To The Power Of Three

28

A floater couldn’t help losing things, Alexa told herself, pawing through a sheaf of papers for the second time, still trying to find the paper she was now sure that Perri Kahn had submitted just minutes before she had gone to the girls’ restroom to confront Kat. If the paper didn’t exist, she couldn’t give Perri a final grade and challenge Barbara on her refusal to grant the girl a diploma. Maybe it never existed, but Alexa had convinced herself that it did, that she’d held it in her hand the very moment the phone rang, a stapled sheaf of off-white typing paper in one of the distinctive fonts that Perri preferred. But the papers had been dropped, and the soda had spilled, and everything had been gathered up in such a rush-

She lifted her head at the sound of a student clop-clop-clopping down the hall, a would-be stealthy Billy Goat Gruff, trying to muffle the sound of her Dr. Scholl’s. It was Eve, trotting toward the exit, shoulders squared. Alexa called the girl’s name once, twice, three times before she finally turned around.

“Oh?” Eve said. “Were you talking to me?”

Several sarcastic replies occurred to her, but Alexa had learned that sarcasm didn’t work on these girls. “Got a minute? I want to talk to you.”

“I’m on a bathroom pass from health,” Eve began, but Alexa knew she was headed for her usual cigarette break in the trees, with Val and Lila.

“I’ll write you a note. Let’s talk.”

Alexa had a classroom for this period, but no real class. This had been her independent study session, and the five girls had all finished their work for the year, except for Jocelyn Smith, who had been given an extension for mental-health reasons. She said, and a family doctor agreed, that Jocelyn had been traumatized by the shooting. Alexa was reasonably sure that Jocelyn had just found an unimpeachable excuse for not finishing her work.

Alexa sat in one of the chairs in the front row, feeling that a desk was too much of a barrier to intimacy in a conversation. She was always attentive to such seemingly insignificant issues. When she was holding a class, her preferred configuration was a circle, although some teachers bitched if she forgot to have the students put the chairs back in their rigid little rows. And she insisted on a true circle, not one of those horseshoe-shaped parabolas, which maintained the teacher as focal point. Ladies of the Round Table, she had once dubbed this circle, although one of her students had quickly pointed out that the Arthurian ideal had not survived. “It was torn apart by a woman, in fact.”

Perri had made that contribution although her knowledge of King Arthur almost certainly came by way of Camelot as opposed to The Once and Future King. Alexa had countered with the story of the Paris peace talks and the argument over the table’s shape, an anecdote that one of her history professors had loved. But she might as well have been talking about a time as remote as King Arthur’s, given the girls’ furrowed brows. At the end of her story, there was a confused silence, and then one girl asked, “Did you march against the war and stuff?”

Alexa had to inform the girls that she had been born after the Vietnam war ended, a fact they seemed to find suspect. No matter how young you were, no matter how young you looked, students thought you were ancient, a witness to everything that had happened in the previous century.

“How are you, Eve?” No reproach in her tone, no reminder that the girl had been ducking her for three days.

“Good.”

“Good?”

Eve frowned. “I mean, good under the circumstances.”

“I imagine it’s hard for students to concentrate these days-not that June was ever known as a month for students to focus.”

“I’m okay.” Said firmly now, in the manner of someone trying to get rid of a telemarketer.

“How are things at home these days?”

Eve squirmed a little in her chair. Her embarrassment about her parents was far more acute than the average adolescent’s. When Mr. and Mrs. Muhly had been summoned to school for that infamous meeting, Eve’s main concern had been that people would see just how old her parents were, and that would be held against her in a way that made the blow job on the bus utterly secondary. They were old, at least her father was, and her mother had disastrously retro taste.

“Fine,” Eve said at last. “Fine.”

Frustrated, Alexa decided to go straight to the matter. Directness was a risky tactic with a girl like Eve, but she hoped her reputation for being truthful and loyal would pay off here. And Eve owed her.

“Did you ever figure out who spoke to you that day? Who you overheard talking about the girls’ room and the gunshot?”

“Nope.” She was swinging her head so hard that her fine dark hair lashed at her cheeks.

“It could be important. You might know something crucial to the investigation and not even know you know it.”

She had expected Eve to look intrigued, but the girl just glowered, as if having vital information were an unfair burden.

“The thing is…there are so many rumors going around. The Kahns have a lawyer. Josie Patel’s family has hired a lawyer. Even Mr. Hartigan has a lawyer. I’ve heard that Perri wrote Kat some sort of letter, too.”

Eve’s face was now a classic teenager’s mask, her eyes focused on some spot over Alexa’s right shoulder.

“So the girl you overheard…” Alexa, no slouch at nuance in conversation, gave this word the most subtle rendering she could, something well short of the arch invisible quote marks used by doubters, but a tone shot through with light challenge. “The girl you overheard…well, maybe it’s the age-old case of someone saying she heard something happened to a friend, when it was really her. This girl, I mean.”

It was you, Eve. Admit it was you.

“And maybe she didn’t just hear something. Maybe she saw something.”

“I wasn’t there,” Eve said, her words coming with painful slowness. “I wasn’t anywhere near there.”

“But the girl who spoke to you…?”

“The girl I overheard.” Eve’s smile was triumphant.

Alexa found herself thinking of one of the few happy memories she had of her father, when he had told her she could win ten dollars by playing the “No” game. He explained the rules at great, ponderous length, speaking for almost ten minutes. She must answer “No” to every question, whether it was the truthful answer or not. “No” was the only answer permitted. The game would go on as long as she was successful. It might go on for hours. Did she understand? “NO,” Alexa had roared, and her father had laughed. But he had also tried to renege on the promise of the ten-dollar payment. No matter. Alexa was sure her five-year-old face had looked much as Eve’s did just now. Victorious, but a little fearful, too, as if there would be consequences for winning this point.

She was trying to figure out what to ask the girl next when Jocelyn Smith appeared in the doorway, her features working as if she were a silent-screen actress.

“Ms. Cunningham, Ms. Cunningham? About my paper?”

“It’s okay, Jocelyn. I already told you it’s okay. You got the extension.”

“But it’s not about finishing it late. It’s about finishing ever. I have horseback-riding camp this summer, and then a killer schedule in the fall, and my parents pointed out that if I have an incomplete going into the fall, it could totally screw up my transcripts on my college applications…”

She was now in a state of near hysteria, admittedly a place never far away where Jocelyn was concerned. Alexa couldn’t help being annoyed by the girl’s selfishness. True, this was Jocelyn’s independent-study hour, when Alexa was supposed to be available to her, but hadn’t she noticed Eve sitting here? For all Jocelyn knew, Eve also was doing an independent study with Alexa and Jocelyn was stealing her time, her attention. But Jocelyn never worried about such things.

“Hold it a sec, Jocelyn. I’ll talk to you in the hall.”

She closed the door behind her, signaling that she was not through with Eve.

Eve, left alone in the classroom, found herself reaching almost automatically for Alexa’s cart. Her father spoke of people who stole as having sticky fingers, and while Eve understood the metaphor, it didn’t apply in her situation. Her fingers never felt drier or cooler than when moving through property that wasn’t hers.

Her parents had made her a thief, she reasoned. They would not buy her the things she needed nor allow her the part-time job that might subsidize such purchases, so she had learned to get what she wanted-what she needed-by seizing opportunities. Left alone to tend the produce stand, for example, she gouged the more gullible types, claiming that ordinary beefsteak tomatoes were a rare hybrid or that the corn was true Silver Queen. (Her father’s corn was actually better, but people thought they wanted Silver Queen.) And she was always on the prowl for untended money, because only a fool would boost things at the mall, although items without price tags were ripe for the taking. Once pocketed, these things were guaranteed, for how could someone prove you took it? Or you could pull a little switcheroo. That’s how she had gotten her big gold E, by switching price tags.

But money was the best. So her fingers moved through Alexa’s cart, looking for a billfold. Never take it all, was Eve’s motto. People noticed when everything was missing. But when it was one twenty-dollar bill out of three, the marks tended to blame themselves, assuming they had lost track of some minor purchase. This assumption worked with everyone but her father, who knew to the nickel how much money he had. That had been a hard lesson, but once learned, it was never forgotten. Eve didn’t make the same mistake twice.

But Ms. Cunningham, while so stupid in some ways, had taken her purse with her when she stepped out of the classroom. Really, Eve should be insulted. Did Ms. Cunningham think she was a thief? (Okay, she was, but Ms. Cunningham didn’t know that.) Would she have taken her purse with her if, say, Perri had been here? Perri, who had brought a gun to school, who had proved to be much more unpredictable than anyone knew? What about Kat Hartigan? But if Kat Hartigan had been a dog, you could have left her alone with a steak and she wouldn’t budge. No-Kat would sit and wait, and someone would bring the steak to her. That was the beauty of being Kat Hartigan. Everything offered up, everything done for her. All she had to do was exist.

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.