The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come;

Sometimes these vivid flashes of memory seemed like pieces of a bad dream, as if none of it had ever happened. Yet in many ways it seemed the only real thing that had happened in Charlotte’s life.

Allison was shy and skittish, and cried when anyone tried to teach her the ABCs;

Though they were intrigued by the camera, they were also wary of it, and they admired their sister’s breezy daring in handling this manly contraption that had to be loaded and aimed and shot like a gun.

We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was.

She daydreamed; she sighed a lot; her walk was awkward—shuffling, with toes turned in—and so was her speech. Still she was pretty, in her shy, milk-white way,

Allison should smile, speak up, develop some interests, ask people questions about themselves if she couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. Such advice, though well meaning, was often delivered in public and so impatiently that Allison stumbled from the room in tears.

considering tranquil and even poetic many of the qualities that Edie found so frustrating.

In their opinion, Allison was not only The Pretty One but The Sweet One—patient, uncomplaining, gentle with animals and old people and children—virtues which, as far as the aunts were concerned, far outshone any amount of good grades or smart talk. Loyally, the aunts defended her. After all that child’s been through, Tat once said fiercely to Edie. It was enough to shut Edie up, at least temporarily.

she, Allison, was not recognizable, not even to herself: she was not a toddler nor yet a baby but only a gaze, a pair of eyes that lingered in familiar surroundings and reflected upon them without personality, or body, or age, or past, as if she was remembering things that had happened before she was born.

She scarcely thought about the past at all, and in this she differed significantly from her family, who thought of little else.

The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother’s girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.

Allison spent most of her time by herself. She listened to records. She made collages of pictures cut from magazines and messy candles out of melted crayons.

“But don’t you understand, darling,” said Tat, “that if you don’t like fruitcake, it’s better to eat it anyway instead of hurting your hostess’s feelings?” “But I don’t like fruitcake.” “I know you don’t, Harriet. That’s why I used that example.” “But fruitcake is horrible. I don’t know anybody that likes it. And if I tell her I like it she’s just going to keep on giving it to me.” “Yes, dear, but that’s not the point. The point is, if somebody has gone to the trouble to cook you something, it’s good manners to eat it even if you don’t want it.” “The Bible says not to lie.” “That’s different. This is a white lie. The Bible’s talking about another kind of lie.” “The Bible doesn’t say black or white lies. It just says lies.” “Believe me, Harriet. It’s true, Jesus tells us not to lie, but that doesn’t mean we have to be rude to our hostess.” “Jesus doesn’t say anything about our hostess. He says that lying is a sin. He says that the Devil is a liar and the prince of lies.” “But Jesus says Love Thy Neighbor, doesn’t He?” said Libby, inspired, taking over for the now speechless Tat. “Doesn’t that mean your hostess? Your hostess is your neighbor, too.” “That’s right,” said Tat gladly. “Not,” she hastened, “that anybody is trying to say your hostess necessarily lives next door to you. All Love Thy Neighbor means is that you should eat what you’re offered and be gracious about it.” “I don’t see why loving my neighbor means telling him I love fruitcake. When I don’t.” No one, not e...

She made them play Crusades, and Joan of Arc; she made them dress up in sheets and act out pageantry from the New Testament, in which she herself took the role of Jesus.

On her way back to Mrs. Fountain, she saw a lighted window blur over the lens and then, to her delight, she was smack in the Godfreys’ dining room, across the road. The Godfreys were rosy and cheerful and well into their forties—childless, sociable, active in the Baptist church—and to see the two of them up and moving around was comforting. Mrs. Godfrey stood scooping yellow ice cream from a carton into a dish. Mr. Godfrey sat at the table with his back to Harriet. The two of them were alone, lace tablecloth, pink-shaded lamp burning low in the corner; everything sharp and intimate, down to the grape-leaf patterns on the Godfreys’ ice-cream dishes and the bobby pins in Mrs. Godfrey’s hair. The Winchester was a pair of binoculars, a camera, a way of seeing things. She laid her cheek against the stock, which was smooth and very cool.

On the worst nights she was unable even to read, and the letters of her books—even Treasure Island, Kidnapped, books she loved and never tired of—changed into some kind of savage Chinese: illegible, vicious, an itch she couldn’t scratch.

Goals for Summer Harriet Cleve Dufresnes Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.

No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the riverbed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.

The rose-pink stripes in the draperies had darkened to a bloody color and the light from the lamp unravelled in long, iridescent tentacles which ebbed and flowed with the wash of some invisible tide, before they, too, began to darken, blackening around the pulsating edges though the centers still burned white and somewhere she heard a wasp buzzing, somewhere near her ear though maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was coming from somewhere inside her; the room was whirling and suddenly she couldn’t pinch her nose shut any longer, her hand was trembling and wouldn’t do what she told it to and with a long, agonized rasp, she fell backward on the sofa in a shower of sparks, clicking the stopwatch with her thumb.

A glass hammer pounded, with crystalline pings, at the base of her skull. Her thoughts spooled up and unwound in complex ormolu tracery which floated in delicate patterns around her head.

Her eyes ached and it was as if the whole ingredients of her head were jostled and crunched together, so that hearing was mixed up with sight and sight with taste and her thoughts were jumbled up with all this like a jigsaw puzzle so she couldn’t tell which piece went where.

As her discomfort increased, and her heart pounded louder, sparkling needle-pricks pattered quickly over her scalp in icy waves, like raindrops. Her eyes burned. She closed them. Against the throbbing red darkness rained a spectacular drizzle of cinders. A black trunk bound with chains clattered across the loose stones of a riverbed, swept by the current, thump thump, thump thump—something heavy and soft, a body inside—and her hand flew up to pinch her nose as if against a bad smell but still the suitcase rolled along, over the mossy stones, and an orchestra was playing somewhere, in a gilded theatre ablaze with chandeliers,

The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell. Allison yawned. How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were dreaming and when you were awake? In dreams you thought you were awake, though you weren’t. And though it seemed to Allison that she was currently awake, sitting barefoot on her front porch with a coffee-stained library book on the steps beside her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t upstairs in bed, dreaming it all: porch, gardenias, everything.

Repeatedly, during the day, as she drifted around her own house or through the chilly, antiseptic-smelling halls of her high school with her books in her arms, she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?

Yet sometimes—at home, mostly—Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation.

What way? She didn’t know. Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

he had an ardent weakness for limp, spaced-out girls with thin arms and their hair falling in their eyes.

but the bright black glaze of pain and fright in its eyes had already dulled to a dumb incredulity, the horror of death without understanding.

You would think (said Edie) that Negroes and poor whites would not hate each other the way they did since they had a lot in common—mainly, being poor. But sorry white people like the Ratliffs had only Negroes to look down upon. They could not bear the idea that the Negroes were now just as good as they were, and, in many cases, far more prosperous and respectable. “A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth,” Edie said. “The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won’t do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.”