Harmless

by Dana Reinhardt

  “I was hoping this was just a passing thing. I was hoping it would go away by now.”

  I moved my fingers across the table so they were almost touching his. He slid his the last few centimeters.

  Contact.

  “They've gone and caught this guy and still, Emma isn't herself. Something is wrong with her and I don't know how to fix it.”

  He pulled his hand away and ran his fingers through his hair. I stirred my coffee slowly and watched as it turned from thick black sludge to a muddy, murky brown.

  Anna

  Tobey wanted to know everything. What's it like to be questioned by the police? To identify a suspect? Was I going to testify? Would there be a trial? How did I feel when I saw him? Did I want to kill him? Could I forgive him?

  I decided to do something I never do. I decided to take the first step. I decided I was done waiting, done being a follower.

  I asked Tobey if he wanted to do something sometime.

  I can't imagine what that would feel like, in those few sec-onds of waiting for an answer, if you had to ask a boy you liked face to face if he wanted to do something sometime. Waiting for a typed response, watching a flashing cursor, a blank page, was torture enough. I forgot to breathe.

  sK8teR817: sure

  Relief came like a cool rain falling on me. I stood up from my desk and opened my window. It was hot in my room and I wanted to take my time responding. I adjusted my pink and white curtains and thought about how it was time to redo my bedroom in more grown-up colors. I stared for a moment across the street at my neighbors' empty house. I came back to my computer screen to find:

  sK8teR817: the river? Saturday at 4?

  It wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking a movie, a cup of coffee, maybe hanging out at his house if his parents were out, not going down to the one place in the world I wanted to forget. But the first-step-taking, outgoing Anna was done for the day, so I just wrote:

  AnnaBanana133: sure, see u there

  This date with Tobey or whatever it was put me in an awkward position with my parents. I'd taken a silent oath to always tell the truth and never lie to them, but could I really tell them that I was going to meet a boy from school? Even if I could, even if that would be okay with them, even if they could finally acknowledge that I was growing up, I most definitely couldn't tell them that I was meeting him down by the river.

  I decided to tell them I was meeting a boy from class (not exactly true as I have no classes with him, but kind of true since he is in the ninth grade with me) to go over some home-work (who's to say we wouldn't talk about homework?) at the Big Cup (who's to say we wouldn't end up at the Big Cup after hanging out by the river?). They just smiled and said, “Fine, but go easy on the caffeine and make sure you're home by eight-thirty.” That's when it gets dark here at the end of May.

  I didn't know what I should wear. I felt like calling Emma. I wanted to tell her that I was going to meet Tobey and that I didn't know what to wear or what to say or what to do. But I wasn't talking to Emma. She was all wrapped up in herself and didn't seem to have any interest in being my friend anymore, and she also didn't seem to be friends with Mariah, so I had no idea who her friends were, or what she did with her time, other than spending it doing everything she could to avoid me. I missed her, but only as much as you can miss someone who you know doesn't miss you too.

  I knew she was going through some stuff. It couldn't have been easy for her to have that crowd around her yelling about what a big perv her dad is. I tried. I called her the morning after the march to talk, to tell her that I was here if she needed me. She never called me back.

  I picked up the phone to call Mariah, but then I decided that I didn't need anybody's help. I could do this on my own. I could figure out what to wear when meeting a boy on a Saturday afternoon down by the river. Not a skirt. Nothing too dressy. But no running shoes either. No baggy T-shirts. I settled on a pair of green Capri pants, some black platform sandals and a black scoop-neck shirt. I put my hair up in a pony-tail.

  Tobey was waiting for me when I arrived. He was riding his skateboard on the sidewalk and he did a jump off the curb when he saw me and then flipped the board up into his hands. I wondered if he was showing off.

  “Hey, Hendricks! What's with the book bag?”

  I'd left the house with it to keep up appearances for the sake of my parents.

  “I'm coming from the library,” I lied.

  “Cool.”

  We stood there staring at each other. Seconds ticked by. A minute? Two? Where was the bold instant-messager who'd suggested this outing? I wished she would speak up.

  He looked down at his feet. He kicked a rock in the direction of the river.

  “So, if you wouldn't mind … would you show me where this all happened? The night of the march the crowd was pretty thick—I was stuck way in the back.”

  “Right over there.” I pointed to the spot where Mariah and Emma and I were sitting the night we made up the story, when it was only the three of us and the river, the night we were terrified of getting in trouble with our parents for lying about being at DJ's house. From where I stood, in the warm sunlight of a Saturday afternoon in May, I looked back at that night and tried to remember why it felt like such a big deal to get caught in that lie. All things considered, the lie about being at a movie when we were really at DJ's was pretty small. There would have been consequences, for sure. But by now it would have been over and done with.

  “Where did he come from?”

  “We're not really sure.”

  Tobey looked down the river. He looked up the river. He put his hand up over his eyes to block out the sun, searching the horizon for something, maybe a sign of some kind, or a clue, some evidence the police might have overlooked. He took his notebook out of his pocket, scribbled something in it, and then seemed to give up and sat down on a rock and motioned for me to sit next to him.

  “Poor Hendricks,” he said. He swung his arm around my neck and gave my ponytail a playful tug. “It really sucks that this happened to you, but at least it all turned out okay.” He paused. “Well, for you anyway.”

  I sat perfectly still. I was afraid that if I talked or breathed or even blinked my eyes, this moment would end.

  “It's a good thing they caught that guy and that he's locked away because I swear, if I ever saw him, I'd seriously kick his ass.”

  No one had ever offered to do anything like that for me before. A huge grin spread across my face, out of my control.

  “You look thirsty, Hendricks. Do you want to go get something to drink at the Big Cup?”

  See. We were going to be at the Big Cup. That's the thing about lies. You never know if they just might end up becoming true.

  Emma

  I had sex with him. Somehow saying those words out loud to Ms. Malachy made it real. I knew this was true, I was there, and sure, I was drunk, but not so drunk that I didn't know it was happening, and yet it didn't seem real.

  I don't know why I told Ms. Malachy. I hadn't told any-one. Ms. Malachy's sneaky that way; she can get you to tell her things you don't even tell your best friends, or things you don't even admit to yourself. But now the secret was out there in the world, or at least, floating around her little stuffy office, and I couldn't take it back. I couldn't preserve it in ice. It was alive. It flew around me like a gnat, buzzing annoyingly in my ear.

  I thought about the way he nodded at me the night of the march. That slight movement of his head. There was an infinite world of meaning in that motion. Sometimes I thought it meant “Thank you for the special night we shared.” Sometimes I thought it meant “Thank you for keeping your mouth shut in front of my tall, skinny girlfriend with short brown hair and hips that knock into mine as we walk.” And sometimes I thought maybe I imagined the nod altogether.

  Mostly, I tried going back to not thinking about it, or him, at all, and that wasn't too hard. I was getting pretty good at not thinking about things I'd rather not think about. I was an
expert, really. The champion of nonthinking. If there were some kind of medal or award, I'd be the one up onstage, ac-cepting it.

  You wouldn't think sand castles were any kind of scientific mystery, would you? But up until very recently, physicists couldn't explain what made them work. Now they've learned that water holds sand together by forming tiny liquid bridges between dry grains, creating tension strong enough to support a structure.

  But no matter how soundly you build your sand castle, there are still things like wind and rain and the tide that will break these bridges apart, and in time, your sand castle will fall.

  Silas and Bronwyn broke up. I watched them and their life fade away. The apartment a short walk from Central Park, de-molished. Goodbye, kids. Dog. Important jobs and fashion-able clothes. Dinner parties and theater. Visits from Aunt Emma. Gone.

  I wondered, briefly, if this had anything to do with Mariah. Since she didn't come over to see me anymore, her contact with Silas was cut off. She wouldn't dare talk to him at school. Not in front of Bronwyn or any of the other senior girls. That left nothing. When else could she see Silas? No, Mariah was not a factor. She wasn't an unexpected tidal wave. Mariah was stuck out at sea, bobbing around, treading water. Silas and Bronwyn were stronger than Mariah, but not strong enough to withstand the natural erosion that comes along with things like graduation and going away to school.

  The college was out for the summer. The students had packed up their cars, driven one hundred miles or three thou-sand miles back to the rooms they'd slept in when they were still children. Mom had a two-week lecturing gig at Oxford that was apparently very prestigious, and Dad had planned to go with her. The idea was that Silas and I would stay home and finish out the school year, and they'd be back in time for his graduation. But Dad decided to stay. He wasn't going with Mom and I took this to mean that maybe their future was made out of sand too.

  I was seeing Ms. Malachy weekly. I saw her during my free period on Tuesdays and nobody knew. It felt strange sneaking off to see Ms. Malachy and revealing my secrets to her when she herself was one of the biggest secrets in my life.

  “I'm in therapy.”

  I tried saying that to myself, out loud in the shower when I knew no one was listening, and even then I wanted to look over my shoulder to make certain I wasn't heard. Therapy was something that other people did. Other people with problems.

  After the Tuesday when I told Ms. Malachy I'd had sex with Owen, I skipped my appointment. I spent my free period alone, in the library, reading a back issue of Scientific American. The library was a ghost town. Everyone was outside; they'd given up on books. Summer was too close. There was studying to be done, notes to be reviewed, but that could happen outdoors, barefoot, sitting in clusters, surrounded by friends.

  I read the same sentences over and over again.

  When we're awake, different parts of the brain communicate constantly across the entire neural network. In the deepest part of sleep, however, the various nodes of your cranial nervous system lose all their connections.

  The silence of the library was distracting. I could hear the humming of the air conditioner and the buzzing of the fluorescent overhead lights. Mr. Frank, the librarian, was typing something into the computer.

  … In the deepest part of sleep, however, the various nodes of your cranial nervous system lose all their connections.

  Suddenly someone was sitting across from me. Ms. Malachy. She must have had superpowers beyond just the power to sniff out secrets.

  “What are you doing?”

  I held up the magazine.

  She nodded. “You know, it's Tuesday.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “It's okay to feel like taking a break. Talking can be difficult.”

  “Uh-huh.” I started flipping through the pages of the magazine, pretending to be searching for something.

  “But I also know that when you feel like taking a break, that's probably when we're getting somewhere.”

  She slipped off her sandals and tucked her feet underneath her. This seemed totally inappropriate to me. No shirt, no shoes, no service.

  “I'm going to tell you something, Emma. I sometimes avoid things that are difficult too. Even in my role as a coun-selor. I let things slide by because I'm afraid of losing my stu-dents. I'm afraid if I push something difficult, that come the next week I'll be sitting at my desk staring at an empty couch. Sometimes that couch is empty anyway, even when I don't say what's on my mind. When that happens it's because the student with whom I'm meeting knows that the difficult stuff is right there, about to be unmasked, even if I'm not the one to pull the mask off it.”

  I stared at her hard. “What are you talking about?” I asked, even though I knew.

  “Last week, I let you tell me that everything at home was fine, and I didn't mention to you that I'm aware of what's gone on with your father at the college. I let you tell me that what happened with you and this boy Owen was no big deal, when I know this can't be true. I let you tell me that the arrest of David Allen meant nothing to you. I know these things weigh on you heavily, I can see that on your face and in the way you carry yourself, and I wanted to tell you I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't honest. It's not right for me to pretend around you when all I ask of you is that you don't do the same to me.”

  I closed the magazine. I looked up and I judged the distance between my chair and the door to the sun-drenched outside to be about fifteen steps, yet even with my head sending my legs the command, they wouldn't move. Like in sleep, there was something interfering with the connections in my brain, and it had been there, I realized, for a while now.

  Mariah

  The ghost we invented to protect us that night had now returned to haunt me.

  I thought about David Allen all the time. I imagined a cell for him with warm light, soft music, Egyptian cotton sheets on his plush king-size bed and gourmet home-cooked meals. I created this world for him knowing this wasn't what it looked like inside a jail cell, but I wanted him to have these comforts. I wanted him to have a vacation from the cold hard world of homelessness. I wanted these things for him even though, I had to remind myself, he was the one who had kidnapped and killed Elinor Clements.

  David Allen couldn't be charged with the crime of taking Elinor away from her family and friends (no body, no evidence), but they seemed to have arrived at some place that began to resemble peace, or at least acceptance. She was finally memorialized. A small local park was named in her honor. Kids at her school wore pink rubber bracelets with her name stamped on them.

  I felt divided in two, which was not entirely new for me. There was the Mariah from Dexter County who lived in a tiny apartment, and the Mariah who lived in the Dalrymple house with its never-ending hallways and its black-bottomed swim-ming pool. There was the Mariah who everybody at Odious thought I was—stuck-up, bitchy, tough, cool—and the Mariah I really was: none of those things. And now there was the Mariah who hated David Allen and wanted to see him in pain, and the Mariah who felt sorry for him and wished he had Egyptian cotton sheets.

  My mom thought I needed a break this summer and tried talking me into a camp in California. I could see Carl's fingerprints all over that plan. They'd go off on a cruise together while I went to some stupid camp. I refused to go, even though I briefly considered going and then ditching the camp and spending my time searching the streets of Los Angeles for my real father. Then I remembered that I'd invented the idea that my father worked as an actor in Los Angeles, much the same way I'd invented this cell for David Allen with soft light and gourmet meals and fancy sheets. And I decided that lately, I'd had more than my fair share of ghosts. I just wanted to spend the summer at home, living my life and hanging out with Silas as much as possible.

  He had a job lined up at the bookstore on Grand and I'd applied for a job there too. I also applied for a job at the gar-den center and the stationery store, neither of which excited me. What I really wanted to do, almost as much as I wanted to work with Silas at t
he bookstore, was to work in a homeless shelter, but I didn't even bring that up to Mom or Carl because, given the circumstances, I knew they'd look at me like I'd gone crazy.

  Silas was having a rough time. Emma was still moping around and I knew things between Silas and me wouldn't really start happening until he stopped worrying about her, or at least until he accepted that she wasn't his responsibility. But there was something sweet about his obsession with Emma, and it made me want to be a better big sister to Jessica, so I started taking her out one afternoon a week for ice cream sundaes. This scored big points with Mom, who dropped the whole summer-camp-in-California idea.

  I never had any intention of following Carl's rule about not spending time with Anna anymore, but somehow it happened anyway. She always went home right after school. She sat with Tammy Frost and her crowd at lunch and I didn't have any interest in that table of people at all. But the more David Allen haunted me, the more I felt the pull toward Anna and Emma, and since Emma had made it very clear that she didn't want to be my friend anymore, I called up Anna and invited her over.

  It was a Sunday, and even though summer hadn't officially started, it was hot and humid. Carl was off at a conference for the weekend and Mom was delighted that I'd invited someone to the house because this wasn't something I made a habit of doing. I guess she'd forgotten about Carl's ban on all things Anna.

  She brought her bathing suit and Mom made us a pitcher of mint lemonade and we sat on the striped lounge chairs and watched Jessica do handstands and retrieve rubber rings from the bottom of the deep end. Finally Mom called Jessica into the house—she thought Jessica had had enough sun and chlorine—and told her it was time to have a peanut butter sandwich and watch Finding Nemo. Anna and I were alone.