Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

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.

Finally, the week after Halloween, a wonderful thing happened. Strep throat made its way through Meeker Creek Elementary, and Perri was out of school for an entire week. Well, it wasn’t wonderful that Perri was sick. But her absence gave Josie a chance to slide into the empty seat opposite Kat during lunch, something that no one else had thought to do.

“Hey,” Kat said, and Josie thought she detected a note of happy surprise in Kat’s usual greeting, as if she had been nervous about being alone.

“Hey.” Josie, who had fantasized about a day when Kat Hartigan might want to talk to her, realized she had not planned on anything to say next. “Do you always wear your hair in braids?”

Kat touched one of her fat plaits, so blond it was almost white. “My mom says I have to wear it this way if I want to keep it long. Otherwise it’s too much trouble, and she says I’ll have to get it all cut off.”

“My mom made the barber give me this cut because my hair’s so curly, but I’m going to grow it back out. It’s already grown two inches since school started.” Josie was sure of this, for she pulled a lock from her forehead every night and measured it with the purple ruler from her pencil case.

“I wish I had curly hair.”

“It tangles even worse than straight hair. Even with cream rinse, it tangles.”

Another silence fell, but it was more companionable, filled with chewing and discreet inspection of each other’s lunches. Kat had Lunchables, which were new at the time and the height of coolness. Josie had a turkey sandwich topped with a special kind of homemade relish. Her father and mother took their lunches to work, and they were firm believers that thrift should be balanced with small indulgences. So Josie’s sandwich was fresh-roasted turkey on bakery bread from Graul’s, her dessert a collection of iced petit fours. Without being asked, Josie pushed two toward Kat, who seemed delighted by this tribute, yet not particularly surprised.

“Where did you live? Before here?”

“ Baltimore. In the city.”

“That’s where my dad grew up, but I’ve always lived in Glendale.”

“Cool,” Josie said, hoping it was the right thing to say. It must have been, because Kat then asked, “Do you want to come over to my house?”

“I have a sitter. My mom works. And I have gymnastics on Tuesdays, down at Gerstung.” Gerstung was a serious gym, the kind whose students sometimes went on to the Olympics, and Josie’s mom always said she should aim high.

“I have horseback riding lessons on Wednesdays. What about Thursday? If you asked, could you come over on Thursday?”

Josie and Kat, raised in an era where the simplest afterschool playdate required planning and permission, both understood the negotiation that had to be completed before Josie could visit Kat’s home. Josie’s mom would have to call Kat’s mom, to make sure that Kat really could bring a friend home from school and that Kat’s mom or some other adult would be there. Josie’s mom would pick her up on her way home from work, while the sitter stayed with Josie’s new baby brother, Matt. The two mothers worked this out by telephone that very evening.

Josie, who watched worriedly as this conversation took place, saw a strange look pass over her mom’s face during the call.

“You didn’t tell me,” she said after hanging up, “that Kat was Katarina Hartigan.”

“Yes I did, I absolutely did, I told you that her full name was Katarina but everyone calls her Kat.” Josie was frantic at the idea that such a trivial matter could deny her this afterschool date.

“Don’t get so upset, Josie. I just meant…she’s a Hartigan . Her grandfather started Glendale. He built our house.”

“Really?” Josie had a vision of Kat and her family in hard hats, pushing wheelbarrows, smoothing concrete between layers of bricks as if icing a multitiered cake. In Josie’s mind the Hartigans were all blond and quite small, just like her-helpful, puttering elves from a fairy tale. She imagined Kat on a ladder, hammering up shutters.