Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

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.