The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(12)
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 stuff.
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.