To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “Hmmmmm.”

  Anita’s doctor was a topic to be avoided at all costs. Six months ago Anita had decided that her health problems—not only her hives but the headaches and chronic shortness of breath—were the fault of some toxin in the Glendale High School heating and cooling ducts. Or the carpet. Or the sealant used on the gymnasium floor. Three tests had been ordered so far, and three tests had come back with inconclusive results. Yet Anita was still threatening legal action, and when she tired of speaking of her doctor, she mulled out loud about which lawyer might represent her. All her options advertised on local television, although she sometimes glimpsed someone promising on Court TV. Otherwise she was waffling between the “Let’s talk about it” guy and the firm endorsed by former Baltimore Colt Bubba Smith. Alexa, one of the few faculty members who accepted multiple chemical sensitivity as a legitimate medical condition, did not scoff at the science behind Anita’s claim. She just didn’t happen to believe that Anita suffered from anything other than her own bad choices.

  “My girlfriend who used to work for social services?” Alexa did not take the bait, but Anita was not someone who considered a lack of response inimical to a conversation. In fact, silence only encouraged her. “They shut down the whole building because it was making people sick. Now she works in that old Caldor on York Road, across the street from a Panera Breads and a Giant Foods and a Starbucks. She says it’s real convenient, especially since Blockbuster Videos went in.”

  So that’s your plan, Alexa thought. Keep demanding tests until she was reassigned to a better location or Glendale High School was rebuilt on a site more convenient to overstuffed sandwiches, grocery shopping, and movie rentals.

  The irony was that there had been growing support to level Glendale and rebuild a new school before Anita began threatening legal action. Such an act, while drastic, would not be unprecedented. Nearby Howard County had recently blown up a windowless octagon built in the heyday of the open-space movement, replacing it with a more traditional rectangle of beige and glass bricks. But Anita Whitehead’s complaints had forced the school board into a defensive posture. The school had no flaws, the Baltimore County school board and superintendent now maintained, a laughable contention at a school that had been obsolete and reviled from the day its doors had opened ten years earlier.

  To begin with, Glendale was too small, a common enough problem in Maryland, where school construction seldom kept pace with growth. The best elementary schools were surrounded by portable classrooms, and some students spent their first five years in these nominally temporary settings. At the high-school level, unhampered by mandated student-teacher ratios, they simply crammed more bodies into existing buildings. Glendale, built for twelve hundred students, held almost fifteen hundred.

  Yet while Glendale High School’s classrooms were cramped and overflowing, its public areas, all in the north wing, were almost too vast. The auditorium was so large that no student concert or play could fill it, which gave productions a melancholy air of failure. The gymnasium was a high-ceilinged barn that always felt half empty, even when the boys’ basketball team made a run for the state championship.

  But the crowning idiocy of Glendale High School, as Glendale’s original developer, Thornton Hartigan, had complained so publicly and loudly, was that the architect simply had not understood Maryland’s climate, much less the quirkier weather peculiar to this valley. Glendale lay in north Baltimore County, physically closer to the Pennsylvania state line than it was to Baltimore, although most parents commuted southward to the city, or beyond. Because storms often cut a northeasterly path across the state, this northern part of the county could be under six inches of snow while the rest of the region was unscathed. And the winds were especially harsh here, whipping around the school’s treeless lot as if still angry at those who had cleared so much of the valley’s forests a century ago.

  Yet the architect had sold the school board on four freestanding wings centered on a courtyard, a design more suitable to California or Florida. In inclement weather students had to choose between cutting coatless across the courtyard or taking the longer circuitous route, which meant being tardy. An in-house telephone system tried to make up for these vast distances, but this only overburdened the school’s wiring, which was wholly inadequate to modern expectations. Students increasingly used BlackBerries, Treos, or other cell phones with e-mail capabilities, rather than rely on the school’s sluggish Internet connections.

  The call that interrupted Anita’s monologue was an in-house one, a fact signaled by two short rings. Anita, looking vaguely annoyed at the phone ringing so early, picked up the receiver and said, “Main office.” Then, “What? What? Don’t you fun with me!”

  Apparently the caller persuaded Anita that there was no fun involved, not as verb or noun, for it was then that she threw down the telephone and began to scream.

  “We’ve been shot!” she shrieked, in violation of every protocol in which the staff had been trained. “There’s a shooting—some damn kid has brought a gun to school—We’ve gotta evacuate, we’ve gotta get out—”

  Barbara Paulson was out of her office so fast that she seemed a pink-suited blur, grabbing the receiver that Anita had thrown down. “This is your principal, Barbara Paulson,” she said, which was how she began every announcement, answered every phone call. This verbal tic was much mocked behind her back by faculty, who speculated that Barbara presented herself this way at every occasion—the dry cleaners, the drive-through at McDonald’s, the rare sexual encounter with her husband. Yet the tone was right for the situation, Alexa realized, stern and authoritative. If this was a prank, the student would never have the nerve to sustain it.

  “Please repeat what you just told Ms. Whitehead.” Barbara grabbed a pen and began jotting down notes on a “Panther Pride” pad that was handy. In reaching for the pen, she upset Anita’s Diet Vanilla Coke, but she didn’t seem to notice the soda that cascaded over Anita’s desk, even as it splashed onto her skirt and jacket and onto Alexa’s mail, which she had put down on the edge of the desk when Anita started screaming. Alexa, not sure what else she could do, dropped to her knees and tried to gather the fallen papers.

  “Yes—but—” Barbara had written “SHOTS FIRED, NORTH WING”—“I must know—hello? Hello?” The line had clearly gone dead. Barbara put down the phone and picked up the microphone for the school’s public-address system.

  “This is your principal, Barbara Paulson.” The words echoed back to them from the hallway speakers. “I need everyone’s undivided attention for a special announcement. Everyone—students, faculty, staff, and visitors—in the south, east, and west wings must leave the school immediately, under the emergency procedures we have practiced throughout the year. This is a Level II emergency. Repeat—this is a Level II emergency.”

  Her hands were shaking, yet her voice retained its usual metallic quality and her face was devoid of emotion, almost waxen. The Botox rumors that had dogged Barbara since spring break suddenly seemed plausible to Alexa. But perhaps Alexa’s own face was blank and empty, too, unable to summon any expression appropriate to the moment, because what expression would be appropriate?

  Barbara continued speaking into the microphone: “Those in the north wing, however, are asked to go into containment procedures, locking doors, drawing blinds, and staying away from windows until an all-clear is sounded.”

  Anita and the other secretaries happily followed the principal’s instructions, grabbing their purses and all but running from the office. Alexa remained, because she thought Barbara might need her, but the principal barely seemed to register her presence. She called 911 and repeated the information she had gathered, while Alexa listened to her carefully worded answers. Yes, she had implemented the county’s emergency plan—evacuation for those in the unaffected wings, lockdown for those classrooms near the reported shooting. No, she did not know if there were any injuries at this point.

  “Glendale High School,” Barbara repeated pat
iently. “Off Glendale Circle.”

  There was a pause while the dispatcher asked another question. Barbara braced the hand holding the phone, but both hands continued to shake.

  “I wouldn’t characterize it so much as a school shooting,” she said, “but as a shooting at the school.”

  Motioning Alexa to follow her, the principal turned out the lights in the office and closed the door, locking it behind them. The halls were already full of students and teachers, and Alexa plunged into the hallway, feeling as if she were trying to body-surf in those spindly, treacherous waves she remembered from the Outer Banks, a place she hadn’t visited since she was four or five. The air had a crackly, electric charge, more like a winter day than a late-spring one, with some girls’ hair dancing on end. The students were moving a bit too fast, talking among themselves in low voices that quickly rose in volume, despite the teachers’ best efforts to enforce the no-talking rule. Others were ignoring the guidelines for a Level II emergency, holding their cell phones low by their hips, text-messaging with the ferocity of young Helen Kellers who had just discovered an accessible language. Alexa tapped one or two girls on the shoulder and shook her head in disapproval, but the girls just widened their eyes in fake innocence, as if they couldn’t imagine why they were being singled out.

  Out in the parking lot, Alexa realized that the timing of the incident would make it nightmarishly impossible to account for everyone. While teachers had brought their roll books, they had yet to take morning attendance. Ten minutes before the first bell, the school was just full enough to be chaotic. There was no way to determine who had been inside or if the three wings under evacuation had truly emptied.

  The staff tried to organize the chattering students, directing them to their homeroom teachers, insisting they turn off their cell phones, but it was like trying to gather feathers in a breeze. Some of the stoner-skater crowd—known as skeezers, for reasons Alexa had never grasped—drifted across the athletic field, heading to the fringe of woods where they gathered in all but the most intolerable weather. Alexa wanted to call after them that this was probably not the best time to get high. Then again, maybe it was. Certainly the police would have more pressing things to do than round up a few pot smokers.

  Meanwhile students continued to arrive by car only to turn around promptly, sometimes taking other students with them, even as teachers yelled at them not to go. Parents, pulling up with dawdling freshmen and sophomores who had missed their buses, behaved no more responsibly, fleeing the moment they caught the scent of the emergency. Alexa imagined the stories that were starting in their heads, the tales of ordinary lateness—oversleeping, finishing homework—that would now take on epic dimensions. These parents were the lucky ones. They had the advantage of knowing now that their children were safe. Other parents would have to endure that horrible gap between partial and full knowledge. Once the police arrived, the driveways to the school would be blocked and parents would be directed to the nearby middle school to wait for their children. That, too, was part of the procedure of a Level II emergency. But it had all seemed so theoretical, so remote, during the training.

  The faculty and those students who remained in the parking lot studied the school, as if the building itself might explain what was going on. It stared back, blank-faced, secretive.

  Eve Muhly approached Alexa, standing a little too close, as usual, so Alexa could feel the odd heat the girl always generated, like a toddler who had just awakened from a long yet unsuccessful nap.

  “Ms. Cunningham?”

  “You can call me Alexa, Eve. You know that.”

  “Someone said it happened in the restroom?” Her voice rose on what should have been a declarative statement of fact. Eve often needed affirmation for the simplest assertions.

  “Who said, Eve?” It was Alexa’s automatic reply to anything that sounded like a rumor, even if she happened to know that the story was true. She never missed an opportunity to remind her students of the power of gossip, of mere words.

  Eve looked around her feet, as if her informant were something she had temporarily misplaced or dropped. “Someone? I didn’t see, exactly? But I definitely heard someone behind me as we were leaving, and she said she, like, heard it, she heard something.”

  “Those in the north wing were instructed to stay put.” Alexa would never fall into the trap of calling it “containment.” She eschewed jargon and euphemisms whenever possible, feeling it gave her more credibility with the students.

  “Right. Like, if you were about to go into the bathroom and you heard shots, would you just stand there and wait for an announcement about what to do?”

  Alexa looked at Eve closely. “Are you talking about yourself, Eve? Were you outside the bathroom when it happened? Did you call the office?”

  “No, I’m just saying. Like, a hypo…hypo…hypothetical. If I heard shots, I wouldn’t just stand around. I’d run.”

  “But you said ‘she.’ And you said she was going into the girls’ room. So you know that much.”

  “Yeah. Well. I know a girl’s voice from a boy’s voice. And no one goes into the boys’ bathroom, not even the skankiest girls. The boys’ bathrooms are nasty.”

  “Do you know anything else, Eve?” Alexa glanced at the girl’s hands, but Eve was the daughter of old farmers. They may have tolerated her alliance with the skeezer crowd, but they were too thrifty to allow their daughter a cell phone. Eve had neither called nor been called in the frantic minutes since the school was evacuated.

  “Someone said a name?” Eve squirmed like an insect impaled on a pin, equal parts misery and defiance. The poor girl constantly sought attention yet was mortified once she got it.

  “A name?”

  “Of the person who’s, like, shot.”

  Alexa waited.

  “They said—” Eve leaned even closer to Alexa and whispered—“Kat Hartigan.”

  “Kat? Are you sure?”

  “It’s what she said.”

  “Who, Eve?” But Alexa knew that even if Eve had any more concrete information, she wouldn’t share it, not under the watchful eyes of her friends.

  “Someone? I don’t know. I didn’t see her? I only, like, heard as I was walking out.” Eve lifted up her hair and let it drop back on her neck, then disappeared into her group, blending in with them so thoroughly that she might have been a chameleon, taking on the protective coloration of a tree or a leaf.

  And now that Alexa had the name—Kat Hartigan—it suddenly seemed to be everywhere, on everyone’s lips. “Did you hear? It was Kat Hartigan.” “Shut up!” “No, seriously. Kat.” Kat. Kat. Kat.

  The students and teachers shared the rumor with horror, shock, and just a little bit of smugness—the smugness born of knowing, the smugness born of being alive. All information was gossip, Alexa thought, even in the mouths of the best-intentioned people. As she told her students, gossip was not about content, and it was not necessarily false. Gossip was about self-importance, the thrill of knowing something and telling others. Those who passed along Kat Hartigan’s name were not simply sharing a fact. They were establishing that they were inside the loop and therefore important. Later she would try to impress this fact upon her students, use this as a learning tool—assuming the school year hadn’t just come to a premature end. It was hard to know what the school district would choose to do.

  What was she doing, making lesson plans in her head, when a student might be wounded in the school, or even dead? It had to be a rumor, Alexa thought. Kat Hartigan didn’t have an enemy in the world. She was the school’s figurative and literal princess, crowned at the prom just two weeks ago. Many students envied her, but no one disliked her. She had the kind of gentle prettiness and self-deprecating manner that girls find tolerable and boys find preferable.

  The police arrived, and now the school property was officially sealed off, with no one permitted to enter or leave. Media vans lined the street just beyond the school’s driveway, and a few parents stood along the road
’s shoulder, craning their necks, gesturing at the students, some of whom ran back and forth, relaying Lord-knows-what information. Alexa felt bad for these parents and others, the ones gathering at the middle school. Of course, many of them would have spoken to their children by now, thanks to the omnipresent cell phones. Even those who did not have phones, girls such as Eve Muhly, could find a way to get word to their parents, assuming that they understood how worried their parents would be. It was all too possible for teenagers to forget that the news of a shooting would scare their parents. Teenagers took their immortality for granted.

  And it was still possible, wasn’t it, that everything would be okay? That Kat Hartigan would walk out of the school, tossing her hair and laughing in her apologetic way, embarrassed to have been the focus of so much attention, to have caused any interruption to the school day. Maybe it was a senior prank, a kind of emotional vandalism that Barbara Paulson hadn’t thought to outlaw. The official news was not bad, not yet. Nothing had been established for the record. Alexa held to that hope even as the Shock Trauma helicopter came and went, even as an ambulance drove across the grass and back again, then left the school parking lot with its lights flashing. These were vehicles for survivors, for those who could be saved.

  Then the coroner’s car arrived, slow and deliberate. A man and woman ambled across the grass, and while their gait was not slow, there was no urgency to their movements. Kat, the voices began again. Kat. It’s Kat. Eve Muhly caught Alexa’s eye and made an “I told you so” face. Alexa summoned her with a stern “I’m not kidding this time” wave.

  “Who did this?”

  Eve shrugged. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “Eve.”

  “Everyone’s saying Josie Patel must have been there, because she’s so far up Kat’s butt the only time she ever gets out is in the bathroom.” She waited to see if Alexa would appreciate this bit of schoolhouse wit. “But I don’t know for sure.”