Why They Run the Way They Do (26 page)

I fell asleep. When I woke the clock above the TV said 11:30 and the house was quiet. I went to the top of the basement steps. The lights were still on but everything was silent; no way there were four boys, even two, even one, down there. I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that Toby'd seen me asleep on the couch and gone to bed of his own accord. Of course this was not the case; his room was empty.

“Shit,” I said.

Then, from downstairs, came the sound of the front door closing. Quietly. I had never yelled at Toby before, never had reason to, but now he was in for it. What if the Hartsocks had come home early and found me asleep on the couch and him gone, at 11:00 on a Saturday night? I stormed down the stairs and came upon Dean, standing at the mirror in the front hall, wiping white paint from his cheeks with a paper napkin.

“S'up, Kit-Kat?” he asked, his reflection acknowledging me with a nod. He was dressed as some garden variety ghoul: tight black pants, black turtleneck, white face, lips thick with bloody lipstick.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I scare you?” He burped, then smiled. “You don't look so hot. You look like, I dunno, like maybe—”

“I'm fine,” I said. He smelled as if he'd swum in the keg before pumping it. He went to work on his nose; the paint fell in flakes on the tiled hall floor.

“Tobes asleep?”

“No,” I said, before it occurred to me to lie, to cover my own ass.

“No?” He turned. His forehead and chin were still white, his lips still red. Only his cheeks and nose were the color of flesh, and somehow this looked ever more ghoulish, half dead and half alive.

“I don't know where he is,” I said. “He was downstairs playing Xbox with his friends and now he's gone.”

“You didn't hear 'em go out?”

“No. I—I must have been in the bathroom or something.”

“That little shit. Time are my parents coming home?”

“I don't know. Like, in an hour or something.”

“Moron,” he said. “What's he thinking? Where would a bunch of ten-year-olds go at this hour?”

I drove his car to the Burger King parking lot; though he'd driven home from the party, I thought it best to designate myself his driver for the rest of the evening. The car stank of beer and (I was almost certain) Rachel Cook's perfume. Where'd she gone? I wondered. And why had he come home so early? I snuck a look over at him as I drove. His eyes were closed. He had his fingers hooked in the collar of his turtleneck, pulled away from his throat as if he were having trouble breathing. Perhaps they'd broken up.

“Dean,” I said gently. “We're here. But I can go look for them myself. You don't have to—”

“I'm okay,” he said, sitting up straight. “I'm good. I just needed a little down time.”

The night was cold and the ground squished under our feet as we made our way into the woods. In another few days the frost would come and the ground would get hard and the scorched earth where the wreckage had smoldered would turn brittle.

“This sucks,” Dean said. He stumbled over a root and had to do a little dance to keep upright.

“We should have brought a flashlight,” I said. “You have one in your car?”

“Nah. I'm an idiot, Katie. I never have anything I need. Never. I swear, I'm like—”

“Drunk,” I said. “You're drunk. You're not an idiot.”

“Why'd we stop bein' friends?” Dean asked.

“We're still friends,” I said. Something scuttled under a nearby branch; the moon slid out from a cloud and illuminated the tops of the trees.

“You know what I mean. You were my best friend, Kit-Kat . . . Katie. You stood out there and watched that plane. You've always been there. You're the best girl I've ever known. You're the best—”

“Dean,” I said. “Shut up, okay? You're really drunk.”

“So? That doesn't mean it's not true.”

He grabbed my wrist. Maybe if it had been my hand he'd grabbed I would have felt differently about the whole thing. Maybe it would have been sweet and clumsy and endearing. Not that he knew either way; he'd just grabbed, and come up with what he came up with.

“You're awesome, Katie,” he said.

He yanked me roughly back toward him and kissed me hard. His lips were tacky with lipstick and the thick taste of beer in his mouth made me gag. His grip on my wrist tightened and he locked his other arm across the small of my back and thrust himself against me. I felt as panicked as if I'd been jumped by a complete stranger, a faceless man who'd leapt from behind a tree. I forced myself to think
I am kissing Dean I am kissing Dean
and for a moment I let myself into it, thinking that it didn't matter why Dean was kissing me and it didn't matter where we were or anything but this kiss and his arms around me and as I gave into him in that instant I felt my knees give and then we toppled onto the wet ground. And he was on top of me and he was heavy, so heavy, and all I could think was how could I not have thought about how heavy a person would be on top of me? How in all my times imagining this, every detail and sensation, could I have neglected to consider the sheer weight of a man? Other things—the stink of his breath, his fingernails digging in my wrist, his flaking white forehead, the twigs stabbing my back, the cold, damp leaves mashing up under the collar of my shirt—none of these things in the moment were more of a surprise than the physical burden of being under Dean.

I might have told him some of this, were I not being suffocated, but all I could muster was “Dean . . .” and even that was said so softly that I myself almost mistook it for a coo of passion. “Dean . . .” I tried again. “Dean, stop.”

He paused and raised his head, his eyes wide, his bloody lips parted.

“You hear that?” he asked.

“It was me,” I said, my voice trembling. “I—”

“No,” he said. He spun off me and in one move was upright. “It was them.”

For a moment I'd forgotten why we were out here. “What? Who?”

“The kids,” he said. “Listen . . .”

Instead of listening, I took the opportunity to sit up, to wipe the muck from my back. And then, as I struggled to my knees, my heart still racing and my breath still short, I heard a whoop from the distance.

“That's Toby,” Dean said. “That goddamn—”

He took a few steps away from me, in the direction of the sound, then stopped and turned back. I was still on my knees in the mud. His face softened.

“Shit, Katie,” he said. He put his hand down to me and I took it and let him pull me to my feet. His hand was coarse and cold, and as we walked a few steps deeper into the woods I let my fingers slip from his.

“Jesus,” he said. “That was stupid back there. I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Whatever,” I said. I didn't even know what he thought was stupid: kissing me, or kissing me the way he did. “It doesn't matter.”

“I'm sorta drunk,” he said. “You know how sometimes you just want to know how it would be with a person? You know, somebody you've known forever? I guess that's kinda stupid.”

“I guess,” I said.

“I didn't—” he started. “I mean, I didn't hurt you or do something or—”

“It's okay,” I said. “I'm okay.”

“I guess this is one of those things you look back on and it's funny,” he said. “Like when we're forty or something we'll talk about the time we made out in the woods.”

“Sure,” I said, though I knew for certain that we would not speak of it again, ever, that not only would Dean Hartsock never be my boyfriend but that he would also never be my friend. He was my neighbor, my acquaintance by coincidence. He was the boy I played with when I was a child.

I saw their costumes first, in the light of the moon that filtered through the trees. A ninja, a skeleton, a boxer, and a hobo, cast off, crumpled in piles at the edge of the water. The four naked boys walked silent circles around the murky pond, the brown water lapping against their hairless chests. Their eyes were closed, their faces pressed in concentration. I imagined their toes clenching the mud.

“Jesus,” Dean whispered. We crouched down in the brush. “What're they doing?”

“They're on a treasure hunt,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said again. “In that shit?” I thought then that he would yell at his brother, that—now sober, his wits about him—he would lay into all four of them, haul them out of the filthy water and march them back half-naked through the woods, raging the whole time about how he had to come out here and track them down.

“Kit-Kat,” he whispered.

I turned to him. He was smiling. “What?”

“That's just like something we woulda done. I love it. It's totally crazy.”

“Hey, Dean!” Toby shouted, catching sight of us. “Hey, Dean! Check this out!”

Dean stood and unzipped his pants. “You guys find anything?”

“Tyler found a bobby pin!”

He looked down at me. “What d'ya say? Let's take a look, huh?”

I just stared at him. My brain was numb, my bones humming. After a moment he stepped out of his jeans, pulled his shirt over his head. Then, nearly naked in the dark, he reached for my face and wiped my bottom lip gently with his thumb. When he took his thumb away it was bright red.

A bobby pin. Was there anything worth
less
than a bobby pin? Had anyone ever regretted the loss of one, dislodged during gym class or shopping for sweaters? The one buried in the mud in the middle of these woods could have come from a hundred different places, could have slipped from the hair of a girl on her back, before the plane, before any of this. And yet I watched them, unable in that moment to walk away from Dean, or from those boys who believed that the treasure they unearthed might bear some resemblance to the treasure they'd imagined. What exactly were they hoping to find? Something to give back to the people of our town, something we could keep as a memento, something to say, we were here, we saw it, we lived under it and now we live over it, this land, this water, we will walk in circles forever searching and some day we will find something that explains it all, something that says here is what transpired and here is why it is important. Here. Here. A gift from us. For you.

Thanks to my brilliant editor and friend, Marysue Rucci, for sticking with me. I could not ask for a smarter reader, a more patient editor, or a more enthusiastic cheerleader. And thanks to the rest of the team at Simon & Schuster, especially the talented and unflappable duo of Elizabeth Breeden and Laura Regan.

Immense thanks goes to my BFF&N Mary Beth Berger Baken, who has been my most thoughtful reader and my lifelong pen pal, beginning when we lived next door to each other.

Thanks also to Randolph Thomas and Brad Barkley and Marion Winik for their consistent good advice and unwillingness to let me get away with much.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Dickinson College for their support, and a most enthusiastic shout-out to my amazing students, past and present, who are a constant source of information and inspiration.

Thanks to Betsy Perabo for her seemingly effortless expertise as sister and friend and reader. And to my parents who continue to inspire me as a parent and teacher and writer.

Thanks and love to my amazing children for giving me the two best excuses in the world for taking fifteen years to write this book. And to Sha'an Chilson for giving me a million reasons to get up from my desk and a million reasons to go back to it. Do I know how lucky I am? I do. I do. I do.

Finally, always, thanks to my beloved teachers and classmates at the University of Arkansas, many of whose hands will never touch these pages, but whose wisdom and humanity has touched all these words.