Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“No. Somebody might see you. Your name’s not on it, is it?”

“Nope. I never use it. Say, Harriet, who was that person?”

“Dunno.”

“They looked real old. That person.”

A tense, grown-up silence followed—not like their usual silences, when they’d run out of things to say and sat waiting amiably for the other to speak up.

“I have to go,” said Hely at last. “My mom’s making tacos for supper.”

“Okay.”

They sat breathing, on each end of the line: Harriet in the high, musty hall, Hely in his room on the top bunk.

“What ever happened to those kids you were talking about?” said Harriet.

“What?”

“Those kids on the Memphis news. That threw rocks from the overpass.”

“Oh, them. They got caught.”

“What’d they do to them?”

“I don’t know. I guess they went to jail.”

There followed another long silence.

“I’ll write you a postcard. So you’ll have something to read at Mail Call,” said Hely. “If anything happens, I’ll tell you.”

“No, don’t. Don’t write anything down . Not about that.”

“I’m not going to tell!”

“I know you’re not going to tell , ” said Harriet irritably. “Just don’t talk about any of this.”

“Well—not to just anybody.”

“Not anybody at all . Listen, you can’t go around telling people like … like … Greg DeLoach . I mean it, Hely,” she said over his objection. “Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“Greg lives way out at Hickory Circle. I never see him except at school. Besides, Greg wouldn’t tell on us, I know he wouldn’t.”

“Well don’t tell him anyway. Because if you tell even one person—”

“I wish I was going with you. I wish I was going somewhere , ” said Hely miserably. “I’m scared. I think that was maybe Curtis’s grandma we threw that snake on.”

“Listen to me. I want you to promise. Don’t tell anybody . Because—”

“If it’s Curtis’s grandmother, then it’s the others’, too. Danny and Farish and the preacher.” To Harriet’s surprise, he erupted into shrill, hysterical laughter. “Those guys will murder me .”

“Yes,” said Harriet, seriously, “and that’s why you can’t tell anybody ever . If you don’t tell, and I don’t tell—”

Sensing something, she glanced up—and was badly startled to see Allison standing in the door of the living room, only a few feet away.

“It sucks that you’re leaving.” Hely’s voice sounded tinny on the other end. “Except I cannot believe you are going to that shitty damn Baptist camp.”

Harriet, turning pointedly from her sister, made an ambiguous noise, to indicate that she couldn’t talk with freedom, but Hely didn’t catch it.

“I wish I could go somewhere. We were supposed to go on a vacation to the Smoky Mountains this year but Dad said he didn’t want to put the miles on the car. Say, do you think you can leave me some quarters so I can call you if I have to?”

“I don’t have any money.” Typical of Hely: trying to weasel money out of her when he was the one who got an allowance. Allison had disappeared.

“Gosh I hope it’s not his grandmother. Please please let it not be his grandmother.”

“I have to go.” Why was the light so sad? Harriet’s heart felt as though it were breaking. In the mirror opposite, across the tarnished reflection of the wall above her head (cracked plaster, dark photographs, dead giltwood sconces) swirled a mildewy cloud of black specks.

She could still hear Hely’s ragged breath on the other end. Nothing in Hely’s house was sad—everything cheerful and new, television always going—but even his breath sounded altered, tragic, when it traveled through the telephone wires into her house.

“My mom’s requested Miss Erlichson for my home room teacher when I start seventh grade this fall,” said Hely. “So I don’t guess we’ll be seeing each other that much when school starts.”

Harriet made an indifferent noise, disguising the pain which bit her at this treachery. Edie’s old friend Mrs. Clarence Hackney (nickname: “Hatchet-head”) had taught Harriet in the seventh grade, and would teach her again in the eighth. But if Hely had chosen Miss Erlichson (who was young, and blonde, and new at the school) that meant Hely and Harriet would have different study halls, different lunchtimes, different classrooms, different everything.

“Miss Erlichson’s cool. Mom said that no way was she going to force another kid of hers through a year of Mrs. Hackney. She lets you do your book report on whatever you want and—Okay,” said Hely in response to an off-stage voice. To Harriet he said: “Suppertime. Talk to you later.”

Harriet sat holding the heavy black receiver until the dial tone came on at the other end. She replaced it on the cradle with a solid click. Hely—with his thin, cheery voice, his plans for Miss Erlichson’s room—even Hely felt like something that was lost now, or about to be lost, an impermanence like lightning bugs or summer. The light in the narrow hallway was almost completely gone. And without Hely’s voice—tinny and faint as it was—to break the gloom, her sorrow blackened and roared up like a cataract.

Hely! He lived in a busy, companionable, colorful world, where everything was modern and bright: corn chips and Ping-Pong, stereos and sodas, his mother in T-shirt and cut off jeans running around barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. Even the smell over there was new and lemon-fresh—not like her own dim home, heavy and malodorous with memory, its aroma a sorrowful backwash of old clothes and dust. What did Hely—eating his tacos for supper, sailing off blithely to Miss Erlichson’s home room in the fall—what did Hely care about chill and loneliness? What did he know of her world?

Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery. Never had she been happy or content, exactly, but she was quite unprepared for the strange darks that lay ahead of her. For the rest of her life, Harriet would remember with a wince that she hadn’t been brave enough to stay for one last afternoon—the very last one!—to sit at the foot of Ida’s chair with her head on Ida’s knees. What might they have talked of? She would never know. It would pain her that she’d run off, cravenly, before Ida’s last work-week was over; it would pain her that somehow, strangely, the whole misunderstanding had been her fault; it would pain her, terribly, that she hadn’t told Ida goodbye. But, most of all, it would pain her that she’d been too proud to tell Ida that she loved her. In her anger, and her pride, she had failed to realize that she would never see Ida again. A whole new ugly kind of life was settling about Harriet, there in the dark hallway at the telephone-table; and though it felt new to her then, it would come to seem horribly familiar in the weeks ahead.

CHAPTER 6.

The Funeral

“Hospitality was the key-note of life in those days,” said Edie. Her voice—clear, declamatory—rose effortlessly over the hot wind roaring through the car windows; grandly, without bothering to signal, she swept into the left lane and cut in front of a log truck.

The Oldsmobile was a lush, curvaceous manatee of a car. Edie had purchased it from Colonel Chipper Dee’s car lot in Vicksburg, back in the 1950s. A vast tract of empty seat stretched between Edie, on the driver’s side, and Harriet slouched against the opposite door. Between them—next to Edie’s straw purse with the wooden handles—was a plaid thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts.