Harmless Read online

  “So what have you been up to lately?” I asked. We both had on sunglasses and she was in a stretched-out blue Speedo one-piece that wasn't exactly flattering.

  She turned to me, pushed her glasses up and shot me a huge smile. “Okay. Promise you won't tell anyone?”

  “Uh … sure.”

  “I mean it. Promise for real. It's a secret.”

  What would ever have made her think I wasn't good at keeping secrets?

  “Okay. I promise.”

  She took a sip of her lemonade. “It's just like you said. As soon as I stopped thinking that he was out of my league, it happened, and now I'm with Tobey Endo.”

  “You are?”

  “Don't sound so surprised.”

  “No, I mean, that's great. I had no idea. But why the secret?”

  “That's just the way it is with us. We IM and we hang out sometimes on weekends but we don't really want everyone to know at school because then you have to deal with all the gossip and stuff and who wants to deal with that?” She squirted some sunblock onto her thighs and started rubbing it in.

  “Wow. You and Tobey. That's great, Anna, really.”

  I had a feeling I was supposed to ask her more but I couldn't think of a single question, so I just cut to the reason I'd invited her here in the first place.

  “I've been thinking a lot about David Allen.”

  “Pervert.”

  “What?”

  “Not you, moron, him. He is so gross. Ew.” She shivered. “I'm so glad he's gone and I don't have to see him again. Tobey says he'll probably plead guilty and take a lighter sen-tence to avoid a trial, so thank God we won't have to go to court.”

  “But, Anna, he didn't do it. Doesn't that bother you?”

  “Not really. Look what he did to Elinor Clements.”

  “We don't know that for sure.”

  “Yes we do. Who else could it have been?”

  “Anybody!”

  I was shouting now. I hadn't planned on having this fight with Anna. I hadn't anticipated that I'd take the position that David Allen hadn't hurt Elinor Clements, but suddenly it was the only argument that made any sense to me.

  “What do you know, Mariah? You think you know more than the police?”

  “Of course I do. I know that David Allen didn't attack us that night. The police don't know that, but I know that. And so do you.”

  “This is stupid. Let's just forget about it. Please. It's over.” She pushed her glasses back down onto her face so I couldn't see her eyes.

  “It's over,” she said, and she turned her back on me.

  Anna

  When Mom told me that Detective Stevens was stopping by after dinner I told her no. I guess maybe I was more forceful than I usually am with Mom because she took a step back and looked at me funny.

  “What's wrong, honey?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I'm just done with this. That's all. I have nothing left to say.”

  She pulled me into a hug. She smelled a little like the onions she'd been cutting in the kitchen. I pushed her away.

  “Listen, Anna, I know you want to bury this. I know the school year is almost over and summer is here and that makes a great time for a fresh start. I want you to have that too. But if Detective Stevens needs your help, you owe him that.”

  “What can I possibly do for him? They've already got David Allen. Case closed.”

  “I don't know, dear, but I told him he could stop by. I've made an apple crumble.”

  “Yippee.”

  She looked a little hurt, but I wasn't in the mood for babysitting my mother. I went up to my room and closed the door. I turned on my computer.

  AnnaBanana133: hey

  sK8teR817: hey Hendricks, wats up

  AnnaBanana133: Det. Stevens is coming over soon

  (dunno why)

  sK8teR817: maybe theres a break in the case

  AnnaBanana133: ???

  sK8teR817: new evidence or something

  AnnaBanana133: yeah, i guess so

  sK8teR817: i wanna hear about it after

  AnnaBanana133: cool

  I didn't say much during dinner. I thought about Tobey, sitting in his room in front of his computer, the police scanner buzzing with static in the background. I thought about his striped wool hat that he wore even in the heat and the curls of sandy brown hair that poked out the bottom of it. I thought about the way his lips had felt when he'd kissed me. Or I guess I should say, when I'd kissed him. After we'd had our coffees at the Big Cup, he walked me part of the way home. The sky was electric, it was just about to get dark, the streetlamps hadn't gone on yet, and standing in front of a big brown stucco house with yellow and white striped awnings, I leaned over and put my arms around his neck and started kissing him. He seemed surprised at first, and so was I, but then he just went with it and we stood like that, kissing until the dark blue sky was turning black and I knew I was pushing my luck and I'd better get home. I thought maybe that kiss would change what it was like between us at school, but it didn't. I guess we just made more sense through IM and outside of ODS.

  Dad was in the middle of talking about work and I was pre-tending that I was listening when the doorbell rang. Detective Stevens wasn't in uniform. He was wearing jeans and black basketball shoes and a gray hooded sweatshirt. With his short hair and his ears that stuck out and his big smile, he almost seemed like he could be a boy coming over to pick me up for a date, if that were the kind of thing that happened to me. He turned down my mom's offer of some apple crumble and I felt a twinge of embarrassment for her. He asked if my parents minded if he talked to me alone and they said no. He'd already explained why he didn't want parents around when he interviewed witnesses, but still, I was suddenly desperate to stay at the dinner table. I was glued to the seat. I made a vow to listen to Dad and take an interest in his work, but they both looked at me like Get up, what are you waiting for? and so I had no choice but to stand and follow Detective Stevens out the kitchen door. We sat on the back steps underneath an exposed lightbulb with moths flittering around it.

  “How's the school year wrapping up?” he asked.

  “Fine.” He looked different out of uniform. I noticed his face for the first time. He had gray eyes and freckled cheeks and slightly crooked teeth. He wrapped his arms around his knees and pulled them to his chest.

  “I'm not even really supposed to be here,” he said.

  “So why are you here?” I didn't mean to sound harsh, but that apple crumble was sounding good now and I just wanted to go back inside and have dessert with my parents and then go to my room and IM Tobey. I wanted Detective Stevens to go away.

  “What I mean is, Detective Caputo kind of took this case away from me. He's busy getting things ready for the DA and I have some new assignments and I have tons of work to do on those cases and yet I can't stop thinking about this case, about you and Emma and Mariah.”

  “We're fine. We're all fine now. Don't worry about us.”

  He looked at me. “I'm not even on duty.”

  I wasn't sure what to say to that. My stomach growled.

  “There are some things that just bother me. They nag at me constantly, even when I'm working on my other cases.”

  This was my chance to say something like “What bothers you, Detective Stevens?” but I remained silent. An agitated cricket was chirping from under something in the darkness.

  “Like, for example,” he continued, “did he bleed?”

  “What?”

  “You hit him in the head with a rock, right? Hard enough to stun him?” I couldn't just keep looking into the night. His eyes were on me. I turned to him. I nodded. “The thing about the head is, it's a messy bleeder. Lots of blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. But there was no blood anywhere at the scene. Not on any rock. Or the ground.”

  I shrugged.

  “You know what's even harder to understand?” Pause. “Why David Allen doesn't have even the slightest sign of a cut or a bruise or any kind of tra
uma whatsoever to his head.”

  “That is strange, kind of,” I said. I untied and then retied my shoelace just to keep my eyes engaged in something other than staring blankly at him. “But hasn't it been, like, two months? I guess maybe the head heals quickly.”

  “Not in my experience.” He bent his head over and gestured to the back of it. “I was a reckless kid. Accident-prone. Always getting stitches. You can still see my scars.”

  I could see one through his crew cut, an inch or two in length.

  “That's just from when my brother lost his grip on his ten-nis racket.” He sat up again. “And there's something else.”

  I was grateful for the cricket now. It was drowning out the pounding of my heart.

  “Everyone seems to recognize David Allen. They don't know his name or anything, but they've all seen him before. He was some kind of fixture down at the river. Most kids I talked to said he was always there.”

  Was it only one cricket? It was starting to sound like thou-sands.

  “If that's so, then why didn't you recognize him that night? How did you not know someone you've seen before?”

  “We told you. It was dark. We couldn't see. We were scared. We panicked. And anyway, why are you doing this? Why are you questioning me? What about Emma and Mariah?”

  “Oh, I was planning on talking to them too. But I thought I'd start with you because you just seem so together to me. And also, I know you're a good kid. I can tell these things.”

  “But I told you—”

  “I know, I know, it was dark. You were scared. You pan-icked.” He stood up. He cast a long shadow that stretched down the steps and disappeared into the backyard. “Good night, Anna.”

  Emma

  I had tests to study for. I had a paper to write. School would be over in two weeks and I would watch Silas walk down the aisle in his black robe and his stupid square hat with the tassel and I was already imagining my future without him. There was too much going on for me to take a day off and spend it with Dad, but he insisted. He demanded. When Dad gets that way you can't say no.

  He wanted to go to the racetrack. I just loved that as an excuse for why I missed a whole day of classes. Sorry I ditched school, Principal Glasser, but I was busy betting on the ponies.

  This was something Dad and I had done together every summer for the first few years we'd lived up here. We would drive the hour and a half north and he would spot me twenty dollars to bet on the horses with names I liked: Proud Princess, Jellybean, Flower Power. The odds meant nothing to me; I placed my bets solely on what sounded closest to the name I might have given my own horse at the age of eight, nine or ten. I usually lost, but a few times I won big—well, as big as you can win on a two-dollar bet. I used to love these days with Dad. We'd listen to the sound track of West Side Story and sing at the top of our lungs with the windows rolled down and we'd buy root beer floats at the Frosty Freeze off the highway on the way back home. But Dad's new car only had a CD player and we'd thrown away our cassette of West Side Story after we found it under the seat, strangled in its own tape ribbon, when Dad sold his old car. This day seemed like a terrible idea.

  I insisted on bringing my books even though reading in a moving car makes me want to hurl. Dad knows this about me. That's probably why he didn't fight me on it. He knew I'd end up zipping them back into my bag.

  We were listening to Bach's cello concertos. Not exactly something to roll the windows down and sing along to, but the mellow music and the green trees speeding by outside my window had a hypnotic effect on me. Just as I was settling into this rare moment of peace and nothingness, Dad pounced.

  “We need to talk, Emma.”

  We. Need. To. Talk. Four words you never want to hear your parents say.

  “Is this about you and Mom?”

  This seemed to catch him off guard. He adjusted his sun visor. He fiddled with the volume knob on the stereo until it wound up exactly where it had been before he started to fiddle with it.

  “Well, in a sense, yes, a bit indirectly, I suppose it is.” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you about what hap-pened the night of that march and about the article in the college paper I'm pretty sure you managed to get your hands on. All this business about the sexual harassment charges. It's time we clear this up.”

  Signs were approaching and then disappearing behind me. I couldn't see them. Couldn't make any sense of them. What does it mean when there's a Soft Shoulder Ahead?

  “You don't have to do this, Dad.”

  “I know I don't have to, I want to.”

  “But I'm not sure I want you to. Sometimes maybe it's better not to know certain things.” That sounded smarter than anything I'd ever said in all my life.

  He took a deep breath, considered me for a minute and then pressed on. “Do you know what sexual harassment is?”

  “I have a feeling you're going to tell me.” I was glad we were driving, glad for the excuse to look straight ahead and avoid his eyes.

  “I'm not really all that sure myself. The exact definition is malleable. What I do know is that one of my former students, a graduate student, made such an accusation against me and I haven't been able to shake it even after all these years.”

  “Was it true?”

  “No.”

  I looked at him. He stared hard at the road. His cheeks were red. His hair was a bit of a mess from running his fingers through it. I felt like I was looking at him, really looking at him, for the first time in a long while, and what I saw made me want to grab hold of the wheel and turn the car around.

  He wasn't telling the truth.

  “You're lying,” I said before I could stop myself. I should have let him lie. I didn't want to know the truth. I'd just told him I didn't want to know the truth. And yet here I was, putting him on the spot.

  He looked over at me and his eyes were soft. His body loosened. He slunk down into his seat. He let something go.

  “I'm not lying, Emma. But the truth is too complicated to explain to you. You're still too young to understand.”

  I turned the music off. Those cello concertos were getting to me. They were sad and hollow and they made me want to cry.

  “What you need to know, Emma, is that I made a mistake and I paid for it dearly. When it became clear to me that all I cared about in this world was your mother and our family, I tried to get myself out of a situation I never should have been in in the first place. And when I tried to do that, this student of mine wanted to hurt me, and she did it in the only way she knew how, by accusing me of things that weren't true, or really, I guess what she did was put some true things into an untruthful context.”

  Maybe a Soft Shoulder is what happens to you when you are beaten down and defeated and you give up on keeping up appearances and you let go of whatever you were using to hold yourself together and, starting at your shoulders, everything inside you just starts going soft.

  “So are you and Mom getting a divorce?”

  “No. Why would you think that?”

  “Because you argue. You get angry at each other. And you didn't go with her to Oxford.”

  “Em, I didn't go with her to Oxford because we were wor-ried about you.” He grabbed my hand. “Mom and I decided that someone needed to be here for you, and since I'm not the genius with the fancy grant, I got to stay home. And there's no place I'd rather be.”

  Something was breaking in me. Slowly. Piece by tiny piece. Grain by grain. I tried thinking of the Arctic, of white-ness, of the frozen Earth, but nothing could stop it. Things were coming apart.

  “I love your mother and she loves me and she was able to forgive me my stupidity and selfishness. Sure, we argue, but that's just who we are. We're both strong-willed and stubborn. Maybe she makes me pay from time to time for what hap-pened in the past, but that's only fair. Marriage is a long and treacherous road, but it's also full of beauty and surprises. The one thing that's always been easy for us is loving you and your brother. That's the easy part.” He loo
ked over at me and stroked my hair. “We've been worried about you, Em, very worried. You seem troubled, like you're carrying a load too big for your fifteen-year-old shoulders. But you're also wise and thoughtful and empathetic and mature. And I guess, as hard as this is for me, you're ready for the truth.”

  I started to cry. Big, deep, howling sobs that came from a part of me I didn't even know was there. I let my father hold my hand. I watched the world go by. I let the truth begin to sink into me.

  Mariah

  I was starting to like the Greek Corner with its faux wood-paneled walls and its stained maroon carpet. I liked the sticky menus and the thick black sludge they called coffee. Silas and I were driving to Greenfield almost every day after school, and con-sidering that graduation was right around the corner, complete with the obligatory senior-class bowling day and senior-class swim in the lake and senior-class bonfire and barbecue, I was flattered that Silas was choosing to spend his final afternoons as an Odious student in my company.

  We talked. Our knees grazed each other under the table. He would take hold of my arm when he was trying to make a point and he'd leave his hand there for a few beats, and after he would take it away, I could still feel where it had been.

  Much as I tried to avoid the subject, we talked a lot about Emma. His whole family was worried about her. He told me Detective Stevens wanted to come speak with her, to ask her some more questions, and he heard his father tell him no. Emma had been through enough, he said. It was time to put this all behind her.

  I wondered if Detective Stevens had tried calling Mom and Carl. Did he want to talk to me? Ask me any questions? What did he want? Why was he still asking questions when this terrible episode already had an answer?

  The answer was:

  (a) An unshaven ghost in a red flannel jacket.

  I thought, more than once, more than twice, during those beats when Silas's hand held on to my arm, when his knees were touching mine, of telling him the truth. The truth about our lie. The truth about our lie? Or was it a lie about the truth? Truth and lies. Lies and truths.