Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

By the end of the week, everyone at Meeker Creek Elementary knew that Binnie Snyder and Eve Muhly had been pretending to be bears in the woods and had gone to the bathroom outside, wiping themselves with leaves. Some said they even had rashes on their bottoms, because they had foolishly used poison oak or sumac. Binnie insisted that it was Kat and Perri and the new girl who had been acting queer in the woods, holding hands and chanting, but it sounded weak, compared to what everyone now knew, or thought they knew, about Binnie and Eve.

“Was it wrong, what we did?” Josie asked Perri and Kat.

“They shouldn’t have been spying,” Perri said.

“I didn’t do anything,” Kat said.

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.