If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

said, looking out at Teacher Margie again. “I was taken. By bandits. I was. And they’ve never been found.” And then she sat down.
    I n the square we were subdued. There was no running up and through the crisscrossing paths. No hopscotch. Just the low murmur of our voices trying to decide what we thought.
    “Who would want her?” Freddy asked, rubbing at the ooze around his eye. “Who would steal her, even if they could?” We all looked over to the bench where she sat, the bench that had become her daily place. “Who would pay billions and billions to get her back?”
    I thought about the father who had told her she was a princess.
    “It was definitely a lie,” Peter Walker said.
    And by the time Teacher Margie clapped her hands, this was the opinion that we voiced.
    But newly, unexpectedly, I wasn’t sure that I agreed with us .
    F rom bed that night, I heard my father yell. And then my mother in response. I rolled over, my back to the door, and took the pillow from under my face, rested it on my head. I felt the cool unyielding flatness of the sheet beneath my cheek, and I tried to escape from the space their voices filled. With the pillow pressed over my ears, I conjured the sensation of sitting on our couch between my parents, equal portions of warmth on either side. And then I attempted, once again, to conjure God, wondering whose fault it was that he was so utterly invisible in me. And when, as always, he failed to appear, I thought about Harriet Elliot. Her father’s little princess. And how much I hated her for those clothes, and for her drawings of fairytale landscapes, and most of all for her disregard of our disregard of her.
    As the voices of my parents burrowed through the darkness into me, I decided I should have told them what had happened. How she had been kidnapped, in Italy. I decided they should know. A sensation of danger was swelling, beneath my covers, beneath my pillow, a feeling so real and so polluting that suddenly anything bad seemed like it must be true; and I was certain that we had been wrong. She had been stolen by strangers. She had lived for three weeks in the company of bandits. I pictured her at first, just as I knew her only younger, but prim and clean and dressed in ruffles and lace. I imagined her captors as unshaven men in black masks and black leather coats. She must have cried for her mother and her father. She must have cried out her eyes. But then, at some point, she must have stopped—an even more frightening thought. And her tights must have faded from white to the pale gray of dirt, and maybe eventually to black. She couldn’t have worn the same dress for three weeks. She must have had to change. Change her clothing. Change herself. She must have had to stop being a princess, if only for those days.
    I rolled over. From my bed I could see out into the hallway. I could see the pine cabinet that had sat there all my life. And at that moment, my mother’s voice from below sounded as though she were singing—singing something sad and worn; a memory that would come to me always with the notes of certain melancholy hymns. I could hear the dishes clattering, water running. But underneath, her voice. As I stared and I listened, I saw my sister cross the hallway from the bathroom to her room. I thought of calling out her name. But then I heard her door squeak closed.

    H ARRIET ELLIOT APPEARED the next morning in a blue satin dress. At her collar were rings of lace that matched her tights. She hung her coat in silence, made her way to the bookshelf, chose a book, and retreated to a corner, by herself. Throughout the morning, as I went about my tasks, I watched her there.
    In the park, during break, she sat on her bench with a box of crayons and a pad. Mary had brought out a big thick piece of chalk and gone over the lines we’d drawn on the pavement two days earlier, faded during showers overnight. A few of us climbed on the bronze statues dotting the square. A pair of