To The Power Of Three

Eleventh grade
25

In the spring of the girls’ junior year, three soccer players had been killed in a one-car accident on Old Town Road. The boys had all been stars on the team, which had made it to regionals that year, and the two juniors, Seth Raskin and Chip Vasilarakis, were their longtime classmates, going all the way back to first grade-third grade for Josie, of course. The third was Seth’s little brother, Kenny, who was not as fortunate in his looks. The older brother’s enigmatic grin became a goofy, overtoothed leer in Kenny’s face, the long, lean body compacted into a much shorter frame, so Kenny was sometimes called “Munchkin” or even “Runtkin.”

But Kenny had been so good-natured and quick to laugh at himself that he was the most popular of the three. The news that he was behind the wheel of the Raskins’ SUV, playing the part of designated driver when he had only a provisional license, had been especially hard on everyone in Glendale. Parents such as Josie’s, assuming that their children were safely out of earshot, said as much. They would actually feel better if Kenny had been drunk, the Patels agreed, but blood tests made it clear that he’d had only a trace of alcohol in his system, whereas Seth and Chip had been just barely over the legal limit. But they also had failed to fasten their seat belts, so they were thrown from the Cadillac Escalade when it rolled.

“I know people misuse the term ‘irony’ all the time,” Josie’s mother had told her dad, making the mistake of thinking that Josie was too absorbed in the family room computer to pay attention to the adult conversation on the other side of the kitchen counter. “But this is truly ironic. Those boys might still be alive if one of the more experienced drivers had been behind the wheel. They were drunker, but they were probably better drivers. Kenny lost control on a curve, overcorrected, and flipped the SUV.”

“Maybe we should slow down with Josie,” her father said. “She needs forty hours of on-road practice before she gets her license. We could put it off until next spring. And I really think the county ought to rethink the Senior Ramble. All those new drivers on the roads at one time…”

“That’s not fair,” Josie had protested, turning away from her mother’s computer, where she and Kat had been IM’ing about the tragedy. “It’s bad enough that I’m the last one to get my license because I have an August birthday. I have to get my driver’s license this summer. How else am I supposed to get anywhere? Do you want to drive me everywhere forever?”

“Only until you’re fifty,” her father had said, coming over and ruffling her short curls.

“If we had stayed in the city,” her mother said, “this wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”

“Yeah, then all we’d have to worry about is whether Josie was going to be stabbed in the girls’ room.”

Given all the attention demanded by the three deaths, it was perhaps understandable that few Glendale parents noticed, much less cared, that there had been an incident of vandalism on a local farm the same weekend. Vandalism was, unfortunately, all too common in this part of the county. The stock ponds on farmland were a longtime lure. But this had gone far beyond mere mischief. Three pigs had been poisoned at the home of Cyrus Snyder. Under different circumstances such a crime might have been the talk of the north county. But the Glendale families bristled at the idea that the death of three boys should be mentioned in the same breath as the slaughter of three pigs. It was disrespectful to two families who had suffered a real loss.

Then an unthinkable rumor began, and the two stories merged in a way that no one could have predicted. Josie heard it first at a cheerleading practice that Kat had missed because she was being tutored for the AP tests. As soon as she got home, she IM’ed Kat, eager to be the first to tell her the latest gossip.

J: have u heard?

K:?

J: S, C and K = incident at Snyder farm. Blood on clothes not theirs. May be PIG blood.

K: NO.

J: Yes.

K: That’s just stupid gossip. Don’t spread it. U know what

Ms. Cunningham says.

J: Perri calls her Ms. Cunnilingus. Cuz she’s all about the mouth.

K::O! Gross!

J: Audrey sez her mom heard from someone at school.

K: Audrey is an idiot. Gotta go-c u later.

Later Josie remembered that Kat had dated Seth once or twice, back in sophomore year, her rebound relationship after Peter Lasko. Like most of the boys Kat dated since that summer with Peter, Seth had ended up being more of a friend, but a devoted one. Josie had pretended to like him, because life was easier that way. It didn’t pay to be too obviously at war with any of the jocks. But Seth had always creeped her out. Where other girls saw his silent style as cool-still waters running deep-Josie had sensed a real meanness in him. And everyone knew Chip was a thug.

But Kenny-well, Kenny had always reminded her of herself, and not just because they were both short. His energy, his bounciness, his clownishness, were not unlike hers. He was the kind of boy who tried hard to please others. In the same situation, if Kat had been drinking-or Perri, although Perri was uninterested in alcohol, perhaps because her parents had given her permission to drink as long as she promised to call them should she ever need a ride-there was no doubt in Josie’s mind that she would take the wheel.

The rumors about the accident continued to whip through Glendale with the same hit-or-miss velocity of the breezes that cut through the courtyard at the high school. Everyone’s information seemed to be fourth-or fifth-hand; each new piece of gossip had the life span of a soap bubble. People did not seem to care if the boys had really done what they were suspected of doing. Their primary concern was whether it was fair to pursue such an inquiry in the wake of their deaths. People were people and pigs were pigs; their lives should not be equated in any way.

The gossip spun ’round and ’round like a child in a tantrum, reckless, indifferent to its own strength. The Snyders wanted an investigation. The Glendale families wanted the controversy buried with the boys. The matter was resolved in an unexpected way when an anonymous benefactor stepped in and made restitution to Cyrus Snyder. The police dropped the inquiry-after all, there was no one to charge, and the murder of a pig, unlike the murder of a person, was not a statistic that demanded a clearance. In the end no one in Glendale really knew if the boys’ clothes had been tested for the presence of nonhuman blood, as rumor had it. Or if a bag of poison had been recovered from the wreckage of the car. It probably wasn’t true either that Kenny Raskin, dying slowly behind the wheel of his overturned SUV, had attempted to make a full confession to the firefighters attempting to extract him. His injuries had been much too severe for him to speak.

Once everything settled down, Alexa Cunningham tried to use the tragedy as a learning exercise, explaining to her students that spreading such rumors was irresponsible and cruel, that people could even be sued for making false allegations about private citizens.

“In your history class,” she had told her girls, “you are taught the difference between primary and secondary sources. In the media there are distinctions among knowing something first-, second-, and thirdhand. Primary, or firsthand, refers to things you have observed. The moment you rely on someone else’s account of an event, no matter how authoritative, you open yourself up to errors. Even in retelling the details of an event that you have seen, you may make mistakes, large or small. Memory is imperfect.”

She told them about the fallibility of eyewitnesses in criminal cases, reading from a piece in the New Yorker. She put them through an exercise, asking half of the students to leave the room while the others watched Ms. Cunningham and the history teacher, Mr. Nathanson, act out a skit. The other students were then summoned back to the room and paired with those who had seen the skit. Based on the retelling, they had to write short reports about what happened.

“It’s like Telephone,” Ms. Cunningham had concluded after sharing some of the funnier errors with the students. “Only it’s not a harmless game. Misinformation can ruin a person’s life.”

A girl’s voice called from the back of the room, “But what if a story is true? Can someone sue you for telling the truth?”

A few girls gasped, but it was a fake shock, a form of mockery. The girl who had asked the question was Eve Muhly, and everyone knew that the stories about her were true. Who was she going to sue, when sixty other sophomores had seen exactly what she did?

“The point of this exercise is just how hard it is to know the truth of anything. If you don’t have firsthand information from primary sources, you shouldn’t gossip about it.”

“What if you talked to the victim?” Eve persisted. “Because I did.”

“I didn’t know,” Ms. Cunningham said, “that you were a pig whisperer, Eve.”

Everyone laughed, and Ms. Cunningham looked uncomfortable at the success of her joke, clearly aware that she had been less than teacherlike in her demeanor. But Eve didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed.

“I mean the Snyder family. We live next to them. My dad went over there after he heard what happened. Would my dad count as a firsthand source?”

“No, he would be secondhand, unless he told you about something he observed directly, not what Mr. Snyder told him. But really, Eve, the point is not to talk anymore about this horrible incident, the point is-”

“My dad saw it. So it’s firsthand. He saw the letter with his own eyes.”

“Eve-”

“They used blood to write a note. It said, ‘We’re coming for your pig daughter this summer.’”

This gasp was real. This information was new, and quite provocative. Binnie Snyder was not as pink and red-eyed as she had been in grade school, but she was still an odd girl with carroty hair, a girl so advanced in mathematics that she took extra classes at Johns Hopkins. When she spoke in class-and she spoke often-her voice was too loud and strangely inflected. And she still had a way of squinching up her face when thinking hard. “Pig” would have been unkind, but not altogether untrue.

“I think,” Ms. Cunningham said, “that we’re getting off topic.”

Josie, who was there for the session, could not wait to tell Kat and Perri about this development. She raced to find them as soon as class was over, risking a tardy slip for English. She reasoned that it was okay to tell Kat about Eve’s information because she wasn’t saying it was Seth, Chip, and Kenny, whose guilt could not be established. The point was that the perpetrators, whoever they were, were so much more evil than anyone had realized.

But Kat had shook her head, refusing to believe the story even in its generalities.

“Eve Muhly is a slut,” she said, shocking Josie, who had never heard Kat speak so cruelly of anyone. “And a liar. Everyone knows that. She’s just making stuff up to get back at the people who talked about her.”

“Don’t use ‘slut’ just to criticize some girl you don’t like,” Perri said, her voice a dead-on imitation of Ms. Cunningham’s. She switched to her real voice. “Seriously, if anyone is a slut in this scenario, it’s Chip. He went after girls the same way he scored goals in soccer. But everyone thought he was cool, whereas Eve gets in trouble for giving one blow job.”

“He’s dead,” Kat protested.

“And when he was alive, he wasn’t very nice. People don’t become something other than what they were just because they had the misfortune to die.”

“Okay, Chip wasn’t the greatest guy. But Seth was our friend,” Kat said. “And everyone loved Kenny. We’ve known them both since we were five years old, Perri.”

That gap, seldom alluded to, always made Josie feel a twinge of jealousy and insignificance. She hated being reminded of Kat and Perri’s longer history, the three-year difference she could never make up. The three could be friends for eighty years, and yet Kat and Perri would then be friends for eighty-three.

“But what if they really did it?” Perri persisted. “How would you feel about them then?”

“I’m not going to speculate about someone who’s dead.”

“Why not?”

“It’s mean, it’s harmful.”

“To whom? They’re dead and it’s not like their parents are standing here.”

Josie had watched them, anxious, filled with regret that she had brought them what she considered nothing more than a juicy story, only to start this near fight. Ms. Cunningham was right about the destructive power of gossip.

Kat and Perri glared at each other. It all seemed so much angrier, so much more personal, than it had any right to be. But Kat had no talent for anger, and she broke first.

“I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t know, and you don’t know, and Eve Muhly definitely doesn’t know. She was, like, borderline retarded when we were kids, remember? I can’t believe you’re taking her side.”

“I’m not. I’m just being open-minded. There are infinite possibilities here.”

“If someone said anything horrible about you or Josie, accused you of doing something disgusting, wouldn’t you want me to defend you?”

Josie waited, as curious about this answer as Kat.

“It depends,” Perri said. “What if I really did it?”