Read Online Helen Hath No Fury by Gillian Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

blinked back tears.
    “It’s okay.”
    “No, it’s not. She’s screaming, ‘That little bitch, where did she really go?’ and ‘I wonder how many other times she’s lied to us’ and on and on, and I made everything really bad. What’ll happen to her if she ever comes back, and if she doesn’t, then what’ll happen to her? Where would she live? What would she do?”
    “Back up, could you? You spoke to her yesterday. You knew she’d spoken to me, right?”
    Bonnie nodded. Inside the room, the herd had realized that nothing was stalking them. That in fact, I was rooted at the doorway, my attention elsewhere. And so they had begun gamboling in the meadow. “Excuse me,” I said. “Wait here. I’ll be a sec.”
    “I have math now.”
    “I’ll write a note. Please.”
    It was my sad duty to put a damper on the merriment. I stood in front of them, my roll book and a notepad clutched against me, and I reinflicted Hester Prynne on them, an essay about which characters in the novel were or weren’t moral. And then I hurried back to Bonnie, one eye still on them as they moaned, groaned, and settled in to writing. It was all an interesting charade since I knew these papers weren’t going to count for much, if anything, and I also knew that they knew it. And, I suspected—they knew that I knew that they knew.
    But with a collective sigh, we played our roles. “Now,” I said to Bonnie. “You were talking. In person? On the phone?”
    “On the way home. And when she came over, we talked more.”
    That seemed to constitute a full report for Bonnie. I prompted. “And? How was she? What was her mental state? Did you think she might run away? Did she say anything that would hint where she might have gone?”
    Bonnie shook her head. “She told me about talking to you. She was sort of glad she had, and sort of sorry? I remember she said that. And she told me about questions you asked, and that she told you about her grandmother who is
awful
—I once went up there with her and her sister. She was afraid you were going to make her tell her parents.”
    I didn’t know how to respond. I hadn’t even known what I’d say to Petra. I’d been so worried about saying the wrong thing. But this sudden flight had me stymied. Without doing a thing beyond offering to help her sort things out, I’d managed to make her more desperate. “Were you there? At that party?”
    Bonnie’s eyes widened, and I got the feeling that shethought if she made them large enough, they’d hide her confusion while she decided whether to tell me the truth or not. Finally, with another tightening of her lips—the girl was going to have purse strings around her mouth way before her time—she nodded. “But I didn’t … I don’t like to drink. I didn’t know what was going on with her until weeks later when she … found out.”
    “Did you know the other people there? The … boy she was with?”
    A head shake. I couldn’t tell if that was true.
    “You have no idea where she’d go?”
    Another head shake. “I can’t believe you can know somebody that well—my best friend! And then they disappear. Like you didn’t even know them at all.”
    I thought about Helen, secretly suicidal, and I wondered how many times in life we had to keep learning and relearning the basic truth that everyone is a mystery.
    “She wouldn’t go to her grandmother’s,” Bonnie said, “and her other grandparents live out in California so where would she go? I think she ran
away.
Just
away.”
    I pictured the girl on the street, in a shelter. I pictured her in too many situations, all of them bad and bound to get worse. There are, in fact, fates worse than death. “She may get in touch with you,” I said. “And if she does, please tell her to come back, to—”
    “But that’s it! I’ve ruined everything. Her parents know she didn’t sleep at my house. They know she lied. They’ll go nuts! I’d have to tell her, warn her, wouldn’t I? That her