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

boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Teacher Margie moved without pause from one group to the next, her little dog trailing just behind.
    I skipped straight through the hopscotch board, two feet, one foot, one, then two, then one, then one. And done. And I kept on walking. When I reached Harriet Elliot, she looked up from the drawing in her lap, silent. For some moments we just stared into one another’s eyes, hers blue, as if painted. China-doll blue, and powerfully uninterested in me. As though she could choose to blink and I’d be gone.
    “It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked. “You really were kidnapped, weren’t you?”
    “Yes, I was. I said so.”
    “Nobody believes you,” I told her—though I did. “Everyone thinks you’re a liar.”
    She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a piece of old newspaper. “Here,” she said, holding it to my face. “This proves that I’m not.”
    The headline wasn’t English, I couldn’t read it, but there was a picture underneath, a tiny girl with a mop of curly hair, held aloft like a prize in a man’s arms. “That’s me, on the day they got me back. I was on Italian TV too.” The child in the photograph wore rags, nothing more than a sack, her bare legs and bare feet sticking out. “And that’s my father.” The man was smiling, his mouth open wide. Not facing the camera; facing her.
    “How do I know that’s you?”
    She ignored the question and put the picture back in her coat.
    “Someday I’m going to find the men who took me,” she said, “and make them pay.”
    “What?”
    “I’m going to go back to Italy and hunt them down. And kill them for what they did.”
    In the background I heard Teacher Margie clap her hands.
    Harriet began packing up her crayons, arranging them carefully in their big box. “We’re supposed to go in,” she said. “Look, they’re all lining up.”
    “What do you mean you’re going to kill them?”
    She shrugged. “I just am,” she said. “But first, I have to grow up. Go through all of this. That’s the boring part.”
    I looked over at my classmates in their line.
    “How’re you going to find them?” I asked. Then: “That’s just stupid.”
    She smiled. “I remember every second. I was there, wasn’t I? I was there the whole time.”
    She walked away, toward our classmates, and I followed, just behind, so I had to take her place as last.
    S oon after that day, my sister began treating me much more cruelly than she ever had. In the car, as our mother drove us to our schools, she would whisper to me that I was ugly. And fat. That I smelled like I never took a shower. At meals she would reach beneath the table, with arms that seemed to lengthen for the task, and pinch my legs until I cried. When I spoke, she mimicked me, anticipating each word as it formed, rendering all my expressions foolish, meaningless. At night, as I lay in the shoulder of the hallway light, she would walk over and pull my door shut tight, leaving me to lie there in the dark.
    One night, uninvited in my room, she first told me that I was too old to sleep with all the stuffed animals I had, then swept them from my bed, onto the floor.
    “You’re just so stupid and babyish. I can’t even believe it. You act like you don’t know what’s going on.”
    I said nothing.
    “I can’t wait to see what happens to you when you… when you have to…” But she didn’t finish the sentence. Just threw my pillow to the ground, stood, and walked away. “God. You’re such a spoiled brat. You and those other stupid co-op kids.” She slammed the door so hard, it bounced open wide. “You’re so fucking dumb!”
    I told no one about Harriet’s plan to seek revenge. I knew that they would laugh at her. And I knew that if they laughed at her, then I would too. And something in me didn’t want to do that. So a new wall of privacy came up. A new realm of secrecy. And a new us began.
    Some days I would join her on her bench and I would ask