The Little Friend

Harriet realized that she was staring at the back door too pointedly, and turned back to her breakfast. If Hely went to her house and she wasn’t home, he came looking for her over here, and this was sometimes uncomfortable since Edie loved nothing better than to tease Harriet about Hely, with murmured asides about sweethearts and romance, humming infuriating little love songs under her breath. Harriet bore teasing of any sort very badly, but she could not endure being teased about boys. Edie pretended not to know this, and drew back from the results of her handiwork (tears, denial) in theatrical astonishment. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” she said, gaily, in a merry, mocking tone that Harriet loathed; or, more smugly, “You must really like that little boy if it upsets you so much to talk about him.”

“I think,” said Edie—startling Harriet from these recollections—“I think they ought to give them a hot lunch at school but they ought not to give the parents a dime.” She was talking about a story in the newspaper. A little earlier she’d been talking about the Panama Canal, how crazy it was to just give the thing away.

“I guess I’ll read the obituaries,” she said. “That’s what Daddy used to say. ‘Guess I’d better go to the obituaries first and see if anybody I know has died.’ ”

She turned to the back of the paper. “I wish this rain would clear up,” she said, glancing out the window, seemingly quite oblivious to Harriet. “There’s plenty to do inside—the potting shed needs to be cleaned and those pots disinfected—but I guarantee you that people will wake up, and take one look at this weather—”

As if on cue, the telephone rang.

“Here we go,” said Edie, clapping her hands, rising from the table. “The first cancellation of the morning.”

————

Harriet walked home in the drizzle with her head down, under a gigantic borrowed umbrella of Edie’s which—when she was smaller—she had used to play Mary Poppins. Water sang in the gutters; long rows of orange day lilies, beaten down by the rain, leaned towards the sidewalk at frenetic angles as if to shout at her. She half-expected Hely to run up splashing through the puddles in his yellow slicker; she was determined to ignore him if he did, but the steamy streets were empty: no people, no cars.

Since there was no one around to prevent her from playing in the rain, she hopped ostentatiously from puddle to puddle. Were she and Hely not speaking? The longest time they had ever gone without talking was in fourth grade. They had gotten into an argument at school, during a winter recess in February, with sleet driving at the windowpanes and all the kids agitated from being kept off the playground three days in a row. The classroom was overcrowded, and stank: of mildew and chalk dust and milk gone sour, but mainly of urine. The wall-to-wall carpet reeked of it; on damp days the smell drove everyone wild, so the kids pinched their noses shut, or pretended to gag; and even the teacher, Mrs. Miley, roamed the back part of the classroom with a can of Glade Floral Bouquet air freshener, which she sprayed in steady, relentless sweeps—even while she explained long division or gave dictation—so that a gentle deodorizing mist was perpetually settling about the heads of the children, and they went home smelling like commodes in a ladies’ rest room.

Mrs. Miley was not supposed to leave her class unsupervised: but she didn’t enjoy the pee smell any more than the children and often plodded across the hall to gossip with the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rideout. She always picked a child to be in charge while she was gone and on this occasion she had picked Harriet.

Being “left in charge” was no fun. While Harriet stood by the door and watched for Mrs. Miley to come back, the other kids—who had nothing to worry about except getting to their seats in time—raced around the smelly, overheated room: laughing, whining, playing tag and throwing checkers, thumping footballs of folded notebook paper into each other’s faces. Hely and a boy named Greg DeLoach had been amusing themselves by attempting to hit Harriet in the back of the head with these thumped paper footballs as she stood watch. Both were unconcerned that she would tell. People were so afraid of Mrs. Miley that no one ever told. But Harriet was in a terrible mood because she needed to go to the bathroom and because she hated Greg DeLoach, who did things like picking his nose and eating the boogers. When Hely played with Greg, Greg’s personality infected him like a disease. Together, they threw spitballs and shouted insults at Harriet, and shrieked if she went anywhere near them.