Harmless Read online

  “Poor you.”

  Wally laughed. He didn't say anything about me being wrong.

  Then, before I even knew what I was saying, I added, “My real father lives in Los Angeles. He's an actor.”

  “Really? That's exciting. What have we seen him in?” asked Carolyn.

  “He mostly does theater. Serious stuff. He's really talented. He's won a bunch of awards.” It was amazing how easy it was for me to picture this made-up father of mine. There he was, standing alone on a stage, a light shining down on him, his hands clutching a statue, and his eyes motionless, locked on mine.

  Later, up in Anna's room, she started pressing me about Owen and Emma.

  “So did Emma tell you anything more about what really happened with Owen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they slept in the same room. Do you really buy that all they did was make out?”

  Wait a minute. Weren't Anna and Emma supposed to be best friends? Hadn't they known each other forever? Weren't they close like sisters? Why was she asking me all this? Why didn't she just talk to Emma?

  “I don't know. But I do know that he likes her. He wants to see her again.”

  “Really? When? Where?”

  Even though I was pretty good at lying, I couldn't come up with anything on the spot. “This Friday at DJ's. We're going to say that we're going to the movies.”

  “That sounds easy enough.”

  Anna's room looked like it must have looked back when she was a kid, like she'd been in this house forever and had never had to move to some strange new place. There was an old, frayed stuffed dog on her bed missing one of its droopy eyes. She still had picture books on her bookshelves. Her walls were pink and white stripes.

  I could see how much she wanted to go with us and at that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint her.

  Anna

  I know what I saw. I may be inexperienced. I may never have kissed a boy or had his hand in my shirt, but I know what I saw. I just didn't get why Emma was lying to me. I kind of thought it was Emma's duty as my best friend to tell me more, but for some reason she was acting like this was too private to talk about and I just couldn't understand that. Emma and I talk about everything. At least we used to. I gave her every opportunity to tell me the truth. We walked back to her house, just the two of us, but she still didn't say anything.

  I stood on the sidewalk after she turned onto her street and watched her keep walking away from me until she got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared up her driveway and I was left all alone.

  Mariah had no problem telling me things. She came over for dinner and it was totally embarrassing because Mom and Dad were giving her the third degree, asking her all kinds of questions, but at least they never suggested we take out the karaoke machine. Then Mariah and I hung out in my room, just the two of us, and that was cool because we'd never hung out just the two of us without Emma around. She told me about how she and DJ had been having sex since about the second week they knew each other. She said it made their relationship really strong. I guess maybe he's different around her when they're alone, just the two of them, up in his room.

  Two. Two is the magic number.

  At school the next week I kind of thought Emma would walk around like Mariah used to with everyone whispering about how she was dating this senior from Orsonville High, but that didn't happen. Emma kept it to herself, and nobody seemed to pick up on anything, probably because nobody could imagine Emma doing something as daring as spending the night on a couch with a guy she didn't know. Emma was just Emma. She wasn't Mariah. And everyone knew it.

  I tried to get more out of her about her night with Owen, but she shut me out. Suddenly, after all our years as best friends, she wasn't sharing the details, which was kind of annoying because I'd heard details about everything else in her life. I could draw a perfect map of her apartment in New York City even though someone else has lived there for the past six years. I know the names of all thirteen of her cousins. I can sing the entire song from the camp she went to for four summers, and I never even visited her there.

  I know some more private things about her too. Serious things. I know about how her dad was accused of sexual ha-rassment by a student when he used to teach in the city and that's one of the reasons they moved up here. I know this about her because she told me one night. She'd overheard her parents fighting about it and she was crying, and she whis-pered the whole story to me in the dark while I was lying in a sleeping bag on the floor of her room. We haven't talked about it since. I tried once to bring it up but she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about.

  That was what she was doing now. Acting like she had no idea what I was talking about when I'd ask her what happened that night with Owen.

  So I stopped asking.

  For the first time in my life, I wasn't Anna Banana, the perfect kid who makes all the right decisions. I was becoming Anna, with her own life and her own friends, who goes off to do her own things.

  We were going back to DJ's and I was hoping there'd be someone better for me to hang out with than Brian. He wasn't that cute and his snoring almost peeled the wallpaper off the walls. Mariah decided we would tell our parents we were seeing some movie adapted from a Jane Austen book. She chose it because it was playing at the college campus the-ater and that's the only theater we can walk to. Also, it's long and that meant we could come home a little past eleven without any questions asked.

  I was a pro at this now. I figured last Friday was the Big Lie, and this was just the little lie and we could pull this one off, no problem at all.

  Emma

  On Friday night Silas and Bronwyn rented two Will Ferrell movies and I wanted to stay home with them and sit on the couch and eat ice cream and get into my pajamas and laugh at Will Ferrell and his stupid sense of humor. Now, more than anything in the world, I wish I had done just that.

  I can't really explain why I went back, other than that I thought I was supposed to want to go back. There are rules, I guess. Laws of science. Let's call this one the Senior Boy-Freshman Girl Principle. When a boy like Owen likes you and wants to see you again, you go. You have no choice.

  But I knew the minute I saw him that the last thing I wanted was to be alone somewhere with him, so I spent the entire night avoiding him. And this time, I also stayed away from the beer.

  Lots of stuff happened that night. It was the night of sur-prises. For one thing, Anna spent most of the night out on the back porch, making out with Brian. Who could have pre-dicted that? And Mariah and DJ got in a huge fight. I had no idea Mariah could scream like that. She's always so cool and laid-back, but we could all hear her screaming even though she was upstairs, behind his closed bedroom door, and we were all downstairs with loud music playing on the stereo.

  But what's really important about that night at DJ's is that my cell phone rang at 10:45. It was Mom. I was smart enough not to answer, and when I checked the message she sounded hysterical.

  She and Dad had a dinner on campus that let out early and they decided to come to the Jane Austen movie. She searched the theater for me, but the lights had already gone down. Now it was over and I wasn't there and where was I and she'd already called Anna's mom and even got a number for Mariah's house and talked to her mom and no one had heard from any of us and WHERE ARE YOU?????

  Species name: Motherus Hystericalus.

  I ran upstairs and pounded on DJ's door even though Mariah was still screaming at him.

  I quickly told her that we were busted and she grabbed her purse and said, “Come on, asshole. We need a ride home.”

  “Screw you,” said DJ. “You can walk.”

  We ran downstairs and found Anna, who was still all over Brian, and even though he's kind of gross and seems like a big dumb jock, he, unlike DJ, was cool enough to at least give us a ride. This time, it was me who left without saying goodbye to Owen.

  Brian dropped us down by the river.

  This was bad. We
couldn't get caught. If our parents found out we were at DJ's this night then they'd figure out we'd been at DJ's the Friday before, and there are certain things that par-ents must never know.

  Anna just sat there with her head in her hands mumbling, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

  Poor Anna. Her body was tense with worry. She pulled into herself hard, like one of the rocks we were sitting on.

  What would happen when her parents realized she wasn't the perfect, always-on-her-best-behavior only child they thought she was?

  Screaming Mariah had turned back into Cool Collected Mariah. She was acting like this whole mess was no big deal.

  “He is such a prick. I give him, like, everything. I'm always there for him. I really thought he loved me even though he never said it. I could just tell. And now he says he's bringing some skank from his class to his prom? I thought he was going to ask me tonight. I really did. I've been slowly stashing away money from Carl's wallet to pay for a dress and everything.”

  I didn't really see what this had to do with our current cir-cumstance. Prom dresses? Really.

  “Mariah,” I said. “This is huge. We're busted. Everyone knows we weren't at the movies. What are we going to do? We can't tell them about going to DJ's. We can't do that.”

  Mariah walked over to the edge of the river, picked up a stone and threw it as far as she could. It disappeared. It didn't make a sound when it hit the water, like the night just swallowed it up.

  “I was a virgin,” she said, just like that.

  We were quiet. I felt the sting of those words, sharp behind my eyes, aching in my body, my heart. I sat down. I looked at my watch. I could barely see the numbers. My head was under-water. I squinted my eyes and managed to focus. 11:00.

  “I'm sorry.” That was all I could think to say.

  She sat down again and looked over at Anna.

  “Hey, Anna Banana. Chill. Take a breath.”

  Anna looked up. She unfolded. Even though there was no moon, only the tiny twinkling lights from other people's houses across the river, I could see that her eyes were filling with tears. “But what—”

  “Don't worry. Let's put our heads together. We can handle this. We can figure something out. We'll come up with something.”

  Mariah was right. We could figure something out. A story. A lie. We tell lies all the time. Sometimes it's easier to tell lies than it is to tell the truth.

  It was then, there in the darkness, with only those little pin-points of light to see by, light from a world away where other people with their own problems and their own secrets lived their own lives, that everything in our world changed for good.

  Mariah

  DJ stands for Darryl Junior. He always hated being called Darryl, which is what his mother called him. His dad sometimes called him Junior. He hated that even more.

  DarrylDarrylDarrylDarryl. JuniorJuniorJuniorJunior.

  DJ stands for Dumb Jackass. DJ stands for Dim-witted Jerkoff.

  It was all suddenly clear. He didn't care about me. He was just using me. He never planned on taking me to his prom or introducing me to his parents or treating me like a real girlfriend. The minute after we left he probably had a big laugh with all of his stupid, stupid friends about how I went all psy-cho on him when he told me he was bringing someone from his class, Kat, to the prom instead of me. Kat. She sounded like a stuck-up prissy bitch.

  To top it all off we were busted and sitting down by the river in the dark trying to figure out what to tell our parents. I was going to be in trouble. Big trouble. I was going to get in big trouble over that Dumb Jackass. That Dim-witted Jerkoff.

  Emma's mom called my mom and there was a message on my voice mail and Mom was trying to sound calm, but I could hear Carl yelling in the background. I wasn't going to get away with this and I was a liar and he'd had enough of me and my attitude and yell, scream, yell, scream, yell.

  Anna was totally freaking out and I just kind of wished I'd never taken pity on her in her little girly room the other night and invited her to come. She was making it hard for me to think.

  We didn't have much time. It was getting late. Now it was later than we said we'd be home, which didn't really matter because everyone already knew that we hadn't been to the movie anyway. We couldn't say that we'd been at DJ's. Emma was right. That was out of the question. Mom and Carl couldn't find out about DJ. Not that way. I couldn't even imagine what would happen if they knew I'd spent the night with him. Yes I could. Carl would talk about sending me to boarding school again but this time it might be more than an empty threat.

  “We could say we changed our minds about the movie and went out to eat instead.”

  Stupid Anna. That would never work. She was so simple-minded sometimes. Where did we go and why didn't we call and why weren't we home already?

  “We could say we went to a different movie.”

  “How did we get there, Anna? Who drove us there? Who drove us home? How is that going to work?”

  “Jeez, Mariah. At least I'm trying to come up with some-thing here.”

  Emma was sitting there without saying a word. At least she wasn't whining like Anna. Then she sat up and looked at me with those honest eyes of hers.

  “We could say something happened to us, something bad. …”

  Something bad had happened. DJ told me he was taking stuck-up prissy Kat to his prom. He told me this after having sex with me.

  Emma went on: ”We could say something bad happened. Something bad happened to me.”

  Emma was starting to make some sense.

  Here's our story:

  It was a nice evening. We had some time to kill, so we came down to the river to watch the sun go down. We were sitting around talking, watching the boats, listening to the crickets, and we lost track of time. When we realized that we weren't going to make the movie we decided to go to the Big Cup and have some hot chocolate and then go home early. But there wasn't any hurry since we could get hot chocolate anytime, so we kept talking. We were alone. It was getting dark. There was no moon, but the stars were beautiful. We lay down on our backs to see if we could find the constellations Mr. Krause had been teaching us about in science class.

  We don't know what direction he came from. He seemed to just appear out of nowhere. He grabbed Emma. We all started screaming but there was nobody around to hear us. He told us to shut up. He said if we kept on screaming like that he'd kill us. He said he had a knife.

  He took our cell phones. He didn't want us calling 911.

  He told Mariah and Anna to stay down on the ground. If we moved an inch, he said, he wasn't afraid of using that knife.

  He picked Emma up and dragged her a few feet away. He told her to take off her clothes. Emma said no. He said take off your clothes now.

  Mariah felt around on the ground next to her. She grabbed hold of a rock slightly bigger than her fist. She showed it to Anna in the darkness. They quietly shifted onto their knees, keeping low to the ground. His back was to them and Emma was sobbing. She was starting to unbutton her shirt.

  Mariah jumped up and lunged at him with the rock in her hand. She struck him in the head. He doubled over. Anna kicked him hard in the back. Then we ran.

  We ran through the woods lining the river. We ran as fast as we could. We came to a landing by the water with a dock people use to launch their motorboats. We crouched under-neath it. We waited. We wanted to make sure he hadn't followed us. We wanted to make sure it was safe to walk home. Our hearts were pounding. We didn't make a sound. We don't know how long we stayed there under the dock. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been three hours. We didn't know. We couldn't be sure.

  Anna

  I guess it goes without saying that Mom and Dad were up and waiting for me when I got home. Every light in the house was on, and as I approached it from the sidewalk it looked warm and welcoming in the darkness.

  I heard Mom shout, “She's here!” as I took the first step up to the front door.

  Dad threw h
is arms around me. “Oh, thank God!” He kissed the top of my head. Then he took a quick step back. There we were, just my parents and me, home together like we would have been on any normal Friday night. But on this night, they were looking at me in a way they'd never looked at me before. They folded their arms across their chests. They wanted an explanation.

  Mom touched my cheek with her hand. “You've been crying.”

  I have the kind of face that gets all red and splotchy when I cry. There's no hiding it. Even if I'd had the opportunity to splash cold water on my face, which I hadn't, or had the chance to borrow some makeup from Mariah, which I hadn't, Mom would still have been able to tell that I'd been crying. And for some reason, when she pointed this out, I started crying all over again.

  They led me over to the couch and sat on either side of me.

  “Why don't you tell us what happened? Where have you been? What's going on?”

  I tried, but the words wouldn't come. Dad rubbed my back. The phone rang. None of us made a move to answer it. Then we heard Emma's mom's voice on the machine.

  “Carolyn? Wally? Are you there? It's Pamela. We need to talk about this. Emma is very shaken up, understandably. How's Anna doing? Let's get together in the morning. I think we need to go to the police. I'll call Shannon, Mariah's mother. For now let's just hold our daughters close. Sleep well. All of you.”

  Click. Dial tone. Silence. Mom and Dad's eyes on me.

  I took a deep breath and I started to tell them the story. The first few words were almost impossible, but then, as I went on, I was surprised at how easy it was. How naturally the details came to me. How clearly I could picture the whole incident.

  “… And then Mariah grabbed a rock and showed it to me and without saying a word I knew what we had to do. …”

  It was just like putting on a show, without a karaoke machine, and with my heart beating hard in my chest.