To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  This made Josie laugh so hard that she had to roll on the ground, pine needles gathering in her hair and sticking to the frosting on her face.

  “You look like a cat,” Perri howled, and Josie laughed harder, arranging the pine needles so they did, indeed, resemble whiskers.

  “I’m Kat,” Kat said, and she scooped up some pine needles, but she couldn’t make whiskers because she still hadn’t smashed her cupcake in her face. Josie’s mother was always saying that Kat was dignified. Josie wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but she thought it had something to do with how Kat was less prone to silliness than Josie and Perri were. Kat was, however, a wonderful audience for their antics, egging them on. Perri tried to say funnier things, while Josie did cartwheels and climbed trees, all for the honor of hearing Kat’s giggle.

  “Drink, my lord,” Perri said, her hand closing over Kat’s and pushing the cupcake up toward her face. “Drink the mead of Hammond Springs Middle School, or you’ll have to go to Deer-field.”

  Kat hesitated, and Perri did it for her, not only pushing the cake into her face but giving it a little twist. Kat’s eyes opened wide, and she looked for a moment as if she might cry. Instead she laughed, using her fingers to wipe the frosting from her face. Yet it was a softer, more controlled version of her usual laugh, and the girls, in a swift shift of mood not uncommon to them, were suddenly quiet and reflective.

  “We get our own lockers in middle school,” Kat said. “With combinations. I’m worried I’m going to forget mine.”

  “We could share our combinations,” Perri said. “And then if one of us forgets, we’ll be okay.”

  “We might not be in all the same classes,” Kat said. “Or even have the same lunch hour.”

  “Oh?” Perri said. “Can’t your dad fix that, too?”

  If there was a hint of challenge in Perri’s voice, Kat chose not to hear it. “No,” she said. “I don’t think my dad would worry about that, as long as I’m in Hammond Springs. Deerfield may be new, but Hammond Springs has the proven teachers, my dad says. He says Deerfield was built for newcomers.”

  “If Deerfield had been the good school, would your dad have worked it out so Josie and I went there?”

  “Sure,” Kat said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But he would have.”

  I was a newcomer, Josie thought. What was wrong with being a newcomer? But that was three years ago. Mr. Hartigan must mean the people in the newer developments, the ones that had created the need for Deerfield. Mr. Hartigan hated these places, so much larger and grander than the houses the Hartigan Group had built. Kat’s grandfather had sold the business this year, and Mr. Hartigan had started his own company, renovating old buildings in the city. He was tired of showing people how to live, he told the other adults. He was going to settle for helping them work and shop.

  The phone rang late that night, after Josie was in bed but still awake. Her parents didn’t like phone calls after nine, because her father had to get up for work at five-thirty in order to leave the house by six-thirty. His job was on the other side of Baltimore, and he preferred heading out an hour earlier than necessary, when the roads were still relatively empty. He always said he’d rather have a quiet hour at his desk than leave later and battle traffic.

  “Josie, sweetie?”

  “Hmmm.” She was reading an American Girl book, although she knew she was getting too old for them.

  “Which cupcakes did Kat eat today?”

  Her mother’s carefully neutral tone told Josie that someone was in trouble. Had they gotten frosting on Kat’s shirt? Mrs. Hartigan was fussy about Kat’s clothes. No, Perri had been precise in her aim, smashing the cupcake into Kat’s face. Maybe Kat wasn’t supposed to eat cupcakes at all. This past year her mother had stopped giving her Lunchables, sending Kat to school with turkey sandwiches and carrot sticks. But Kat remained as round-faced as ever. Perhaps it was because Josie always shared her lunch with her.

  “She really didn’t eat any,” Josie said.

  “Really? Not even a bite?”

  “Well, she might have had a little orange frosting. Why?”

  “That was Mrs. Hartigan on the phone. Kat’s allergic to orange flavoring, of all things, and she has a horrible rash on her face and hands. She may have to miss the first day of school.”

  Josie felt a flip-flop of panic in her stomach. Her parents were easygoing, but that simply made her more nervous about doing anything wrong. It wasn’t her idea to push the cupcake into Kat’s face. She shouldn’t be blamed.

  “I didn’t know Kat had allergies.”

  “She had a workup at the beginning of the summer, apparently. Although I have to say…I’ve never heard of an allergy to flavoring. I wonder sometimes if Mrs. Hartigan is a little—” Her mother broke off, as if she had noticed Josie’s sharpening interest. It was always fascinating when adults talked about other adults. They said the meanest things in the nicest ways and then acted so surprised if anyone suggested they didn’t like another adult, as if part of being grown-up was liking everyone, or pretending to.

  “The important thing is, Kat’s going to be fine. It’s just a rash. Probably psychosomatic, for all we know. Kat’s a little delicate, isn’t she?”

  Josie thought about this. Although Kat wasn’t athletic, she was strong and solid, even brave in her own way. She had let Perri push the cake in her face, knowing she was allergic to the flavoring. When she fell or slipped, she always got back up and kept going, laughing at her own clumsiness. Perri was the one who used her injuries and illnesses to make excuses, who hesitated when she had to do something physical.

  Then again, Josie had the feeling that her mother was trying to say something nice about Josie, in a roundabout way—that Josie wasn’t delicate, that she didn’t have allergies, and if she did, she wouldn’t be so silly as to eat something that she knew would make her sick.

  “I guess so.”

  “Sometimes I think the mothers who don’t work—outside the home—tend to be a little more hysterical about the small things.”

  “Mrs. Hartigan is nice. She lets us play with her makeup and fixes us special treats when we’re over there.”

  Her mother reached toward Josie as if to smooth hair away from her face, then let her hand hover in space as if awaiting permission. Josie had gotten touchy about her parents’ touchy-feely ways. Finally her mother went ahead and did it anyway, and Josie didn’t protest.

  “Do you wish I didn’t work?”

  Josie thought about this. The truth—yes!—would make her mother feel bad. But she didn’t want to tell an out-and-out lie either.

  “No, but I don’t like having a baby-sitter. I’m going to middle school now. I can look after myself, if not Matt and Timmy. Do we still have to have Marta?”

  “Yes, according to the state of Maryland. Want to know something funny? When I was your age—well, just a little older—I was baby-sitting. Taking care of little babies, changing diapers. Diapers with pins, not the sticky tapes. Looking back, I’m just so glad nothing happened to the children in my care. I was completely over my head.”

  “If you didn’t work, I could have gone out for travel soccer.”

  “Really? You never said anything at the time. I thought you decided you’d rather concentrate on your gymnastics. You can’t do everything. If you took up a team sport, you wouldn’t have any time for Kat and Perri.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “We both have to work, your dad and I, if we want to live in a place like Glendale.”

  “Yeah,” Josie said again.

  “Not to mention having money for extras—like gymnastic lessons and trampolines and day camp.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Try saying ‘yes’ sometimes, Josie. It’s not that much effort to put the s on the end of it.” But she hugged her, and Josie had a moment of wishing she could be a little kid again, someone who got tucked in every night, really tucked in, with a story and a song, the way her
brothers still did. Middle school was so very, very grown-up.

  “Did you truly have an allergic reaction?” It was two days later, and Perri was studying Kat’s skin, as smooth and pink as ever.

  “My mom took me to the emergency room, and they stuck me with a pen.”

  “Like a marker?” Josie was puzzled.

  “No, a special pen that sends something to your heart so your throat won’t close up and keep you from breathing. She thought I was going to die.”

  Kat’s manner was calm as ever, her voice low; they had to lean in to hear her over the din of the lunchroom. The middle-school cafeteria was thrillingly chaotic, much noisier than elementary school.

  “Did you think you were going to die?” Perri’s question struck Josie as odd. If your mother thought you were going to die, then of course you thought so, too. But Kat shook her head. Her hair, now worn loose from a center part, had grown quite long, and Josie noticed that a few of the older boys glanced at Kat’s shining banner of hair as it moved back and forth.

  “I wasn’t scared at all. In fact, it was kind of interesting. I felt like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Remember when she ate the gum and she turned into a giant blueberry?”

  “ ‘Take her to the dejuicing room!’” Josie shouted in a fairly good imitation of the movie Willy Wonka, and the others laughed, which made her happy. She so seldom said something funny on her own.

  “Exactly,” Kat said. “I just assumed they would take me to the dejuicing room and I would be fine. And that’s what the pen did. It dejuiced me. Everything stopped swelling, and I was okay.”

  “But how could you be so sure that you weren’t going to die?” Perri did not want to let that part of the discussion drop.

  “That’s not how death happens. From a cupcake, I mean.”

  “A person can drown on a teaspoon of water,” Perri said with great authority. “So I suppose a cupcake can kill.”

  “Well, it didn’t kill me.”

  “How would you like to die?”

  “Perri—that’s gross.” Kat had finished her lunch—a cup of yogurt, an apple, and a chopped green salad packed in Tupperware, with an individual packet of salad dressing. Josie slid two of her oatmeal cookies over to Kat, who smiled gratefully.

  “No orange flavoring,” Josie said. “Everyone wants to die in their sleep.”

  “Yes, but what if that wasn’t a choice? What if you had to choose from choking…” Perri paused for a moment. Her brain sometimes reminded Josie of a computer, taking a few seconds to switch from task to task, then humming along, faster and faster. “Choking or suffocation. Then burning up, plane crash or…”

  “Being shot,” Josie supplied.

  “No,” Perri said. “That’s instant, so it becomes the easy choice. We need a list of things that are painful and scary.”

  “You die instantly in a plane crash.”

  “No you don’t,” Perri said. “That’s why people get money when they sue the airlines. For suffering.”

  “How do you sue if you’re dead?” Kat asked.

  “Not the dead people. Their families. Okay—so being smothered. A fire. Plane crash. We need one more.”

  “Need?” Kat asked.

  “Our statistics project. Oh, that’s right, you weren’t there on the first day when Mr. Treff explained it. We have to conduct a survey, then chart our results, along with demo…demo…demographics on our survey sample. It’s a poll, like the ones they do during elections, but we can ask anything we want. Mr. Treff said.”

  “Drowning,” Josie said.

  “What?”

  “Death by drowning. That should be the last one.”

  “That’s awfully like suffocation,” Perri objected.

  “Well, burning up and dying in a plane crash are alike, too.”

  “That’s okay,” Kat said. “For things to be alike. After all, the idea is to find out what people pick. Maybe it would be interesting to see if certain people pick drowning while other people pick suffocation.”

  They bent their heads together, pleased with themselves. Although no one made the point out loud, Josie knew they were all thinking the same thing: This was a way to get noticed, to make their mark in the new school. Other students would ask boring questions about television shows and desserts. Only they would investigate death.

  And so the very next afternoon, a full week before the assignment was due, they set out, notebooks in hand, and began to canvass the neighborhood. The kids they met—school peers, high-school students, younger kids—were happy to answer their questions. (“That is sick,” said an older boy who was hanging out with Perri’s brother, Dwight, a high-school senior. But he clearly meant it in a good way.) Mothers and baby-sitters, however, frowned and told them not to ask such questions.

  “It’s our homework,” Perri replied. “It’s for school. We have to do it.”

  By Saturday they had polled forty people, but Perri was not pleased with the results. For one thing, far too many people were picking drowning, with plane crashes a distant second. Perri, however, claimed she was more disturbed by what she called demographics.

  “We’re doing okay on age, but we don’t have enough over-eighteen men.”

  “We have our fathers,” Josie said. Her own father had loved the assignment, if only because he liked to see Josie get excited about anything mathematical.

  “That’s all we have. And they all picked drowning.”

  “Do you want to go out in the neighborhood and see if there are fathers around?”

  “We could, but it’s so inefficient. We need to go to a mall or someplace where there are a lot of men.”

  “My mom would take us to the mall,” Kat said.

  “Men at malls would all pick drowning,” Perri said. “Just like our fathers. We need to find a wider sample.”

  “We’re not supposed to worry about the results,” Josie said. She suspected that Perri disliked the “drowning” responses because the choice had been Josie’s contribution to the poll. “That’s why we vary the order of the possible answers, to control for people picking the first or last thing automatically.”

  “Still,” Perri said, “it’s a very narrow sample, just people we know.”

  “How are we supposed to talk to people we don’t know?” Kat asked.

  “That’s my idea. Let’s get our bikes and meet at Kat’s house on Saturday.”

  Glendale had bike paths that connected its various developments, and now that they were in middle school, the girls had been given wide latitude to travel these routes. Still, Old Town Road was forbidden territory, so Josie was shocked when Perri led them to the edge of that busy two-lane strip, almost a highway in its own right.

  “We’re not supposed to go on Old Town Road.”

  “We won’t,” Perri said, turning right on the shoulder. Josie and Kat had no choice but to follow. Perri was right, they weren’t exactly on the road, although Josie suspected their parents would not be impressed by this technical compliance with the rule. They rode about a mile, passing a feed store and a tractor dealership, until Perri came to a stop at last in a gravel parking lot outside a windowless concrete building labeled, simply, Dubby’s.

  “We can’t go in a bar,” Kat said.

  “Sure we can. My dad brings me here for mozzarella sticks and cheeseburgers. We can’t sit at the bar, but we can go into the restaurant part.”

  The air inside was smoky, the smokiest air Josie had ever smelled, and there were other smells beneath it, mysterious and unknown. The girls blinked rapidly, their eyes adjusting to the gloom. Suddenly a woman flew at them out of the darkness, like one of those shrieking bird persons they had studied in their mythology unit in fifth grade.

  “Little girls can’t come in here by themselves. What are you thinking?”

  Josie and Kat shrank back, happy for an excuse to flee. But Perri didn’t seem the least bit intimidated. “We’re here on a school project. We would like to quiz your custome
rs for an exercise in polling.”

  A man at the bar—an enormous man, with a belly that came so far down his legs that it appeared to rest on his knees—turned to inspect them with interest.

  “My customers don’t come here to talk politics.”

  “This isn’t about politics,” Perri said. “It’s a survey on how one would like to die.”

  The man frowned, then started to laugh, and Josie wasn’t sure which reaction scared her more. He was a white man, but with skin so tanned that he was darker than Josie’s father. He had dark hair sprouting from his ears, broken yellow teeth, and truly terrifying eyebrows, scraggly and wild.

  “Next commercial,” he said, waving a huge, puffy hand toward a television tuned to a baseball game. “But that’s it. Then you’re out of here.”

  They agreed, interviewing all seven patrons as soon as the beer commercials began. The men did not appear happy about answering the questions, but when they glanced at the man who had given the girls permission, they reluctantly went through with it. One especially mean-looking man studied them for a long time before he answered their questions.

  “Do you know my daughter?” he asked. “Eve Muhly?”

  “She’s a year behind us,” Perri said. “We knew her back in elementary school.” She made this sound as if it were a long, long time ago.

  “Is she a good girl?”

  The only thing to say to such a question from an adult was yes. Even if another kid was hateful to you, it was wrong to tell an adult. And back then Eve was pretty well behaved in the way that parents cared about, if smellier than ever. No one remembered the story that Perri made up about her back in third grade, but Eve was still famous for smelling, and picking her nose. For being, in general, a mess.

  “She’s okay,” Perri said.

  “What does that mean? Is she good or is she not?” The man’s voice rose, and Josie thought, I’d be so scared if he were my father.

  “She’s good,” Perri said hastily. “Very good.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Perri.”

  “Isn’t that a boy’s name?”

  “No, there’s a writer my mom likes. I was named for her.”