Harmless

by Dana Reinhardt

  “You worry too much, Mariah. This is a good thing. Lots of bad stuff happens to women on college campuses and all over. And something probably did happen to Ellie Clements. It can't hurt to get our community out in the streets demonstrating that we aren't going to let this stuff happen anymore.”

  I could see that she had a point, but still, I didn't feel like taking to the streets. I felt like taking to bed until this all went away.

  Anna

  We filled up the waiting room of the police station. With the three of us and three sets of parents, there weren't any more chairs. I stood reading the peeling posters on the walls about keeping kids off drugs and what to do if someone is choking and I tried to ignore how quiet a room filled with nine people could be.

  Detective Stevens poked his head in and waved at every-one and then asked if Mariah and Emma and I could join him in his office. Emma's dad jumped up from his seat.

  A few quick facts about Raymond Calhoun: He's kind of a jerk. He always corrects my grammar. He's full of himself. He's not that nice to Emma's mom. And also, and I never manage to put this out of my head whenever I'm around him, there's that stuff Emma told me about why they left the city.

  “If you don't mind, I'd like to be there for this discussion,” he said.

  Detective Stevens stepped into the waiting room, closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it. “I'm sorry. That's not possible.”

  “Listen, Detective.” Raymond's face was red now. “If you don't mind my saying, I don't exactly think you're doing a bang-up job with this investigation. My daughter was lucky. She made it home that night. But I don't want to take any chances. I want this guy caught and put behind bars and, frankly, I'm not sure you're up to the task.”

  Mariah's stepfather was on his feet now, standing next to Emma's father. I looked over at my dad. He was still sitting in the uncomfortable blue plastic chair. He smiled a sad smile at me.

  “I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. Calhoun.” Detective Stevens pulled at his tie.

  “Dr. Calhoun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I have a doctorate in English literature.”

  “Oh. Okay. Fine. Whatever. Dr. Calhoun. We don't allow parents in when we interview witnesses. It can tamper with our process. I understand that you want to protect your daugh-ters, but you have to understand that that's also what we want. That's what we do for a living. We protect people.”

  This seemed to work on Raymond. He took his seat again. So did Mariah's stepdad. We followed Detective Stevens down the halls of the station, through a large room with officers typing on gigantic old computers, to a door he held open for us. “We can talk in here, my boss's office.”

  He sat behind a big desk and we sat in chairs facing him and a nameplate that said DET. ROBERT CAPUTO. He picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers.

  “My boss wanted me to bring you guys in here again. He wanted me to find out whether there could be any connection between what happened to you and what happened up in Ka-pachuck. What do you guys think of that?”

  Silence. Detective Stevens stared at us. He was tugging at one of his Howdy Doody ears. I hated being there. I hated the way he held that spiral notebook and the pen in his hand. I hated the way he stared at us with his wide eyes, waiting. Someone had to say something.

  I was surprised to find that that person was me. “I dunno.”

  “Okay. Let's start over.” He leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on the desk but then he seemed to remember that it wasn't his desk and he quickly put his feet back on the floor. “What do we know about this man who attacked you?”

  “Not much,” I said, because I had taken on the role of Anna Who Does All the Talking.

  “Well, do we think maybe he was a homeless person?”

  “What? Where'd you get that idea?” I asked.

  He didn't answer right away. Again, he was practicing his Detective Stevens waiting method. I glanced at Emma, who had that faraway look in her eyes she seemed to be perfecting. Mariah looked like she was doing some kind of feverish calcu-lation in her head. Her eyes were darting back and forth.

  “Let's see.” He looked down at his notepad. He tapped it a few times with his pen. “Silas Calhoun.” He looked at Emma. “Your brother. He told me that Mariah told him that the man appeared to be a vagrant.”

  I didn't say anything. I didn't remember that part of the story.

  Mariah finally spoke up. “Yeah. I guess I can't be sure but he was dirty and he smelled kind of bad and his clothes were beat-up.”

  “Is this true?” The question was directed at Emma and me.

  “Um, yeah, I guess Mariah's right. I can't remember so well but that sounds right to me,” I said, because what else could I say to make Detective Stevens stop looking at me?

  “Emma?” he asked.

  Emma shot an angry look at Mariah. “Why are you talking about this to Silas?”

  Detective Stevens didn't take his eyes off Emma. “Does this seem right? You were in the best position to say.”

  She stopped glaring at Mariah and turned back to Detective Stevens. “I don't really know.”

  “Okay. Fine. I don't want to push anything on you. But I do wish you'd told me this at the beginning, Mariah. Every de-tail is critically important. Is there anything else you, any of you, might be forgetting? Is there anything at all you need to tell me? If there is, please, the time to tell me is now.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” said Mariah.

  Emma didn't answer right away. She looked down at her lap. She looked like she was close to tears. I saw her jaw clench. But then, in a voice that I could barely hear, she said, “No, Detective Stevens. Unfortunately, there isn't anything I'm forgetting.”

  Emma

  Ms. Malachy thought it was important for me to participate in the Take Back the Night march. She thought it would help me work through some of my PTSD. That stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. That's what Ms. Malachy thought I had. PTSD. She said I was putting up a wall to protect myself from the memory of what happened that night. She said I put up a wall between myself and the truth. I told her that I thought building a wall like that sounded like a perfectly rea-sonable thing to do.

  My mom wanted me to go on the march too. Some of her students were organizing it and she thought the whole family could go together to show how grateful we were that the college students were taking what happened to me so seriously.

  I agreed to go, but not for Ms. Malachy and not for my mom or her students. I wanted to march for Ellie Clements.

  I remember when I was little and I used to watch Saturday-morning cartoons and Wile E. Coyote would chase the Road Runner over the edge of a cliff and he'd freeze right there, high above the rocky earth below, and as soon as he realized how high up he was, he'd fall. I thought about Ellie's family and how they were like Wile E. Coyote, perched over an abyss, staring down at a life without their daughter.

  I knew that all hope of finding her alive was pretty much gone, but I liked imagining Ellie out there somewhere, using the survival skills she'd learned as a junior explorer, beating the odds. I imagined her swimming. She was an excellent swimmer. That's what the article said. But really, I knew that the dangers she faced couldn't be helped by rubbing two sticks together to make a fire or by doing a flawless butterfly stroke.

  The blue flyers that littered our school all week were right: it was time to Take Back the Night. This madness had to stop.

  It was also time to Take Back My Brother. I should have known that it would come to this. All this time that I thought Mariah wanted to be my friend, she really just wanted to get closer to Silas. It's always been that way. My friends have always had crushes on my brother. Just look at Anna. But it was never a serious threat until now. I'd never had a friend like Mariah. I'd never had a friend who had a way of getting ex-actly what she wanted. I'd been walking around in a daze thinking, me, poor me, poor me and what happened to me, and I hadn't
paid any attention to what was happening around me, what was happening right in front of me.

  The night of the march came and we ate dinner late so that we wouldn't get hungry while we were out walking the streets past midnight because this isn't New York City and there's nowhere to get something to eat if you get hungry after nine o'clock.

  Silas came to my room while I was getting ready. I didn't know how to prepare for this night, so I reached for what felt familiar: my worn-out sneakers, my red fleece jacket, things that would make me comfortable outside on a cool spring night. I felt grateful for these simple things because inside, I was in knots, and there was nothing I could pull from my closet or from a drawer that would make that go away.

  Silas sat down on my bed and asked, probably for the five hundredth time since this whole mess began, if I was okay.

  “Jesus, Silas. Enough. Okay? I'm fine. Stop treating me like a child. I'm not a child. I'm not naïve. I'm not stupid. I know things.”

  “What are you talking about? I never said you were naïve or stupid.”

  I stared at him hard.

  There was a hole in the knee of his pants. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt. It was cold outside. For someone so together, Silas was pretty clueless sometimes.

  Didn't he know Mariah was after him? Was he doing anything that might give her the wrong idea?

  Silas brought his eyebrows together and then sighed one of his Silas sighs. I knew how worried he was about me. I hated how worried he was about me, but what could I do? For the first time in my life, I couldn't talk to Silas. I couldn't tell him the truth.

  “Grab a jacket, will you? It's cold out,” I said, and I walked out of my room.

  The crowd was huge, gathered on the lawn in front of the main college building. I wasn't sure that I'd been in this large a crowd since I moved up here. It wasn't just Mom's students who'd shown up. There were college boys with beer on their breath. Professors in unfashionable, too-blue blue jeans. There were tons of kids from ODS because our school president, Darby O'Shea, who was there with bullhorn in hand, had decided that the ODS student council would cosponsor the march with the college's Feminist Union. Blue and gold letter jackets from Orsonville High were scattered throughout the crowd. And lots of parents were there, holding tight to their daughters' hands.

  My family came in one car, but as soon as we got there my parents and my brother disappeared into the sea of people. Mom found some of her students, Dad some of the faculty, and Silas went off with Bronwyn, who at least was nice enough to come and say hello before dragging Silas away. I wandered around. I knew Anna and Mariah must be somewhere in the crowd but I made no effort to find them.

  And then I saw him. There he was. He had his arm around a tall, skinny girl with short brown hair and a corduroy jacket. She was whispering something in his ear and he threw his head back and laughed and then, just at that moment, our eyes met. Somewhere deep inside, the saner part of me knew that he couldn't possibly be laughing at me, but I couldn't quite get in touch with this part of myself. I felt my face go hot. I felt my late-night dinner curdling in my stomach.

  Owen nodded at me in a way that probably nobody but I would have noticed, and then he turned around and walked away, his hips knocking into the hips of that tall, skinny girl with short brown hair.

  I heard a voice on a loudspeaker but I couldn't make out what it was saying over the noise of the crowd and the feedback from the microphone. I imagined it was saying, Let's all stop and look at that loser Emma Calhoun. Isn't she pathetic? But the voice was saying something about getting the march going, because suddenly the crowd was moving and I was swept along with it, and just as I thought that maybe I would drown, if it were actually possible to drown in a sea of people, I felt someone grab ahold of my hand. Silas.

  “Let's do this,” he said, and he squeezed me tight.

  That night I walked probably three miles but I couldn't tell you where or how. I drifted along. When we got down to the river there was a pause. I saw Anna up at the front of the crowd. I felt Silas loosen his grip on my hand, but that only made me grab on tighter. I stayed where I was, anchored to my brother.

  A college student with dark red hair faced the crowd. Her voice was hoarse from chanting. Her face was beaded with sweat. I thought, This is a march, not a race: relax. She was exploding with energy. I guess that's why she didn't need a fleece pullover like I did. She wore a black tank top with a picture of Elinor Clements on the front. Her arms were wispy and white like snow in the Arctic Circle.

  She was carrying a sign that said “End the Victimization of Women NOW.” I'm not sure how she knew who we were but when she found Silas and me in the crowd, she ran over to us and said, “He shouldn't be here! He should have stayed home! He should have stayed out of academia altogether!”

  When she saw the puzzled look on our faces she said, “Your father. The esteemed Professor Raymond Calhoun. He doesn't belong here. Not tonight.” And she marched away.

  Mariah

  I didn't want to go on the march. But of course Carl was on my case about going, because Carl loves nothing more in this whole wide world than to be on my case. He thought it would look strange if I didn't show up. He thought somehow somebody somewhere would pass judgment on him if I didn't go. It wasn't about me. It never is with Carl. So I lied and I told him that I was having killer cramps and that pretty much shut him up about the whole thing.

  I spent the evening with Jessica. I painted her toenails a light shimmery shade of pink that I was pretty sure would go unnoticed by Carl. I told her not to tell. I made her sign an oath of secrecy. She giggled. We slipped it under her mattress. I coaxed her mop of light brown curls into a French braid. We played Candy Land and I let her win. We made popcorn and tried dyeing it purple using grape juice but that didn't work, so we threw it away and made another batch, which we devoured while watching Mary Poppins.

  Late that night, lying in bed, with no light to see by but the red numbers on my digital alarm clock, I heard voices.

  Hundreds of voices.

  I threw my windows open. I could hear the marchers out in the streets. I could hear chanting and talking and hollering and even some laughter but I couldn't make out any words.

  And then it hit me. They are out there because of me.

  I was used to being powerless. I wound up in this big house and in that fancy private school, with a new father and sister, without ever agreeing that any of this was a good idea. But now, when I heard those voices out there in the streets, I realized that I did have power. I had the power to bring together hundreds of voices.

  I closed my windows and put a pillow over my head. I tried to drown them out. I tried to make them go away. All I wanted now was quiet. I didn't want power. Power was way overrated.

  I knew Anna was out there somewhere. She had agreed to show the marchers where the assault took place. I pictured them all stopped there, looking at the river, staring at the spot where Anna and Emma and I sat and made up this little story that grew and grew and grew until all these people were out in the streets when they should all have been home, in their beds, fast asleep.

  I didn't want to go on the march. I didn't want to be a part of this anymore. And I didn't know what to say to Anna. Carl told me that I wasn't allowed to spend time with her. He said I had to end our friendship. He said she was bad news, a bad seed, a bad influence. Bad cliché after bad cliché. He said he wasn't spending all this money to send me to Odious so that I could hang out with the daughter of someone in the CompuCorp sales department who hadn't had a promotion in five years. He said that children of parents like that spend their time hanging out by the river, getting into trouble. He said I needed to find friends who were more like me, but then he corrected himself: I needed to find friends who came from families more like mine.

  Not that any of this mattered. Since when did I listen to Carl? But it showed once again how Carl didn't know any-thing about anything or anyone. Especially me.

  The march was al
l over the papers the next day. Ellie Clements's picture was on the front page along with a refer-ence to the three minors who were involved in the assault at the riverbank, whose names were being withheld to protect their privacy, as if we had any privacy to begin with. The reporter didn't even need to talk to any of us to get our version of the story. That's how private the story had become.

  The word mobilizing was used probably ten times in the article. Students were mobilizing. The community was mobilizing. Local government was mobilizing: there was going to be some kind of public-safety summit with all the community leaders of all the nearby towns to discuss how they should respond to the recent spate of violence. There was a quote from Detective Caputo, Detective Stevens's boss, saying that they were close to solving the Orsonville case and that they were sharing information with the squad from Kapachuck.

  We are not going to sit by and let this happen to our children. We will see that justice is done.

  That quote wasn't from Darby O'Shea, president of the Odious student body, or any of the members of the college Feminist Union. It didn't come from Detective Stevens or his boss, Detective Caputo. That quote, big and bold in the cen-ter of the front page of our local newspaper, came from the mayor of Orsonville.

  I knew right then and there what would happen next.

  The phone call came late in the afternoon, about ten days after the march.

  Someone had been arrested.

  Someone was going to pay.

  Anna

  Two major events in my life were taking place at the very same time, after a lifetime of very little in the major-event department.

  First things first: I had a new relationship with Tobey Endo. All my time spent outside of school was spent instant-messaging with him. The first one came at two a.m. on the night of the march. I saw Tobey there, but we didn't talk. He was holding his skateboard in his hand and he was wearing a green and blue striped wool hat. He smiled at me and I smiled back and when I got home and turned on my laptop, I could see he was online: