To The Power Of Three

PART TWO. Death, Near And Certain
Saturday
8

It was still early, not even 7:00 A.M., when Eve Muhly rose and hurried to the barn. Claude and Billy began scampering around the pen as soon as they heard her footsteps and, in their excitement, were almost impossible to harness. “Stupid goats,” she scolded them, although her voice was as fond as her words were harsh. “If you want to go so badly, then stand still. Stand still.” But she said the same thing every day, and they behaved the same way every day. There was just no reasoning with goats.

Their halters fixed, she led them down the paved driveway her father had put in a few years ago, when a new development had gone in behind their farm. It had amused her father, creating this shortcut, which only he could use, although teenagers sometimes tried to drive on the Muhlys’ property late at night, tempted by the stock pond. They never tried more than once, however, as Eve’s father was quite fearsome in such situations. “I have to be,” he said. “We gave ’em a mile, and now they want to take every last inch.”

Claude and Billy were small but fast, and Eve had to trot to keep up with them. She skirted along the rear property lines of the houses, glancing at the windows, still dark on a Saturday. While the owners had taken great pains to make their homes distinctive from one another in the front, the back views were strikingly similar-decks with French doors or soaring windows, with another set of small windows at the top, like two quirked eyebrows. When the development had first gone in and the hill was still bald, Eve had had the sensation of being stared at by a series of narrowed, unblinking eyes. Now trees and gardens had started to compensate for this naked look, but she still felt as if the houses were watching her. That was okay. The houses, even the adults, could stare at Eve all they wanted. It was only her classmates that she wanted to avoid.

Eve would die, just die, if Val and Lila knew about the chores she was still expected to do. Most of the 4-H kids walked their goats and lambs in the afternoon hours, just before supper. But Eve tried to keep those hours free for hanging out with Val and Lila, and she could not imagine what they would think about a life that required goat walking, not to mention working in her mother’s greenhouse and, once summer was truly here, taking turns at the produce stand. Val and Lila weren’t snobs, but they simply wouldn’t think that they could be friends with a redneck. So Eve hid that part of herself.

The goats walked and their pen mucked, Eve risked her father’s wrath over the gas bill and stood in the shower for almost thirty minutes, slathering herself with strongly scented bath gel and shampoo, cheap but potent things she bought at CVS. Even so, she thought she caught a whiff of feed and manure beneath all those flower and berry scents. To her knowledge there were no high-school kids in the houses behind her family’s farm, but what if someone she knew saw her walking the goats? She believed she would never live it down, and Eve had lived down a lot during her seventeen years, more than her share. That’s how she had come to be friends with the skeezer girls in the first place, because she had held her head high and refused to be cowed when the divas started gossiping about her.

“Skeezer” was an ancient bit of slang in this part of the county, older than Glendale itself, older than Eve’s parents even. Its origins, while murky, dated back to a time when this valley was true country and Baltimore seemed as far away as the moon. The original skeezers had something to do with hot rods-the boys who drove them and the girls who liked them. Liked the boys and the cars, that is, because cars offered escape. Eve’s mother often said she thought “skeezer” might be connected to an old comic strip called “Gasoline Alley,” whose main character was named Skeezix. Then she would start to get all nostalgic about other comic strips she had liked-“Mr. Tweedy,” the girls in “Apartment 3-G,” “Mary Worth”-and Eve would end up tuning much of it out. Eve’s mom was prone to memories.

Today’s skeezers might have been called goths at another school, although they weren’t quite that. Nor were they to be confused with “skeezy,” a more recent coinage that suggested a combination of sleazy, skanky, and sketchy. They were mostly girls who hung with the skater punks, mellow and nonjudgmental.

Yet even the skeezers wouldn’t be friends with an out-and-out redneck. The farm kids weren’t exactly at the bottom of Glendale ’s social hierarchy, just separate, assumed to have different values and ambitions. When Eve’s history class had read about the walled ghettos in Poland, she had thought that Glendale had managed to turn this idea inside out. The rich kids lived behind gates and curving brick walls, while the farm kids were left outside at day’s end, forgotten. Sometimes even the teachers seemed to forget that the rednecks intended to go to college, that they couldn’t just work on their family farms. That’s how dumb the teachers were. Eve didn’t know of a single full-time farmer left in the valley. Her father managed a fleet of school buses, and her mother boarded horses, while Binnie Snyder’s father sold farm machinery and riding lawn mowers. The Coxes were Amway reps. Even the kids who actually liked farming knew they had to have something else going.

Again, this was not a subject that Eve could speak of to Val and Lila, her new friends. To keep their approval, Eve believed she had to give up things she had once loved-competing in the state fair, making jams and jellies with her mother, participating in 4-H. She was raising Claude and Billy for the livestock auction only because her father had laid down the law, insisting that Eve contribute to her own college fund, and he wouldn’t let her take a job at any of the mall shops, although they paid much better than raising and selling goats. Plus, it wouldn’t give you a pang, selling a sweater at the Gap, whereas Eve had never gotten used to handing over her animals at summer’s end.

Eve’s father was rigid, and she had decided early on that the only way to cope with such an unmoving, rock-hard man was to maneuver around him. A curfew of 10:00 P.M. was ridiculous for a seventeen-year-old girl, but that was Eve’s curfew, and she wasn’t going to change her father’s ideas by arguing with him. So, since taking up with Val and Lila, she had learned to escape her room at night by climbing out on the porch and jumping to the ground. She figured this was between her and her conscience. And if she got caught…well, then, Eve’s behind would be between her father’s knee and hand. That was fair, that was okay. She knew the risk of disobeying her father, and she was willing take it. Besides, she hadn’t come close to getting caught. Her father was already in his mid-fifties-Eve was a late baby, born thirteen years after her next-oldest sibling-and a little deaf. He slept, her mother said, the sleep of the dead. Her mother did not, but if she ever heard Eve’s footsteps on the porch roof, she let it go.

Eve was naturally stealthy, had been from an early age. If there were a contest for keeping confidences, she would win that every time. She had started out by learning and then protecting her parents’ secrets. These were small privacies, things that could be concealed in drawers or tins of flour, beneath the loose floorboard in the barn. A cache of money (her mother’s), for example, or a bottle of whiskey (her father’s). No one ever told Eve not to reveal the whereabouts of these things, because no one knew she had discovered them. Yet Eve understood instinctively that the fact of these stashes was as important to her parents as the items themselves. Her father wasn’t a drunk-the level in his bottle stayed more or less constant for months, his breath seldom smelled. Nor was her mother saving up to run away or buy something outrageous. They just needed a part of themselves that wasn’t wholly known. Eve understood.

Over the years she tested them a time or two-sliding a bill out of the lining of her mother’s sewing basket, taking a nip of her father’s whiskey. Her mother’s eyes would look distant and troubled for a while, but the look would gradually fade. As for her father, he never missed a swallow as far as Eve could tell. Sometimes she wanted to tell them what she knew and assure them that their secrets were safe, that she loved them more for knowing they had things to hide, too. But she did not think her father would see it that way.

Now, however, she had a real secret, a huge one, one she must never tell. Eve had given her word readily, sure of her ability to keep any secret. Yet this one was so enormous she wasn’t sure how she would hold it inside, or even if she should. The knowledge already felt oppressive, so omnipresent in her thoughts that she thought she might blurt it out at any moment, much like this one joke her father liked to tell, about the self-conscious boy with a wooden eye who asked a girl to dance, only to end up yelling at her, “Harelip! Harelip! Harelip!” She wanted to tell Claude and Billy, she wanted to say it out loud, just to hear the words, but she almost feared that the wind might carry it away, over the hills and into the world.

Ms. Cunningham was always telling her students that gossip was a weapon, that talking behind someone’s back was a destructive act on a par with hitting someone from behind. Yet Eve was in the curious position of knowing even the meanest, evilest gossip could change a person’s life for the better. Eve had been saved from her redneck-girl existence by a horrible story, one made all the more nasty because it was the word-for-word truth.

It had happened more than a year ago, the fall of her sophomore year, on a field trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Eve had entered high school with the brief hope of starting over and forming a new identity for herself, but Glendale was not big enough to wipe out the knowledge of the dorky kid she had been for eight years, first at Meeker Creek, then in Hammond Springs. Eve was beginning to accept that she was a dork for life, a dork without even the consolation of being a brain, like Binnie, who was turning out to be some kind of supergenius. They didn’t share a single class in high school. Binnie didn’t even go on the same field trips, being a year older, so Eve sat alone on the bus to Philadelphia, odd girl out. She should have been used to it, but maybe you never get used to it.

The bus ride north had been the usual keyed-up affair, the popular kids swapping ring tones and text-messaging on their cells, despite sitting just a few feet away from each other. Text messages were meaner than whispers, impossible to overhear or second-guess. Eve’s ears burned as she listened to the near-silent conversations behind her-tap, tap, tap, tap, burst of raucous laughter, tap, tap, tap, tap, more laughter. She assumed they were making fun of her, but what could she do about it?

Once at the museum, however, she had been approached by Beverly Wilson, whose sole claim to fame was being best friends with Thalia Cooper, the absolutely top girl in their class-the prettiest, the most popular, a girl who disdained cheerleading because she rode competitively and didn’t have time to go to practices, although the JV coach had made a special point of pleading with her to reconsider.

“Thalia says you know something about horses,” Beverly had said as they waited in line to walk through the supersize version of the human heart.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, my mom boards some, for some city people who like to ride. My dad doesn’t have much use for them, though.”

“Thalia likes people who like horses.”

Eve started to say, I didn’t say I liked them-she thought horses disgusting, given that she spent much of her time cleaning up after them-but she stopped herself. Just the possibility of Thalia’s positive attention was dizzying. If Thalia wanted a friend who liked horses, Eve could be that girl.

“Do you want to sit with us?” Beverly asked. “On the bus, on the way back?”

“Sure,” she said, hoping she was hitting the right casual note.

Beverly left her then and rejoined the group of girls orbiting around Thalia, but that made sense to Eve. Things should not go too quickly. She had been invited to ride with them at the back of the bus, an almost-two-hour trip. It would be too much to expect that they would allow her to walk with them through the museum or unwrap her lumpy homemade sandwich next to their purchased burgers and salads. She ate alone, not minding, the promise of the return trip bright in her mind.

After a quick but dutiful inspection of the Liberty Bell and Benjamin Franklin’s penny-speckled grave, they boarded the bus at six o’clock. Once they were on the highway, Beverly crooked a finger at Eve, summoning her to the seats two-thirds toward the rear of the bus. By custom, the final rows were reserved for the jocks, soccer and football players who hung over the seat backs, sweet-talking the girls, trying to get their attention. Eve was quiet, but she tried to make it an interesting kind of quiet, laughing at what seemed like the right moments, smiling and nodding otherwise. Sometimes Beverly would ask her sharply, “What’s so funny?” Eve just shrugged and rolled her eyes heavenward, which made the other girls laugh, seemingly with her.

They were in the final thirty minutes of the trip, the sun down and the bus dark inside, when Beverly explained what she called the initiation. “We’ve all done it,” she said, gesturing to Graham Booth, the least attractive of the jocks, a boy who liked to say he was descended from John Wilkes Booth, just to get attention. He particularly liked making this boast around the school’s few African-American students, adding, “So my sympathies for the Confederacy aren’t racist, just respect for family.” It was clever, a vicious way of suggesting things that could never be said directly under Glendale High School ’s speech codes, and Graham seemed proud of himself for figuring that out. He was a large boy with messy hair and a grin that showed too much gum. But he was good at football, and that was enough, for a boy.

Eve bit her lip after Beverly detailed the initiation. “I’ve never done that.”

“No one had. That’s why we made it our initiation. Graham’s big-big as a horse.”

“Does it have to be Graham?” Kenny Raskin, the runty younger brother of Seth Raskin, was next to Graham, and Eve thought he would be preferable. Smaller, certainly. Besides, Kenny was as nice as Graham was mean.

“Yes. It’s always Graham.”

Eve walked to the final row, where Graham now sat alone, Kenny having slipped into the aisle to help block the view of the backseat. She wasn’t afraid, not really, especially when she saw Graham wasn’t as big as the horses, nowhere near. And it was over so fast, thank God. For some reason she thought it might be like squeezing a bit of milk from a cow or a goat. But it wasn’t anything like that.

She took her seat among the girls, waiting to be congratulated, welcomed. The bus was suddenly so quiet, all the usual buzz gone. Perhaps people had fallen asleep.

Finally Beverly said, “That’s a lot of calories, you know.”

“Oh, but Eve doesn’t have to worry about what she eats,” Thalia said. “You can eat anything, can’t you, Eve?”

Everyone laughed, and Eve joined them, thinking it was a funny line. It was only the next day, when she tried to sit with them in the cafeteria and Beverly said all the seats were taken, that she knew she had been tricked. She just didn’t know why.

The strange thing was, the story didn’t spread, not in the way that Thalia and Beverly had clearly intended. The sophomores knew, and then the rest of the students, but the story failed to jump the firewall to the faculty. Eve stalked through the halls for a week, fierce and proud, staring balefully at boys who attempted to taunt her. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said, not understanding the double meaning of her words until she saw Graham blush brick red and punch the boys who dared to laugh. From then on she said the line deliberately to anyone who dared to approach her. “It wasn’t a big deal at all.”

After a week of this, Val Morrisey stopped by Eve’s locker at day’s end.

“Hey,” she said. She was a big girl, broad-shouldered, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes, a light, clear green.

“Hey,” said Eve, steeling herself for some new form of taunt she hadn’t imagined. Val had a legendary mouth, as quick and lethal as Perri Kahn’s. Unlike Perri, she used it only for her own amusement, refusing to join the debate or drama clubs.

“Some of us were going to get some coolers at Caribou Coffee. You want to come?”

“I take the bus home,” Eve said. “I live pretty far out.”

“This guy I know, Tom, he has a car. He could drop you home, after.” Val saw Eve hesitate. “He’s my friend, and he’d take you home if I told him to, and if he tried anything-not that he would with me in the car-I’d knee him in the balls. Okay?”

“I’d have to call my mom. I mean, I don’t have to ask for permission or anything. She’ll just need to know that I’m coming home in someone’s car.”

“Here,” Val said, proffering her cell.

It was that easy. Val liked Eve because she hadn’t broken down in the face of the diva girls who had been intent on humiliating her. And whomever Val liked, Lila liked and the other skeezers accepted. Val and Lila even knew why Eve had attracted the divas’ wrath. “You’re cute,” Val said, and Lila nodded a little reluctantly. “They hated that boys were looking at you.” Eve finally had the new start she had wanted. The divas’ only recourse was to go to Ms. Cunningham and tell the whole story, pretending it was because they were so very, very concerned about Eve.

Ms. Cunningham had summoned Eve’s parents to school, which was what the divas had wanted all along. Again-why? That was the part that Eve still didn’t get. Not even Val understood this strategy. Did they want her parents to come to school in hopes that their very queerness would destroy what she had with Val and Lila? Eve remembered a goat that had been born blind, the way the other goats had cowered in the pen, afraid of it, when it was the weakest and most helpless of all. Was she the blind goat of Glendale High School? No, she was just a girl who had been dumb enough to yearn openly for what she wasn’t supposed to have. That was the lesson Beverly and Thalia had been intent on teaching her. Know your place, redneck.

In Ms. Cunningham’s office, bracketed by her parents, Eve had a terrible moment. She was still more good girl than skeezer then-she had not started smoking, much less using pot, although she would learn to do those things over time-and she could not imagine the punishment her father would fashion when he learned what she had done with Graham Booth. Her father always said the punishment should fit the crime, by which he meant it should have a certain Old Testament logic. Would he bind her mouth with duct tape? Make her swallow something even more disgusting? Did her parents even know about oral sex? It seemed unlikely. As Eve understood it, the activity had been pretty much abandoned until the former president made it popular again.

But Ms. Cunningham did not tell. She had meant to, Eve was sure of it, perhaps had thought Eve would volunteer the story, which showed how little Ms. Cunningham knew of Eve. In the end, however, she could not form the words, and Eve certainly didn’t volunteer any information. Ms. Cunningham told Eve’s parents that she was worried about Eve’s thinness, to which her father had said, “You wouldn’t be if you could see our food bill. The girl eats like there’s no tomorrow.”

Her mother put in, “It’s just genes. I was built the same way, as a girl.”

Ms. Cunningham gave Eve’s parents some pamphlets on eating disorders. Her father glanced at them, then stared at Eve. “Do you do this? Eat good food and throw it up? Because that’s just wasteful.”

“No, sir,” she said. It was so easy, being sincere when telling the truth. It almost seemed like cheating. Then again, Eve was pretty sure she could be just as sincere when lying. Ms. Cunningham waited to see if Eve could be bluffed into saying anything, then finally sent the Muhlys on their way.

“That was a strange to-do over nothing,” Eve’s father grumbled. “Making a man come all the way up to the school just to ask why a girl is thin.”

Eve supposed that Ms. Cunningham thought Eve owed her now, which is why she kept asking her questions yesterday. But Eve didn’t see it that way. Besides, people didn’t really want to know the truth. They thought they did, then got mad at the people who insisted on it. It was a lesson Eve had learned over and over in high school. Stick to the official version of things. Say what people wanted to hear. And no one, no one, wanted to hear what she knew now.