Harmless Page 6

  “… We ran and ran through the woods by the river until we came to a dock. …”

  When I finished there was no standing ovation. No loud whistles. This was a new kind of performance for me.

  Dad started pacing the room. This is what Dad does. He's a pacer. Mom took the blue cotton throw blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders even though I wasn't cold in the slightest.

  Mom and Dad believed it all. There was no question about that.

  “We have to do something about this,” Dad was saying. “We can't allow this to happen.”

  “It did happen, Wally. It happened to our little girl.”

  “Dad. Mom. I'm fine now. Really. I mean it. Let's just for-get about this.” This was supposed to be it. The end. Tell the story and you will be forgiven.

  “How can we forget about this?” Mom was the one crying now. Her hands were shaking. I felt something spreading through me. Heat. Sickness. Nausea.

  “Everything's okay. Can't we just pretend this didn't hap-pen?” Please? Pretty please? Trust me, pretending is easy.

  I'd told the story to my parents and they believed it and I wasn't in trouble for lying or going to DJ's or making out with Brian or anything. Now it should all be over and done with and I swear, I promise, I won't lie about where I'm going ever again if we can just STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS.

  Dad grabbed a spiral notebook and one of my pens and pulled up a chair so he was facing me.

  “Tell me every detail you can remember, Anna. I know you've had a long night but I'm afraid things will get fuzzier in the morning and it's important that we make a note of every-thing you can remember so we can give it to the police.”

  “The police?” I knew this would happen. I just knew it. I asked, right there by the river, “What about the police?” Mariah said it wouldn't be a problem. She said our parents wouldn't make us go if we didn't want to, they wouldn't want everyone knowing, and anyway, even if we had to go to the police, she said, we had nothing to worry about because the police are idiots. Nothing to worry about. That's what Mariah always said. And I always listened to her. “Of course. We have to go to the police.” “No we don't. I told you. I'm fine. Look at me.” “You're lucky, Anna, and also very, very brave. But we can't let anyone get away with this. What if this happens again, to someone who isn't as lucky or as brave as you?” “It won't happen again.” “You don't know that.”

  “Yes I do. Dad, please. I don't want to go to the police.” “I'm sorry, Anna Banana. This is just something you have to do.”

  It's hard for me to remember what else I said that night. What exactly I told my father. I remember only that he was taking notes with my purple felt-tip pen and our story looked absurd written out like that in purple ink. I kept to the script and when his questions called for specifics I was as vague as possible. He was medium-size. I don't remember what he was wearing. I don't know what he looked like. I can't be sure. I don't remember. I don't know. It was dark. I was scared. I wasn't thinking clearly.

  Sometime during all this my mother was able to calm down and stop crying and turn her attention to me, which meant supplying me with things to keep me warm: more blan-kets, some hot tea. Did I want her to draw me a bath?

  She was just trying to help. It wasn't her fault. She couldn't have known that the last thing I needed was heat.

  She couldn't have seen the white-hot shame that was burning deep inside me.

  Emma

  By lunchtime on Monday everyone knew. But that was Monday. On Sunday Silas and I took a train into New York City, just the two of us, and got ice cream and took a walk in the park and then rode home with the river on our left as the sun was setting and just sat there side by side. On Saturday we went to the police.

  I'd never been in a police station. What I learned right away is that they aren't like what you see on TV. They're win-dowless and dirty with horrible fluorescent lighting and a smell like too many meals reheated in an ancient microwave. Also, they're surprisingly quiet. I don't know what I expected to see. Maybe lots of people in handcuffs and people running in screaming, “Help! Officer, I need help!” or at least telephones ringing off the hook. I didn't expect to see a bunch of people in bad-fitting polyester uniforms sitting around looking bored.

  The detective who took our statements was named Scott Stevens. He was tall and lanky with ears that stuck out and a goofy smile and kind eyes and everyone around the station called him Scotty but we called him Detective Stevens. Anna and Mariah and I told Detective Stevens everything we knew, which was, basically, nothing.

  We kept our answers vague. We didn't know what direction he came from. We didn't know what he looked like. How tall he was. What color eyes. What color hair. If he had any distinguishing features. Detective Stevens pointed out that I was in the best position of the three of us to get a good look, but I told him that I was so frightened it was like I was having one of those experiences people talk about having right before they die, when they float out of themselves and observe the scene from above. I was out of my body, watching from someplace else, seeing only shapes in the darkness.

  Detective Stevens was patient. When he listened he had the habit of tugging at his ears as if that might make him hear more than what was being said. He didn't push us. He offered us sodas from the machine in the hall. We told him what we knew and he wrote it all down. When we said we didn't know something, he said that was fine, that we shouldn't worry about it, and he smiled one of his goofy smiles, which were really more sweet than goofy. After a little over an hour he led us out to our parents, who were waiting in the lobby, and they took us all home.

  Mom ordered some pizzas and Dad canceled a dinner he had and the four of us sat around the table and tried to pretend like everything was normal. Everything was normal. Every-thing was normal before I became friends with Mariah. Now I couldn't sit and eat a piece of pizza without Mom and Dad and Silas staring at me like I'd grown a second head.

  Mom tried talking about a trip to Chicago to visit my grandparents over the summer, but then out of nowhere Dad slammed his fists on the table and shouted, “Goddammit.”

  “Raymond,” Mom said, which really meant: Raymond, don't do that, calm down, you're overreacting in that annoying way you do.

  This is what it was like with Mom and Dad. There was always a second conversation happening that only they were supposed to understand.

  “What? Are you trying to tell me I can't be upset about this? Are you trying to tell me that I can't be furious that some dangerous miscreant, some soulless felon tried to … to … to attack my only daughter?”

  The word he chose not to say hung heavily in the air above us all.

  Rape.

  It echoed silently in every corner of the room. It seeped into our clothes. Our food. The walls around us. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to think about it.

  I thought instead about the Arctic Circle. I read about this group of French scientists who were camped out at the Arctic Circle, studying the shape of the earth beneath its surface. Everyone assumes the inside of the earth is shaped just like the outside. I remember the diagrams in my fifth-grade textbook of different-colored concentric circles.

  But maybe if you cut the earth in half you wouldn't find perfectly rounded layers, one tucked neatly inside the next. Maybe my textbook was wrong. Maybe on the inside, the earth's just a big, unruly, indefinable mess.

  I envied those scientists and the months they would spend trying to figure this out, surrounded only by the Arctic's white nothingness.

  Mom paused and took the sharp edge off her voice. “What I'm trying to tell you, Raymond, is that we need to be here for Emma right now. We need to concentrate on supporting her.”

  “Well, I think we need to figure out who did this to her and then do something about it.”

  “That is the typical male response. Fix it. Do something. Men never deal with the emotional truth of the situation. Look at her, Raymond. Look at her.”

  “Can we please stop
talking about me in the third person?”

  I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.

  Silas pushed his chair back and stood up. “Hey, Em. Let's leave these freaks and go watch some bad TV.”

  He put his arm around me and led me downstairs. Mom and Dad stayed at the table and we could hear their whispering voices from the depths of the basement. It wasn't the kind of whispering full of concern or conspiracy. These were whis-pered daggers.

  Silas reached for the remote control but he didn't turn on the TV. Instead he turned and looked at me. Silas Seesallicus.

  “Do you want to talk about this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “All right, then. Let's not. Let's talk about something else.”

  “Excellent. Great. Perfect.”

  “Okay. Here are your choices: We can talk about Dalton's law of gas pressure, which, no, does not have to do with my personal gases, it has to do with what's on my AP test next Wednesday. Or we can talk about the bonehead trade Stein-brenner just made, which guarantees that the Yankees stand no chance in this year's pennant race. If neither of those top-ics does it for you, we can talk about why Bronwyn is so pissed off at me right now.”

  Silas knows I always want to talk about Bronwyn, to hear more about their relationship and what it's like to love some-one and have that someone love you back.

  I managed a smile. “I'll take door number three. Bronwyn troubles.”

  He picked up my feet and put them in his lap and we talked about how he thought they should start school in the fall with a clean slate, without longing for each other, without ties to who they were before they got to college. And even though this wasn't what I wanted to hear, even though I liked to picture Silas and Bronwyn married with a family, forever the perfect couple, it still felt good to me to sit there like that with my brother. He was treating me like a friend, not like a little sister, and for a brief moment, I felt like there wasn't any-thing in the world that I couldn't tell him.

  Mariah

  Carl said if I didn't dress like I do and I didn't go hanging around by the river, where people do God knows what, and if I spent more time studying and trying to be a role model for my younger sister, then this never would have happened.

  Mom said she was proud of me for being so brave and standing up for myself and my friends and for having the pres-ence of mind to grab a rock, but really, she added, Carl was right, I shouldn't be hanging out down by the river.

  Carl got up and left the room.

  “Carl's just upset,” Mom said. “It's hard for him to deal with difficult things sometimes. You know, he's so protective of you girls.”

  “Yeah, Mom. Sure.”

  “No, Pumpkin, I mean it. I know he isn't saying the right things, but trust me, I know him. I know how he sounded, but that's not really what he means. He just wants everything to be perfect. He cares about you.”

  Then it was my turn to get up and leave the room.

  And that's my summary of what happened at Casa Dal-rymple in the aftermath of Friday night. The next morning we went to the police.

  I tried saying I didn't want to go. I did all the things I told Anna and Emma to do. I begged. Please don't make me do this. Please. I don't want to talk about this. But when Carl gets something in his big bald head, sometimes there's just nothing you can do about it. He insisted. And in our house, he makes the rules.

  So we went the next day and talked to Detective Stewart or Stevens or whatever his name was. He didn't have a clue. I was pretty sure that was the last we'd ever hear from him. It was time to move on.

  DJ was out of my life. I would never, ever talk to him again. My cell phone was lying somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson River, so even if he wanted to reach me, he couldn't. He didn't have my home phone number and he wouldn't have any luck dialing information because I doubted he knew that even though my last name is Hofstra, I live among Dalrym-ples. I doubted he knew my last name at all.

  It didn't matter. I was so over him. I didn't care if he was trying to call me. I imagined my phone vibrating deep under the water, entangled in some weeds, fish giving it a sideways glance as they swam by. Go ahead, DJ. Call all you want. Nobody's around to hear you except for the sad little fish that manage to survive the polluted waters of the Hudson River.

  At school on Monday I was sitting in the courtyard before third period when Tammy Frost came over to me. Tammy Frost hadn't talked to me since eighth grade, back when I used to be part of her little group, before I dared to sit somewhere else during lunch. I did overhear her calling me a slut a few months ago, but that's talking about me, which is different than talking to me.

  “Oh my God, Mariah. I heard about what happened. Are you totally freaking out or what?” For a minute I thought maybe she heard that DJ had sex with me and then told me he was taking someone else to his prom, but then I realized she was talking about the Incident Down by the River. “I mean, that totally could have been me. I was hanging out there, like, three days before it happened. I never could have done what you guys did. I probably would have just sat there crying quietly and then who knows what that crazy pervert would have done to me.”

  She was wearing silver eye shadow and way too much mascara, which made it look like she had black boogers on her eyelashes. That may sound gross or mean or both, but that's exactly what it looked like to me.

  “I have a free period now, if you feel like talking.”

  I held up my social studies textbook I'd been trying to skim before class started. I hadn't done the reading. Then again, if word had traveled as quickly as I expected it had, Mr. Langdon probably wouldn't hold the fact that I hadn't done the reading against me.

  “Sorry. Social studies calls.”

  “Do you have Langdon? He's such a dork. Anyway, wanna have lunch together?”

  Lunch. With her? I don't think so. This was a road I'd been down before.

  “Maybe,” I said, because that was what my mom always used to say to me when I was younger, when it was still just the two of us, when she didn't want to start a scene by saying no. I stood up and shoved the book in my bag. “I've gotta run.”

  I left Tammy Frost, my new best friend (again), who suddenly didn't think I was too much of a slut to have lunch with, and ran to the main building, where my class was about to start. Just as I was rounding the corner, Silas was there.

  “Hey, Mariah, do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” Silas never talked to me unless I was with Emma. But today it seemed like everyone had something to say to me.

  “You don't have a free period, do you? I was thinking we could go somewhere and talk.”

  What was all this about talking?

  “Uh-huh.” That was all I was managing to say. “Uh-huh.” Here I was with Silas Calhoun, probably the hottest guy at Odious, standing face to face, with nobody else around, and all I could say was “Uh-huh.”

  “I don't want to keep you from something. You look like you're in a hurry. …”

  “No. I'm not in a hurry at all. I was just going to my locker.” I figured if Langdon didn't care that I hadn't done the reading he'd probably let it slide if I ditched class too. I could stop by his office later and apologize and tell him I was too upset. I'm so sorry, Mr. Langdon, but I really didn't want to be a disruption to the rest of the class, I didn't want to get in the way of anyone else's learning.

  We left the building and walked over to this grassy slope that leads down to the athletic fields. It was warm out and the sky was a perfect blue. I took off my sweater. All I was wearing underneath was a tank top. I sat down and leaned back in the grass and let the sun warm my skin. It felt so much better to be here than in Langdon's crappy class.

  “I'm worried about Emma. Do you think she's okay? She doesn't seem to want to talk about what happened.”

  He was wearing a gray ODS T-shirt and when he put his arms behind him and stretched, his shirt pulled tight against his chest and I could see up close why everyone always talks about
what a hot body he has. DJ was a lardass compared to Silas.

  “She's fine. We're all fine. Sure it was scary, but we all made it out okay. No harm, no foul. Isn't that what they say in the world of basketball?” I sat up next to him.

  “I don't know, Mariah. It sounds pretty traumatic to me. But you're probably tougher than Em. I just want to know if there's anything you think I can do to help her.”

  “Give her some space. Don't press her on it. She probably doesn't want to be bombarded with questions right now. I'm sure she'll be back to herself before you know it.”

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, I do. She's going to be fine.”

  “You think so?”

  “I'm certain of it.”

  He smiled. I was telling him just what he wanted to hear.

  “Thanks, Mariah.” He stood up and brushed the grass off his pants. He looked down at me and offered his hand. I took it and he pulled me to my feet. “You know …” He shook his head. “Sometimes it's hard to believe that you're only a freshman.”

  Now he was telling me just what I wanted to hear.

  Anna

  Tammy Frost asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her. Rachel Engel saved a seat for me in Spanish class. Tobey Endo said “Hey” to me as I passed him in the hallway. Tobey never says anything to me. But on the Monday after, Tobey said “Hey” and he smiled a really nice smile at me. Instead of turning red and looking down at my feet, I said “Hey” right back to him.

  After we went to see Detective Stevens and told him our story my parents had pretty much given it a rest. I spent Sunday just hanging out in my room and listening to music and while I was lying there I thought about how I, Anna Banana, made out with a guy and he wasn't even some total loser like I thought. He was kind of nice. We kissed for a really long time. It was just like how I always imagined it would be to kiss someone. Warm and wet and dizzy with time standing still. Then Emma and Mariah came running out onto the porch and said we were busted and we had to go home. How had it gotten so late?