Harmless Read online

  Partying?

  I guessed this meant drinking. I was hoping it didn't mean anything more than that. See: there's that perfect kid my par-ents are always talking about. The one who knows how to make all the right decisions for herself. That kid, the one who was finding her own way through the world, knew she didn't want to be at a party where people were doing any drugs.

  Our sixth-grade science teacher once told our class about a kid who took LSD and it lasted for a week. His parents found him in the closet, wrapped tightly in bedsheets. He started screaming when they tried to unwrap him. Bloodcurdling screams. He thought he was an orange and he didn't want to be peeled.

  That story scared me off drugs for life, not that I ever would have been the kind of person who would have taken drugs in the first place. I've always been cautious, maybe even too cautious.

  There was a silence. Emma was acting as if this were all no big deal, like she had spent lots of nights over at some strange guy's house and lied to her parents about it.

  “Relax,” said Emma with a slight sound of something in her voice. Like she was impatient with me, or just cooler than me. “It's going to be fine.”

  “I'm relaxed,” I snapped back.

  Mariah smiled that Juliet smile of hers. “It's going to be more than fine. It's going to be totally fun. I'm so glad you guys are going to get to know DJ. And that he finally gets to meet my two best friends.”

  She put one hand on each of our knees. Two hands. Two knees. Three friends.

  Emma

  Silas asked me what I was doing on Friday night. I couldn't figure out where this was coming from. Did he know something? Did anything ever get by him? Maybe his species name should be Silas Seesallicus.

  I just sat there with a blank face.

  “Control room to E.P.: do you compute? Question ren-dered. Awaiting response.”

  This was another of Silas's jokes. There's this child robot scientists have been working on in Japan. It has a vocabulary of over ten thousand words and is able to do light housework. Silas says I'm a prototype, that he ordered me over the Inter-net, and my duties include keeping his room neat, serving his meals and generally obeying his every command.

  “Huh?”

  “This Friday, you know, the day that immediately follows Thursday. What are you up to?”

  “Nothing. Just going to Anna's.”

  “Oh.”

  “What?” I said, meaning: what's with the look?

  “Nothing. I just thought maybe you'd want to come to the basketball game on Friday night. Bronwyn said she'd give you a ride.”

  “Much as I'd love to be your little cheerleader and sit in the special section roped off for Fans of Silas, I actually have a life.”

  “Whatever, kid. Just asking,” he said, and then he pinched the skin on my elbow really hard because he knows that's the one part of the human skin where we don't have any real nerve endings.

  It was a perfectly reasonable question. Silas knows that on most Friday nights I have nothing to do. I hang around at home, usually with Anna, sometimes with Silas and Bronwyn. My dad is out a lot and on those nights Mom likes to take me to plays and lectures and stuff like that on campus. When I go with her I pretend I'm in college and the guy who's playing the lead in the play is my boyfriend and I'm about to introduce him to my mother and then we'll all go out to dinner and maybe even have a glass of wine.

  The truth is I haven't had a boyfriend since seventh grade. That's two whole years. His name was Michael and he still goes to ODS but this year we don't have any classes together.Back then he was really skinny with kind of a big nose and a mass of tight black curls. Now he's filled out and gotten taller and his nose isn't so big and he goes out with Isabella Rothenberg.

  He called me up out of the blue one day and said he had something to tell me.

  “I can't just come out and say it, so you're gonna have to guess,” he said.

  “Okay. Can you at least give me a hint?”

  “Sure. It's a three-word sentence with a subject, a verb and a direct object.”

  We both had Ms. Lockhart for English and he was the star student. Not that this was such a complicated or brilliant little hint, but it did show how he couldn't stop himself from being the class brainiac.

  “Hmmm. I don't know.” I was playing dumb. Why else would this boy who I hadn't really talked to before call me at home on a Wednesday afternoon to say he had something to tell me? He liked me! A boy liked me! And he was about to tell me he liked me! I remember sitting there with the phone pressed to my ear, writing our names side by side and then enclosing them in a sad little heart.

  “Okay. I'm the subject. You're the direct object and the verb is ‘to like.’ As in I—like—you. That's what I called to tell you.”

  I knew it.

  He asked me if I wanted to go out with him and I didn't hesitate in saying yes. We were a couple all the way up until the summer. We were part of an elite group, cool enough to be going out, which didn't really mean all that much. We almost never went anywhere together. Then summer came and we didn't see each other for three whole months. When we returned for eighth grade he acted like we'd never made out and he'd never put his hand up my shirt, which he had done on five separate occasions. Not that he was mean; he just treated me like some girl who happened to be in Ms. Lockhart's English class with him back when we were both in the seventh grade.

  When eighth grade started and I wasn't a couple with Michael I went back to being Anna's best friend. The privileged world of those who have boyfriends closed its iron doors to me.

  When Friday finally rolled around, I was ready. It was time to meet new people who didn't know me, not that everyone at ODS really knew me, they only thought they did.

  I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little nervous about getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. Things had been pretty easy in our house lately. I hadn't heard Mom and Dad fighting in a really long time and I didn't want to give them any new ammunition. I figured that if I got caught lying and sneaking off to a party, then they might start fighting and blaming each other about whose fault it was that I screwed up, and I didn't want to be responsible for starting another Clash of the Calhouns.

  I wondered if Silas had ever been in my situation. I wondered if he ever lied about where he was spending the night. I'm not sure Mom and Dad would get so bent out of shape if Silas spent the night at some strange girl's house with no adult supervision. There's a clear double standard in our house and it's not just because Silas is older. It's because Silas is a boy, and I get the sense that Dad takes pride in knowing, or at least as-suming, that Silas has a way with girls. Dad was uncomfortable with me even having a boyfriend in seventh grade because he said I was too young. Mom said he was being sexist and that led to a huge blowout, so I stopped mentioning Michael's name around the house. Silas had at least three girlfriends in seventh grade and I can't even count how many hearts he's broken in all the years since we left the city and moved up here. For some reason, that seems to make Dad proud.

  I think it's pretty safe to say that even my feminist, girls-should-live-by-the-same-standards-as-boys mom would be beyond pissed off if she knew I was going to be having a sleepover not in Anna's little house with the green trim two blocks away, but in a house the next town over with several older boys who went to Orsonville High.

  I think it's also safe to assume that they would hit the roof just knowing that I lied to them because, as they've said for as long as I can remember: We will always be understanding if you promise to always tell us the truth.

  That's a bunch of bullshit.

  Parents don't really want to know the truth. They just want to know that everything is perfect and that their children are smart and happy and popular and out of danger so they can concentrate on their own problems.

  When I sat down to breakfast Friday morning both Mom and Dad were there because one of the many benefits to being a college professor is that sometimes you don't have any classes to teach on
Fridays. Or Tuesdays. What a life.

  Silas was already gone. Probably picking up Bronwyn before school. I was glad he wasn't home. I'd had a narrow escape with him the other night when he asked me what I was doing, and I knew if it came up again, he'd probably see right through me, Silas-style.

  I had my overnight bag by my side. “You guys remember that I'm staying at Anna's tonight, right?”

  “Of course, honey. I hope you have a good time.” Mom looked up from the paper and smiled at me.

  “We will.”

  “What are you two going to do?” Dad asked.

  What kind of question was that? And what was with all the questions anyway? First Silas, now Dad. Why would he ask me what I was going to do at Anna's? He never asks me what I'm going to do at Anna's.

  I wondered for a minute if child robots come equipped with self-activating panic buttons.

  “I don't know. Nothing. The usual. Hang out. Watch TV.”

  “That sounds truly edifying.” Now that was the Dad I knew. Spouting big words with just a little hint of sarcasm.

  “It will be.”

  I said goodbye and grabbed my backpack and my overnight bag and went outside, where Anna was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for me, with her overnight bag in her hand. We walked to school together like we've done almost every single day since the beginning of third grade.

  Mariah

  I told Mom we had an overnight class trip to Sturbridge Village. I guess she didn't remember that we had one last year, when I was in eighth grade. She could probably have told you what the second graders were doing every day of the week and every minute of the day because she was a parent advisor to Jessica's second-grade class. Lucky for me they keep the kindergarten through sixth graders on a totally separate campus, so Mom is clueless about what's happening at the upper school and it somehow didn't strike her as strange that the eighth and ninth graders would take the very same field trip.

  She did ask if there was any permission slip she had to sign and I just said no, although I thought it would be kind of funny if Mom had to sign a slip giving me permission to sleep over at DJ's.

  To whom it may concern:

  I, Shannon Hofstra Dalrymple, grant permission for my daughter, Mariah Hofstra, to spend the night at the home of her boyfriend, who is seventeen years old, turning eighteen in the sum-mer. There will be no adults present to provide supervision, giving them the opportunity to spend the entire night together and wake up in the morning in the same bed.

  I'd been waiting for a night like this. The first few times we were together we did it in his bedroom but it was always rushed and he always had to hurry me out before his mom got home. Since then it had mostly been in the backseat of his car. It's not all that comfortable or nice and it's not the kind of place where you want to spend much time after it's over holding each other. You pretty much just want to sit up and stretch your legs out and get your clothes back on.

  But tonight was going to be different. I could lie in his arms all night long.

  DJ was my first but he doesn't even know it. I managed to grind my teeth through what was a pretty unpleasant experience without shedding a tear or letting out any cries of pain. There wasn't all that much blood afterwards, but what there was he noticed, and I had to tell him I was just getting over my period, which somehow seemed less embarrassing than admitting it was my first time having sex.

  I know that people at school assume I've had sex even though I've never bragged about it. I think you can tell with people. Like even though I've never asked her, obviously Anna hasn't had sex. Probably not Emma either.

  I told Mom I'd be back by midday on Saturday. She slipped me a twenty and told me to bring Jessica a souvenir. I figured I had a day and a half to come up with a good excuse for why I forgot to bring her back anything and what hap-pened to the twenty.

  Carl wasn't a problem because Carl doesn't get involved in where I am or what I'm doing, unless it's to criticize me in some way, like about my room or what I wear or why my grades aren't good enough. He was gone early Friday morning like he is every day of the week. Off to his boring job running some big boring department at boring CompuCorp, where they pay him enough money to have a pool in his backyard.

  I met Emma and Anna after school in the library like I always did and we had some time to kill, so we walked into town and I got a cup of coffee and Emma got a tea and Anna got a hot chocolate at the Big Cup, which is our lame town's version of a hip café, and we ran into Silas and Bronwyn. Emma went white as a ghost and that's saying a lot because the girl is seriously fair-skinned. I didn't have time to give Emma a lecture about playing it cool, so I just walked us all over to Silas's table and said hi to them, and Bronwyn gave Emma a big hug. We sat down for a few minutes and then they got up to leave and Silas messed up Emma's hair and said, “Don't get too wild tonight.” And he did the same to Anna's hair and then gave my shoulder a squeeze and it was clear that he wasn't suspicious at all.

  DJ was half an hour late picking us up but that was okay because it was kind of nice sitting down by the river. It was gray and cool. A big barge worked its way slowly upstream against the current. Nobody else was around, although we did see that homeless guy who hangs out by the river sometimes. He didn't come anywhere near us. Once when I was down there with DJ, the guy looked like he was going to come up to us and maybe ask for money or something and DJ's friend Brian threw a rock at him and now I guess he knows that it's best if he keeps his distance.

  We heard a car horn.

  “Hello, ladies.” DJ rolled down his window. “Hop on in.”

  We threw our bags in the back and I gave him a long kiss and introduced him to Anna and Emma.

  “It's a pleasure,” he said, and he smiled one of those smiles that showed off his dimples. “I'm so glad you could make it. Now let's get going and meet the others and get this party started before the keg gets warm.”

  We climbed into Sally, the name DJ gave to his big green station wagon with the wood paneling, and headed off for his house on Orchard Road.

  A bunch of his friends were already there when we arrived. I'd met Brian before but I'd never met Owen or Chris or this girl named Becky who seemed to be the girlfriend of either Owen or Chris. I couldn't tell right away which one. They were all drinking beer out of big red plastic cups and there were four pizza boxes lined up on the dining room table.

  Right away, DJ took me up to his room. I didn't even have a chance to meet his friends or make sure Emma and Anna got something to drink, but I figured they could fend for themselves. I brought them there. Now they were on their own.

  He closed his door and he started taking off my clothes and kissing me and taking off his clothes and pulling the comforter off his bed. He was moving quickly like on those after-noons when we only had a short window of time before his mom would be getting home. I wanted to slow things down. It had been over two weeks since we'd seen each other. I wanted to talk. I wanted to take our time. I wanted to look at him. I wanted him to look at me. I wanted to tell him something, anything, about Mom or Carl or Jessica. I wanted to tell him how easy it was to lie about where I was going when nobody seemed to care.

  But then he whispered in my ear, “I need you.”

  And I was quiet. There was nothing more for me to say.

  Anna

  I knew Mariah and DJ were having sex. I just knew it. The minute we arrived at his house they disappeared upstairs. They came back only fifteen minutes later but I could tell that they'd been doing it up there.

  You'd think it'd be awkward, just Emma and me and these seniors from Orsonville High while Mariah and DJ were somewhere having sex, but it wasn't awkward at all. We each took a piece of pizza and a beer, which I could barely sip without gagging, and we sat in the living room while that guy Owen, who was really cute, played some stupid PlayStation game against Brian. I sat on the arm of the couch with Owen sitting to my left and watched his hands on the controls. He had a bracelet made of string on one of his w
rists.

  Emma, I noticed, wasn't having any trouble drinking her beer. She was done and up for another before I'd even finished my slice of pizza. Where did she learn how to drink beer? How did she get so good at it? We'd never been to a party with beer before this one.

  I studied Mariah after she rejoined the group. Her face was flushed but instead of having that look in her eyes that Bron-wyn does around Silas, she looked a little sad. Maybe it was because DJ didn't spend more time upstairs with her, but this was his house, and he did have to play host, and I figured she should give him a break.

  I was relieved when it became clear that the beer was it. There wasn't any talk of drugs or even any liquor, just a suggestion from Owen that we play a drinking game.

  It was called Quarters and it involved bouncing a quarter into a cup of beer. I sat down next to Owen, and Emma took the seat on the other side of him. It was a pretty stupid game. Chris and Becky didn't play. Without saying anything, they were gone, and I guessed they were up to the same thing that DJ and Mariah were up to earlier in the evening. So it was just me and Owen and everyone else.

  It was getting late. I was getting tired but I didn't want to let that show, so every time I felt a yawn coming on I faked a cough instead. No one picked me to drink the beer with the quarter in it and I was grateful. Maybe all that coughing con-vinced everyone I was getting sick and they didn't want to get my germs.

  I'm sure Emma would have picked me but she wasn't able to get the quarter into the beer. On her best days she's not the most coordinated person I know, but on this night she also happened to be wasted. She'd finished off more beers than I could count. Everyone seemed to be zeroing in on her, choosing her to down the beer, even after it was clear that she was drunk.