Free Harmless by Dana Reinhardt

say hung heavily in the air above us all.
    Rape .
    It echoed silently in every corner of the room. It seeped into our clothes. Our food. The walls around us. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to think about it.
    I thought instead about the Arctic Circle. I read about this group of French scientists who were camped out at the Arctic Circle, studying the shape of the earth beneath its surface. Everyone assumes the inside of the earth is shaped just like the outside. I remember the diagrams in my fifth-grade textbook of different-colored concentric circles.
    But maybe if you cut the earth in half you wouldn't findperfectly rounded layers, one tucked neatly inside the next. Maybe my textbook was wrong. Maybe on the inside, the earth's just a big, unruly, indefinable mess.
    I envied those scientists and the months they would spend trying to figure this out, surrounded only by the Arctic's white nothingness.
    Mom paused and took the sharp edge off her voice. “What I'm trying to tell you, Raymond, is that we need to be here for Emma right now. We need to concentrate on supporting her.”
    “Well, I think we need to figure out who did this to her and then do something about it.”
    “That is the typical male response. Fix it. Do something. Men never deal with the emotional truth of the situation. Look at her, Raymond. Look at her.”
    “Can we please stop talking about me in the third person?”
    I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.
    Silas pushed his chair back and stood up. “Hey, Em. Let's leave these freaks and go watch some bad TV.”
    He put his arm around me and led me downstairs. Mom and Dad stayed at the table and we could hear their whispering voices from the depths of the basement. It wasn't the kind of whispering full of concern or conspiracy. These were whis-pered daggers.
    Silas reached for the remote control but he didn't turn on the TV. Instead he turned and looked at me. Silas Seesallicus.
    “Do you want to talk about this?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “All right, then. Let's not. Let's talk about something else.”
    “Excellent. Great. Perfect.”
    “Okay. Here are your choices: We can talk about Dalton's law of gas pressure, which, no, does not have to do with my personal gases, it has to do with what's on my AP test next Wednesday. Or we can talk about the bonehead trade Stein-brenner just made, which guarantees that the Yankees stand no chance in this year's pennant race. If neither of those top-ics does it for you, we can talk about why Bronwyn is so pissed off at me right now.”
    Silas knows I always want to talk about Bronwyn, to hear more about their relationship and what it's like to love some-one and have that someone love you back.
    I managed a smile. “I'll take door number three. Bronwyn troubles.”
    He picked up my feet and put them in his lap and we talked about how he thought they should start school in the fall with a clean slate, without longing for each other, without ties to who they were before they got to college. And even though this wasn't what I wanted to hear, even though I liked to picture Silas and Bronwyn married with a family, forever the perfect couple, it still felt good to me to sit there like that with my brother. He was treating me like a friend, not like a little sister, and for a brief moment, I felt like there wasn't any-thing in the world that I couldn't tell him.

Mariah
    Carl said if I didn't dress like I do and I didn't go hanging around by the river, where people do God knows what, and if I spent more time studying and trying to be a role model for my younger sister, then this never would have happened.
    Mom said she was proud of me for being so brave and standing up for myself and my friends and for having the pres-ence of mind to grab a rock, but really, she added, Carl was right, I shouldn't be hanging out down by the river.
    Carl got up and left the room.
    “Carl's just upset,” Mom said. “It's hard for him to deal with difficult things