To The Power Of Three

12

“Do you want anything from downstairs? Zip’s going to the food court.”

“Did I see a Mama Ilardo’s down there? I love the sausage and pepperoni thick crust.”

Eloise Kahn paused, and Dannon Estes wondered if she was going to suggest a healthier alternative, as she often did when Dannon dined with the Kahns. He couldn’t blame her. Eloise, as she insisted on being called by Perri’s friends, knew that Dannon was troubled by his weight and acne, not to mention his height. There’s nothing you can do about your height, Eloise would tell him in her gentle way, but the first two conditions actually respond to diet and behavior changes, even medication. If he wanted to be thin, if he wanted clear skin, he could have them. He just had to make different choices. It was one of Mrs. Kahn’s favorite words-choices.

But perhaps Eloise Kahn was less wedded to this view of self-control. For all her good choices, she was now hunkered down in the corridors of Shock Trauma, one of the most despised people in the Baltimore metro area this weekend. The other being her husband, of course. And Perri, too, although Dannon had a hunch that Perri didn’t make a very satisfactory villain, being comatose. So her parents had to shoulder all the blame for now.

“Sure,” she said. “Sausage and pepperoni, thick crust. What do you want to drink with that?”

“Mountain Dew.”

“One slice?”

He held up two fingers, embarrassed by his greed, but he had been here since 10:00 A.M., when his mother had finally agreed to drive him down rather than continue to listen to his insistent wheedling.

Eloise nodded. “You got it. I’ll go tell Zip before he gets on the elevator.” She walked down the hall, her feet dragging along the linoleum, in marked contrast to her usual gait, which was bouncy, more girlish than Perri’s. At the end of the corridor, she turned and called back to him.

“Are you sure that’s all you want?”

“Yeah,” he said, although it was far from all he wanted. But what Dannon really craved was not available at the food court, or anywhere else. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to be taller. First and foremost, he wanted to be someone else-not merely a taller, cooler, clear-skinned Dannon Estes but someone altogether different. An outlaw type, the kind of silent guy who glided through life letting others project their dreams and desires on him, like Keith Carradine in that old movie. Not Nashville, but the other one where all the women were crazy in love with him. Except that Dannon would want other Keith Carradines to love him. That was his exact type. Tall, lanky, hetero, but maybe not wedded to it.

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, thereis 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.