To The Power Of Three

22

“That was soooooooo queer,” Lila said.

“Definitely,” Val agreed, cupping her hands around her cigarette to light it. The breeze was surprisingly stiff this afternoon, even here where it was buffered by a stand of evergreens. “He, like, wouldn’t make it past the first round on American Idol.”

Eve kept her head down, worried that Lila and Val would see that she did not agree. She tried to think whatever they did. It seemed to her a reasonable price for their friendship, sharing their opinions. But she couldn’t believe they hadn’t been moved by Peter Lasko’s performance.

“I mean, he was just swimming in Lake Me, he was so in love with himself,” Lila continued.

“He is hot, though.” Shit, had she really said that out loud? “I mean, if he wasn’t singing such a stupid song, he could be hot. Don’t you think? He’s going to be in this movie and all.”

“Yeah,” Val said. “We all heard Old Giff huff and puff about that. But I just figured he was trying to show us that getting killed wasn’t the only way to get famous at Glendale High School.”

Lila rewarded Val with the laugh that line demanded, but Eve couldn’t quite muster one.

“I’m not saying it’s a big deal,” she said carefully, ready to abandon the conversation if it was clear Val and Lila were united against her. “But it’s cool. And he is good-looking.”

“Lasko’s okay-looking,” Lila admitted, a little cautiously, as if she, too, craved Val’s approval. It was funny about Val. She wasn’t pretty or attractive. In fact, she was kind of heavyset, with bad skin and mud-brown hair. She wasn’t accomplished at the things that mattered, like sports or music or classwork. Yet lots of people at school wanted to be on her good side, not just Eve and Lila. She had some kind of weird authority. “But why did he have to sing such a queer song? I mean, there have to be a million better things to sing. Even… ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’ That would have been okay.”

“But that would have been more about Kat,” Val pointed out. “I think they wanted him to sing something for us. Like a stupid song could make us feel better.”

“Do you feel bad?” Eve’s question sounded odd even to her ears, so she tried rephrasing it. “I mean, of course we all feel bad, but do you feel especially bad? It’s not like we really knew her.”

“She was a little stuck-up,” Lila said. “But not as stuck-up as she might have been, given how rich her dad was. And she didn’t cut on people. She wasn’t really a diva that way, although the divas liked to hang with her. She got along with everybody. She was, like, above the divas.”

“Yeah, but it’s easier to be nice when you’re rich,” Val said. “Because when you’re rich, you have nice clothes and a car of your own, and you can afford to be nice, because no one has anything you want. She had everything.”

“She didn’t have a boyfriend,” Eve said. It was one of the things that amazed her about Kat, the fact that she could have any boy in school yet didn’t seem to want any of them. “I heard she told her parents she’d rather take the money they were going to give her for after-prom and donate it to a homeless shelter.”

“That’s because Kat was scared to spend the night in a hotel,” Lila said. “A curfew is a cocktease’s best friend.”

“Was she, had she…?” Eve was unsure how to phrase the question.

“She was a virgin,” Lila said dismissively.

Eve was, too. A virgin, that is. Val and Lila never pressed her directly on that subject, but she suspected they knew she had never gone further than she did that day on the bus-had never gone that far again, truth be told. A lot of boys had come around at first, of course, but when Eve showed no inclination to repeat her performance, they gave up on her. Ms. Cunningham had given her a book, a slender but odd story about a school in Scotland, called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “Nothing changes,” she had told Eve. “The girls in this book could be smoking with you out in the woods.” (That was Ms. Cunningham’s style, letting the students know she was privy to all their secrets but didn’t care. She thought she was so cool, so hip.) The thing is, Eve didn’t see how these girls in the book were anything like her. There was one girl who was described as being famous for sex, although she wasn’t actually having sex. She was just very pretty and posed naked for a painter. Eve supposed that was her and was flattered, but she didn’t really know what else to do with the book, other than write an extra-credit report for English, which pulled her up to a C-plus.

“If one of us was shot, do you think it would be as big a deal? Like, would they let everybody out of school to go to our memorial service?”

Val and Lila shook their heads in unison. “Definitely not,” Val said. “Although I think what’s really freaking them out is that it was Perri Kahn who shot her. If you had brought a gun to school, Muhly”-Val always used their surnames-“they wouldn’t have been shocked at all. Or any of us. Because we’re skeezers. If you ask me, the real surprise is that it doesn’t happen every day. I can think of at least a dozen girls I’d like to kill.”

“Including Kat?” Eve asked.

Val exhaled noisily. “No. Not her. She was okay. She wouldn’t even make my top twenty.”

Eve thought about her secret. Val and Lila could definitely be trusted. But she had promised. She must tell no one. No one. If only Val and Lila had been here Friday morning, if they had not been late-but they were, there was no undoing it.

Instead she asked, “Are you going to talk to Ms. Cunningham? One-on-one, I mean, like she encouraged us to?”

“Of course not,” Val said, as if insulted by the very suggestion.

Eve fingered the paper slip in her pocket, the one given to her at homeroom that morning, the one that she was trying to ignore. “Ms. Cunningham keeps bugging me to talk to her.”

“That’s what you get,” Lila said, “for yakking to her on Friday like a little brown-noser. What were you thinking?”

“I dunno. I was bored. Besides, she’s okay, Ms. Cunningham.”

“Never trust a guidance counselor,” Val said. “They live to get inside your head. Her more than most of them. She thinks she’s, like, decoded us. Guidance counselors are supposed to help us get into college, not play shrink. I don’t need Ms. Cunningham to explain to me how girls are mean to each other because they’re competing for boys. I need her to tell me how I can get my SATs over 1250.”

“What’s your reach school?” Lila asked.

“McDaniels, can you believe it? If I’m lucky, I’ll get to spend four years in beautiful downtown Westminster, Maryland.”

“ Dickinson,” Lila said. They looked expectantly at Eve.

“My parents say I have to live at home, wherever I get in.”

“Wow.”

Val’s sincere and sorrowful shock proved to Eve just how dire her situation was. It was one thing to joke about community college as one’s only option, another for it to be true. Theoretically, Eve’s parents had told her she could go anywhere in the metropolitan Baltimore area, and that included Johns Hopkins and Goucher. But even Towson University or Villa Julie were not sure things for Eve, with her middling grades and test scores. She thought she might be able to do an end run, get into Maryland College Institute of Art on the basis of her work in jewelry making and ceramics. But her father might decree that an art school didn’t count as a real college, even though it had regular classes, like English and math. Or he might say she hadn’t banked enough in her college fund. Eve’s chest felt a little tight. She was seventeen, only a junior. She hadn’t even gotten her driver’s license yet, because her parents kept putting off the mandated forty hours of supervised practice, and she was expected to make this decision that was going to rule the rest of her life. How weird was that?

They heard the bell ring, announcing the change for the last period of the day. Eve had to be all the way back at the south wing for history, an impossible distance even when she actually showed up for her PE class, instead of crouching and smoking in the woods. But the teachers were being extra lenient today. Between the end of school and the shooting, tardiness and cuts weren’t going to draw too much attention.

She stood up, brushing the dirt from her jeans. What would it be like, she wondered, to cut class and meet a boy, instead of just smoking cigarettes with Val and Lila? She didn’t want to give them up, but it would be nice to have their companionship and a boyfriend. A boy who really liked her, a boy who wouldn’t think of her as the girl on the bus, who might not even know about that. Someone who looked like Peter Lasko, with his dark hair and green eyes. She hoped he was doing okay. He would probably go to the funeral, being Kat’s former boyfriend and all. She wondered if he would sing again.

“Are either of you going to the memorial service?” she asked her friends.

“Sure,” Val said. “It means missing the last three periods.”

“We could say we’re going, then just cut,” Lila said.

Eve waited to see what Val would decide. The thing was, she wanted to go to the funeral, although she couldn’t say why. It just seemed like one of the few all-school events where everyone was truly welcome, where everyone belonged. Unlike pep rallies, for example.

“That would be in bad taste,” Val decreed. “If we say we’re going to go, we should go. I’ll get permission to drive us there, though, instead of going on the buses. Then we can hang out in Baltimore after. Who’s going to complain?”

Eve thought of her dour father, who objected if she was even a minute late for supper, which they ate at six o’clock sharp. But it was Kat Hartigan’s funeral. Her mother would explain to him that such a circumstance merited an exception.