The Little Friend

Hely glowed. It was for cryptic and unpredictable gestures like this that he adored Harriet. You couldn’t understand why she did things like this, or even why they were cool, but they were cool. Certainly the black mark had upset Mr. Dial, especially after the Curtis debacle. He’d blinked and looked disturbed when a kid in the back held up an empty paper, blank except for the creepy little mark in the center. “Someone’s being funny,” he snapped, after an eerie skipped beat, and went on immediately to the next kid, because the black mark was creepy—why? It was just a pencil mark, but still the room had gone quiet for a strange instant as the kid held it up for everyone to see. And this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.

He bumped her with his shoulder. “You know something funny? You should have wrote ass. Ha!” Hely was always thinking of tricks for other people to pull; he didn’t have the nerve to pull them himself. “In really tiny letters, you know, so he could barely read it.”

“The black spot is in Treasure Island,” said Harriet. “That’s what the pirates gave you when they were coming to kill you, just a blank piece of paper with a black spot on it.”

————

Once home, Harriet went into her bedroom and dug out a notebook she kept hidden beneath the underwear in her bureau drawer. Then she lay down on the other side of Allison’s twin bed where no one could see her from the doorway, though she was unlikely to be disturbed. Allison and her mother were at church. Harriet was supposed to have met them there—along with Edie and her aunts—but her mother would not notice or much care that she hadn’t shown up.

Harriet did not like Mr. Dial, but nonetheless the exercise in the Sunday school room had got her thinking. Put on the spot, she had been unable to think what her goals were—for the day, for the summer, for the rest of her life—and this disturbed her, because for some reason the question was merged and entangled in her mind with the recent unpleasantness of the dead cat in the toolshed.

Harriet liked to set herself difficult physical tests (once, she’d tried to see how long she could subsist on eighteen peanuts a day, the Confederate ration at the end of the war), but mostly these involved suffering to no practical point. The only real goal she was able to think of—and it was a poor one—was to win first prize in the library’s Summer Reading Contest. Harriet had entered it every year since she was six—and won it twice—but now that she was older and reading real novels, she didn’t stand a chance. Last year, the prize had gone to a tall skinny black girl who came two and three times a day to check out immense stacks of baby books like Dr. Seuss and Curious George and Make Way for Ducklings. Harriet had stood behind her in line, with her Ivanhoe

and her Algernon Blackwood and her Myths and Legends of Japan, fuming. Even Mrs. Fawcett, the librarian, had raised an eyebrow in a way that made it perfectly plain how she felt about it.

Harriet opened the notebook. Hely had given it to her. It was just a plain, spiral-bound notebook with a cartoon of a dune buggy on the cover which Harriet did not much care for, but she liked it because the lined paper was bright orange. Hely had tried to use it for his geography notebook in Mrs. Criswell’s class two years before, but had been told that neither the groovy dune buggy nor the orange paper was suitable for school. On the first page of the notebook (in felt-tip pen, also pronounced unsuitable, and confiscated by Mrs. Criswell) was half a page of sporadic notations by Hely.

World Geography   

Alexandria Academy

Duncan Hely Hull     September 4

The two continests that form a continuos land mass Eurge and Asic

The one half of the earth above the equtor is called the Northern

.

Why is it standerd units of mesurament needed?

If a theory is the best available explanation of some part of nature?

There are four parts to a Map.

These Harriet examined with affectionate contempt. Several times she had considered tearing the page out, but over time it had come to seem part of the notebook’s personality, best left undisturbed.