shook her head. “I think you have a serious problem.” She allowed her bag to fall to the floor, on its side. It belched up two books, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, 1996 ed.) and How to Write a Poem (Fifer, 2001). “You’re desperate. And completely sad and embarrassing. Whatever your lame excuses are, no one gives a shit. It’s over.”
She was waiting for me to protest, fall to my knees, moan, but I couldn’t. I sensed the impossibility of it. I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life’s answers worked out the day they’re born and there’s no use trying to teach them anything new. “They’re closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday,” Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they’ll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor’s hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor’s hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free.
“We don’t think you’re like, psychotic, or a Menendez brother,” Jade said. “You probably didn’t do it on purpose. But still. We talked it over and decided if we’re honest with ourselves we can’t forgive you. I mean, she’s gone. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means the world to us. Milton, Charles loved her. Leulah and I adored her. She was our sister—”
“That’s breaking news,” I interrupted. (I couldn’t help myself; I was Dad’s daughter and thus prone to blowing the whistle on Hypocrisy and Double-Talk.) “Last I heard, you thought she was responsible for estranging you from mint chocolate chip ice cream. You were also worried she was a member of the Manson Family.”
Jade looked so enraged, I wondered if she was going to fling me to the linoleum and rip out my eyes. Instead, her lips shrunk and she turned the color of gazpacho. She spoke in pointy little words: “If you’re so dumb that you can’t understand why we’re upset beyond all possible belief, I’m not having this conversation. You don’t even know what we went through. Charles went out of his mind and fell off a cliff. Lu and Nigel were hysterical. Even Milton broke down. I was the one who hauled everyone to safety, but I’m still traumatized by the experience. We thought we were going to die, like those people in the movie when they’re stuck in the Alps and forced to eat each other.”
“Alive. Before it was a movie, it was a book.”
Her eyes widened. “You think this is a joke? Don’t you get it?”
She waited, but I didn’t get it — I really didn’t.
“Whatever,” she said. “Stop calling my house. It’s annoying for my mother to have to talk to you and give you excuses.”
She leaned down and picked up her bag, heaving it up onto her shoulder. Primly she smoothed back her hair, displaying the self-consciousness of the Ones Making an Exit; she was well aware that a great deal of Exiting had been done before her, for millions of years and millions of different reasons, and now it was her turn and she wanted to do a decent job. With a prim smile on her face, she picked up The Norton Anthology of Poetry and How to Write a Poem, took great pains to tuck them neatly into her bag. She sniffed, pressed her black sweater over her waist (as if she’d just completed a first round of interviews at Whatever Corp.) and began to make her way down the hall. As she walked away, I could tell she was considering joining the elite subgroup within the Ones Making an Exit, a sect reserved for the wholly unsentimental and the completely hard-boiled: The Ones Who Never Looked Back. She decided against it, however.