Harmless (3 page)

No worries there. Mom is totally hot. He must have been blown away when she showed up for their first date because even if she had posted a photo, it couldn't have done justice to how truly beautiful she is. She used to be a model when she was younger and she even got some guest-starring roles on a few TV shows that I've never heard of because they were on before I was born. I think people must look at them funny when they're out together, like what's this Beauty doing with that Beast? But then again Carl has a lot of money and I guess that counts for something.

Being with DJ made everything in my life seem more normal. He's who I'd probably have been with anyway if Mom hadn't double-clicked on Carl's Internet profile one day and forever changed my future. We were a lot alike. So what if he was older? I've always felt and acted older than my age. That's what happens to you when you spend most of your life taking care of yourself. So I couldn't imagine dating any of the boys in my class. They were still little boys. DJ was not a boy, he
was a guy, and there's a big difference between a boy and a guy. The seniors at Odious are guys too but there's some kind of unwritten rule that if you're a freshman, you stay away from the senior guys or else face the wrath of the senior girls, who manage to scare the crap out of me, even though I don't scare very easily. Especially that girl Tara. She was, like, the ringleader of the bitchy senior girls and she always looked at me like she'd slit my throat if nobody was watching. Anyway, DJ was much cooler than any of the guys at Odious.

I really wanted Emma or Anna to start dating one of DJ's friends. Then DJ and I could be together more. I didn't get to see him all that much because he spent a lot of time with his friends, and it's not like I didn't understand, but sometimes it bummed me out even though I never told him that.

Honestly, it was hard for me to imagine Anna dating any of DJ's friends. It was hard for me to imagine Anna dating any-one. Emma was different. She had potential. She had long, curly blond hair and I know it's a cliché, but guys do tend to like girls with blond hair. She also had pretty big boobs and I figured that couldn't hurt either. She had that total girl-next-door look, complete with the freckled nose and big, open, honest eyes. You take one good look at Emma and you think: here's someone I can totally trust with my deepest darkest secrets. Maybe this made guys shy away from her. Maybe they thought she was too nice, too trustworthy. That's the only explanation I could come up with for why someone who looked like she did in a pair of jeans didn't have a boyfriend. Or maybe it was simply that she spent all her time with Anna.

When Anna wasn't in her uniform she dressed in baggy
khakis and T-shirts, and her shoulders were sort of hunched forward like she was trying to hide what little she had in the chest department. She always wore running shoes and I don't think I'd ever seen her in lipstick even though she could have really used some. Her hair was mousy brown and cut blunt at her shoulders and she almost always had it in a ponytail. She didn't seem to know how to talk to guys. She didn't really seem to know how to talk to anyone other than Emma and me. I noticed the way she was around Emma's brother, Silas. She probably would never admit it, but I could tell that she was madly in love with him even though he was so far out of her league it was ridiculous.

But sometimes people see something in each other even when no one else does. Look at Mom and Carl. So maybe Anna did stand a chance with one of DJ's friends. You never can tell. I invited both of them and I figured we could just wait and see what happened.

Anna

I'd never lied
to my parents before. Sure, there were little things like saying I'd finished my homework so I could watch TV when really I had a chapter left to read. There was the time I broke a pair of my dad's reading glasses and then put them back on his desk to let him think maybe he did it, and he never even mentioned it to me. That's a lie too, isn't it? When you fail to tell the truth even if no one asks you? Oh. And I guess there was also that stuff about being in the library after school when really I was hanging out by the river or somewhere in town with Emma and Mariah, but that didn't feel like such a big deal. I had seventh period free and I used to wait in the library for their classes to get out, so when I said I was in the library after school it wasn't a total lie. It was a partial truth.

I was going to tell my parents that I was spending the night at Emma's when really I was going to sleep over with a bunch of other people at the house of a guy I didn't know and there weren't going to be any adults around. This was going to be my first real lie. This was going to be the kind of lie where if my parents knew the truth I'd be in huge trouble. Gigantic trouble. The kind of trouble I couldn't even imagine, probably because I'd never been in trouble before. But I figured that it took Mom years to tell me she couldn't have another baby. So maybe I'd wait years to tell Mom the truth about where I was going to be on Friday night.

I knew my parents would never check with Emma's par-ents. Emma's would never check with mine. That's how it was with us. Our parents knew we were always together and they didn't have to call to see if it was okay for one of us to spend the night. Since we lived so close, we always walked to each other's houses, so there would be no dropping us off or picking us up. And also, our parents weren't really friends, so it's not like they would talk and say, “By the way, thanks for letting Anna sleep over the other night.” Or “Emma said she had a great time at your house on Friday.”

Then again I guess they might say something like that if they were to run into each other in the supermarket or the bank or the dry cleaners, but I was keeping my fingers crossed that that wouldn't happen.

There are those kinds of parents who become best friends just because their kids are best friends. Our parents weren't like that. It's not like they hated each other. They just had very different lives. Emma's parents spent most of their time
with other college professors. They were always going to functions at the college that didn't seem to require the presence of my mom, the administrator, or my dad, who works for Compu-Corp. Emma's parents had dinners and lectures and cocktail parties and conferences. My parents liked to stay home and hang out with me. We played cards or Pictionary and made our own sundaes and sometimes I'd perform karaoke on the machine we kept in the family room. My parents love to hear me sing. When I was younger I'd put on shows whenever they had friends over to the house. They'd give me standing ovations and Dad would put his fingers in his mouth and make one of those crazy loud whistles that I still can't figure out how to do. I thought I was the best singer in the world. Then I tried out for the musical in seventh grade. Standing on that stage and seeing the look in the eyes of our music teacher and the kids in the audience, I knew right then that those standing ovations at home were just another of those things that par-ents do for their children. But even now that I know how bad my voice really is, I still perform karaoke for Mom and Dad on those weekend nights when it's just the three of us home alone together.

Mom and Dad always made this big deal all the time about what a perfect kid I was and that made it difficult for me to lie to them. They always told me that I was so smart and mature and that I know how to make the right decisions for myself. They tell me that the best part about being my parents is, no, not listening to my bad karaoke, it's just sitting back and watching me figure out my way through the world. Well, that's what I was doing, wasn't I? Sometimes figuring out your own way
through the world means lying to your parents. Sometimes it means taking risks. Making new friends. Meeting new people from different neighborhoods and different backgrounds. Sometimes it means doing things that nobody would ever imagine Anna Banana would do.

I was doing something different. Something new. I was leaving something behind.

I was excited all week long. I had a hard time concentrating in school. My heart was racing. My stomach was in knots, but in a good way. I had a secret. I had a secret that I shared only with Emma and Mariah. We had a three-way secret. Nobody in the plaid skirts or gray pants or navy V-neck sweaters knew that I was going to spend the night at DJ's. But it was true. I was going to spend the night at a senior's house. So maybe he was a senior at Orsonville High, but a senior was a senior as far as I was concerned. The only senior I knew at ODS was Silas. I also knew Bronwyn but I never really liked her all that much. She seemed nice on the surface, but I always felt like that was a facade, like she was only being nice so that everyone would always talk about how nice she was. And perfect. With the ideal boyfriend. She seemed kind of ditzy to me.

After school on Wednesday Mariah and Emma and I met in the library, as usual, but we stayed there this time because it was pouring rain and not showing any signs of letting up. The March sky was black even though it would be several hours before the sun went down. I could go home and tell Mom I'd been in the library, and this time, it would be the God's honest truth.

We had a plan to work out.

“So on Friday you guys should pack your bags and bring them to school and then DJ will pick us up down by the river at five o'clock.”

“What should we pack?” I asked.

Mariah laughed. I thought maybe she was laughing at me. But I couldn't help it. This was the first time I'd ever done something like this.

“You know. Stuff that makes it look like you're going to Emma's for the night. It doesn't really matter because I'm sure you won't need anything. Just a change of clothes for the morning. We'll probably stay up hanging out and partying.”

Partying?

I guessed this meant drinking. I was hoping it didn't mean anything more than that. See: there's that perfect kid my par-ents are always talking about. The one who knows how to make all the right decisions for herself. That kid, the one who was finding her own way through the world, knew she didn't want to be at a party where people were doing any drugs.

Our sixth-grade science teacher once told our class about a kid who took LSD and it lasted for a week. His parents found him in the closet, wrapped tightly in bedsheets. He started screaming when they tried to unwrap him. Bloodcurdling screams. He thought he was an orange and he didn't want to be peeled.

That story scared me off drugs for life, not that I ever would have been the kind of person who would have taken drugs in the first place. I've always been cautious, maybe even too cautious.

There was a silence. Emma was acting as if this were all no big deal, like she had spent lots of nights over at some strange guy's house and lied to her parents about it.

“Relax,” said Emma with a slight sound of something in her voice. Like she was impatient with me, or just cooler than me. “It's going to be fine.”

“I'm relaxed,” I snapped back.

Mariah smiled that Juliet smile of hers. “It's going to be more than fine. It's going to be totally fun. I'm so glad you guys are going to get to know DJ. And that he finally gets to meet my two best friends.”

She put one hand on each of our knees. Two hands. Two knees. Three friends.

Emma

Silas asked me what I was doing
on Friday night. I couldn't figure out where this was coming from. Did he know something? Did anything ever get by him? Maybe his species name should be
Silas Seesallicus
.

I just sat there with a blank face.

“Control room to E.P.: do you compute? Question ren-dered. Awaiting response.”

This was another of Silas's jokes. There's this child robot scientists have been working on in Japan. It has a vocabulary of over ten thousand words and is able to do light housework. Silas says I'm a prototype, that he ordered me over the Inter-net, and my duties include keeping his room neat, serving his meals and generally obeying his every command.

“Huh?”

“This Friday, you know, the day that immediately follows Thursday. What are you up to?”

“Nothing. Just going to Anna's.”

“Oh.”

“What?” I said, meaning: what's with the look?

“Nothing. I just thought maybe you'd want to come to the basketball game on Friday night. Bronwyn said she'd give you a ride.”

“Much as I'd love to be your little cheerleader and sit in the special section roped off for Fans of Silas, I actually have a life.”

“Whatever, kid. Just asking,” he said, and then he pinched the skin on my elbow really hard because he knows that's the one part of the human skin where we don't have any real nerve endings.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. Silas knows that on most Friday nights I have nothing to do. I hang around at home, usually with Anna, sometimes with Silas and Bronwyn. My dad is out a lot and on those nights Mom likes to take me to plays and lectures and stuff like that on campus. When I go with her I pretend I'm in college and the guy who's playing the lead in the play is my boyfriend and I'm about to introduce him to my mother and then we'll all go out to dinner and maybe even have a glass of wine.

The truth is I haven't had a boyfriend since seventh grade. That's two whole years. His name was Michael and he still goes to ODS but this year we don't have any classes together.
Back then he was really skinny with kind of a big nose and a mass of tight black curls. Now he's filled out and gotten taller and his nose isn't so big and he goes out with Isabella Rothenberg.

He called me up out of the blue one day and said he had something to tell me.

“I can't just come out and say it, so you're gonna have to guess,” he said.

“Okay. Can you at least give me a hint?”

“Sure. It's a three-word sentence with a subject, a verb and a direct object.”

We both had Ms. Lockhart for English and he was the star student. Not that this was such a complicated or brilliant little hint, but it did show how he couldn't stop himself from being the class brainiac.

“Hmmm. I don't know.” I was playing dumb. Why else would this boy who I hadn't really talked to before call me at home on a Wednesday afternoon to say he had something to tell me? He liked me! A boy liked me! And he was about to tell me he liked me! I remember sitting there with the phone pressed to my ear, writing our names side by side and then enclosing them in a sad little heart.