Harmless

Also by Dana Reinhardt

A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life

For Daniel

Anna

This is what I know
about the truth: the farther you get away from it, or it gets away from you, the harder it is to tell.

If only I had told the truth that night.

Life would have gone on. Life has gone on, but everything is different. I wish more than anything that I could go back to that night, walk in my front door, and undo everything we did.

This is the story of what really happened. This is the truth.

I knew Mariah was hanging out with a guy from the local high school. Everyone knew. That's what it's like when you go to a school as small as ours. I wasn't one of the girls Mariah
would peel down her turtleneck and show her hickeys to, but I'd heard about them. I'd heard they were the size of golf balls and as dark as overripe plums. I wished she would show them to me. I wished she would pull me into the bathroom and block the door with her black Converse high-top and say “Check this out” and I'd gasp and then we'd both be late to our next class. But Mariah never gave me the time of day.

It was Emma who first brought me into Mariah's orbit. They were assigned a scene from Romeo and Juliet. They had to rehearse it and then perform it for their English class. Emma was playing Romeo because there's a shortage of boys in our school. Maybe that's why Mariah was hanging out with the guy from the public high school, although really, I think she was just trying to be different. To stand out. To be talked about. And probably to get away from all the boys in gray slacks and navy V-neck sweaters we're trapped with day after day after day.

I don't think anybody really knew what “hanging out” meant, but most of us chose to believe it meant “having sex,” and that gave Mariah even more of an edge than she already had. It's hard to stand out in a school where everyone wears the same uniform and everyone lives in the same community and everyone's parents work either at the college or for CompuCorp. But Mariah managed to stand out. She was pretty, but not girly. Smart, but not a teacher's pet. Boys liked her. Girls wanted to be like her. There is no other way to say it: she was the coolest person in school, or at the very least, she was the coolest person in the freshman class.

So when Emma was assigned to be her Romeo she couldn't
stop talking about Mariah this and Mariah that. Finally she invited me to her house one afternoon when Mariah was coming over to work on their scene.

Emma's been my best friend since third grade, when she moved here from the city. Her parents are literature professors at the college. They live only two blocks away and her older brother, Silas, was a senior who somehow managed not to look dorky in our school uniform. He wanted to go to Colum-bia next year and even though I knew Columbia was only an hour and fifteen minutes away by train, I still secretly hoped he wouldn't get in.

When I got to Emma's house, they were down in the base-ment, drinking lemonade and eating Oreos. They'd both changed into jeans and Mariah was wearing a tank top and right away I could see the hickeys. They looked like they ached, like if I reached my hand over and touched one, she'd wince.

I sat down in a beanbag chair and threw my backpack on the floor. My plaid skirt felt itchier than usual. Why didn't I think to change my clothes?

“Hey, Anna Banana,” Mariah said, and she dipped her Oreo into her lemonade.

Anna Banana. It's what my dad used to call me when I was a little kid and no matter how hard I try I can't get him to break the habit. But for some reason, coming from Mariah, I kind of liked the way it sounded.

“What're you doing here?” she asked.

I looked over at Emma, but she just sat there, twirling her finger in her hair and staring at her lines. “I'm always over
here,” I said. The beanbag chair was disappearing beneath me. I readjusted the stuffing. “I practically live over here.”

“That's cool. Wanna be our audience?”

“Sure,” I said.

She smiled at me. “Feel free to applaud wildly when we're done.”

They stood up and I stayed in the beanbag. Emma was pretty good, but she seemed a little uncomfortable and stiff, and Mariah was amazing and beautiful. I could see why a guy like Romeo might kill himself over her.

After that we just sat around and talked and I got to hear firsthand about DJ and his car and his favorite leather jacket that he gave her and even about the hickeys. She said he had some really cool friends and we should all hang out sometime and I probably should have just said “No thanks” but I didn't because she's Mariah and I'm just plain old ordinary Anna with nothing at all to show for it.

Emma

I wish we'd never left
the city. My parents always talked about how much better it would be for everyone if we could have a real house with a real yard in a real neighborhood where we could ride our bikes up and down the tree-lined streets. Well, New York City is real too, real in a different way, and I don't know why everyone seems to think life in the country is so much better. And safer. It's not. I know that for a fact.

New York City gets a bad reputation up here. Take Cen-tral Park. People always talk about it like it's some scary place where you should never go alone, but for me growing up, that's where I fed my first duck and where I hit a triple in T-ball. Or take the place down the block from our apartment where Silas and I would get ice cream cones. The guy who worked there
used to give us free sprinkles. Does that sound dangerous to you? Does that sound scary?

Sometimes Silas calls me
Emmalus Painintheassicus
. That's my species name. It's a joke we have because there's this zoo in London where they have people in cages, and he threatened to send in my name for one of the few coveted spots. Thou-sands of people applied. Thousands! This boggles my mind. Why would you want all those strange eyes watching your every move?

The only explanation I can come up with is that none of these people live in a small town like I do, because if any of them did, they'd already know what it feels like to live in a cage.

It's not like I hate it here. In fact, I used to like it here just fine. But now there's a part of me that wishes I were back in the city, taking a subway or a bus to school instead of walking. I wish there were so many people in my grade that I couldn't know everyone's name even if I wanted to. If I went to school in New York and something happened to me, not everyone would know about it because New York has so much else going on, who would ever care about what happened to me, or about what I did?

It doesn't seem fair to blame Mariah, but any way you look at it, that's where this all started.

Mariah and Anna and I started hanging out because of that stupid English class assignment where I had to be Romeo. I didn't want to be Romeo. I've tried hard to shake my tomboy image, including wearing eyeliner and shaving my legs, even
though my mom says I'm too young to do those things. She says I shouldn't buy into the male-dominated ideal of feminine beauty, which to me is just professor-speak for it's hard for her to watch me grow up. Anyway, I didn't think playing Romeo would do much for me in the image department. But at least I got paired with Mariah. It could have been worse. Then again, when you look at the big picture, I guess it could have been a lot better.

I could tell Anna was jealous that I was talking to Mariah and that we were sitting together during study hall and that she was coming over to my house after school. Anna's like that. She kind of freaks out whenever she thinks I'm making new friends. But I'd made a resolution at the beginning of freshman year to broaden my social circle and here it was January already, half the year had gone by, and there was no-body until Mariah.

Finally I just told Anna she should come over because I was kind of getting sick of her asking me all these questions about Mariah. What's she like? Have you seen her hickeys? What's up with her boyfriend? Whatever.

She's fine. I haven't seen her hickeys. And I saw DJ once when he picked Mariah up at my house.

He drove an old lime-green station wagon with wood pan-eling. Not exactly a tough-guy car, and the truth is, he didn't look like much of a tough guy. He was a little pudgy with really big eyes and dark hair and dimples and a tiny diamond earring. I'm sure everyone at school pictured him as some kind of tattooed badass who chain-smoked and strangled live pup-pies for sport, but that's just because everyone at our school
thinks that people who don't live in our neighborhood and wear our stupid uniform every day are scary. Just like they think New York City is scary.

When Mariah talked about DJ, at first it was kind of an-noying, like she was bragging and all: look how cool I am, I have a boyfriend and he's older and he drives a car with a roomy backseat … if you know what I mean. Anna was really impressed. You could just tell by the way she stared at Mariah, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes big as moons. Not me. Unlike Anna, I'd actually had a boyfriend once, though I didn't anymore.

Silas had a girlfriend. She was a senior like him and her name was Bronwyn and she had curly brown hair and freckles and really long legs. She was pretty cool. Whenever she saw me in the halls or in the cafeteria she came over and talked to me. Once she even took me shopping. Silas and Bronwyn made everything seem so easy. They were good-looking and in love and happy. Maybe they were so happy because they knew they got to go off to college in the fall. Silas said he didn't know what was going to happen with them next year, but I could totally see them staying together and then getting mar-ried and having kids and living in an apartment in the city that wasn't too far a walk from Central Park.

Mariah told us that DJ had some cute friends. She wanted to plan a party at his house. He'd bring some people and she'd bring Anna and me. I was supposed to be broadening my so-cial circle, so I said sure. Why not?

Mariah

Carl thinks this whole thing
is my fault. It doesn't even matter what really happened—whatever the story, Carl would find a way to blame everything on me. He's an asshole, for sure, but I don't know, maybe this one time he's actually right. Maybe everything is all my fault.

Jessica thinks he's some kind of hero, a prince or a knight on a white horse or Batman or maybe even SpongeBob SquarePants. But that's Jessica's world. She's only six. And Carl is her real father. When he comes home from work and he picks her up and spins her around really fast, she looks down at him with the biggest smile and this expression of complete and total devotion on her chubby face. She's a sweet kid and I don't want to be the one to clue her in on the fact
that he's an asshole. I'm pretty sure she'll figure that out on her own when she gets a little older. But maybe not. Maybe she'll always look at him that way.

Mom tells me I should give him a break. That he works hard supporting this family. That we're lucky. Ha.

Mom and Carl never even knew about DJ. They would have freaked if they knew I had a boyfriend. And if they knew I had a boyfriend who was older? Who drove? Who went to the public school? Forget about it.

Thank God for Jessica. She kept them busy enough that they weren't in my business all the time.

DJ was seventeen. I met him down by the river one afternoon after school. He was with this group of guys and they had a boom box and they were playing this music really loud that at the time I had no idea what it was but now I know was Ludacris. I was with a couple of kids I used to hang out with before I started hanging out with Emma and Anna. It was early December but it was this crazy warm day that melted all the snow, and the sky was clear and the air smelled great and you just wanted to go be by the river and be outside and obviously I wasn't the only one who felt that way.

I was wearing my uniform. He came over to me and said, “Hey. Shouldn't you be in the library or home baking cookies or doing volunteer work with the elderly or something?”

Right away I noticed his dimples. And he had these amazing eyes that sparkled like when the sun hits the river.

“My homework's all done and there's a big plate of cookies that's been cooling on the windowsill since just after I finished
helping the old lady cross the street.” Pretty quick comeback, if I do say so myself. Then I leaned in a little closer to him and added, “I think I've earned a sip of whatever it is in that paper bag you're holding.”

My fingers brushed against his when I took the bottle from him. It burned my throat but I tried not to let that show. We started talking and before I knew it his friends had disap-peared. The music had stopped. The sky was turning pink just above the hills. My so-called friends who I don't even talk to anymore, probably because I started going out with DJ and that broke some kind of code of conduct or something, asked me if I was ready to go, but I told them to leave without me. DJ asked if I wanted a ride home. Even though I'm only about a ten-minute walk from the river I said sure.