Harmless

by Dana Reinhardt

  “I'll be fifteen next week.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  I smiled. I leaned forward. He leaned forward and pulled me onto his lap, my legs wrapped around his waist, and we started kissing again. His mouth hard on mine. Everything else fell away.

  Then he pulled back again.

  “Emma,” he said.

  Emma. The sound of her name landed with a thump. I thought in that moment about my empty life. How I had no-body. No friends to speak of. Not the kind of family you dream about. I had no one to look up to. To count on. To turn to when things got out of my control. I didn't know whose fault that was. Mine? Mom's? My absent father's? The rest of the unforgiving world's? All I knew was that right at this perfect moment, I had Silas, and I wasn't going to let him go.

  I held two fistfuls of his hair. I looked into his face and no-ticed a small speck of gold in his left eye. “She doesn't have anything to do with this. This is just you and me. Nobody else matters.”

  He was perfect. Kissing him was like kissing for the first time. Nobody else had ever mattered.

  “She's my sister, Mariah. This may sound strange, but I can't lie to her. Not about something like this.”

  On his face I saw worry and concern, but I could also see something else. I could see how much he wished we weren't down by the river, out where other people might be able to see us. I saw what might happen if we were somewhere alone with four walls around us.

  I didn't want to let that look of worry and concern get between us. I felt some space opening up and I moved to close it, quickly.

  More kissing. Barely stopping to breathe. His arms sleek and strong and smelling like sunblock. My hands. On his jeans. Fumbling with the buttons. He started tugging at my shirt. I thought he was trying to take it off, and I reached down to help him, I didn't care if anyone came along and saw us. But instead, he used the fabric of my shirt to pull me off his lap.

  He buried his face in his knees and let out a deep, guttural groan.

  “This is totally messing with my head,” he said.

  For a minute, looking at him sitting there, his beautiful face in his hands, I felt sorry for him. I knew what it felt like to wrestle with something. To want to do the right thing.

  “I need to think about this. I don't know how to do this or if I should do this or if it's even what I really want to do. I'm sorry.”

  “Silas.”

  He lifted up his face and looked at me. I could feel that the space between us was now too big for me to bridge. I couldn't touch him. Not right then. I needed to wait. I needed him to come back to me.

  “What?”

  I figured I had time. I could turn my head and watch the sun on the water and sit in silence with just the knowledge that he was there beside me.

  “Nothing.”

  If I'd known what would happen over the next few days, if I'd known that this would be the very last chance I'd have to talk to Silas, there is a world of things I might have said right then. I might have started with the truth. The truth about every-thing. But that isn't how time works. I didn't know then that the moment had come, that it was right there in front of me and that before I knew it, it would be gone, off down the river, never to return again.

  Anna

  I remember a time when nobody looked at me. When I could walk through the hallways and I was invisible. I blended in. I was ignored. Anna Banana. Anna Nobody. Plain old ordinary Anna with nothing at all to show for it.

  I've said it before, but I wish I'd just told the truth. I wish I could go back and be who I was before all this happened. I miss that person. I miss that life.

  When everything started to change, when I was finally noticed, it felt like the beginning of something exciting. I wasn't going to be that invisible girl forever. But what I didn't stop to think about is that when there's a beginning, there's bound to be an ending lurking somewhere right around the corner.

  I just didn't know that the ending would come the way it did.

  I was sitting in English class, one of the last few English classes of the year. It was Monday. School let out on Friday for the summer. Graduation was on Saturday. The afternoon was quiet and lazy. The windows were open. There was nothing to keep out: no cold, no excessive heat.

  I did a kick-ass final paper on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was a good English student. I participated in class discussions. Ms. Christofar seemed to like me.

  None of that matters anymore. Nothing matters other than what happened at two-fifteen.

  There was a knock on the door and then it opened. Prin-cipal Glasser walked in and for a moment I thought he was just stopping by to wish everyone a happy summer and thank us for a good year but then I saw that he wasn't alone. Some-one with a long shadow was standing in the hallway, just out of sight.

  “I'm sorry to interrupt,” Principal Glasser said. “But there is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

  Detective Stevens walked into the room and the door closed behind him. He was back in uniform.

  Ms. Christofar sat down at her desk. Principal Glasser handed her a folded piece of paper and then he turned to face the class. “Students, I'm sure you all recognize Detective Stevens from the special assembly we held some months back.”

  Everyone nodded. I stopped breathing. I could feel the eyes of every person in the room.

  “Well, he's taken time out from his busy schedule again today, this time, unfortunately, not to help us as a community in our collective search for justice, but instead he's here to see that justice is done.”

  He looked at me. “Anna.”

  I stood up. He motioned for me to come to the front of the room. I neatly packed up my things. I put my backpack on my shoulders. I slid my chair under my desk and I walked forward, left foot, right foot. I didn't stumble. How I managed to function in this way I don't know, because inside, my head was filled with static. I could feel my pulse rattling my shell of a body. My face was hot. Scarlet red. Scarlet Letter. A. A is for Anna.

  I stood at the front of the room. The stares of the students were sharp pricks in my skin, as if everyone's eyes had suddenly grown long sharp needles. But when Detective Stevens looked at me, even as his hand reached around to the back of his belt to grab hold of his handcuffs, I saw a hint of kindness in his gray eyes.

  “Anna Hendricks,” he said. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  There are certain things I never thought I'd know, like what it feels like to have those words spoken to you. I never thought I'd know that handcuffs are cold. They're heavy. They hurt.

  In the hallway, Principal Glasser told me that Ms. Christo-far would explain to the class why I'd been arrested. Why the same thing was going to happen to Emma and Mariah. How we had lied. We had broken the law. We had sent an inno-cent man to jail. We had manipulated and violated the trust of every member of this and the greater community. He said all this without ever meeting my eyes.

  I'm sure I had questions, but I couldn't put them together. My mouth was parched. My throat taut as a rubber band. I would have cried, but I was all dried up. There was nothing left of me.

  We rounded the corner and I saw Emma, standing next to Ms. Malachy, the school guidance counselor. Emma looked at me and I looked at her and what I wanted to do more than anything right then was the one thing in the world I couldn't do. I wanted to hug her.

  Together we waited outside as Principal Glasser and Detective Stevens repeated the scene from my English class in Mariah's algebra class. My wrists shackled. My eyes cast down, locked on my black Skechers and the cold linoleum floor. I needed to stretch my neck, and when I looked up, through the small square window in the door, I saw Tobey. He was sitting in the front row of Mariah's class. I looked over at Emma but she didn't seem to notice him. Why should she? Emma didn't know anything about Tobey and me. She didn't know about our IM relationship, or about our one kiss under the dark streetlamp, at the end of a day, just before the lights came on.

  He saw me too. I didn't kn
ow how to read what was on his face. It wasn't shock or surprise or hurt or disappointment. I think maybe it was something far worse. I think it was the indifferent look of someone who barely knew me at all.

  My tears came, finally, in the car. I was sitting by the window. Emma was in the middle. Mariah on her other side. All three of us with our hands cuffed behind us. I realized that we hadn't been together in months. AnnaEmmaMariah. Three best friends. Three is the magic number.

  Just like that night when we were alone by the river, I was the one doing the crying. But this time, nobody was talking. We weren't trying to figure a way out of the situation. We weren't plotting or strategizing or searching for a story to tell our parents. Story time was over. We all knew that this was bigger than anything we could even begin to imagine and there were no words that could be of any use to us.

  When we were a few blocks from the station, Detective Stevens finally spoke.

  “I'm sorry it had to be this way. I'm sorry. I'm sorry on every level.”

  My parents were waiting for me when we came in the back entrance. My mother wore the same blotchy look I knew must have been on my own face, brought on by all the tears.

  “Oh, Anna,” she said, and there was nothing she could have said to make me feel worse than the way she pronounced my name.

  Since that day, the day we were arrested, the day everyone learned the truth, so much has been debated. How could we have made up that lie? Why did we make up a lie so big to cover for something so small? Didn't we know what would happen? Why did we continue to stand by our story as it grew and grew? How could three girls with our backgrounds, girls who had never been in trouble, how could girls like that do something so terrible?

  But immediately after our arrest, all those good solid questions without any easy answers were overshadowed by this one other question: why did the police handcuff three young girls at school, in front of their classmates, and lead them to the back of a squad car like a group of violent criminals? Even people who hated us for what we had done thought the actions of the police were extreme. Of course there were those who thought we deserved every minute of those handcuffs and then some, but I think more people thought that what the po-lice did to us was out of line.

  They would have gone willingly, people said, and it doesn't matter that the police had more than probable cause to make the arrest. Couldn't they have brought them in without the handcuffs?

  Mariah's stepfather was at the head of the pack of people who protested the arrest. He hired some famous lawyer from the city to sue the department for intentionally humiliating and degrading three minors.

  I didn't hold our arrest at school or the handcuffs against the police. I know what they were trying to do. They wanted to give us some sense of the gravity of what we'd done, they wanted us to pay, and they knew we'd never serve time or even be held overnight. We'd be let go, even though David Allen spent forty-two nights at the Orsonville County Jail, and it could have been far worse. His public defender was in the process of negotiating a plea deal for him to serve seven years for assault, even though the lawyer was completely con-vinced of Allen's innocence. They'd decided it wasn't worth risking the trial and the life sentence a guilty verdict might bring when there were three witnesses, all prep school girls with no history of telling lies.

  I'd like to believe that if it had ever gotten to that, if there had been a trial and we were called to the witness stand and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that we would have done just that.

  All of us.

  I don't think we would have let it go any further. I can't be sure, I can't be sure of anything, but I like to believe that we never would have let it come to that.

  The police were right. We went home with our parents that afternoon. We weren't held overnight. We didn't serve any time. That was never on the table. David Allen even came to our defense, asking that they go easy on us, and that maybe made me feel sorrier for what we'd done than anything else.

  I was expelled from school. I got one thousand hours of community service. I began to chip away at that with a sum-mer job at a camp for troubled children. That was kind of funny. There are many people who would have said that I should have gone to such a camp myself. Me. I used to be so perfect. Well, not perfect, but harmless, I guess.

  I think it was good for me to get away from Mom and Dad for a while. We're working on getting to know each other again. I'll go to a new school in the fall. I'm going to a public school in the next county over, where you don't have to wear a uniform every day and nobody knows me. I'm kind of looking forward to that. It's never too late to reinvent yourself. I'm going to be different. No one will ever call me Anna Banana again.

  Back on that day when we were arrested, while we sat in the waiting room after we'd been fingerprinted, I tried to remember what I'd talked to my parents about over breakfast that morning. It was only hours earlier, but it felt like a lifetime ago. I think maybe I complained that the milk smelled a little off. I think they both kissed me when I walked out the front door on my way to school, like they had done every morning of my life. One thing I remember for certain is that as I walked away, I looked back over my shoulder, and I waved goodbye.

  Emma

  Late in the summer, a pair of hikers out for the day with their black Labrador came across what was left of Elinor Clements's body, at the bottom of a ravine off the side of a mountain road, twenty miles from where she used to live. Too much time had passed for there to be a real autopsy with real answers about what exactly had happened to her, but certain things could be deduced from the circumstances. Her clothes were fifteen feet from where her skeleton lay. That told investigators that she was most likely sexually assaulted. And on her clothes was the DNA of a man with a long criminal record.

  That man was not David Allen.

  David Allen had been free for months and if I'd had any lingering suspicions about whether he'd been involved in her disappearance, this would have put them to rest, but I had no suspicions at all. I knew he was just another innocent victim. The world was filled with them.

  I've been thinking about victimization on a spectrum. Scientists use spectrums to classify and organize information and thereby understand it better. When you know where something fits in relationship to things around it, you learn more about its nature and its parameters and what it really means.

  I've met twice a week with Ms. Malachy throughout the summer. I would have wanted to meet with her anyway, but the meetings happen to be part of the deal I struck with the DA's office that kept me out of trouble. She's helping me to organize my thoughts and I've begun to understand that when it comes to sex, the spectrum from what is completely healthy and consensual to what is clearly a rape is a long and very murky line.

  Some things are easy to place, like what happens between two people who respect each other and are grown-up enough to make responsible decisions. What happened to Ellie Clements occupies the extreme other end.

  We've spent the better part of the summer trying to place the recent episodes of my life on this spectrum. There's what happened with Dad and his student when he used to teach in the city, and that's really hard for me to place, but Ms. Malachy keeps telling me that I should leave this episode off the spectrum altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with me, I don't know the facts, and most important, she says, I need to allow myself to just be his daughter, and to let him be my father. This wasn't easy at first, forgetting everything he told me, but just the other night I went to a movie with my parents and afterwards we went out for dinner and Dad, in his Dad way, so completely missed the central point of the movie that Mom and I were laughing at him, hard, and the waiter had to come over and ask us to keep our voices down, and that made us all smile big broad smiles.

  I don't mean to make it sound like everything is fine now. It's not. Far from it. My life is a mess. I don't go anywhere or talk to anyone. I stay home. I'm grounded pretty much for-ever. My parents don't let me out of
their sight. Maybe it's because of the terrible lie I told, or maybe it's because they worry about what might happen to me if I go out, unsupervised, to a party where there's beer and older boys I don't know. They're also painfully aware that everyone hates me. So maybe they figure I've been through enough and they don't want me going out and having to face that.

  I know they worry about me, and I'm sorry for that, but there's no going back from what happened. You can go back and understand the past, but you can't go back and change it.

  I barely leave the house unless it's to see Ms. Malachy or to meet my dad for lunch at the faculty dining room. Soon I'll have to live a normal life again. Have friends. Go to school. It's hard to imagine. Silas leaves in a few days for Columbia and I've been watching him pack up his room, and the emptier it gets, the emptier I feel.

  I know he forgives me. He tells me so and Silas has never given me a reason not to believe him. But on the day of our arrest, Silas went screaming into Glasser's office and then down to the police station. It isn't true. She didn't lie. She wouldn't do that. And then he saw me, and he knew.

  Silas Devastaticus.

  He forgives me now, I know. I just hope he can love me in the same uncomplicated way he used to when I was just his little sister, before I was the girl who told the terrible lie.

  The main reason Ms. Malachy and I developed the spectrum was to find a place on it for what happened with Owen. The summer is almost over and I still can't figure out where this belongs. I think it falls somewhere vaguely in the middle. It's complicated. I willingly did something I didn't want to do, even though that sounds like a contradiction. I know that I don't blame Owen. People talk sometimes about victimless crimes. I think this was like a crime with a victim, but without a victimizer.

  I've spent much of my summer writing. I wrote a letter to Owen explaining how being with him made me feel and how in the aftermath of that night I lost myself. I never sent it. I never intended to.

  I wrote a letter to Detective Stevens in which I told him that I thought he was the most principled person I'd ever come to know and how much I regretted not being able to see through the haze of my fun-house mirror of a mind and say no, this never happened. I told him that knowing he was serving our community made me feel like I'd be safe for all the days I continued to live here. That letter I sent.