Harmless (11 page)

I managed to sneak a quick look at Jessica and I crossed my
eyes and stuck out my tongue. She'd recently lost her two front teeth and she covered the gap in her grin with her little freckled hand. Then I turned back to Carl.

“What do you want me to say? Principal Glasser talked about new rules on campus. We have to, like, sign in and sign out and stuff. And he was all ‘
in loco parentis
’ or some Latin thing for how the school is our family when we're there, and families look out for each other, which is a lot more than I can say for certain people at this table.”

He smiled the smile of someone overly pleased with him-self. “Now, that is an answer. That is what your mother was looking for. See how easy putting together a real sentence can be?” Then his face darkened. The vein in his big bald forehead was pulsating. “Now, if only you were smart enough to quit while you were ahead. I won't be disrespected at my dinner table. You are excused.”

I pushed my chair back and tried to think about how I'd gotten to this moment so that I could remember it and do it again. Not have to sit with Carl at dinner? Not have to eat Constance's disgusting pot roast? I'd won. Victory was mine.

I went to my room and picked up the phone. I decided I should call Emma. She didn't sit with us at the assembly. I saw her afterwards and she really looked upset. I was pretty freaked out too when I saw Detective Stevens there, but I felt better after he talked because hearing him address the school rein-forced my first impression of him as a goofball who didn't really seem to know what he was doing. Darby O'Shea proba-bly asked him to be there and he knew he couldn't say no even though he had nothing valuable to say about the so-called
investigation. I was going to tell Emma not to worry about Detective Scott Simpleton.

Silas answered the phone. He sounded sleepy even though it was only eight-thirty. I could picture him lying on the couch in the basement watching TV or maybe throwing a basketball up in the air and catching it with his big strong hands.

“Emma's not here. She and my mom are having a girls' night out, which I'm pretty sure involves dumplings and hot-and-sour soup.”

“Oh. That sounds cool. So what about you? What are you doing?”

“Just chilling. I'm staring at my books and willing them to impart wisdom to me without my having to actually open them and read them.”

“Ah. Well, Silas, tonight is your lucky night. You happen to be on the phone with the master of the closed-book method of learning.”

“Oh yeah?” I could hear him shifting his position. Maybe he was sitting up. Or maybe now he was lying down. “Tell me, wise master Mariah. How do you do it?”

“By recognizing that learning is about so much more than what is written on those limited pages. I like to learn through life and its experiences.”

“Aren't you, like, fourteen? What do you know about life experiences?”

“More than you could probably guess.”

“Hmmm … Intriguing …”

I felt a bolt of something hot and electric rush through me. Stop, I thought. Breathe. Stay calm.

“Please,” he said. “Go on.”

I talked to Silas for almost an hour and only hung up because my mom was at my door and wouldn't go away even though I was shooing her with dramatic pantomime motions. She wanted to talk to me about my behavior at the dinner table, and also, she'd snuck me up some rice pudding that made me rethink my earlier assessment of Constance's cooking credentials.

She sat on my bed and yawned. “Jess was hard to get to sleep tonight. She's really excited about this birthday party she's been invited to on Saturday. She wouldn't stop talking about it. But I also suspect that she's bothered by what happened between you and Carl.”

“Mom. Really. If you are up here to scold me for making Jessica's bedtime routine tougher on you, I don't think I can handle that.”

“No, Pumpkin. That's not why I'm here. I just really want you and Carl to get along better.”

“I'm not so sure it's all my fault.”

“I'm not saying it is. I'm just asking that you make more of an effort.”

“Honestly, Mom. He can be kind of a dick.”

“Mariah …”

“I mean, blaming me for what happened down by the river is pretty unfair, don't you think?”

“He doesn't blame you. He just thinks you shouldn't have been there in the first place.”

The strangest thing was happening to me. I was feeling something heavy in my chest and a tickle in the back of my throat and an itching behind my eyes. Even though this was all just a made-up story, I was bothered by Carl's reaction.
Maybe even more so, I was bothered that I was bothered by Carl's reaction. Why did I care what he thought about me or about what had happened? I felt a tear rolling down my cheek and I didn't make a move to wipe it, hoping that Mom wouldn't notice it and would just say good night and get up and leave me alone in my room. But she's my mom and she reached over and caught it just at my cheekbone. She put her arms around me.

“Oh, Pumpkin. I'm so sorry. I know how hard this is on you. You shouldn't have to be facing all this. This isn't right. You shouldn't have these kinds of worries.”

It felt good to have her arms around me, it had been a long time since we'd sat like that, but I wasn't quite sure what to make of what she was whispering in my ear. I couldn't figure out which kinds of worries she was talking about.

Anna

Up to this point in my life
, I was sure that I'd always be Anna Ba-nana, that I'd never be part of a popular crowd. I'd go to school dances alone or not at all. I'd hear people talking about parties in the bathroom and I'd take my time washing my hands and drying them so I could gather as many details as possible about who was kissing who and who threw up in whose mom's closet, and I'd file all these details away in my sad and lonely little head. But here I was, nearing the end of my freshman year of high school, and already things were looking better for the next three years than I ever could have hoped for in my wildest imagination.

For one thing, I was pretty sure that Tobey Endo and I were flirting. I couldn't be entirely sure because flirting was
new to me, but he did say hi and smile every time he saw me. He called me Hendricks, as in “What's up, Hendricks?” and “Hendricks in the house!” and even though I know addressing each other by your last name is usually something guys do among themselves, being called Hendricks felt much better than being called Anna Banana or, even worse, being called nothing at all.

For another thing, I could sit at Tammy Frost's table at lunch if I wanted to. Emma sometimes wasn't even at lunch, and when she was she didn't seem to care much if I sat with her or not, so I started making a habit of sitting at Tammy's table and listening to her and her friends talk about lipstick shades. What had happened by the river was no longer the big news on campus. Our article came out and people talked about it for another day or two, but there were other things to talk about, like lipstick shades. And boys.

I was debating telling Tammy about my crush on Tobey Endo. On the one hand, it felt against the natural order to talk to someone other than Emma about this. On the other hand, Emma seemed to be impatient with me lately and grumpy and also kind of bitchy and I wasn't sure she deserved to hear my confession or even if she'd care at all. And let's not forget that Emma was not exactly doing a great job of revealing her secrets to me these days.

Tammy had clout. She could make things happen. If I told her, and she told more people, and word got around, and everyone talked about it, maybe it would become something real. But each time I opened my mouth to say something to Tammy, I felt the all-too-familiar heat in my face and I felt the old Anna grab ahold of my vocal cords and squeeze them shut.

I decided to tell Mariah. Even if she didn't have pull with Tobey, she knew more about boys than anyone and I figured she could give me some valuable advice.

We went to the Big Cup after school, just the two of us. I had my first-ever cup of coffee, and with a lot of milk and sev-eral spoonfuls of sugar, it tasted pretty good and I wondered why it had taken me so long to make the switch over from hot chocolate. We took a table in the corner and the place was practically empty. There were no other uniforms inside the Big Cup.

I decided to jump right in and I told her I had a confession.

She looked a little nervous and that made me feel even more nervous but I took a deep breath and came out and told her.

“I know this may seem crazy, because he's, like, probably way too cool for me, but I have a pretty big crush on Tobey Endo.”

She smiled a huge smile at me. “Christ, Anna. You had me all freaked out there for a minute. Inviting me for coffee. Telling me you had to confess something. You had me wor-ried.” She folded her arms in front of her. “So? What are we going to do about this?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, I do. We're going to get him for you. He'd be lucky to have you as a girlfriend. Get that into your head, because the first thing you have to stop doing is thinking you aren't cool enough for him. That kind of thinking gets you nowhere, my friend.” She stopped for a minute and looked out the win-dow. “I know how you feel. I know what it's like to want some-one you think may be out of your reach.”

“You do?” Someone out of Mariah's reach? No way.

“I mean, I guess I can imagine what that would feel like. Anyway, look at you, Anna. Tobey Endo would be lucky to have you.”

I went home that night and, despite my first encounter with coffee, I slept a deep sleep and dreamed of something wonder-ful. But when my alarm clock went off the next morning and I reached back for what it was that had left me feeling so warm and content, it wasn't there anymore. The harder I tried to remember what it was, the vaguer my memory of my dream became. I got dressed in my uniform. It looked better in the mirror to me than it ever had before and I went downstairs for breakfast, happy to see my mom and dad sitting at the table, waiting for me.

And then I saw the front page of the paper, her eyes gazing out at me, and just as mysteriously as the warmth from my forgotten dream had come over me, I felt it vanish.

Emma

Her name was Elinor Clements
. People called her Ellie.

As I carefully trimmed the edges of the article, I didn't take my eyes off hers.

She was only twelve and lived about forty-five minutes north of here on the other side of the river. She had blond hair like mine, except hers was straight and fell just below her ears, and she had big blue eyes and a gap between her two front teeth. In the photograph she was wearing overalls. She was smiling and squinting into the sun. The caption said she was a junior explorer with the county nature society and that she was an excellent swimmer.

She'd gone missing sometime after school. The last time anyone reported seeing her was at her locker after her last class of the day, an earth science class. Her earth science
teacher was interviewed for the article and she said that Elinor was a wonderful student and very respectful of her classmates.

Her best friend, Mandy, who chose not to reveal her last name, was supposed to meet Ellie in the library, where they were going to work on their essays for the sixth-grade graduation contest: “What's in Store for Us?” But Ellie never showed.

Her father owned a big-and-tall men's store in the Ka-pachuck Mall. Her mother worked as a receptionist at a local veterinarian's office. Neither responded to requests for inter-views for this article.

The police had no leads but they stressed that it was too early to assume anything. Kids get upset. They run away. They make irresponsible decisions. Even the good kids like Ellie Clements.

I read the article three times, squeezing out every bit of in-formation there was to squeeze, glued it onto a piece of cardboard so it wouldn't get torn and put it away in my desk drawer, at the top of the pile of articles I've saved throughout the years. Over time, I swear her face started to disappear, worn away from all my hours of staring at it.

When I came out of second period I saw Mariah and Silas sitting together on a bench. They saw me too and they waved me over like they were excited to see me, like it was a surprise to find me in the halls of my own school. “Hurry, Emma, over here! We were just talking about you!” But I kept on walking. I had an appointment with Ms. Malachy.

She'd been on my case to come see her since the school
assembly. I ignored the note in my locker and the one that was hand-delivered to me in English class and finally she was waiting for me the other morning as I was going into gym class, and I figured I'd better agree to see her or else she might follow me into the locker room and we'd be having this discussion with me in my bra and underpants.

I didn't really believe in counseling, but there was something about Ms. Malachy, other than my desire not to have to talk to her in my underwear, that made me agree to see her in her office. She had a gentle voice and she always wore a blue bandana in her hair and she smelled like dirt and honey and she was big and soft and in every way the opposite of my mother. Don't get me wrong, I love my mom. I want to be her someday. She's tall and thin and beautiful and glamorous and intellectual and when she tells a story the entire room hangs on her every word. But Ms. Malachy seemed like the kind of woman you could show your messiest self to and not have to worry that you were letting her down in some way.

I liked her office. It was cluttered and small and the couch was an ugly shade of orange with a big tear in one of the cushions. The office had high ceilings and a small octagonal stained-glass window above her desk that gave the room an almost churchlike feel.

“Forgive me, Ms. Malachy, for I have sinned. It has been forever since my last confession.”

“You've sinned?”

“I was joking. It just feels like a confessional in here, what with the stained glass and the close quarters, not that I've ever been in a confessional, but I've seen them on TV.”

She looked around and smiled. “Yeah. I guess I see what you mean. Okay. Here I am, I'll take your confession.”