To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  For now his only claim to outlaw status was that he was willing to be here, keeping a vigil with Baltimore’s newest pariahs, part of a tiny minority who wanted to see Perri live. Oh, other people probably wanted Perri to survive, too, but only to see her punished. Dannon and the Kahns clung to the idea that Perri could somehow explain it all if she would only regain consciousness. It had to be a mistake, some freakish accident. This was not Perri.

  The Kahns, for once needing Dannon almost as much as he needed them, had lied and told hospital personnel that he was Perri’s brother and eighteen, neither of which was true. Both lies would be exposed once Dwight made it home from Japan, where he had just started a new job in some bank. Dannon felt noble, and then he felt stupid: What did Dannon Estes, wardrobe master for the drama club, really have to lose by being here? Until Perri came along, he hadn’t had a real friend in all of Glendale. He was the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, a movie-besotted geek whose only friends were AMC and TCM and the Sundance Channel.

  Then, last fall, Perri Kahn had taken him under her wing suddenly, excitingly, needing a coconspirator in her scheme to get the drama department to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. They hadn’t won in the end, but they should have, and Dannon was flattered to discover that Perri still desired his company when she no longer needed him as a political ally. A year older than Dannon, one of the acknowledged stars of Glendale’s drama department, she had barely spoken to him during previous productions—Carousel, The Lark. Perri had been a big wheel in the drama department since scoring the title role in Mame in the summer production, back when she was all of sixteen. Dannon had loved helping to create the illusion of glamour the role required. Watching from the wings as Perri descended the mock staircase in a gold dress that Dannon had found in a consignment shop, he had been as smitten as Mame’s nephew in the play. Life really was a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches were starving.

  Perri wasn’t supposed to say “sons of bitches,” of course. She was expressly forbidden, told to say sons of guns instead. So on opening night she substituted “bastards.” That word, she blithely told a furious Barbara Paulson after the performance, had not been prohibited. Eloise and Zip had defended her, as they usually did. Eloise and Zip were big on integrity and principle.

  Of course, Dannon, watching from the wings, didn’t know that then. He hadn’t gotten to know the Kahns until this fall, when it turned out that hanging out with Perri also meant spending time with her folks, a kind of accelerated intimacy that almost left him breathless. Eloise and Zip Kahn had treated Dannon as if he had been part of Perri’s life since grade school, automatically including him in all sorts of outings and celebrations. Overwhelmed by their kindness at first, he had begun to understand there was an element of relief in it for them, too: Dannon was filling Kat and Josie’s spot in the Kahn family. Tight as the Kahns were, they liked to have outsiders around to validate their closeness, their specialness.

  The senior-year rupture in Perri’s friendship with Kat and Josie had been the gossip of the school, as much discussed as the breakups of the all-but-married couples, the ones who started going together in middle school. But no one knew anything. Even broken, the three were a closed unit. Dannon could tell Perri was angry and unhappy. But the origin of the grudge remained a mystery to him, despite his famed eavesdropping skills. (Oh, there were some advantages to never being noticed.) There was no backbiting, none of the diplomatic back-and-forth that some other girls employed when quarreling, with some poor intermediary sent between two camps. Instead Kat and Josie walked through the halls as if nothing had happened, and Perri stalked around in her increasingly odd garb—lots of black, a man’s cashmere coat that Dannon had helped her find at Nearly New, and a battered homburg. Eloise just laughed and said Perri looked like a goth Annie Hall.

  He wondered who was outside Josie’s hospital room, who would stand beside Kat’s grave when she was buried. Probably everybody in the school. He wasn’t sure he could stomach the hypocrisy. Not that he disliked Kat. She was so unobjectionable that she was objectionable, as Perri had said in an unguarded moment just a few weeks ago. She was part of a larger problem, the very blandness of Glendale High, a culture that valued inoffensiveness above everything else. How are you? You look great! Shut up, there is no way I’m going to be elected prom queen. Yet she had said these things with genuine warmth. No one had ever caught Kat Hartigan being two-faced. She may not have known Dannon’s name, but she had always been nice to him.

  No, back in middle school, Perri was the one who had been in charge of making Dannon’s life miserable. She had been vicious and tart-tongued, as bad as the mainstream popular kids she later disparaged. Her genius for dissection was fearsome, her instinct for weakness frightening. And back then her alliance with Kat and Josie, whom everyone liked, made her fearless. Safe within that ironclad friendship, she had mocked everyone who was the least bit off—Binnie-the-Albino Snyder, Fiona “Stiffie” Steiff, Bryan “Aimless” Ames, Eve Muhly. And Dannon.

  “Dannon has bigger breasts than any girl in the seventh grade,” Perri once said in that calculated undertone that sounded like a whisper but was pitched to be overheard, and he was “Boob Boy” for the rest of middle school. Reunited with Perri and her crowd in high school, he had waited nervously for the abuse to start again, but Perri seemed to have settled down. Or maybe she had just learned to channel her dark energy into villainous roles. She had been a most memorable Mrs. Mullins in Carousel.

  When Perri found out Dannon knew even more about theater and old movies than she did, their friendship really took off. She drew him into her family, invited him to attend Bounce at the Kennedy Center. (Dannon tried not to think about for whom that ticket had been purchased, months earlier. Kat? Josie? Some boy she had dated? But Perri never seemed to get that tangled up with her boyfriends.) The Kahns’ beaming attention was so seductive, relative to his own mom’s strong but spotty love. They sought his opinions and encouraged vigorous debate, as long as it was backed up with thoughtful reasons. They pushed him to take his ambitions seriously, whereas Dannon was pretty much used to being told by his stepfather that all his dreams were out of reach. Once Mrs. Kahn learned of his interest in fashion design, she began giving him college catalogs for places like RISD and Pratt Institute. A chance remark about film school brought a similar torrent of catalogs and books.

  At times Dannon would find himself feeling overwhelmed by the Kahns’ cheerfully high expectations for him. And then he would wonder what it was like to be Perri, but he had never dared to ask, because the last thing he wanted to know was that the Kahns had any shortcomings. Because if Perri’s parents were wrong, then there were no good parents, and who needed to know that?

  He had known about the gun. Should he tell her parents? Was it his fault? He had known about the gun, but Perri had said it was a caper. Well, she hadn’t used that word, but she had implied it. All Perri had said was “I stole a gun.” “Why?” “ ‘Seemed like a smile,’” she said, quoting one of their favorite actors in one of their favorite movies, Kevin Bacon in Diner. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Perri and Dannon had loved that game, because their mastery of old movies made them unstoppable. Their Holy Grail was to link Kevin Bacon to Fatty Arbuckle, and just because they hadn’t done it yet didn’t mean they never would. Unless, of course—but he had to be hopeful. Perri alive was better than Perri dead, right? Even if she faced a lifetime in jail, her parents would want her alive. All the Kahns ever wanted was for their daughter to be the best at what she did.

  Dannon had tried so hard to come up with a way to save Perri without ratting her out, which would have lost him her friendship. I tried, I tried, he thought frantically now, not sure if he sought to convince God or himself. But she didn’t tell me she was going to kill Kat. She didn’t say anything like that. “A little theater,” she had promised, nothing more. “Think Much Ado About Nothing.” There was no shooting in that play that Dannon knew of, although, granted, he wasn�
�t the Shakespeare fiend that Perri was. Still, if the Kahns knew that he had been Perri’s confidant before the fact…

  “Here’s your food, Dannon,” Mrs. Kahn said, handing him a cardboard plate that was barely up to holding the two huge slabs of pizza. “What’s making you look so thoughtful?”

  “Oh, thinking of that Kevin Bacon game,” he lied. “Still trying to make my way to Fatty Arbuckle.”

  What would the Kahns have done if Perri had told them she had a gun, if she had told them she planned to make a rumpus? (That was another one of Perri’s sayings, when she planned mischief: “Let’s make a rumpus.”) Of course, Dannon knew they would have talked her out of it, sent her to a psychiatrist, gotten Perri whatever help she needed for whatever kind of breakdown she was having.

  But a part of him, the evil part of him that Perri had so encouraged, couldn’t help imagining the Kahns reacting with their typical enthusiasm: You want to shock everyone in Glendale, dear? You want to kill your friend? Then you must be the best killer of your generation. They would have heaped books and documentaries on Perri, maybe hired a pistol expert to train her in shooting.

  Dannon blinked back tears. He knew that voice in his head. It was Perri’s, sarcastic as ever. Get out of my head, Perri. Get back into yours, fix yourself, wake up, explain what happened. Please, Perri, please. Make this make sense. Tell us it’s not what it looks like.

  And he saw her again, Mame on the staircase, trumpet in hand, her angular thinness rendered glamorous in the gold sequins he had found for her. Life was a banquet, and Dannon was the poorest son of a bitch of all, still starving despite the two huge slices of pizza he had crammed into his mouth, barely noticing their taste. What would Perri do? Would she want him to tell, or would she want him to be quiet for now? The answer only mattered if you thought she was going to be all right, and that was pretty much Dannon’s religion right now. Clap for Tinker Bell, boys and girls. Clap if you believe in fairies.

  If Perri were here, she’d probably got a laugh out of that, Dannon Estes of all people, asking an imaginary audience to believe in fairies. Yet if anything ever got through to Perri, it was definitely applause.

  sixth grade

  13

  The summer before the girls were to enter sixth grade, a new middle school was completed and the students in the Glendale subdivisions had to be split between the old and the new. Perri and Josie remained in the district for the original school, Hammond Springs, but Kat wound up on the other side of an invisible line and was assigned to Deerfield.

  No one liked this idea, of course. Kat was terrified at the idea of being alone—separated not only from Perri and Josie but from virtually every classmate she had known since kindergarten, with the exception of Binnie Snyder. Perri had become so enamored of the idea of the three of them that she viewed the new school as a specific plot to break them up. Josie didn’t care so much if they were two or three, but if there were going to be just two, she would prefer it to be Kat and her. While she and Perri sometimes spent time alone—and even had fun that way, for Josie rather liked Perri’s cruel wit, as long as it was directed at others—she was nervous she wouldn’t be able to meet Perri’s standards, day to day. Kat was their anchor, the one who kept them steady.

  “We’re a triangle,” Perri said. “And a triangle that loses one of its points is nothing but a line.”

  “Wouldn’t we be two lines?” Geometry was not Josie’s best subject.

  “No, just two points, a single line. It takes three points to make a shape.” Perri, like Kat, was in gifted-and-talented math.

  “It won’t be so bad for you,” Kat said. “You’ll have each other, while I’ll be alone. What am I supposed to do, ride the bus with Binnie?”

  “The new school is prettier, though,” Josie said, thinking that might be a consolation.

  “You’re not going,” Perri assured Kat, but even her agile mind failed to concoct a plan. It was the beginning of summer, but the season’s normal joys were small consolation to them as they contemplated summer’s end.

  Yet the girls had an unexpected ally in Kat’s father, who believed that Deerfield, despite its newness, was not as desirable as Hammond Springs. “Teachers are what make schools good,” he said. “Not buildings.” (Perhaps this was a lesson that he had learned from the high school, whose physical problems were manifest now that it was three years old.) Meetings were held, phone calls were made, and somehow, midway through August, the invisible line jumped over the Hartigans’ house and it came back into the Hammond district, along with the Snyder and Muhly farms.

  So it was with giddy relief that the girls met at the Ka-pe-jos’ old campsite, the ceremonial grounds, although the tribal name had fallen into disuse over the last year. No one had said they should stop speaking of the Ka-pe-jos or relinquish their vows. A day just came when it seemed natural to stop doing those things. Josie assumed that a new game or ritual might replace the old, and she had waited hopefully to see where Perri’s imagination might lead them. But so far the abandoned campfire was a place to meet and talk, nothing more.

  It was the last Sunday in August, and they had not seen each other for almost a month. Kat’s family had gone to Rehoboth, while Perri’s folks had taken her to New York City, where, as she kept telling them, she saw five plays in seven days. Josie hadn’t gone anywhere, except to a dreary day camp. Her parents had spoken of a long weekend in West Virginia, but something had fallen through, Josie wasn’t quite sure what, and her parents had bought her a trampoline instead, much to the neighbors’ disgust. “They’re not safe, you know,” Mrs. Patterson told Josie’s mother. “About the only more dangerous thing you can have on your property is a pool.” Josie’s mother just shrugged and said Mrs. Patterson’s children didn’t have to play on it.

  In mid-August, Josie’s grandparents had arrived from Chicago, and that was fun, although their foreignness had embarrassed Josie when they went to places like the mall or Moxley’s ice cream. She didn’t know what was worse, her grandmother’s sari or her bindi. Still, it was nice to have such a rapt audience for her trampoline tricks, although Grammy Patel seemed a little shocked by some of the things Josie did. “Is it safe? Is it nice?” she had asked Josie’s mom, who had assured her that Josie was trained to do these amazing things and no one cared if an eleven-year-old girl’s limbs were exposed. Josie had flown into the summer sky, tucking and turning and twisting, and her grandparents had clapped their cautious, bewildered approval.

  But now, with school beginning, Kat and Perri were finally back. In acknowledgment of the reunion’s importance, Josie’s mother had provided cupcakes—extremely fancy ones, from Bonaparte’s in the city—and helped Josie pack them in a wicker basket lined with a napkin. There were six cupcakes in all: two with pink frosting, two with white, two with orange. The white-frosted ones had devil’s food bases, while the others were plain vanilla cake.

  “Everyone should choose one first,” Josie said. “And then we’ll go in reverse order to choose the second, so it’s fair.”

  “It’s not fair to the one in the middle,” Perri objected. “The one in the middle always goes second, while the other two both get to go first at least once.”

  “But my way, if there’s one kind you really want, you’ll get it. And the middle person has a choice between the last two, while the one who goes last has to take what’s left.”

  “But what if the last two are the same kind? That’s not a real choice.”

  “I’ll go second,” Kat said, ending the disagreement, as she so often did.

  Perri nodded, picking a devil’s food with white icing. Josie wanted to point out that Kat’s going second did not mean Perri necessarily got to go first, but she had provided the cupcakes, so she should act as the hostess. Her mother was big on those kinds of manners.

  Kat took an orange one. Josie picked a devil’s food, then a pink, leaving a pink and an orange. Kat began to reach for the pink one, but after a quick glance at Perri, whose gaze was fix
ed on the pink with an almost unsettling ferocity, Kat chose the remaining orange instead.

  “I didn’t know you liked orange that much,” Josie said. “Not enough to pick it twice.”

  Kat shrugged, glancing sideways at Perri, as if seeking her permission for something. Perri was already licking the pink frosting from the top of her cake, so there was no going back, or trading.

  “Your mother should have gotten two kinds, not three,” Perri said. “Then we all would have had the same.”

  At least my mother buys cupcakes, Josie wanted to say. Perri’s mother was big on healthy foods—fruit, yogurt, granola bars, and not even the good ones but dry, dusty things that stuck in the throat.

  But Josie did not want to risk ruining this moment of reunion and celebration. She lifted her cupcake as if it were a goblet, the kind of gesture that Perri usually thought to make. “A toast! A toast to…Kat not having to go to Deerfield!”

  “To Kat!” Perri echoed. “To middle school! To Seth Raskin!”

  They giggled at that. Seth Raskin was now the best-looking boy in their grade. Perhaps he had always been, but that information had begun to interest them only in the past year. They were all too aware that girls in middle school, the advanced ones, went with boys. And while they swore to each other that this was not something they wanted to do, if one were to have a boyfriend, Seth Raskin would be the one to have.

  “To me!” Kat said, raising her orange-topped cupcake, her laugh spilling out.

  “No, like this,” Perri said, changing the game, taking charge. She took her second cupcake, the devil’s food one, and smashed it into her face, so her nose was covered with white icing. Josie did the same thing with her white-frosted cupcake. Kat, however, hesitated.

  “Drink, knave!” Perri commanded. “Drink deep from your cup…cake.”