Harmless Read online

  She talked to him a lot on her cell phone but he wasn't really around that much. He was always just about to show up and then he'd call, or sometimes he wouldn't, because something came up. The few times he did show she would leave us and hop into his car and he would wave from the driver's seat and they'd be off. I'd watch his green station wagon speed down the road with a big hollow feeling in the bottom of my stomach.

  They were planning a party at his house when his parents were going to be out of town. It was going to be a small party. Just their closest friends. That meant Emma and me. Me. I was one of Mariah's closest friends.

  Emma

  When we first moved up here I wouldn't come out of my room for three days. My parents tried bribing me and then threatening me and finally they just brought in dinner on a tray and we all sat on my floor and ate spaghetti carbonara. On the fourth day my mom knocked on the door and told me there was someone here to see me. Anna walked in. She had straight brown hair and bangs. She was about my height but heavier than me and her toes pointed in a little and it looked as if her shoes were two sizes bigger than mine.

  “I heard you just moved into the neighborhood and you'll be going to my school.”

  “Where'd you hear that?”

  “My mom. She's downstairs. Do you wanna come over to my house?”

  And with that I left my room. I went over to Anna's and then we played every day until school started, by which time I was already known as Anna's best friend, Emma. That was six years ago. Now I'm three inches taller than she is.

  Sometimes I wonder if we'd ever have become friends if her mom hadn't made her come over that day. If I'd just started third grade as the new kid from the city who didn't know anybody maybe I would have become best friends with Sharon Bender or Tammy Frost or someone else or nobody. But that isn't how it happened. We became Anna and Emma.

  It's not like I never had any other friends. The kids at school have always been pretty nice to me. I've hung out with other people, but whenever it would get to something I'd do more than once or twice, Anna was always there, asking what's up with you and so-and-so or inviting herself along to the movie or over to my house or whatever. It's a small world at Orsonville Day School. Everyone knew from those first days of third grade that I was paired off with Anna. That's just who I was, I was Anna's best friend, and unlike shedding the tomboy thing, I couldn't just shave my legs and wear mascara to change that.

  Maybe that sounds harsh. I don't mean to be harsh. Anna has always been a very loyal friend, and that counts for some-thing. It counts for more than that; it counts for a lot. I mean, one thing we know about animals in captivity is that they need companionship. For starters, nobody wants to go to the zoo to see lonely monkeys or seals or lions. That's just plain sad. When you go to the zoo you want to see monkeys picking things out of each other's fur or seals touching noses underwater or lions lazily swatting their tails at the rocky earth, napping side by side.

  Mariah was the first person to come along who didn't seem to mind having Anna around and this made me like Mariah even more. The three of us were quickly becoming the best of friends. My social circle was growing.

  One afternoon after Anna and Mariah left my house Silas came down to the basement. He was just getting back from basketball practice.

  “What's up with that chick Mariah?”

  “She's my friend.”

  “Awwww. How sweet. E.P. has a new friend.” E.P. Short for: Emmalus Painintheassicus.

  “Shut up, Silas.” Why was it that I could never come up with a rude species name for him?

  “You should know this about your new friend: lots of peo-ple talk about her. Lots of guys do. Guys in my class.”

  “Yeah, what do they say?”

  “They think she's hot.”

  “Well, she has a boyfriend.”

  “I heard. Some guy from Orsonville High?”

  “Yeah. DJ. He's cool.” I still hadn't ever talked to DJ but I wanted Silas to think I knew him. I wanted Silas to know I had a life; that my circle was expanding. “He's older. He's a senior.”

  Silas bounced his basketball a few times on the floor. Then he started bouncing it off the wall. He fixed his eyes on me. “Well, all I can say is be careful.”

  I now ask myself why I didn't listen to Silas when I have to admit, as strange as it sounds, I don't think he's ever been wrong about anything.

  But I didn't listen. Instead I grabbed the basketball from him. “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “I don't know. You're still a kid and she seems different. She seems older than you.”

  “Well, she's not. She's three months younger than me. And anyway, I'm not a kid.”

  He took his basketball back and cradled it in his lap. He looked carefully at me. Maybe he was reevaluating me. Trying to see me differently. Trying to see through the bars, beyond the description next to my cage. Emmalus Painintheassicus: generic human little sister.

  “It's just that I can't picture you going out with a senior. That wouldn't be right. That would mean you'd be going out with someone in my class and it's just that I know those guys too well to let any of them go anywhere near you.”

  So I was wrong about the way he was looking at me, but I didn't hold that against him. I guess it goes both ways. I had a hard time seeing what everyone else saw in Silas. Silas the senior, the star athlete, the Columbia-bound perfect boyfriend with a killer body. I still know things about Silas. I know that certain movies make him cry and that his farts make our dog get up and leave the room. That's the thing about being in a family. No matter how old I get and no matter what happens to me or any of us, I'll always be his little sister and he'll always be my big brother.

  At least I hope this is true.

  The party at DJ's was on. It was going to be on a Friday night. Mariah suggested I tell my parents I was sleeping at Anna's. Anna would tell her parents she was sleeping at my house. Mariah would make up something else, she said she'd done it before and it was no problem. She said we'd have nothing to worry about.

  Mariah

  I didn t start at ODS until seventh grade. ODS stands for Orson-ville Day School, but everyone just calls it ODS, which is pretty funny because it sounds like you're saying Odious, and if you ask me, that name suits this school perfectly. By the time I got here everyone was already established in little cliques and everyone knew everything about everyone else because that's what happens when you all go to school together from the time you're five years old.

  I spent seventh grade as kind of a loner. I spent most of eighth grade with this group of really annoying girls who never talked to anyone else and finally stopped talking to me when I dared to sit with other people during lunch. That's when I decided to avoid cliques altogether. This year I had a few different friends before I met DJ and before I started spending the time that I wasn't spending with him with Emma and Anna. I knew some people thought they were losers, especially Anna, but I didn't care. At least Emma and Anna were cool enough to want to get out of Odious and maybe meet some of DJ's friends from Orsonville High.

  Before we moved here, I lived in Dexter County. It's about forty-five minutes away. I didn't go to a private school because there is no private school in Dexter County and also we didn't have much money then. It was just Mom and me in our little apartment and she worked a lot and sometimes that was hard, but in other ways it was easier than it is now even though we live in a big house with a pool. For one thing, there was no Jessica. Now, even though Mom doesn't work anymore, she has to spend a lot of time on Jessica, taking her to dance classes and piano lessons and even a mother-daughter book club where I guess they don't care if you're really mother and daughter or not.

  Mom met Carl online. I think they only went on, like, three dates before he asked her to marry him, and before I knew it we were packing up our apartment and I was writing all these essays about what a great opportunity it would be for me to go to an institution as well regarded and academically challenging as Odious. T
o tell the truth, Carl wrote the essays for me. Or maybe it was his assistant. Or his secretary. I think he has both. We all pretended like I was doing the work but I wasn't. I could have. I'm not a bad writer. I'm also pretty good at math. When it comes to factors and ratios and properties, I know how to solve those kinds of problems.

  I wonder sometimes what Carl's online profile looked like. If he were being honest he would have written something like this:

  Balding middle-aged widower with bad temper, boatloads of money and a motherless daughter seeks pushover with no spine to live in my huge house and take care of my child even if it means ignoring your own. No ugly chicks need apply.

  No worries there. Mom is totally hot. He must have been blown away when she showed up for their first date because even if she had posted a photo, it couldn't have done justice to how truly beautiful she is. She used to be a model when she was younger and she even got some guest-starring roles on a few TV shows that I've never heard of because they were on before I was born. I think people must look at them funny when they're out together, like what's this Beauty doing with that Beast? But then again Carl has a lot of money and I guess that counts for something.

  Being with DJ made everything in my life seem more normal. He's who I'd probably have been with anyway if Mom hadn't double-clicked on Carl's Internet profile one day and forever changed my future. We were a lot alike. So what if he was older? I've always felt and acted older than my age. That's what happens to you when you spend most of your life taking care of yourself. So I couldn't imagine dating any of the boys in my class. They were still little boys. DJ was not a boy, he was a guy, and there's a big difference between a boy and a guy. The seniors at Odious are guys too but there's some kind of unwritten rule that if you're a freshman, you stay away from the senior guys or else face the wrath of the senior girls, who manage to scare the crap out of me, even though I don't scare very easily. Especially that girl Tara. She was, like, the ringleader of the bitchy senior girls and she always looked at me like she'd slit my throat if nobody was watching. Anyway, DJ was much cooler than any of the guys at Odious.

  I really wanted Emma or Anna to start dating one of DJ's friends. Then DJ and I could be together more. I didn't get to see him all that much because he spent a lot of time with his friends, and it's not like I didn't understand, but sometimes it bummed me out even though I never told him that.

  Honestly, it was hard for me to imagine Anna dating any of DJ's friends. It was hard for me to imagine Anna dating any-one. Emma was different. She had potential. She had long, curly blond hair and I know it's a cliché, but guys do tend to like girls with blond hair. She also had pretty big boobs and I figured that couldn't hurt either. She had that total girl-next-door look, complete with the freckled nose and big, open, honest eyes. You take one good look at Emma and you think: here's someone I can totally trust with my deepest darkest secrets. Maybe this made guys shy away from her. Maybe they thought she was too nice, too trustworthy. That's the only explanation I could come up with for why someone who looked like she did in a pair of jeans didn't have a boyfriend. Or maybe it was simply that she spent all her time with Anna.

  When Anna wasn't in her uniform she dressed in baggy khakis and T-shirts, and her shoulders were sort of hunched forward like she was trying to hide what little she had in the chest department. She always wore running shoes and I don't think I'd ever seen her in lipstick even though she could have really used some. Her hair was mousy brown and cut blunt at her shoulders and she almost always had it in a ponytail. She didn't seem to know how to talk to guys. She didn't really seem to know how to talk to anyone other than Emma and me. I noticed the way she was around Emma's brother, Silas. She probably would never admit it, but I could tell that she was madly in love with him even though he was so far out of her league it was ridiculous.

  But sometimes people see something in each other even when no one else does. Look at Mom and Carl. So maybe Anna did stand a chance with one of DJ's friends. You never can tell. I invited both of them and I figured we could just wait and see what happened.

  Anna

  I'd never lied to my parents before. Sure, there were little things like saying I'd finished my homework so I could watch TV when really I had a chapter left to read. There was the time I broke a pair of my dad's reading glasses and then put them back on his desk to let him think maybe he did it, and he never even mentioned it to me. That's a lie too, isn't it? When you fail to tell the truth even if no one asks you? Oh. And I guess there was also that stuff about being in the library after school when really I was hanging out by the river or somewhere in town with Emma and Mariah, but that didn't feel like such a big deal. I had seventh period free and I used to wait in the library for their classes to get out, so when I said I was in the library after school it wasn't a total lie. It was a partial truth.

  I was going to tell my parents that I was spending the night at Emma's when really I was going to sleep over with a bunch of other people at the house of a guy I didn't know and there weren't going to be any adults around. This was going to be my first real lie. This was going to be the kind of lie where if my parents knew the truth I'd be in huge trouble. Gigantic trouble. The kind of trouble I couldn't even imagine, probably because I'd never been in trouble before. But I figured that it took Mom years to tell me she couldn't have another baby. So maybe I'd wait years to tell Mom the truth about where I was going to be on Friday night.

  I knew my parents would never check with Emma's par-ents. Emma's would never check with mine. That's how it was with us. Our parents knew we were always together and they didn't have to call to see if it was okay for one of us to spend the night. Since we lived so close, we always walked to each other's houses, so there would be no dropping us off or picking us up. And also, our parents weren't really friends, so it's not like they would talk and say, “By the way, thanks for letting Anna sleep over the other night.” Or “Emma said she had a great time at your house on Friday.”

  Then again I guess they might say something like that if they were to run into each other in the supermarket or the bank or the dry cleaners, but I was keeping my fingers crossed that that wouldn't happen.

  There are those kinds of parents who become best friends just because their kids are best friends. Our parents weren't like that. It's not like they hated each other. They just had very different lives. Emma's parents spent most of their time with other college professors. They were always going to functions at the college that didn't seem to require the presence of my mom, the administrator, or my dad, who works for Compu-Corp. Emma's parents had dinners and lectures and cocktail parties and conferences. My parents liked to stay home and hang out with me. We played cards or Pictionary and made our own sundaes and sometimes I'd perform karaoke on the machine we kept in the family room. My parents love to hear me sing. When I was younger I'd put on shows whenever they had friends over to the house. They'd give me standing ovations and Dad would put his fingers in his mouth and make one of those crazy loud whistles that I still can't figure out how to do. I thought I was the best singer in the world. Then I tried out for the musical in seventh grade. Standing on that stage and seeing the look in the eyes of our music teacher and the kids in the audience, I knew right then that those standing ovations at home were just another of those things that par-ents do for their children. But even now that I know how bad my voice really is, I still perform karaoke for Mom and Dad on those weekend nights when it's just the three of us home alone together.

  Mom and Dad always made this big deal all the time about what a perfect kid I was and that made it difficult for me to lie to them. They always told me that I was so smart and mature and that I know how to make the right decisions for myself. They tell me that the best part about being my parents is, no, not listening to my bad karaoke, it's just sitting back and watching me figure out my way through the world. Well, that's what I was doing, wasn't I? Sometimes figuring out your own way through the world means lying to your parents. Sometim
es it means taking risks. Making new friends. Meeting new people from different neighborhoods and different backgrounds. Sometimes it means doing things that nobody would ever imagine Anna Banana would do.

  I was doing something different. Something new. I was leaving something behind.

  I was excited all week long. I had a hard time concentrating in school. My heart was racing. My stomach was in knots, but in a good way. I had a secret. I had a secret that I shared only with Emma and Mariah. We had a three-way secret. Nobody in the plaid skirts or gray pants or navy V-neck sweaters knew that I was going to spend the night at DJ's. But it was true. I was going to spend the night at a senior's house. So maybe he was a senior at Orsonville High, but a senior was a senior as far as I was concerned. The only senior I knew at ODS was Silas. I also knew Bronwyn but I never really liked her all that much. She seemed nice on the surface, but I always felt like that was a facade, like she was only being nice so that everyone would always talk about how nice she was. And perfect. With the ideal boyfriend. She seemed kind of ditzy to me.

  After school on Wednesday Mariah and Emma and I met in the library, as usual, but we stayed there this time because it was pouring rain and not showing any signs of letting up. The March sky was black even though it would be several hours before the sun went down. I could go home and tell Mom I'd been in the library, and this time, it would be the God's honest truth.

  We had a plan to work out.

  “So on Friday you guys should pack your bags and bring them to school and then DJ will pick us up down by the river at five o'clock.”

  “What should we pack?” I asked.

  Mariah laughed. I thought maybe she was laughing at me. But I couldn't help it. This was the first time I'd ever done something like this.

  “You know. Stuff that makes it look like you're going to Emma's for the night. It doesn't really matter because I'm sure you won't need anything. Just a change of clothes for the morning. We'll probably stay up hanging out and partying.”