Free The Girl in the Park by Mariah Fredericks

call from the police.”
    “Do you know who they’re calling?”
    He shakes his head. “Why?”
    I stare down at the ground. “No, I just hope they talk to people who …” I look up. “Not everybody liked Wendy. Some people are into trashing her, saying, like, she deserved it, ’causeshe …” I wave my hand, not wanting to list the reasons people think Wendy deserved to get killed.
    Mr. Farrell says, “When disaster strikes, people get scared. They want to find a reason it won’t happen to them. Something the victim did wrong that they would never do.”
    “Yeah.” I nod gratefully. “I think there’s a lot of that going around.” Then in a burst, I add, “It’s like when people pick on a kid, they know it’s wrong? But they always find some reason the kid deserves it.…”
    Too much. Way too much. I stop talking, stare at the floor. What am I doing, blathering like this?
    I mumble, “I guess I’m just freaked by the whole thing.”
    “Of course.” A pause. “Do you feel like you could talk to Ms. Callanan?”
    I shake my head. Freshman year, when I was having a really rough time, I went to her once. All she did was grip my hand and say things like You must feel so SAD. You must feel so ALONE. I was like, Well, yeah—and?
    “I think I have to get through it myself,” I say.
    “No, you don’t,” he says.
    Something in that statement gives me the guts to look up. We sit there looking at each other. It occurs to me that if the silence lasts one more second, he will know how much I like him and this will go from wonderful to deeply embarrassing.
    Actually, he probably already knows and the only thing left is to show him that it’s cool, I’m not a moron.
    So I get up. “I’ve wasted a lot of your time.”
    “You have not,” he says.
    “Well … at any rate”—I start toward the door—“thank you again and …”
    “Rain?”
    “Yes.”
    He hesitates. “You’re welcome. First. And …”
    I wait.
    “Come talk to me anytime.”
    “Okay.” He doesn’t mean it. I do get that. He’s being nice.
    “And I’m not just being nice.”
    I laugh. “Okay.” Wanting this to last, I glance at the bare walls. “You don’t like pictures?”
    “I don’t like pictures,” he says, grinning. “I like words. When people are in my class, I want them to listen. Really hear the words and feel the emotion. Not get distracted by a picture of the person or their life. Listening—it’s an old-fashioned concept, I know.”
    “Yeah, I do know.”
    He smiles.
    Most Alcott kids live near school, in the Seventies and Eighties, either on the pretty wealthy West Side or the flat-out rich East Side. I live on 110th, up near Columbia University, which is a different scene. My mom got a huge apartment there when she wasn’t making a lot of money. The neighborhood’s changed since then, but a lot of professors and writers and artists still live here. My mom says she’ll never leave because this is where she brought me home after I was born. Plus our building has gargoyles. “How can I leave the gargoyles?” she asks. Not to mention St. John the Divine, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and V & T’s, which has the best pizza in the city.
    As I walk, I think about what Mr. Farrell said about Ms. Callanan. Maybe I should try again. The thing is, the one time I saw her, she was so busy feeling sorry for me, she never evenheard why I was there in the first place. I feel like I could have told her exactly what happened with Nico in the stairwell and she still would have gushed on about SAD and LONELY. She would have made it about me and not him.
    Right after the thing with Nico, I thought about it every day. I would play it over and over in my mind; what Nico said was always the same. What he did was the same. But in my imagination, I fought back.
    Which was not what happened, of course.
    I haven’t thought about it in a while. Now the whole rotten memory comes back in a rush like vomit.
    “Come on, I want