Harmless (7 page)

DarrylDarrylDarrylDarryl. JuniorJuniorJuniorJunior.

DJ stands for Dumb Jackass. DJ stands for Dim-witted Jerkoff.

It was all suddenly clear. He didn't care about me. He was just using me. He never planned on taking me to his prom or introducing me to his parents or treating me like a real girlfriend. The minute after we left he probably had a big laugh with all of his stupid, stupid friends about how I went all psy-cho on him when he told me he was bringing someone from his class, Kat, to the prom instead of me. Kat. She sounded like a stuck-up prissy bitch.

To top it all off we were busted and sitting down by the river in the dark trying to figure out what to tell our parents. I was going to be in trouble. Big trouble. I was going to get in big trouble over that Dumb Jackass. That Dim-witted Jerkoff.

Emma's mom called my mom and there was a message on my voice mail and Mom was trying to sound calm, but I could hear Carl yelling in the background. I wasn't going to get away with this and I was a liar and he'd had enough of me and my attitude and yell, scream, yell, scream, yell.

Anna was totally freaking out and I just kind of wished I'd never taken pity on her in her little girly room the other night and invited her to come. She was making it hard for me to think.

We didn't have much time. It was getting late. Now it was later than we said we'd be home, which didn't really matter because everyone already knew that we hadn't been to the movie anyway. We couldn't say that we'd been at DJ's. Emma was right. That was out of the question. Mom and Carl couldn't find out about DJ. Not that way. I couldn't even imagine what would happen if they knew I'd spent the night with him. Yes I could. Carl would talk about sending me to boarding school again but this time it might be more than an empty threat.

“We could say we changed our minds about the movie and went out to eat instead.”

Stupid Anna. That would never work. She was so simple-minded sometimes. Where did we go and why didn't we call and why weren't we home already?

“We could say we went to a different movie.”

“How did we get there, Anna? Who drove us there? Who drove us home? How is that going to work?”

“Jeez, Mariah. At least I'm trying to come up with some-thing here.”

Emma was sitting there without saying a word. At least she wasn't whining like Anna. Then she sat up and looked at me with those honest eyes of hers.

“We could say something happened to us, something bad. …”

Something bad had happened. DJ told me he was taking stuck-up prissy Kat to his prom. He told me this
after
having sex with me.

Emma went on: ”We could say something bad happened. Something bad happened to me.”

Emma was starting to make some sense.

Here's our story:

It was a nice evening. We had some time to kill, so we came down to the river to watch the sun go down. We were sitting around talking, watching the boats, listening to the crickets, and we lost track of time. When we realized that we weren't going to make the movie we decided to go to the Big Cup and have some hot chocolate and then go home early. But there wasn't any hurry since we could get hot chocolate anytime, so we kept talking. We were alone. It was getting dark. There was no moon, but the stars were beautiful. We lay down on our backs to see if we could find the constellations Mr. Krause had been teaching us about in science class.

We don't know what direction he came from. He seemed to just appear out of nowhere. He grabbed Emma. We all started screaming but there was nobody around to hear us. He
told us to shut up. He said if we kept on screaming like that he'd kill us. He said he had a knife.

He took our cell phones. He didn't want us calling 911.

He told Mariah and Anna to stay down on the ground. If we moved an inch, he said, he wasn't afraid of using that knife.

He picked Emma up and dragged her a few feet away. He told her to take off her clothes. Emma said no. He said take off your clothes
now
.

Mariah felt around on the ground next to her. She grabbed hold of a rock slightly bigger than her fist. She showed it to Anna in the darkness. They quietly shifted onto their knees, keeping low to the ground. His back was to them and Emma was sobbing. She was starting to unbutton her shirt.

Mariah jumped up and lunged at him with the rock in her hand. She struck him in the head. He doubled over. Anna kicked him hard in the back. Then we ran.

We ran through the woods lining the river. We ran as fast as we could. We came to a landing by the water with a dock people use to launch their motorboats. We crouched under-neath it. We waited. We wanted to make sure he hadn't followed us. We wanted to make sure it was safe to walk home. Our hearts were pounding. We didn't make a sound. We don't know how long we stayed there under the dock. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been three hours. We didn't know. We couldn't be sure.

Anna

I guess it goes without saying
that Mom and Dad were up and waiting for me when I got home. Every light in the house was on, and as I approached it from the sidewalk it looked warm and welcoming in the darkness.

I heard Mom shout, “She's here!” as I took the first step up to the front door.

Dad threw his arms around me. “Oh, thank God!” He kissed the top of my head. Then he took a quick step back. There we were, just my parents and me, home together like we would have been on any normal Friday night. But on this night, they were looking at me in a way they'd never looked at me before. They folded their arms across their chests. They wanted an explanation.

Mom touched my cheek with her hand. “You've been crying.”

I have the kind of face that gets all red and splotchy when I cry. There's no hiding it. Even if I'd had the opportunity to splash cold water on my face, which I hadn't, or had the chance to borrow some makeup from Mariah, which I hadn't, Mom would still have been able to tell that I'd been crying. And for some reason, when she pointed this out, I started crying all over again.

They led me over to the couch and sat on either side of me.

“Why don't you tell us what happened? Where have you been? What's going on?”

I tried, but the words wouldn't come. Dad rubbed my back. The phone rang. None of us made a move to answer it. Then we heard Emma's mom's voice on the machine.

“Carolyn? Wally? Are you there? It's Pamela. We need to talk about this. Emma is very shaken up, understandably. How's Anna doing? Let's get together in the morning. I think we need to go to the police. I'll call Shannon, Mariah's mother. For now let's just hold our daughters close. Sleep well. All of you.”

Click. Dial tone. Silence. Mom and Dad's eyes on me.

I took a deep breath and I started to tell them the story. The first few words were almost impossible, but then, as I went on, I was surprised at how easy it was. How naturally the details came to me. How clearly I could picture the whole incident.

“… And then Mariah grabbed a rock and showed it to me and without saying a word I knew what we had to do. …”

It was just like putting on a show, without a karaoke machine, and with my heart beating hard in my chest.

“… We ran and ran through the woods by the river until we came to a dock. …”

When I finished there was no standing ovation. No loud whistles. This was a new kind of performance for me.

Dad started pacing the room. This is what Dad does. He's a pacer. Mom took the blue cotton throw blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders even though I wasn't cold in the slightest.

Mom and Dad believed it all. There was no question about that.

“We have to do something about this,” Dad was saying. “We can't allow this to happen.”

“It did happen, Wally. It happened to our little girl.”

“Dad. Mom. I'm fine now. Really. I mean it. Let's just for-get about this.” This was supposed to be it. The end. Tell the story and you will be forgiven.

“How can we forget about this?” Mom was the one crying now. Her hands were shaking. I felt something spreading through me. Heat. Sickness. Nausea.

“Everything's okay. Can't we just pretend this didn't hap-pen?” Please? Pretty please? Trust me, pretending is easy.

I'd told the story to my parents and they believed it and I wasn't in trouble for lying or going to DJ's or making out with Brian or anything. Now it should all be over and done with and I swear, I promise, I won't lie about where I'm going ever again if we can just STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS.

Dad grabbed a spiral notebook and one of my pens and pulled up a chair so he was facing me.

“Tell me every detail you can remember, Anna. I know you've had a long night but I'm afraid things will get fuzzier in the morning and it's important that we make a note of every-thing you can remember so we can give it to the police.”

“The police?” I knew this would happen. I just knew it. I asked, right there by the river, “What about the police?” Mariah said it wouldn't be a problem. She said our parents wouldn't make us go if we didn't want to, they wouldn't want everyone knowing, and anyway, even if we had to go to the police, she said, we had nothing to worry about because the police are idiots. Nothing to worry about. That's what Mariah always said. And I always listened to her. “Of course. We have to go to the police.” “No we don't. I told you. I'm fine. Look at me.” “You're lucky, Anna, and also very, very brave. But we can't let anyone get away with this. What if this happens again, to someone who isn't as lucky or as brave as you?” “It won't happen again.” “You don't know that.”

“Yes I do. Dad, please. I don't want to go to the police.” “I'm sorry, Anna Banana. This is just something you have to do.”

It's hard for me to remember what else I said that night. What exactly I told my father. I remember only that he was taking notes with my purple felt-tip pen and our story looked absurd written out like that in purple ink. I kept to the script and when his questions called for specifics I was as vague as possible. He was medium-size. I don't remember what he was wearing. I don't know what he looked like. I can't be sure. I don't
remember. I don't know. It was dark. I was scared. I wasn't thinking clearly.

Sometime during all this my mother was able to calm down and stop crying and turn her attention to me, which meant supplying me with things to keep me warm: more blan-kets, some hot tea. Did I want her to draw me a bath?

She was just trying to help. It wasn't her fault. She couldn't have known that the last thing I needed was heat.

She couldn't have seen the white-hot shame that was burning deep inside me.

Emma

By lunchtime on Monday
everyone knew. But that was Monday. On Sunday Silas and I took a train into New York City, just the two of us, and got ice cream and took a walk in the park and then rode home with the river on our left as the sun was setting and just sat there side by side. On Saturday we went to the police.

I'd never been in a police station. What I learned right away is that they aren't like what you see on TV. They're win-dowless and dirty with horrible fluorescent lighting and a smell like too many meals reheated in an ancient microwave. Also, they're surprisingly quiet. I don't know what I expected to see. Maybe lots of people in handcuffs and people running in screaming, “Help! Officer, I need help!” or at least telephones
ringing off the hook. I didn't expect to see a bunch of people in bad-fitting polyester uniforms sitting around looking bored.

The detective who took our statements was named Scott Stevens. He was tall and lanky with ears that stuck out and a goofy smile and kind eyes and everyone around the station called him Scotty but we called him Detective Stevens. Anna and Mariah and I told Detective Stevens everything we knew, which was, basically, nothing.

We kept our answers vague. We didn't know what direction he came from. We didn't know what he looked like. How tall he was. What color eyes. What color hair. If he had any distinguishing features. Detective Stevens pointed out that I was in the best position of the three of us to get a good look, but I told him that I was so frightened it was like I was having one of those experiences people talk about having right before they die, when they float out of themselves and observe the scene from above. I was out of my body, watching from someplace else, seeing only shapes in the darkness.

Detective Stevens was patient. When he listened he had the habit of tugging at his ears as if that might make him hear more than what was being said. He didn't push us. He offered us sodas from the machine in the hall. We told him what we knew and he wrote it all down. When we said we didn't know something, he said that was fine, that we shouldn't worry about it, and he smiled one of his goofy smiles, which were really more sweet than goofy. After a little over an hour he led us out to our parents, who were waiting in the lobby, and they took us all home.

Mom ordered some pizzas and Dad canceled a dinner he had and the four of us sat around the table and tried to pretend
like everything was normal. Everything was normal. Every-thing was normal before I became friends with Mariah. Now I couldn't sit and eat a piece of pizza without Mom and Dad and Silas staring at me like I'd grown a second head.

Mom tried talking about a trip to Chicago to visit my grandparents over the summer, but then out of nowhere Dad slammed his fists on the table and shouted, “Goddammit.”

“Raymond,” Mom said, which really meant:
Raymond, don't do that, calm down, you're overreacting in that annoying way you do
.

This is what it was like with Mom and Dad. There was always a second conversation happening that only they were supposed to understand.

“What? Are you trying to tell me I can't be upset about this? Are you trying to tell me that I can't be furious that some dangerous miscreant, some soulless felon tried to … to … to attack my only daughter?”

The word he chose not to say hung heavily in the air above us all.

Rape
.

It echoed silently in every corner of the room. It seeped into our clothes. Our food. The walls around us. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to think about it.