To The Power Of Three

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 fixed 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.”

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 customers 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.”

“Are you friends with my girl?”

“N-n-not really.”

“Why not?”

Perri was speechless, something Josie had never seen, and Kat stepped in. “We’re not not friends with her. She’s in a different class from us. But she plays with Binnie Snyder sometimes.”

“The Snyders are our neighbors, so I know them. What’s your name?”

“Kat Hartigan.”

“As in Thornton?” Kat nodded shyly. People were usually impressed when they learned that fact, but she almost never volunteered it. She was clearly surprised when the man added, “That old crook. He bought all that land on the sly to keep the prices low.”

“What do you care?” the owner asked Mr. Muhly. “You didn’t sell, and now your land is worth three times what it was. Anytime you want to give up your acreage, you’ll have a buyer.”

“And then what would I do with myself? Sit around here like the rest of you? That farm has been in my family for almost two hundred years.”

“I’m just saying you’ve got no beef with him.”

“Well, if he hadn’t started building houses out here, someone else would have, sure enough,” Mr. Muhly said. “But I don’t have to like it.”

The commercial break ended, and the girls started to go, for that was the agreement. But the owner insisted on giving them free Cokes and french fries. He even seated them at the bar, although Perri said later she was pretty sure that was against the law. He seemed to find them amusing, Perri in particular. As the girls prepared to leave, strapping on their bike helmets, he suddenly grabbed Kat’s right arm by the wrist.

“Hit it,” he said, indicating his left thigh.

Kat looked to Josie and Perri, but Josie didn’t know what to tell her, and Perri again was at a loss for words. They were supposed to be on guard against strange people, of course, especially those who made unwelcome touches. But this man had let them take over his bar and fed them. Besides, what could he do to Kat with Josie, Perri, and a roomful of men watching?

“Hit it,” he repeated. “Hard as you can.”

Kat complied, but her punch was clearly too soft to please him. So he struck himself, producing a strange, hollow noise on contact.

“Fake,” he said. “Fake! I lost it in an accident when I wasn’t much older than you, working on my father’s place. A tractor flipped over on me.”

“Eleven-year-olds don’t drive tractors,” Perri said.

“My daughter, Eve, drives a tractor and a truck, and she’s only ten,” Mr. Muhly put in. “And she doesn’t wear a helmet while doing it.”

For the rest of the weekend, Josie lived in apprehension, sure that her parents would find out about the visit to Dubby’s. Then, just as she was beginning to believe they had escaped detection, the three were summoned to the principal’s office on Monday, with Mr. Treff in attendance. Josie assumed they were going to be suspended for going to a bar, and Perri cautioned them to volunteer nothing until they knew what was up.

It turned out that one of the mothers had complained about their “morbid” assignment.

“I know it seems unfair, after all the work you’ve done,” the principal said. “But we really need you to pick another topic. Mr. Treff will give you an extension, to make up for the week you’ve lost. But we just can’t condone such a, uh, ghoulish exercise.”

Josie and Kat hung their heads, ashamed of being ghoulish. But Perri, although her face was quite pink with embarrassment, challenged the principal.

“It’s a perfectly good survey,” she said. “I’m not going to redo it.”

“Then you’ll receive a zero, and it will pull your grade down for the semester.”

“My parents will understand. They’d rather that I get a zero than agree to something that I thought was unfair. There’s a principle involved here.”

“And what would that principle be, Perri? The right to ask people gruesome, disturbing questions?”

The principal clearly thought this point would end the discussion, but Perri shook her head. “That’s part of it. Freedom of speech and all. But the principle is that we were given an assignment and we did it according to the rules outlined, and now you’re changing the rules, saying we have to do it over, to get credit we’ve already earned. That’s not fair.”

“There are limits, Perri. There are always limits.”

“Then Mr. Treff should have made it clear when he gave us the assignment.”

“If Mr. Treff failed to tell you that it was wrong to kill people in the name of an assignment, would you assume you could do that?”

“No, but murder is illegal. We didn’t do anything against the law.”

“Perri, you’re a bright girl, but sometimes you have to accept the rules without arguing. Redo the assignment or get a zero. Those are the choices.”

Kat and Josie redid the poll, asking people in the neighborhood to pick their favorite desserts. They had no intention of going back to Dubby’s, however, so the sample was a little smaller although the answers ultimately more diverse, people having more emphatic ideas about dessert than death, as it turned out. Perri handed in the charts and graphs based on the death survey, refusing Mr. Treff’s attempts to give her extra-credit projects that might have made up the damage done by the zero he was forced to give her. Perri got a C in math that semester. On the Friday after grades came out, her parents took Perri, Kat, and Josie to Perri’s favorite restaurant, Peerce’s Plantation. She liked it because it seemed so grown-up and grand, with its striped awnings and views of the reservoir.

“Is this because you got all A’s except for math?” Josie asked Perri. But it was Dr. Kahn who answered her question.

“This is because she got a C in math-because she stood up for what was right.”

“Were Kat and I wrong to redo it, then?” Josie had gotten a B in math, barely. She hated to think what would happen if she had taken the zero. Kat had gotten her usual A. Only Binnie Snyder did better in math than Kat, and Kat was the best in all the other subjects.

“Not wrong,” Dr. Kahn said. “Practical, under the circumstances. The principal was a bully, and it’s hard to stand up to a bully. And you couldn’t know, sitting in his office that day, how your parents might react if you argued with him.”

Josie did know, however. Her parents would have told her that sometimes you have to do things you don’t think are fair, because that’s the way the world works. And Kat’s father would have said that she had to get A’s now so she would keep getting A’s later. Getting good grades was like anything else, Mr. Hartigan always said. You practiced until it became second nature.

“I didn’t mind doing it over,” Kat said.

“Oh, Kat,” Dr. Kahn said, tugging a lock of her hair. “You never mind anything.”

“I didn’t like hitting that guy’s leg. That was gross.”

“What?”

Josie felt Perri’s leg brush past hers beneath the table, landing a quick and careful kick on Kat’s shin. So Perri’s parents didn’t know about the trip to Dubby’s. Would they have supported that principle? Would they admire Perri for figuring out a way to get around their rules?

“Nothing,” Kat said. “Just something that happened in gym.”

“What were the final results anyway?” Mrs. Kahn asked. “I know I picked a plane crash, but what did others say?”

“Forty-two percent picked drowning. Twenty-eight percent chose plane crash. Then there was twenty-five percent for suffocation and only five percent for fire.”

“Which is funny,” said Dwight Kahn, whose eyes Josie could barely meet, given that he was a high-schooler, six whole years older than they were. “Because most fire victims die from smoke inhalation, not burning.”

“We knew that. We specified being set on fire,” Perri told her brother. “And everyone who picked that was male, between the ages of ten and eighteen.”

They were eleven. They were in sixth grade, a much more innocent version of sixth grade. September 11 was literally unimaginable, except for those who were planning it. When 9/11 came in the fall of sophomore year, it turned out that one of those killed in the World Trade Towers was Dwight’s friend, the older boy who had thought their survey was so funny. He was a trainee at an investment firm, high in the second tower.

“I remember him,” Josie told Perri. “From the survey. He wanted to die in a plane crash. Remember, Dwight’s friend?”

(Actually, they knew by then that Dwight’s friend had been his supplier, that Dwight had run a thriving dope-dealing ring in Glendale all through high school, but it was not a topic that the candid Kahn family liked to discuss, now that Dwight had straightened out.)

Perri looked disgruntled at the mention of Dwight’s friend, perhaps because Josie was getting too close to the forbidden subject of Dwight’s pothead phase, or just because Josie was claiming a first-person connection that Perri considered her private property. It was a time of much weeping in Glendale High School, with girls erupting like geysers, and there was almost a competition of sorts, as unseemly as that might sound, to form connections to these events, at once so close and far. To speak of funerals attended and friends of friends of friends who had perished, to repeat stories of close calls-the local family that had almost flown out of Dulles that day, the cousins who lived mere miles from where the one jet crash-landed in Pennsylvania.

“Well,” Perri said. “He got his wish.”