To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  What, exactly? What else could her father have wanted from life? Here he was, asleep in front of her, murmuring, literally dreaming. Yet Josie could not imagine her father’s dreams. For all her mother’s complaints, he had a job he genuinely liked at Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, pretty much nirvana for a onetime math nerd. (He wrote code. At least that’s what Josie thought her father did. She had always been a little vague on the details, even after going to the office with him on Take Your Daughters to Work Day, where the one thing that kept Josie’s interest was the tray of doughnuts. She was only eleven.) He adored Josie’s mother to a degree that was almost embarrassing, and he was just as affectionate with his children. If she had to guess, Josie would say her father was happy, although she didn’t know why.

  Josie’s father had been a musician in college, playing guitar in a band. That was how her parents met, at a keg party in the middle of a field at Grinnell College. “His band was terrible, just terrible,” her mother said. “Although they did a very good punk version of ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday.’” Her father still had a guitar and played in the garage on the rare weekends when there was nothing else to do. He wasn’t very good. Josie could recognize the chords he picked out only because some Glendale guys listened to a lot of vintage music—the Clash, the Rolling Stones, that sort of thing. Every now and then, her father would start plucking out the derder opening of what Josie’s mother called his signature song, and her mother would abandon whatever she was doing and go out into the garage and dance to the Monkees’ idea of what was subversive, all those years ago—to Josie’s utter embarrassment, although her brothers were still young enough to think it was funny. There was something so…well, teenage about her parents’ devotion to each other. Her mother especially reminded her of the Glendale girls who went steady with the same boys all four years. Although, come to think of it, those girls always looked grim and exhausted, while Josie’s mom beamed as if she still couldn’t believe that Susie Cobb from Janesville, Wisconsin, had landed worldly Vik Patel, the math whiz who played in a band, tossing his then full, dark hair back from his face, smiling his brilliant smile, so white in contrast to his walnut-colored skin.

  “I couldn’t believe someone so worldly was interested in me,” her mother always said. Josie, who had learned the word “uxorious” when studying for the SATs, asked her English teacher if there was a corresponding word for a woman who worshipped her husband. Mrs. Billings had shrugged. “I guess it was assumed that wives were supposed to be that way about their husbands, that it was the natural order of things.” So sexist, Perri had pointed out.

  But being goony in love with your spouse clearly wasn’t the natural order, not based on what Josie saw around her in Glendale. Perri’s folks were nice enough, but hardly romantic. Mrs. Kahn did that humorous, put-upon thing, claiming that Dr. Kahn was terrible to her, but it was clearly all for show. As for Kat’s parents—they had always been a little snappish with each other, even before the divorce. Kat may have been shocked when her parents broke up, but Josie and Perri had seen it coming from a long way off. Josie had always been keen to escape the Hartigan house, despite its wealth of toys and gadgets, making a beeline for the patch of trees and the old creek at the far end of the Hartigans’ property. Yes, Kat had the coolest house but the worst parents. Josie had the worst house, and her parents were a close second to Perri’s. Perri had the second-best house and the best parents, because they simply never got mad. Perri could do no wrong as far as her parents were concerned, although they did have very high standards in terms of effort. The only time that Perri had gotten in trouble for a report card was when she had gotten a 2 in effort.

  But it was wrong, keeping score, now that Kat was dead. Dead for no reason. How could this have happened? Perri was crazy, an actual lunatic. Had she always been this way? Not when they were little, of course. No one’s insane in the third grade, except for serial killers, the boys who blow up cats and set dogs on fire. It was only in the past year that Perri had gotten so weird, and every-one—Josie included—had chalked that up to her obvious jealousy of Kat.

  Still, she was Perri. The smart one, the funny one, the one with the best ideas. She was the one who had dropped them, although the school didn’t spin it that way, couldn’t see how much Kat and Josie missed Perri when she distanced herself from them last fall—suddenly, viciously, without any explanation. Just because they were two and she was one didn’t make it any easier to bear. Especially given the fact that Kat was as strangely silent on the topic as Perri was.

  The memory of how her two friends had looked, after, rushed over Josie, and she glanced around frantically. There was a plastic trash can near her bed, but she had to lean out at a perilous angle. She tried to throw up silently, but it was too hard maintaining that posture while vomiting, and the sound of retching woke her father.

  “Oh, Josie.” Her father tucked her hair behind her ears, fetched a towel from the bathroom, and wiped her face. He was still in his office clothes—the embarrassing short-sleeved shirt and polyester old-man pants—and his BO was a little funky. He must have sweated a lot today. Her father’s sweat didn’t smell like anyone else’s—it wasn’t worse, just different—and Josie had always feared that it had something to do with being Indian, that her own perspiration would have this same foreign undercurrent. So far it didn’t, but you never knew.

  “I was worried the codeine and the sedative would be hard on your stomach, but the doctor kept saying he didn’t want the pain to get ahead of itself. How’s the foot?”

  “It feels kind of…fiery.”

  “Yeah. There may be some bone chips in there. They took the bullet out, but they still need an orthopedic surgeon to go over the X-rays.”

  “Am I going to be okay? I mean, totally normal, so I can—Dad, what about my scholarship? If I can’t do acrobatics, if I end up with a limp…Dad, Dad—”

  “You’re the lucky one, Josie. We’re the lucky ones. That’s all that matters for now.”

  Her father’s voice became thick and strange, as if he might begin to cry, an idea that made Josie even more frantic. “Dad…Dad…Dad.”

  “What, Josie?”

  But she didn’t know how to deny him his tears, so she said instead, “Can I have a Sprite or a ginger ale to settle my stomach?”

  “You bet, Josefina.” It was his private pet name for her, one he hadn’t used for years. “You bet.”

  He left her room, whistling one of the songs he liked to play on the guitar—“The Best I Ever Had”—as if he wanted her to be able to know where he was once he was out of view. A nurse must have reproved him, for Josie heard a soft but stern female voice, chiding in tone, and the whistling stopped abruptly. But Josie could still hear her father’s shoes, slapping down the corridor in search of a vending machine. Oh, God, he was wearing his Tevas.

  She thought she had nothing left to throw up, but the moment she tried to close her eyes, the room began to spin and the bile rose again, until nothing came out, her mouth opening and shutting almost convulsively. Wasn’t there a movie where a woman had honked silently the way Josie was now? Or was she thinking about someone in real life, someone odd, someone her mother had told Josie to stop staring at, a long time ago, when Josie was little and didn’t know better. Yes, that was it. Back when she was in middle school, there was a woman who looked like a goose, with a long, skinny neck and flying brown hair, and after each sentence she had opened her mouth wide and made a clicking sound deep in her throat. She had worked at the sandwich shop in the Strand, one of the first strip centers in the area. The woman looked straight at you while taking your order, and she seemed to speak more than was strictly necessary, as if to flaunt her disability, make you confront it. Her thin, long lips opened wide, and the strange snap echoed at the end of every sentence. “Do—you—want—cheese—with—that?” Snap. “What—do—you—think—of—the—weather—we’re—having?” Snap. When they were in middle school and wanted to buy sandwiches after school, they use
d to take turns going in. (If they tried to enter the store together, they ended up laughing too hysterically, and they were not unkind, not really.) Whenever it was Perri’s turn, she always convinced one of the others to do it for her. Kat would try to coax her: “It wasn’t so bad, she’s really very nice.” “So why don’t you go in every time?” Perri asked. “Because it’s not fair,” Kat countered. “We’re supposed to take turns.” Yet the next time it was Perri’s turn, Kat or Josie would end up going for her.

  The sandwich shop had disappeared, replaced by a Caribou Coffee, and the woman had disappeared, too. Things in Glendale were always disappearing, changing—the open spaces that were supposed to be left untouched, the original houses such as the Patels’, which were now being torn down right and left. And now Kat was gone, and perhaps Perri, too. It had been horrible, waiting there with them, listening to the strange, labored sound of Perri’s breathing, looking, then trying not to look, at Kat’s waxy features beneath the fluorescent lights. There was no place to look safely, except the ceiling, which Josie had never noticed before. White, pockmarked, divided into squares by aluminum bands.

  Finally the policemen had knocked, asking her to unlock the door, but Josie couldn’t get up, she just couldn’t. “Can you walk, honey? Can you crawl?” “Yes—no. I mean, I’m okay, but I can’t get up, I just can’t.” “You don’t have the gun, do you—what’s your name? Who are we talking to?” “I’m Josie. I’m not the one who did this. It was Perri, and she’s—” “Is she dead? Did she shoot herself?” “Yes. No. I mean, yes, she shot herself, but I don’t think she’s dead. She’s…it’s—Please find someone to unlock the door. I don’t want to look at them anymore.” But they had kept talking to her, disbelieving. “You don’t have the gun, do you…Josie? It’s Josie, right? You’re sure you’re not holding the gun?”

  “I never touched the gun.” Finally a key turned in the lock, and she began to sob when she saw the police officers enter with their weapons drawn. Then everything had speeded up, with paramedics rushing in, taking away Perri, then Josie. Yes, it was Perri, she told them over and over. Perri had done this. Shot Kat, shot Josie, then herself. Perri. It was Perri, only Perri.

  “What about Kat?” she had asked as they wheeled her out. “Aren’t you going to get Kat?”

  “Your friend has to stay here a little while longer,” the attendant had said, soothing her as if she were stupid enough to think Kat was alive. “The important thing is to get you to the emergency room, have that foot looked at. You were smart to wrap it like you did and prop it up, but we need to attend to that.”

  “I don’t want to go without Kat. She’s my best friend. I want to be with her. You can’t separate us. You can’t, you can’t.”

  She knew she was being hysterical and idiotic. But there was a part of her that clung to the idea that everything could be undone

  somehow, if they would just let her stay, give her five more minutes with the two girls who had defined her life for the last ten years, almost from the first day she had walked into Mrs. Groves’s class at Meeker Creek Elementary School. One for all and all for one, the eternal triangle. She finally knew what she needed to make everything right again.

  third grade

  7

  Josie Patel, assigned to the front row because she was the smallest student in Mrs. Groves’s third-grade class, steeled herself not to look back as Seth Raskin and Chip Vasilarakis chose teams for kickball. If she swiveled her head the tiniest bit, it would be apparent that she cared, and nonchalance was the only thing Josie had going for her on that first day at Meeker Creek Elementary School.

  As each pick went by and she remained unchosen, she reminded herself that she was a new girl, the only new girl in a room where everyone else seemed to be old friends. She was a short, skinny new girl with what she was just beginning to suspect was a disastrous haircut—boyishly short, an attempt to tame her cowlicky curls. Clearly she was going to be the last or next to last called. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter, that she wouldn’t always be new, judged solely by her size and her strangeness and her stupid hair. Still, it hurt. She felt odd-looking, with her dark skin and darker hair. Her old school, back in Baltimore, had been so small that differences hadn’t mattered as much. Here she was the only dark-skinned girl. There was an African-American boy and three girls who were what Josie thought of as real Asians—Chinese and Japanese, with pretty, pretty hair, straight and shiny—but no one who looked like Josie.

  “What are you?” a ghostly pale redheaded girl had asked her that morning before the bell rang.

  “American,” Josie said, although she knew what the girl was trying to determine.

  “I mean your parents. Are they from Mexico or someplace like that?”

  “They’re American.”

  “Are you adopted? You look like Minetta, in Mrs. Flippo’s class. She had to fly here on a plane from India when she was a little baby, and the plane ride was, like, a whole day. She flew through seven time zones.”

  “My grandparents’ parents were from India,” Josie admitted. “But my dad was born in Chicago.”

  “So you’re not adopted.”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” The redheaded girl’s tone suggested this was a failing on Josie’s part. She had a flat, thin face with watery blue eyes that looked even smaller behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m adopted.”

  The redheaded girl abandoned her, going to whisper with a dark-haired girl from another class. That was okay. Josie didn’t want to be friends with them anyway. The redheaded girl was funny-looking, and her friend had a sneaky look. She wouldn’t settle for them. The redheaded girl was Seth Raskin’s last pick, leaving Josie for Chip, who made a face and said, “Her, I guess.”

  Given the last slot for at-bats, Josie was worried she wouldn’t get a turn before recess ended. What if she never got a turn? What if the game started over from the beginning, every day, and she was always at the end of the line, and the bell rang just as she approached the plate? At least being last gave her time to study Seth’s fast, underhanded rolling style. The ball was the standard red rubber one, lighter than a soccer ball, but it gathered a stinging, intimidating force when kicked hard enough. Josie could tell which kids had played soccer by the way they approached the ball, where they placed their toes.

  When her team was sent to the field, she was sent to far, far right, the loser’s spot.

  Few of the girls were any good. One on Seth’s team was especially bad, her feeble kick sending the ball only a few feet from home plate. Tagged out at first, she made an elaborate curtsy, turning her incompetence into comedy. The other students seemed to like her, Josie noted, despite the fact that she made the last out, giving Josie’s team another turn. Fourth in line now, she prayed, literally prayed, that she would get up to the plate before the end of the inning.

  She did, with runners on first and second, one out. “I could take your turn,” Chip offered. “I mean, if you don’t feel like it.”

  “I feel like it,” Josie said.

  She let the first ball roll by, paying no attention to the groans behind her. It had too much spin. The second pitch came flat and direct, and she booted it into right field, straight at the redheaded girl, who didn’t even try to catch it, just covered her face with her hands and squealed as the ball rolled away, the other outfielders chasing it. “Binnie!” her teammates yelled, in a way that made it clear they did not find her antics humorous. Josie scampered home. “Hey, she’s good,” Seth said accusingly, as if Chip had tricked him by not choosing her until last.

  “I played soccer in the city,” she panted out. “My coach wanted me to be on a travel team, but my mom works and can’t do all that driving.”

  It was a promising start. Yet being athletic was not enough to win Josie friends, not at first. All it gave her was some breathing room those first few weeks, as the girls studied her and she studied them back, trying to figure out where she might fit.

  The
boys would have been happy for her company, for Josie was not only agile but fearless, doing tricks on the monkey bars that few other third-graders dared. But Josie had already decided that she did not want to be one of those girls who have boys for friends. Her best friend back in Baltimore, Parson, had been a boy, and the grown-ups had been stupid about it, asking when they were going to get married. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. She preferred a best friend, but all the girls in Mrs. Groves’s class already came in pairs. And while some of the girls began to court her—offering her stickers and pogs, which were very big then, inviting her to sit with them at lunch—the two she liked best didn’t seem to notice her at all.

  Perri Kahn—the thin girl from the kickball game, the one who had curtsied—and Kat Hartigan had a calm, quiet way about them, as if they were visiting the third grade from some far more desirable place. They were not the prettiest or most fashionable girls. They were not mean or bossy, although Perri’s words were often sharp, shooting down the dumber kids with sharp one-liners. (Lifted from television, Josie would come to find out, but that was allowed. It was okay to copy a television program, as long as you thought of it first. Copying the copier was what was unforgivable.) Kat, who wore her blond hair in fat pigtails, was super nice to everyone and therefore forgiven for her consistent A’s, about which she was borderline apologetic. “Hey,” she said to everyone, even Josie, and it made Josie happy in a way that she could never have explained, getting her own personal “Hey” from Kat Hartigan.