Harmless (6 page)

It was Saturday night and I had nothing to do. Mom and Carl were taking Jessica to a kids' movie, and not like I felt like spending two hours watching a talking armadillo, but they didn't even ask if I wanted to come along. I called DJ. I thought maybe he could come over for a quick visit and then
disappear before they returned, but he just let his voice mail pick up even though I called him three times in a row and sent him two instant messages.

Emma was at a potluck with her parents and Silas. There was no one else I could call, so I called Anna. She invited me over for dinner and even though that sounded like a lame thing to do, eating dinner with Anna and her parents on a Saturday night, I didn't exactly have any other options.

I left the house without a coat and realized halfway through my walk to Anna's that this was a mistake. By the time her dad opened the door my teeth were chattering.

He put his arm around me and said, “Mariah. It's so nice to meet you. We've heard so much about you.”

He was short and stocky, with a big warm smile and tufts of hair visible over the neck of his T-shirt. His hug felt sort of cozy. He was the opposite of Carl. He was a teddy bear. Carl's more like a G.I. Joe.

He told me to call him Wally and then he yelled up the stairs for Anna, who came racing down them like the house was on fire.

Her mom came out of the kitchen and wiped her hands on her apron. She was short too, a couple of inches shorter than me, with big boobs, but not the good kind of big boobs. They were the kind of big boobs that looked like a shelf sticking out from her chest: something she could rest her arms on, or maybe a book or a mug of coffee. She had long straight hair that was braided into a rope down her back, too many freckles and big brown eyes. My mom's a former model. Anna's can make a mean lasagna. I ate three helpings.

I wouldn't have ever believed it, but halfway through din-ner I found myself envying Anna. She has this perfect little family of just her and her mom and dad and a warm little house and an old wooden dinner table with lots of scratches in it. Ours gets polished probably three times a week and I can see Carl's reflection in it whenever we're eating together. Be-lieve me, one view of Carl is more than anyone should have to stomach, especially while you're eating.

This could have been my life if my mom had married my real father. Just the three of us. Laughing and talking with our mouths full of lasagna. But I guess for her to have married my real father she would have had to know him in the first place, and she didn't. He was some guy at a party. Or maybe a guy she met while she was on a shoot. She wasn't really sure. It never mattered much to me because I had Mom and I had her all to myself.

Then Carl came along.

“So, Mariah, what do your folks do?” asked Anna's mom, whose name I learned was Carolyn.

“My mom mostly takes care of my little stepsister, Jessica. And she, you know, takes yoga and she volunteers and stuff like that.”

“And your father?”

“You mean my stepfather? I have no idea. Something at CompuCorp.”

“He's vice president in charge of sales and new-product development,” said Wally. Then he saw my confused expression and added, “Carl Dalrymple. I work under him.”

“Poor you.”

Wally laughed. He didn't say anything about me being wrong.

Then, before I even knew what I was saying, I added, “My real father lives in Los Angeles. He's an actor.”

“Really? That's exciting. What have we seen him in?” asked Carolyn.

“He mostly does theater. Serious stuff. He's really talented. He's won a bunch of awards.” It was amazing how easy it was for me to picture this made-up father of mine. There he was, standing alone on a stage, a light shining down on him, his hands clutching a statue, and his eyes motionless, locked on mine.

Later, up in Anna's room, she started pressing me about Owen and Emma.

“So did Emma tell you anything more about what really happened with Owen?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they slept in the same room. Do you really buy that all they did was make out?”

Wait a minute. Weren't Anna and Emma supposed to be best friends? Hadn't they known each other forever? Weren't they close like sisters? Why was she asking me all this? Why didn't she just talk to Emma?

“I don't know. But I do know that he likes her. He wants to see her again.”

“Really? When? Where?”

Even though I was pretty good at lying, I couldn't come up with anything on the spot. “This Friday at DJ's. We're going to say that we're going to the movies.”

“That sounds easy enough.”

Anna's room looked like it must have looked back when she was a kid, like she'd been in this house forever and had never had to move to some strange new place. There was an old, frayed stuffed dog on her bed missing one of its droopy eyes. She still had picture books on her bookshelves. Her walls were pink and white stripes.

I could see how much she wanted to go with us and at that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint her.

Anna

I know what I saw
. I may be inexperienced. I may never have kissed a boy or had his hand in my shirt, but I know what I saw. I just didn't get why Emma was lying to me. I kind of thought it was Emma's duty as my best friend to tell me more, but for some reason she was acting like this was too private to talk about and I just couldn't understand that. Emma and I talk about everything. At least we used to. I gave her every opportunity to tell me the truth. We walked back to her house, just the two of us, but she still didn't say anything.

I stood on the sidewalk after she turned onto her street and watched her keep walking away from me until she got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared up her driveway and I was left all alone.

Mariah had no problem telling me things. She came over for dinner and it was totally embarrassing because Mom and Dad were giving her the third degree, asking her all kinds of questions, but at least they never suggested we take out the karaoke machine. Then Mariah and I hung out in my room, just the two of us, and that was cool because we'd never hung out just the two of us without Emma around. She told me about how she and DJ had been having sex since about the second week they knew each other. She said it made their relationship really strong. I guess maybe he's different around her when they're alone, just the two of them, up in his room.

Two. Two is the magic number.

At school the next week I kind of thought Emma would walk around like Mariah used to with everyone whispering about how she was dating this senior from Orsonville High, but that didn't happen. Emma kept it to herself, and nobody seemed to pick up on anything, probably because nobody could imagine Emma doing something as daring as spending the night on a couch with a guy she didn't know. Emma was just Emma. She wasn't Mariah. And everyone knew it.

I tried to get more out of her about her night with Owen, but she shut me out. Suddenly, after all our years as best friends, she wasn't sharing the details, which was kind of annoying because I'd heard details about everything else in her life. I could draw a perfect map of her apartment in New York City even though someone else has lived there for the past six years. I know the names of all thirteen of
her cousins. I can sing the entire song from the camp she went to for four summers, and I never even visited her there.

I know some more private things about her too. Serious things. I know about how her dad was accused of sexual ha-rassment by a student when he used to teach in the city and that's one of the reasons they moved up here. I know this about her because she told me one night. She'd overheard her parents fighting about it and she was crying, and she whis-pered the whole story to me in the dark while I was lying in a sleeping bag on the floor of her room. We haven't talked about it since. I tried once to bring it up but she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about.

That was what she was doing now. Acting like she had no idea what I was talking about when I'd ask her what happened that night with Owen.

So I stopped asking.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't Anna Banana, the perfect kid who makes all the right decisions. I was becoming Anna, with her own life and her own friends, who goes off to do her own things.

We were going back to DJ's and I was hoping there'd be someone better for me to hang out with than Brian. He wasn't that cute and his snoring almost peeled the wallpaper off the walls. Mariah decided we would tell our parents we were seeing some movie adapted from a Jane Austen book. She chose it because it was playing at the college campus the-ater and that's the only theater we can walk to. Also, it's long
and that meant we could come home a little past eleven without any questions asked.

I was a pro at this now. I figured last Friday was the Big Lie, and this was just the little lie and we could pull this one off, no problem at all.

Emma

On Friday night
Silas and Bronwyn rented two Will Ferrell movies and I wanted to stay home with them and sit on the couch and eat ice cream and get into my pajamas and laugh at Will Ferrell and his stupid sense of humor. Now, more than anything in the world, I wish I had done just that.

I can't really explain why I went back, other than that I thought I was supposed to want to go back. There are rules, I guess. Laws of science. Let's call this one the Senior Boy-Freshman Girl Principle. When a boy like Owen likes you and wants to see you again, you go. You have no choice.

But I knew the minute I saw him that the last thing I wanted was to be alone somewhere with him, so I spent the
entire night avoiding him. And this time, I also stayed away from the beer.

Lots of stuff happened that night. It was the night of sur-prises. For one thing, Anna spent most of the night out on the back porch, making out with Brian. Who could have pre-dicted that? And Mariah and DJ got in a huge fight. I had no idea Mariah could scream like that. She's always so cool and laid-back, but we could all hear her screaming even though she was upstairs, behind his closed bedroom door, and we were all downstairs with loud music playing on the stereo.

But what's really important about that night at DJ's is that my cell phone rang at 10:45. It was Mom. I was smart enough not to answer, and when I checked the message she sounded hysterical.

She and Dad had a dinner on campus that let out early and they decided to come to the Jane Austen movie. She searched the theater for me, but the lights had already gone down. Now it was over and I wasn't there and where was I and she'd already called Anna's mom and even got a number for Mariah's house and talked to her mom and no one had heard from any of us and WHERE ARE YOU?????

Species name:
Motherus Hystericalus
.

I ran upstairs and pounded on DJ's door even though Mariah was still screaming at him.

I quickly told her that we were busted and she grabbed her purse and said, “Come on, asshole. We need a ride home.”

“Screw you,” said DJ. “You can walk.”

We ran downstairs and found Anna, who was still all over Brian, and even though he's kind of gross and seems like a big
dumb jock, he, unlike DJ, was cool enough to at least give us a ride. This time, it was me who left without saying goodbye to Owen.

Brian dropped us down by the river.

This was bad. We couldn't get caught. If our parents found out we were at DJ's this night then they'd figure out we'd been at DJ's the Friday before, and there are certain things that par-ents must never know.

Anna just sat there with her head in her hands mumbling, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

Poor Anna. Her body was tense with worry. She pulled into herself hard, like one of the rocks we were sitting on.

What would happen when her parents realized she wasn't the perfect, always-on-her-best-behavior only child they thought she was?

Screaming Mariah had turned back into Cool Collected Mariah. She was acting like this whole mess was no big deal.

“He is such a prick. I give him, like, everything. I'm always there for him. I really thought he loved me even though he never said it. I could just tell. And now he says he's bringing some skank from his class to his prom? I thought he was going to ask me tonight. I really did. I've been slowly stashing away money from Carl's wallet to pay for a dress and everything.”

I didn't really see what this had to do with our current cir-cumstance. Prom dresses? Really.

“Mariah,” I said. “This is huge. We're busted. Everyone knows we weren't at the movies. What are we going to do? We can't tell them about going to DJ's. We can't do that.”

Mariah walked over to the edge of the river, picked up a
stone and threw it as far as she could. It disappeared. It didn't make a sound when it hit the water, like the night just swallowed it up.

“I was a virgin,” she said, just like that.

We were quiet. I felt the sting of those words, sharp behind my eyes, aching in my body, my heart. I sat down. I looked at my watch. I could barely see the numbers. My head was under-water. I squinted my eyes and managed to focus. 11:00.

“I'm sorry.” That was all I could think to say.

She sat down again and looked over at Anna.

“Hey, Anna Banana. Chill. Take a breath.”

Anna looked up. She unfolded. Even though there was no moon, only the tiny twinkling lights from other people's houses across the river, I could see that her eyes were filling with tears. “But what—”

“Don't worry. Let's put our heads together. We can handle this. We can figure something out. We'll come up with something.”

Mariah was right. We could figure something out. A story. A lie. We tell lies all the time. Sometimes it's easier to tell lies than it is to tell the truth.

It was then, there in the darkness, with only those little pin-points of light to see by, light from a world away where other people with their own problems and their own secrets lived their own lives, that everything in our world changed for good.

Mariah

DJ stands for Darryl Junior
. He always hated being called Darryl, which is what his mother called him. His dad sometimes called him Junior. He hated that even more.