Harmless by Dana Reinhardt

always scheduled during third period. That meant no algebra for me, which was the only upside I could see to this whole disaster. I wanted this to stop. I wanted it to go away. I wanted it to disappear. I wanted to disappear.
    ODS assemblies are usually a little rowdy. Everyone sits on the gym bleachers and there's a semicircle of folding chairs around the microphone, where the headmaster and the deans sit facing the students. You can always count on one of the football players to shout out something inappropriate or at least fake a really loud farting noise just as someone is about to speak. On this morning, however, everyone sat perfectly still and quiet on the bleachers. I sat in the back, with Silas and Bronwyn, hidden among the seniors. Anna sat with Mariah down in the front row.
    Principal Glasser was sitting in the center of the semicircle surrounded by the deans and also Ms. Malachy, the school's crisis counselor. Glasser stood at the microphone looking out at us for a long time before he spoke. There were no inappropriate comments shouted from the audience. No fake farting sound. Finally, he launched into one of his typical way-too-long speeches about the dignified history of our esteemed institution.
    “And now our confidence has been compromised.” And on and on and on. He listed all the precautions the school was taking, how when we are at school it is the school's duty to keep us safe. In loco parentis , he said.
    Sitting in the back didn't keep anyone from staring at me. In fact, it made the stares more obvious as all the heads turned around, one after the other. I started trying to keep count, cate-gorizing them using grade and gender and popularity as a kind of classification system, but all the numbers and information started buzzing around in my head, making me feel faint.
    Suddenly, I saw the story from a new point of view. Anna and Mariah were heroes, two young girls with the presence of mind to grab a rock and strike back, while I was just the whim-pering victim who would have met an unimaginably terrible fate were it not for my two brave saviors.
    But wait a minute … I was the victim. It was me he grabbed. It was me he ordered to remove my clothes. It was me he planned to do something unthinkable to. Right? That was the story. And I was the victim.
    Darby O'Shea, the student body president, stood up from her seat next to Anna in the first row of the bleachers andapproached the microphone. The sound of her shoes against the hardwood floor echoed off the far wall of the gym. Darby was probably the most popular girl in school, although Bron-wyn had been giving her a run for her money ever since she'd been dating Silas. Darby had thick black hair and blue eyes and a deep raspy voice. She'd been accepted early decision to Harvard, where her boyfriend, Clyde Pressman, was a sopho-more. Clyde himself was student body president at ODS two years ago.
    She unfolded a piece of yellow lined paper. She looked down at it, back at the semicircle of teachers and then at the students gathered on the bleachers. “Fellow Vikings,” she said. It struck me then how absurd it was to have a Viking as a mas-cot. Weren't Vikings rapists and pillagers? Why did we cele-brate Vikings? Was it just the funny hats?
    Darby continued, “What happened to these young women could have happened, and could still happen, to any of us gathered here. We are all so grateful that Anna and Emma and Mariah emerged from this nightmare unharmed.”
    So much for a generic assembly about community safety. Silas gave my knee a protective squeeze.
    “But now we must ask ourselves,” she went on, “what are we going to do about it?”
    “String him up by his balls!” someone shouted from the crowd.
    It was oddly comforting to me to hear this and the chuckling that followed it. I was relieved to see that the entire social order hadn't been disrupted: that football players could still be counted on to do what we expected of