The Hazel Wood Page 4

  “I’m Alice Crewe,” I’d said quietly, looking over his shoulder. Considering Proserpine was a ridiculous last name of my grandmother’s invention, my mom was cool with me going by any last name I wanted. I’d chosen mine at age eight, after reading A Little Princess.

  He nodded. “I get it. Proserpine’s a lot. I mean, I should know. Technically I’m Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch.” He clocked my look of horror. “No, seriously. People always say, ‘But what happens when two people with hyphenated last names marry each other?’ Well, that’s what happens. I go by Finch.”

  People passing by were nodding at Finch and giving me the appraising new-girl look. I should’ve been used to it, but I wasn’t.

  “Cool story, Finch,” I said, with more acid than I intended.

  He blinked but didn’t walk away. “Your grandmother’s book is like nothing I’ve ever read,” he said in a quieter voice. It was a tone I was familiar with: the hushed voice of the true believer.

  It made me prickle with discomfort, and with something else—a jealousy I didn’t want to look at too closely. “I’ve never met her,” I’d blurted, slamming my locker shut. “You probably know more about her than I do.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not. The bitch of it was, we probably knew the exact same stuff about Althea, from the same secondhand sources—except he’d gotten to read the book. Before he could say another word, I’d cut through the crowds and down the hall.

  That should’ve been the last time we spoke, but Finch had a way of turning up.

  First I saw him in the park, jogging in a corduroy jacket. I’d wondered if he was running from a mugger, then saw the embarrassing white sneakers and realized corduroy and denim were his exercise clothes. “Alice!” he’d yelled as he passed, his voice happy and his hair exploding around his headphones.

  A week later I ran into him at a bookstore on Fifty-Seventh Street. It was like something out of a bad movie: I’d tugged a fat, tattered copy of Yeats down from a shelf, and there he was, a book-sized slice of him in the space it left behind. He was chewing his thumbnail, reading Patti Smith.

  The third time I saw him he was under an awning at a restaurant a block from Harold’s, its long windows open to let summer in and a spill of rich people at tiny, marble-topped tables out. He was sitting with a man I recognized from the internet as his father and a gaunt woman with a sharp blonde bob, trailing a steak knife through crème brûlée. He caught me looking before I could turn away, and stood up like he was on strings. In three bounds he was away from the restaurant and walking beside me.

  “You saved me,” he said. “I was starting to levitate back there. I was starting to think, What if my entire life has been watching my stepmom take fourteen minutes to eat one bite of dessert, and all my memories of the world before that were just implanted by the Matrix? Hi, Alice.”

  “Hi,” I said, flustered. I was on my way home from work. My shirt was covered in scone crumbs and my hair was spiked with sweat.

  “You smell like a coffee bean,” he said when we reached the corner. “It’s awesome.” He glanced back at the restaurant, his face so full of regret I almost laughed. “Okay, I better get back.”

  “Back to stabbing your dessert.”

  His smile reached his eyes then, just for a moment. A flicker of light on dark water. Then he swung around and walked back up the sidewalk.

  After that he’d started waiting at my locker some mornings, leaning against it with one foot up like something out of an eighties movie.

  “Crewe,” he’d say, nodding, then he’d stand there while I juggled my books. When I was done he’d pull a book off the top of my stack, walk me to class, and hand it back when we got there, like an inside joke he had with himself. Finch’s approval was armor. I wasn’t just Audrey’s weird stepsister, I was Finch’s … something. Charity case?

  Friend?

  It wouldn’t be a first, exactly, but close enough. I didn’t talk much to anyone. It wasn’t that people didn’t try—there’s always somebody who wants to adopt the new girl. I’m small, with blonde hair and dark eyes that look soft and surprised until I get angry.

  “Aren’t you a pretty little house cat,” a teacher said to me once, in a low voice nobody else could hear. It was my first week as a freshman in Nashville. His words and the way he’d looked when he said them shivered under my skin and stayed there like poison. The only way to purge it was to pour a thermos of hot coffee into the keyboard of his laptop. I never got caught, and I never stopped hating the disconnect between what I saw in the mirror and how I felt.

  But it was different with Ellery Finch. I’d grown up too steeped in fairy tales and shit luck that kicked in like clockwork to believe much in coincidence. I had … something with Finch. I’d never quite decided what that might be, but there was this skin of meaning that had attached itself to him. Maybe it was the Althea connection, or the way our paths kept crossing like we were skaters spinning in a figure eight. Or maybe it was wanting to see that light in his eyes again, a possibility that made my skin flutter with heat rash.

  It was weird that Audrey’s seat was empty—she never ditched Drama—but I took it as the gift from the universe that it was. She had a way of identifying weak spots and sticking her fingers in them. She liked to watch me and Finch like she was watching TV.

  And my premonition was right: Toby paired us up, dropping a quick wink that filled me with a hot-lava embarrassment—for myself, but also for him. Teachers who clocked their students’ alliances, then tried to play matchmaker, were almost as sad as teachers who let themselves get bullied by teenage girls in Nars lip gloss.

  I pretended to look for something in my bag while my face cooled, then drifted over to where Finch sat, watching me come and bending back the cover of The Glass Menagerie.

  “Hey, Crewe.”

  “Finch,” I replied.

  “You want to read Laura, or should I?”

  I hated Tennessee Williams’s Laura. She reminded me too much of a fairy-tale character. Not the ones my grandmother wrote, allegedly—those women drew blood. No, she was the worst type of Grimm Brothers beauty: isolated, soft-spoken, waiting for a man to save her. She probably looked like me.

  “You take Laura,” I said quickly.

  For the next fifteen minutes we ran lines together. He was weirdly good. Most of us didn’t try, and the ones who did tried way too hard, speaking in plummy stage tones that had everything to do with the school myth that Toby was a talent scout in disguise. You should’ve seen Audrey chewing over Maggie the Cat.

  When the bell rang, Finch put his hand out affectedly, like he was laughing at himself for doing it. That was his thing, I’d noticed: doing everything with an ironic twist. Like he was going to laugh at himself before anyone else could. Being a perpetual new kid made you an anthropologist of the American Teen, and I’d seen his type before. I’d seen every type before.

  I hesitated, then shook it.

  “We should meet up on purpose sometime,” he said, holding on for an extra beat. “Like, outside of school. Don’t you think?”

  I pulled away, my mind filling like a fishbowl with reasons to say no. Ella needed me. We’d be leaving town soon anyway. The bad luck. Maybe Ella thought it was sleeping, but after last night I didn’t buy it.

  But Finch looked nervous. His voice had a tremor in it, a bend that gave his last word an extra syllable. His friends were watching from the door, a skinny beanpole whose name I could never remember, because it was one of the few normal names at this school—Mike? Mark?—and Astrid, a long-haired girl who looked at me with a distinctly wounded expression on her face.

  “Yeah,” I said. “All right.”

  He grinned, walking backward a few steps with his hands shoved into his pockets. He turned as one of Audrey’s friends shoved by me, laughing in a way that made sure I knew she’d been listening. I ignored her and gave Finch a head start at getting gone, confusion making my hands slow and stupid as I gathered my stu
ff.

  Is that all there is? The thought came to me on a scrap of song. The thing between us, the weird growing thing that looked like nothing head-on but sometimes glowed in the corners of my vision, like a secret. Was it just a crush, something as stupid as that? Would we get coffee now? Would he try to hold my hand?

  I thought over our whole brief history—me being rude and him being funny and our quiet walks down the hall—and the idea of him wanting something more from me, something I wasn’t prepared to give, closed in on me like sweaty fingers.

  But there was a story I’d heard about Finch since the first time we spoke, the kind of thing you learned by osmosis going to a small school like Whitechapel. It was the first reason I’d stopped trying to drive him away, before better ones crowded in. Something about his father and the man’s new wife. Something about Finch’s mother and pills and a bathtub. His mom had been a little bit famous, to a certain set of people, so when she died the story was news.

  It made me think of the way Finch’s eyes blanked out to zero when he wasn’t smiling or laughing, and the way almost nobody smiled and laughed as much as he did. And it made me wonder if we weren’t a little bit alike. Behaving the way we had to to get by, while hiding a core that was a mystery even to ourselves.

  6

  After school I loitered on the sidewalk waiting for Audrey. She didn’t show, and neither did the town car. I checked my phone, tapped out half a text, erased it. Every moment I stood there it became more excruciatingly possible Finch would walk out the door and see me. When the need to avoid that became too much, I started walking.

  I heard the broken-box-fan sound of its engine before I saw it: a rickety yellow cab idling along beside me, with outsize fenders that made it look like a getaway car in an old movie. Actual plush dice hung from its mirror.

  My heart did something funny, but the driver’s hair was dark, not red. He was a boy not much older than me, reaching across to crank down the passenger window.

  “Need a lift?” He looked at me from under the brim of what could only be described as a cabbie cap.

  New York cab drivers never actually said that. They said, “Where you going,” in a robotic voice, and if they didn’t like your answer, they shook their heads and sped away.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “You sure?” His brown eyes were sly. “I don’t think your ride is coming.”

  Something about the way he said it set off alarm bells deep in the forested part of my mind. The part that tells you not to walk down a particular street at night, or to change subway cars when a certain kind of crazy gets on. “I wasn’t waiting for a ride,” I lied.

  “Why don’t you take one anyway?”

  I looked straight at him, his dark, narrow face and mocking eyes, and a feeling of vertigo swept from my face to my feet. I’d never met him, but I knew him. I couldn’t remember why or from where. It was something about the way he spoke to me, like he knew me, too, and we were having a conversation we’d had before.

  I stepped back. Then kept stepping, and turned and began running down the street, my bag hanging from my fingers and bouncing against my leg. An old woman wearing fur and pearly lipstick tried to scowl at me, but Botox took all the mean out of it. I veered around a knot of tourists stopped to photograph an enormous cupcake made to look like Cookie Monster. I hit the corner and almost kept going, but a double-decker bus whooshed past, so close it blew my hair back. My stomach lurched, and a boy on the bus flipped me the bird. I’d come half a second from getting pancaked.

  I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I had the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I’d rather have retribution than comfort.

  I got my breath back, but my mouth was dead dry. I stopped to buy a bottle of water at a newsstand and scanned the headlines while the guy made change. Senator Under Fire in Campaign Finance Scandal. Connection Suspected in Rash of Upstate Homicides.

  The vendor’s sunburnt hand slapped down on the page. “No buy, no read.”

  I rolled my eyes, took my water, and cut in toward the park. All at once I was desperate to get home to Ella. The cabbie, the bus, the redheaded man—I had to tell her all of it. I should’ve talked to her last night. Impatience made me run the final block home, everything I needed to say to her expanding like helium in my chest.

  The outer door of Harold’s building was slightly ajar when I reached it, and the doorman was away from his desk. The combination made me falter for a moment, which was stupid because there are a million and one cameras trained on the lobby and front sidewalk, and you can’t use the elevator—a private one that goes straight to Harold’s apartment—without a hollow key you insert below the panel.

  My skin felt keyed up and nervy. And there was something else: the pressure-shift feeling of bad luck on the move, as familiar to me as the smell of Ella’s skin. Think of a hand running over the hairs on your arm, setting all of them to rising. Think of every room you walk into being filled with the sense of someone having just left it.

  Maybe Ella was already packing our stuff. I pictured her paint-spattered suitcase splayed out across Harold’s high bed. Maybe we’d be out of New York by nightfall, and soon, all of this—Audrey, Harold, Finch, the Salty Dog and serving biscotti and living in an apartment that smelled like a department store—would melt together like colors going to gray on a palette. I’d remember the six a.m. feeling of opening the café, eating Chinese takeout in bed in Brooklyn, reading Tam Lin in Prospect Park. The highway would carry everything else away.

  The elevator doors slid open onto the foyer of Harold’s apartment, and I stepped out.

  The first thing that hit me was the smell. A wet, almost rotten scent, with something wild curling beneath it—something green. It crawled under my skin and set my heart to hammering.

  “Hello?” The apartment was oppressively silent, a quiet that pressed against my eardrums. It swallowed my voice like black water. I took a few slow steps through the entryway, all cream-colored walls and marble floor. It was spotless.

  But that stink. Where was it coming from? I pulled out my phone and called my mom. It went straight to voicemail. I called Harold—same thing. After a minute, with misgivings, I called Audrey.

  A bright string of candy-colored pop broke the quiet. Audrey’s ring tone, but I had never seen that girl without her phone. Then I remembered I hadn’t seen Audrey, period, since that morning. My mind flipped through horrible possibilities—was she dead? Was that what the smell was? Had the bad luck finally followed us up to the thirty-fifth floor? The old dread settled in my limbs.

  I walked carefully through the apartment, like moving quietly would save me if someone was already inside. The rooms had an eerie, recently occupied feeling I recognized from the time a house we were staying in got burglarized. That intruder had taken all the books from the shelves and replaced them with food from the fridge. The beds had been filled with dead leaves, the mirrors cracked. Nothing valuable was gone, but a fur coat was pinned to the wall above Ella’s and my bed like a dead animal, stabbed through with a carving knife.

  The woman hosting us kept saying how lucky she was nothing got taken, in a bright, false voice nobody believed. The worst part was the way I couldn’t stop seeing the house through the eyes of someone who shouldn’t have been there. I kept imagining how it might feel to walk through someone else’s space, tasting all the strange things you could do there. It made me hungry. I was less in control of myself then.

  But nothing here was out of place. No meat sweating on the bookshelves, no fur coat slung up on the wall.

  Except: on the kitchen island, a glass of wine fallen on its side. I moved close enough to see Ella’s lipstick smudge on its rim. For a horrible, suspended moment I thought I’d find her lying on the tile floor along
side it, but there was only the wine, pooled and staining. The kitchen was the clean white heart of Harold’s neurotically kept home—the wine looked like carnage.

  I ran to my mom and Harold’s room. I hated going in there, hated seeing the high antique bed and Ella’s shape in it.

  Now I threw open the door, so sure of what I’d find it took me a moment to recognize the bed was empty. Harold’s bedside table was neatly stacked with copies of The Economist and a Kindle I knew from snooping was stocked with multivolume space epics. On Ella’s side was a sweater set and slacks, laid out like mourning clothes. I ducked down quickly to check beneath the dust ruffle. Nothing.

  Audrey’s room looked like Sephora and Barney’s had a brawl, but that was normal. No psychopath crouched in front of her underwear drawer, no rotting, leftover BluePrint juice explained the smell. Her gum-pink phone lay abandoned on the bed, its screen bristling with texts and missed calls. Where u at bitch.

  I saved my room for last. The smell was strongest there, a sickly braid of green and rot that felt like someone facepalming my brain. I dropped stealthily to the floor, ready to run out the nearest window if I saw anyone under the bed, but there was just a stretch of vacuumed carpet. My closet door was open, thank God, with nothing more sinister inside it than the primrose bridesmaid gown I’d worn at Ella and Harold’s wedding.

  Then I saw it: an envelope lying on my pillow. I made myself take tiny steps toward it, till I could see what it said: Alice Proserpine, in spindly letters across the back. No address.

  My stomach broke into pieces and spun like a kaleidoscope. Dimly I saw my hand reaching toward it, lifting it to my nose. Cheap ink and old paper. I felt hot, but my arms prickled with goosebumps. I ripped it open.

  The page inside it was soft with use, folded in on itself. I had a sharp flare of déjà vu as I eased it open.