Harmless (20 page)

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.

I also wrote a letter to David Allen. I don't know if he'll ever read it. I don't know if he'll ever get it. I sent it to an organization called Family of Kapachuck because they have a homeless services department, and the last I heard, Detective Stevens delivered him there, on the very same day he was freed.

I told him I was sorry. I didn't know what else to say. There
was no excuse for what I did that was worth the piece of paper I might write it on.

I don't talk to Anna much anymore. She's spending the summer as an assistant counselor at a camp for troubled children. That was part of her deal with the DA. We didn't have a big falling-out. We never screamed at each other. We never made a conscious decision to end our friendship. I don't think she was mad at me for telling the truth. I know Anna. She's a decent person, and if it hadn't been me, it would have even-tually been her. It's just that after all the years of being insep-arable, this incident worked itself in between us in a way that seems unfixable right now. Maybe it won't always be. Maybe we'll pass each other on the street next year, or the year after that, somewhere in between our two houses, when enough time has gone by that we can get to know each other again, as two different people.

I have no idea what happened to Mariah. I never saw her again after the day we were arrested. None of us was allowed back on campus. I had to miss Silas's graduation. My dad videotaped it, but that isn't the same. The tape is still sitting on top of the VCR. I can't even bring myself to watch it.

Principal Glasser decided to let me return this fall. I'm not really sure why. I know he didn't extend the same invitation to Anna or Mariah, who were expelled for good. It probably has something to do with being Silas's little sister or the fact that my parents are who they are at the college or maybe he has sympathy for my situation because he knows about what happened with Owen. I guess I have to get used to the fact
that everybody knows everything now. That's just the way it's been since the truth came out.

Some people can't believe I'd go back, but I think it's the only way to get over this last year. I have to face who I was, and what happened to me and what I did. Running off to an-other school or another town or New York City would just give me a chance to start all over again, and I don't think I de-serve that chance. I don't even want that chance.

I'm here. Right now. Time is ticking forward.

Mariah

School started three weeks ago
and it's taken me all that time to settle in. I'm still getting used to choosing my own clothes every morning. That tacks on at least half an hour to my rou-tine and it's a wonder I make it to classes on time. But the commute is short. My dorm is no more than a three-minute walk from the main academic building.

I didn't even put up a fight. When Carl told me the decision was final I just said, “Fine.” He looked all flustered, like he'd prepared this whole speech and I wasn't even polite enough to let him have the chance to deliver it. Mom came to my room later that night. She said she was sorry but she just didn't see any other way.

“Don't worry, Mom,” I said. “I don't mind. Maybe I'll even like boarding school.” I smiled at her. She started to cry.

“I'll miss you.”

“I know you will.”

“I love you.”

“Mom …”

“I love you, Mariah. You are my daughter, my only daughter, and you mean the world to me. But I'm doing it all wrong. I must be doing it all wrong for this to have happened. And now you're going away.”

“It'll be fine, Mom. I'll be okay.” I wiped a tear from her cheek. “And it isn't your fault.”

What I didn't have the heart to tell her was that I agreed with Carl. I didn't fit in here. I never felt at home in his house. I never felt like I belonged. Mom seemed to be adjusting just fine to her new life, to this new family, but I felt left behind, standing somewhere by the side of a road leading nowhere. I was hoping that maybe, when I had my own room assigned in a dormitory, that that room would become mine, my own, and it wouldn't be just a room in someone else's house.

It's not so bad here. The people are kind of cool. My room has a view of the quad and right now the trees are full and there's a family of birds outside my window. The campus is pretty, and it doesn't feel like a prison even though I sleep and eat and go to all my classes here.

I knew, even in the very first minutes of arriving here, that I had to take control of how people saw me. Reputations pre-cede you in places like this, and I didn't want to be known as that tough chick with a criminal past. So from day one, I told the truth.

Everyone always asks me why. Why would you do something
like that? Why would you make up a lie like that? Didn't you know what could happen?

All I can say is that sometimes something makes perfect sense, and then it's a complete mystery when you look at it the next day, or even the next minute, and you can't remember or explain what was so clear to you back then, because that moment is gone.

I know it sounds crazy now, but that night, making up the lie seemed like the easy way out. A harmless little lie.
You've told lies before, haven't you?
I ask them.
Everyone's told lies
. It's just that I was unable to see, right then, that the lie would gather speed and its current would carry it further and further away from me.

When I explain this, the kids here nod their heads like they understand. I'm not sure they do. I'm not sure I even do. It sounds pretty lame when I hear the words coming out of my mouth, but there's nothing else I can say about it, other than to tell the truth.

I haven't made any real friends here yet, but I'm hoping that'll happen eventually. I'm taking it slow. I like to come back to my room between classes. I keep it pretty messy. No one tells me to clean it up. It's mine. At least until next sum-mer comes and I have to put everything I own back into cardboard boxes. But I try not to think about then.

I never talked to Silas again. It feels strange to cut off ties with someone like that without hating him. I don't hate him at all. In fact, when I come back to my room between classes and kick off my shoes and lie down on my unmade bed, I often think of him. I think of him in his dorm room at Columbia
and I wonder if he likes it there. I wonder if he likes having his own place and starting everything all over. I wonder if he thinks about me. During the moments when I'm being really honest with myself, I have to admit that I doubt it. I doubt he thinks about me at all.

When I lose faith, when I think that I don't belong here, when I think that I'll just mess things up all over again, when I wonder what will become of me, I think of David Allen, and I hope that what he said is true.

After our arrest, after his release, before he walked away, he asked to speak to the chief of the police department. I'm sure they thought he was going to talk about a lawsuit or a list of demands to make a lawsuit go away, but instead he said he had only one request: don't press charges.

They're just kids
, he said.
They have their whole lives ahead of them. They shouldn't be defined by this lapse in judgment. They should go on and live normal lives and not be remembered for the bad things they did. They should finish school. They should love and be loved by the people around them. They deserve forgiveness. Everyone does
.

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Douglas Stewart, for everything you do on my behalf and for always being there on the other end of a phone call or e-mail with just the right advice.

Thank you, Wendy Lamb, for taking me into the fold of Wendy Lamb Books. It is a wonderful place to be.

Thank you to everyone at Random House for all the hard work you do and have done, past and present. Thank you to Ruth Homberg, Shanta Small, Josette Kurey, Adrienne Wain-traub, Alan Mendelsohn, Isabel Warren-Lynch, Stephanie Moss, Kaitlin McCafferty, Alyssa Sheinmel, Barbara Perris, Jenny Golub, Andrew Bast.

Thank you to Brendan Halpin, Andrew Sokatch, Ann Sokatch, Mary Lelewer, Justin Reinhardt, Chelsea Hadley, Stephen Reinhardt, Ramona Ripston, and Daniel Sokatch for reading this book in its various early stages and for sharing with me your invaluable comments.