To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  Out in the hall, Jocelyn was now sobbing, the sobs growing fainter, as if Ms. Cunningham were trying to walk her away from this corridor, where several classes were in session. Ms. Cunningham probably thought she was doing Jocelyn a kindness, but Jocelyn cried precisely so she would get attention. Being deprived of an audience, Eve thought, was the opposite of what Jocelyn wanted.

  There was a folder at the bottom of the cart, marked “Independent Study.” Eve opened it. The first paper, by Paige Hawthorne, had the word “pornography” in the title but also the word “semiotics,” which canceled out the promises of the first word. She tried to skip to the end, to see if it got juicier, but the final pages were sticky, almost as if something had been spilled on them, and when Eve finally got the last page to pull away, it was a different font, a different topic. A paper by Perri. Again it had a promising title but a dull treatment, and she skipped to the end. But instead of finding a great summing-up, she found a letter. A handwritten letter to Kat, stapled to the term paper.

  Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. Fuck. No wonder Ms. Cunningham wouldn’t leave her alone. If she had read this, she knew. Not everything, but more than she should. How had she gotten this letter? She had enough information to put it together, and now Eve would be accused of not keeping the secret, which she absolutely had. It was so unfair.

  Wait, Muhly. (The voice in her mind was Val’s, calm and cool.) Wait. The paper wasn’t marked, not anywhere, and perfect as Perri was, not even she could turn in a term paper that didn’t merit one correction. It had been stapled to the back of Perri’s paper, which had been stuck to Paige’s paper until Eve had pulled it away. Maybe Ms. Cunningham hadn’t seen it. And even if she had, and it disappeared, then what could she prove? All Eve had to do was make this letter disappear, and then Ms. Cunningham couldn’t do anything.

  Eve took the whole batch—Paige Hawthorne’s paper, Perri’s, the letter—reasoning that this caper should be played according to reverse logic: The more missing, the less suspicious it would be. No, better, an entire folder. She would take the folder, secure it inside her oversize binder and—

  “I’m so sorry about that interruption, Eve. Jocelyn was very upset.”

  “No problem. But I really should get to class. I have…a paper due.”

  “For health? So late in the semester?”

  “I’m behind. It’s on STDs—sexually transmitted diseases. Did you know that babies can be born with that stuff, even though they never had sex?”

  “Well, they can be infected by their mother in utero—”

  “They can be born blind.”

  “All the more reason to use a condom.”

  “Then there’s no baby at all.”

  “Exactly, Eve. Exactly.”

  Teachers were always bringing up condoms to Eve in this roundabout way, which amused and disappointed her. Even the teachers, even Ms. Cunningham for all her disavowal of gossip, thought she was a slut. Whereas her only true sexual adventure was that time on the bus, almost two years behind her now. Eve wanted a boyfriend, although no one really had them anymore. The problem was, the boys all thought she knew so much more than she did. Virginity, once gone, could never be reclaimed, a point that was made repeatedly in health class. But it was worse, Eve thought, to be a virgin and have everyone think you were this superslut who knew how to do everything. The only way she could keep her reputation intact was to stay out of the fray completely.

  She almost wished she could be who she used to be. She loved hanging with Val and Lila and had no affection for her old outcast status. She was proud to be a skeezer. Still, there was something about the girl who had gotten on the bus to Philadelphia that day, the girl in her mom’s crocheted vest, with her uncool lunch of preserves on lumpy homemade bread. The girl who had taken second place in the juvenile fudge division the year before. She was nice, that girl. Nice and maybe even pretty. Talk to her. Get to know her. You’ll be surprised by how much fun she can be.

  Yet Eve had abandoned that girl at the first opportunity, finally seeing her as everyone else did—out of it, stupid, queer, a social liability. It was bad enough dropping an old friend for such reasons, but you could take the friend back or make it up to her in other ways. Once you dropped yourself, you could never go back.

  29

  Josie was lying on the sofa in the family room, clicking idly through the channels. This mundane afternoon activity was almost exotic to her, given how many extracurriculars she had pursued over the years. She had started with soccer as a six-year-old, then gymnastics, which had led to both theater and cheerleading. The last had meant not only practices and games but also endless fund-raising activities.

  Josie had never much cared for the “spirit” part of cheerleading—the car washes, the bake sales, the pep rallies. In fact, Josie didn’t really care if the Glendale Panthers won or lost. She liked leaping into the air, pooling her hoarse voice with the others, the crowd roaring back at their command, completely in their control. She loved her purple-and-white uniform, the way the pleats brushed her thighs as she walked through the halls, but she barely noticed if the boys in purple and white heeded the exhortations to fight, fight, fight. At dinner Josie sometimes had to think for a moment when her father asked her the score. The only way she could remember was by recalling what she had done, in the final moments. Had she jumped up and down squealing or stood in pretend dejection, hands on hips? Some of the girls cried over games, shed actual tears, but Josie never did.

  She studied her bandaged foot, propped up on a pillow. Although she was not quite five-two, her right foot looked very, very faraway and alien, as if it were not truly attached to the rest of her body. The prognosis was uncertain, the doctor had said when she left the hospital. So many bones and nerves in feet, so many possible outcomes. She would definitely walk again, probably do everything again. Yet she was cautioned to be patient and let the foot heal before she started pressing it, testing its flexibility and strength.

  “When you come off the crutches,” the doctor said, “it may even take time for your leg to believe it can come all the way down to the floor. It’s almost as if your foot needs to learn to trust itself again, to remember that it really does have the capacity to make contact with the ground, to support you.”

  Her mother’s car pulled into the garage. Josie could tell it was her mother because the muffler on the Honda Accord was beginning to go. She could hear her mother coming from a block away sometimes. Her parents kept saying the Honda would be Josie’s car when she went to college, a car being pretty much a necessity at the University of Maryland. Josie hoped they would get the muffler fixed first.

  “You’re home early,” Josie said as her mother came through the door from the garage, burdened with purse, tote, and two bags of groceries.

  “My boss is cutting me some slack right now. No one likes the idea of you here alone, hobbling around by yourself.”

  “Matt and Tim are here somewhere,” Josie said, even as part of her mind focused on that one word, “alone.” “Although maybe Marta took them out.”

  Josie had never been expected to care for her younger brothers. When she did baby-sit, her parents paid her the going rate—not as much as Marta, of course, but what other teenagers made to baby-sit.

  “Besides, I have some good news. Enormous news.”

  “Hmmmmm?” Josie was still flicking through the channels, looking for something decent. TRL was on, but Josie hadn’t watched that since she was fourteen or fifteen. She was in the mood for something quasi-real yet not truly real, and not too mean-spirited. The show where they redid a dowdy woman’s wardrobe would be good, or something competitive, as long as it didn’t involve eating gross stuff.

  “Mr. Hartigan called me today—”

  Josie’s stomach clutched a little.

  “Remember the scholarship his family endowed for the school? Well, it’s going to be the Kat Hartigan Memorial Scholarship now.”

  “Hmmmm.” Josie had landed on the show
about people who had too much stuff and their makeover included a garage sale where they were forced to divest themselves of their clutter. A very large woman was swearing she couldn’t give up a single Aladdin toy. She had seventeen Princess Jasmines alone.

  “And you’re going to be the first recipient.”

  Josie muted the television. “Why?”

  “Well, he didn’t say. But you were her best friend. You tried to take the gun from Perri. And you stayed with her. Mr. Hartigan said that meant a lot to him, that you wouldn’t leave her.”

  “Is that going to be the requirement every year? Hanging out with a dead body? Because there are plenty of kids at Glendale who would kill someone if that’s the case. Kill someone and just sit there waiting for the paramedics.”

  Her mother’s face puckered, the way it did whenever someone didn’t share her excitement or enthusiasm. “I thought you’d be happier. We’ve all been so worried about your scholarship, the implications of the injury. If you can’t…well, then you can’t. College Park said they’d hold the spot for you, at least for the first year, but they can’t offer any financial aid if you can’t participate in the program. This solves everything. You should be happy.”

  “I am happy,” Josie said, bursting into tears.

  “Oh, Josie baby.” Her mother started to sit on the sofa, but she didn’t want to crowd Josie’s foot, so she knelt on the carpet, looking for a way to put her arms around her, only Josie wouldn’t quite yield. Instead she allowed her mother to pat her all over, smoothing her hair away from her face, rubbing her shoulders.

  “I wasn’t thinking. Of course it’s bittersweet. Maybe just bitter. I shouldn’t expect you to be jumping for joy.”

  “I can’t jump for anything,” Josie muttered, knowing that the halfhearted joke would calm her mother.

  “It is a relief. I can tell you now, honey, your father and I weren’t sure what we were going to do. I mean, we would have found a way—a second mortgage maybe, although we already have a second mortgage—something. But this is truly a godsend.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to get better, do you? If it was just this year, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But you think I’m never going to be able to join the cheerleading squad at College Park.”

  “No. No. I’m sure you’ll be fine. But this way you don’t have to even consider deferring your acceptance. Assuming,” she added, “it’s even that bad. I didn’t think you’d enjoy delaying a year, with all your friends gone.”

  They’re already gone, Josie wanted to say, but her tears were slowing. She would get to go to college, no matter what. Even if her foot were permanently damaged, she would still get to leave. Her mother was right: She wouldn’t want to stay in Glendale one more day than necessary. She had to get out, go somewhere, anywhere.

  “Now, remember, it’s a secret,” her mother said, rising from the floor, her hose generating a little electric shock that raised the hairs on Josie’s arm. “We mustn’t tell anyone until it’s announced at graduation.”

  Josie knew that her mother was not much good at keeping secrets, not happy ones. She would probably call Grammy and Grampa in Janesville tonight, and the news would be all over Janesville, Wisconsin, before it was announced at graduation.

  Then again, only family members could appreciate the story, for only the family knew that Josie’s college education had been saved for the second time. Her mother, gregarious and talkative as she was, had told very few people just how bleak Josie’s college prospects were. For it was her mother who had squandered Josie’s college savings in a desperate game of catch-up, trying to save in three years what she should have been saving since Josie was born, only to end up with a paltry few thousand.

  The Patels had started a small fund when Josie was in third grade, but it had stayed small, in part because her mother had a bad habit of mentally assigning the fund various abstract savings without actually putting them there. “All the money we save by not sending Josie to private school can go to the fund,” she had said when they had moved to Glendale. But she had allocated those same savings to the kitchen renovation, and her Honda Accord, and the trip the family had taken to India when Josie was twelve, and the fees paid for Josie’s gymnastics lessons, not to mention Josie’s orthodontia. Meanwhile her brothers had come along, and they needed college funds, too, so the nonexistent savings were now divided by three. One didn’t need to be a math genius to know that zero divided by three kept ending up zero.

  When Josie was thirteen, a stock adviser had done the math for her mom, explained the mysteries of compound interest, and said the boys still had a chance but only a high-risk strategy would work for Josie. He recommended that Mrs. Patel take out a second mortgage and invest that money. He pushed Josie’s mom toward telecommunication stocks, including WorldCom. For a brief, giddy period, it looked as if they would be okay. But it was very brief.

  Josie still remembered the shock of finding out that all those headlines about people somewhere in Alabama actually affected her, that a corporation’s accounting fraud had dovetailed with her mother’s incompetence to deprive her of the funds for a college education. By junior year her fund had dwindled to three thousand dollars, barely enough to pay tuition for a single semester at the University of Maryland—and Josie did not have the grades to get into College Park. The chances for a National Merit Scholarship were long gone, not that Josie would have had much of a shot, even with a tutor, and the Patels earned too much for Josie to qualify for a needs-based scholarship. “On paper,” her father said, his voice despairing, looking at how much they still owed on the second mortgage. “On paper, we’re very well-off.”

  Forced to confront for the first time the financial sacrifices her parents had made over the years, Josie felt guilty and resentful. She had not asked to move to Glendale. It wasn’t her fault her teeth came in crooked. She had never wanted gymnastics lessons. Well, no, she had wanted those.

  Even as Josie stewed, her mother schemed. Nothing motivated Susie Patel as much as Vik Patel’s disappointment. After researching Title IX scholarships and deciding that Josie was too late for lacrosse and too small for rowing, she had found out that College Park was offering athletic scholarships to cheerleaders. It was an odd kind of cheerleading, to be sure, in that the qualified students spent all their time competing while a different group of young men and women cheered for the UM Terrapins. (“Fear the turtle!” was the school’s well-known slogan.) The program was, in short, what Josie had always wanted—a chance to fly and soar on her own, no longer a sideshow to the main event but the event itself. Josie wasn’t crazy about staying in-state, but at least College Park was prestigious now, taking only the top Maryland graduates. No one had to know how close she had come to attending a truly crappy school.

  She called to her mother, who was now puttering in the kitchen, “Do I have to, like, make a speech when they give it to me?”

  “I don’t think so. Is that what’s bothering you? You’ve never minded being the center of attention.”

  Josie thought of herself at the top of the pyramid, airborne in the night sky at football games, flying as Michael in Peter Pan. Yes, she had enjoyed the attention, but what she had really liked was the feeling that she had complete mastery over her body. It was the one thing she could always control.

  “Not talking, though. I don’t like to talk in front of people.”

  “Well, I’ll make sure you won’t have to talk. Just say thank you and get off.” Her mother returned to the sofa to rumple Josie’s curls. “You have the prettiest hair. I would have killed for hair like this when I was your age. I think I fell in love with your father because of this hair.”

  “Mom.” It was far from the first time her mother had shared this anecdote, but it never ceased to embarrass Josie, this vision of her father not as her father but as a boy, someone with hair that a girl could love. And not just any girl, but her mother. She did not like to think of her parents that way. These images had made her adamant in
her rejection of Grinnell College, although her double-legacy status might have secured her a place in a school that would otherwise be a huge reach for her. She did not want to walk where her parents had walked, sleep in the dorms where they had slept, much less daydream in the classrooms where her father had impressed teachers with his budding genius and her mother had beamed at him, happy just to bask in his glow.

  “Wow, I think you got five syllables into that ‘Mom,’ a new personal best for you.”

  This was Josie’s cue to say it again, holding the final syllable so it sounded like the “om” chant in a yoga class. But her heart wasn’t in it today.

  “It’s expected, you know,” her mother said after realizing that Josie wasn’t up for their usual game. “Being sad. You might be sad for a long time.”

  Like the rest of my life?

  “It’s not just being…sad,” she said. “It’s…” But there was no way to finish the thought. She felt sad and guilty, yet resentful of the guilt, convinced she didn’t deserve it. None of this was her idea.

  She picked up the remote control, began working her way up and down the channels again. Her parents had only basic cable, so there wasn’t as much to see as there had been at Kat’s, for example, where the Hartigans had all the movie channels, ten for HBO alone. Perri’s parents didn’t even have cable, and they limited their children’s “screen time,” as they called it, which had just made Perri crazed on the subject, plopping in front of Kat’s set for hours at a time, surrendering her vivid imagination to much lesser ones. Kat and Josie had to flatter her outrageously to get her away from the television, but Perri had grown out of it. Eventually. That was the way it was with Perri. Her manias were like the flu bugs that knocked her flat every winter. You just had to let them run their course.