Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  “It’s better to let people’s business be their business,” Mémé has said to you, many times. And she’s lived her life by those words. You can’t remember Mémé ever having friends, or talking about her past—your grandfather, or your mother, or her childhood, or anything like that. Her work, too, Mémé keeps apart from the world. “Poetry doesn’t pay the bills,” she says when you ask why she’s never published a poem, why instead she churns out a romance novel a year, and all with the name Selene Couteau instead of her own on the cover.

  You’ve taken your lead from Mémé, staying close to home, not taking much interest in the other people at school, not having any close friends at all—and, for the most part, you’ve liked it that way. Until you and James started talking last fall, and flirting last spring, and your body woke up, slowly at first, and then with insistent desire. Then, it became your business to be close to him, and that meant opening doors—not all the way wide, but a crack, at first, that had widened with time.

  You could crack the door to Maggie, you think, watching as your hand reaches out to take the locket. It is almost weightless, gold-colored but probably plated rather than solid. Maybe you don’t need Maggie . . . and probably it’s not smart, right now, to make someone else’s business your business. But maybe Maggie needs someone. And maybe that someone could be you.

  You push the necklace into your jacket pocket.

  When you head to her house after dinner, however, you find that Maggie is not alone after all.

  “That’s weird,” Maggie says when she answers the door. She’s changed into track pants and a sweatshirt, and her hair, still in a bun, lists slightly to one side. Her face is puffy, like she’s tired or maybe she’s been crying. “Keisha just stopped by, too.”

  “I can come back another time,” you offer. You would prefer to have as little contact with Keisha as possible, especially after lunch yesterday.

  “No, that’s silly,” says Maggie, and she turns away from the front door, heading into the house, leaving you no real choice but to follow.

  Maggie’s home is much bigger than yours and Mémé’s. The downstairs, where last spring’s party was held, is decorated in sleek, muted modern colors and shapes—a dark mahogany coffee table, curved edges and legs; a cream leather couch and matching side chair; a long black-framed mirror above the fireplace. You follow Maggie up the staircase. Her room is at the top of the stairs, its door open, and you’re glad you didn’t pull out Maggie’s locket yet. You definitely don’t want to return it to her now, in front of Keisha, who is sitting cross-legged in stockinged feet in the middle of Maggie’s bed, her opened notebook in her lap.

  Maggie’s bedroom is different from the polished, minimalistic decor downstairs. The walls are painted light pink, and all her furniture, including her four-poster bed, is white. It’s overfilled with stuffed animals on the bed and piled in each corner; a collection of music boxes is displayed on a high shelf above the window; there’s a corkboard crisscrossed with concert and movie tickets. Her dresser spills clothes from each half-open drawer. There are six throw pillows, maybe more. Above, a ceiling fan slowly whirs.

  If Keisha is surprised to see you, she hides it well. Her face is hard to read, anyway; maybe it’s her glasses, the thick-rimmed white ones today. Maybe it’s the stillness of her mouth, how her lips barely ever move into a smile or a frown. She’s a watcher, Keisha, which isn’t surprising, since she’s the editor-in-chief of the school paper.

  “Hey, Keisha,” you say.

  “Keisha’s doing an article about Tucker for this week’s paper,” Maggie says. “Like an obituary.”

  “Something like that,” Keisha says. “What are you doing here, Bisou?”

  “I just thought I’d stop by and check on Maggie,” you say to Keisha, and then, to Maggie, “How are you doing?”

  Maggie shrugs, and smiles, but then her face twists and she begins to cry. She sits down on the edge of her bed, almost on Keisha’s foot, and drops her head into her hands. You don’t know what you are supposed to do in this situation. You and Maggie may not be close, but you are here, and here she is in need of comfort. And Keisha is watching.

  “Oh, Maggie,” you say, and you slide yourself next to her on the bed and put your arm around her shoulders. Maggie collapses into you, and her cries go up an octave, a breathy, gasping sound. You tighten your grasp around her shoulder, and you bring your other hand up to enclose her in a hug.

  She stays like that, crying, for three or four minutes, but it’s so awkward that it feels longer. Eventually, she takes a few jagged breaths, sits up, and smiles at you. Her eyes are red and swollen.

  Behind you, from the center of the bed, Keisha reaches out and waves a tissue. Maggie takes it, wipes her eyes, blows her nose.

  “It’s really nice of the two of you to come over like this,” she says, mostly calm now. “It’s been so weird since Tucker and I broke up. All the girls I used to hang with are still dating Tucker’s friends; I’m not sure what he told them, but whatever it was, everyone has been really ‘busy’ the last few months.” She smiles, but not happily. “Of course, they’re all calling now, but they can go fuck themselves.”

  You wonder if she’s saying you should go fuck yourself, because you’ve never made an effort to get to know Maggie before this, and you’re one of the girls who’s dating one of Tucker’s teammates, even if you two were never exactly friends. It’s true you’ve mostly ignored the gossip, but it’s also true that you didn’t do anything to shut it down. You’re not interested in drama, you’ve always held yourself to the periphery, and that’s had its benefits—you’ve never been backstabbed, you’ve never found yourself the center of a controversy. You catch Keisha looking at you over Maggie’s head.

  “I mean,” Maggie says, sniffing, “Mercury’s in retrograde, so if shit was going to hit the fan, I guess now’s the time.”

  “Anyway,” Keisha says, ignoring Maggie’s astrology reference and seeming to pick up where she left off, before you came in, before all the crying. “What sorts of drugs would Tucker get into on a typical weekend? And about how often would you say that he drank?”

  These don’t sound like questions for a puff-piece obituary. You don’t say anything, but you scoot out of the way so that instead of Keisha sitting behind you and Maggie, the three of you form a semicircle.

  Maggie sniffs again. “Tucker didn’t really do drugs,” she says. “He wanted to play college ball. He liked edibles and beer and stuff like that, but nothing really heavy. Well, I guess I don’t know what he was into lately. I mean, we broke up over the summer.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Keisha says. “So you hadn’t been hanging out with him lately?”

  “It didn’t end great between us.”

  “Yeah,” says Keisha. A pause. Then, “But, that’s kind of weird, because people saw you talking together at the dance. And Lorraine said she saw you getting out of Tucker’s truck in the parking lot. After the dance.” She kind of shrugs, like she’s embarrassed to contradict Maggie but had to say it anyway.

  You turn to look at Maggie. Her features, which had been softened by emotion, harden. She doesn’t say anything for a long minute. Then, “I think maybe you should go. Both of you.”

  “Can I just ask—” Keisha says, but Maggie’s lips are pressed into a line, and she shakes her head. Keisha shoots you a look, as if it’s your fault that Maggie won’t talk to her after she was super rude and nosy. She flips her notebook closed, tucks her pencil behind her ear, and scoots off the bed. “Call me anytime,” she says, slipping her feet into her shoes, “if you want to talk.”

  You follow Keisha out of the room. Before you go down the stairs, you look back at Maggie, who is still sitting on her bed. She has her head in her hands again, but this time she isn’t crying.

  “Hang on,” you say to Keisha as she hurries up the street to her car. “I want to talk to you.”

  She stops, but she’s fishing through her pockets for her keys. “What do you want,
Bisou?”

  “What was that about? Why are you hassling Maggie?”

  “I wasn’t hassling her. I was just asking her some questions.”

  “What does it matter if she was in Tucker’s truck?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it does. I was just giving her the chance to explain herself. For the article.”

  “So, not an obituary.”

  Keisha blinks, says nothing.

  “So, what is it then?”

  “Investigative journalism,” Keisha says. “Tucker’s death is the weirdest thing that’s happened in our town in years. Tucker Jackson, star of the basketball team, naked in the woods, running into a tree? Sounds pretty interesting to me. And what about his eye? Do you know about that?”

  “His . . . eye?” You hope Keisha cannot hear the frantic beating of your heart.

  “His eye,” she repeats. “They’re saying he’d been stabbed in the eye, before his neck was broken.”

  You do your best to keep your face even. “Wow,” you say at last, but you sound unconvincing to your own ears.

  “And do you know what’s really weird?” Keisha doesn’t wait for you to answer. “This isn’t the first time that a dead guy was found in the woods around here. It was a long time ago, back in the seventies. Not far away. A student at the university named Dennis Cartwright.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was found naked and dead, just like Tucker. With a broken neck.”

  Your mouth opens and closes. You have no words.

  Keisha looks at you more closely. “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “I wanted to check on Maggie,” you say.

  “Uh-huh. Because the two of you are such good friends.” She finds the keys at the bottom of her bag and pulls them out, goes around to the driver’s side door. Before she gets in, she says, “You know, Bisou, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

  Before you can think of a response, she slams herself into her car and drives away.

  At home, you tuck Maggie’s necklace into the top drawer of your dresser. You don’t really want it in your house, but after the run-in with Keisha, maybe it’s not the smartest idea to give it back to Maggie. You could take it back to school and slip it onto the Tucker table, but that seems like an unnecessary risk with no reward—there’s no reason to draw attention to yourself, no upside to putting yourself closer to the whole situation.

  Just stay away from Maggie and let the whole thing play out. No one knows—except for James—that you were out in the woods that night, and even James doesn’t know the rest of the story. It’s better to let people’s business be their business, as Mémé liked to say.

  You’ll avoid Maggie. And you’ll avoid Keisha. You shut the drawer with a bang.

  When you get to school on Friday, almost everyone in the halls is reading the school paper on their phones. Keisha’s article, it seems, was posted overnight. Like she said, nothing this interesting has happened at your high school in years.

  You pull up the site on your phone.

  Varsity Basketball Star Tucker Jackson Found Dead in Woods

  Beneath the title, another line reads:

  Authorities Tight-Lipped as Investigation Continues

  Elle A Vu le Loup

  It’s not the article that upsets you—not exactly. Mostly it contains a summary of the events, with a few quotes from students. “Tucker was acting sort of strange at the dance,” says Mackenzie Carter, a senior who was crowned homecoming king. “He seemed really angry, but no one could get him to say what about.” Then there’s the description of how his body was found, and a quote from the jogger who found it: “It was just so awful. The way his head was twisted on his neck, bent off to the side in a way necks don’t bend. My dog found him first, actually.” Farther down, there’s a line about how investigators found scraps of Tucker’s clothing near the entrance to the woods. And then there’s a summary of the toxicology report, along with something you didn’t already know from reading the rumor chain on James’s phone: though substances similar to methylone and cathinone were detected—two common ingredients in bath salts—they weren’t formulations previously seen by toxicologists.

  Keisha hasn’t mentioned what Lorraine told her about Maggie getting out of Tucker’s truck that night, but maybe that’s not so much an act of generosity as it is a chess move. She also hasn’t written anything about the other death, that guy she told you about, who was found in the woods back in the seventies. You guess that’s not because she’s decided it’s unrelated, but because she’s got more investigating to do.

  But the final line of the article, just three words long—these three words are what unsettle you:

  To be continued.

  You thumb through the rest of the paper to see if there’s anything else about Tucker, but there isn’t, just a roundup of scores from recent games, a puff piece about the homecoming decorations, and letters to the editor. The first letter can’t help but catch your eye—it’s titled “Whatever Happened to Manners?”

  It’s basically a whine-fest about how hard it is to get a girl to say yes to dancing anymore. “It’s called a dance,” the letter reads. “People are supposed to dance with each other, but even the fours and fives say no these days. I think there should be a rule that if a girl is attending a school dance and a guy asks to dance with her, she has to say yes. Otherwise, what’s the point?” It’s signed “It’s Not Cool to Evade Love.”

  You turn back to Keisha’s article and read it again.

  Everyone talks about the article all day, but then the weekend comes, and with it comes Tucker’s funeral. Half the school, it seems, turns out for it, and you go with James, holding his hand through the service.

  Tucker’s family is Catholic, and large. He was the youngest of four boys, and all three of his brothers are home for the funeral. They form a circle around Tucker’s mom, a tiny round woman who cries silently and endlessly throughout the service. When it’s time to carry the casket, Tucker’s three brothers take one side, and three of his closest friends take up the other.

  You’d entered the church service under a gray-blue sky, but it doesn’t take long for things to change. It’s raining at the cemetery, and everyone gathers tightly together under the plastic shelters that have been erected near the grave. James stands behind you, his hands on your shoulders, and you watch together as the casket descends into the ground.

  When it reaches the bottom, with a dull thud, you feel James’s hands tighten on your shoulders. Silent until that moment, Tucker’s mother wails, high-pitched and terrifying, a sound without words. Louder and louder, higher and higher, and her remaining sons, those not in the ground, envelop her.

  Everyone stiffens, the air seems to freeze as you together bear witness to her pain, and though the rain pours down, you cannot hear it. All you hear is Tucker’s mother’s cry for a son who will never come home.

  The sound she makes—it vibrates your bones. It shakes something awake. It’s the sound you made once, years ago, for your mother.

  By Monday, the memorial table is gone, and pretty much everyone seems ready to move on from talking about Tucker to getting excited about Halloween, which is just three weeks away. It surprises you how quickly everyone seems to jump to the next thing, how life resumes even after something like this, but as it’s in your best interest for the whole thing to fade away, you do not make a point of it.

  This Wednesday, when James drives you home after school, you don’t wait for him to ask if he can come in. When the car pulls to a stop at the curb in front of your house, you put your hand on the gearshift and push it into park.

  James smiles. It’s raining hard today, but it is not just the rain that spurs you both to run up the driveway and into the house. You hang your coats, one on top of the other, on a hook beneath the mirror. Your hair drips onto the wooden floor of the front hallway as you unlace your boots; James’s high, tight curls glisten from the rain. You line up
his boots next to yours on the rubber mat beneath the bench, and then you take his hand and lead him through the house, into your bedroom, and, from there, into the adjoining bathroom.

  James leans in to kiss you, his warm, soft mouth on yours, and then you take a towel from the rack and lift it to his hair to dry it. He tips his head so you can reach, and, gently, you squeeze the water from his hair.

  When you’ve finished, James takes the towel from your hands and drapes it over your head, massaging the wetness away. You close your eyes and feel his fingers working through the towel. It has been a long time since anyone dried your hair for you.

  He sets aside the towel. Now there is nothing between you but clothes. You work on loosing the buttons of his blue-and-green plaid flannel, and though he could do it more efficiently himself, he waits and watches. Then the last button is free, and you push the shirt off his shoulders. There’s a white T-shirt underneath, tucked in, and, with a sudden rush of urgency, you pull it roughly from the waistband of his pants, up and over his head. He lifts his arms willingly, and you see the dark curls of his armpit hair, which seems like maybe the most intimate thing you have ever seen.

  He is hard, you see the shape of him through the thick denim of his jeans. You reach out, you put your hand there. You squeeze and look up into James’s eyes. They shine down at you, and you read them well—desire, pleasure, love.

  Hand still wrapped around his erection, you lean up to kiss him. This time, when James’s lips touch yours, there is urgency there, yours and his, together. His hands are on your shoulders, then your back, then lower, on your butt, and all of this feels so good, so exciting and wonderfully good.