Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

She took her seat among the girls, waiting to be congratulated, welcomed. The bus was suddenly so quiet, all the usual buzz gone. Perhaps people had fallen asleep.

Finally Beverly said, “That’s a lot of calories, you know.”

“Oh, but Eve doesn’t have to worry about what she eats,” Thalia said. “You can eat anything, can’t you, Eve?”

Everyone laughed, and Eve joined them, thinking it was a funny line. It was only the next day, when she tried to sit with them in the cafeteria and Beverly said all the seats were taken, that she knew she had been tricked. She just didn’t know why.

The strange thing was,the story didn’t spread, not in the way that Thalia and Beverly had clearly intended. The sophomores knew, and then the rest of the students, but the story failed to jump the firewall to the faculty. Eve stalked through the halls for a week, fierce and proud, staring balefully at boys who attempted to taunt her. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said, not understanding the double meaning of her words until she saw Graham blush brick red and punch the boys who dared to laugh. From then on she said the line deliberately to anyone who dared to approach her. “It wasn’t a big deal at all.”

After a week of this, Val Morrisey stopped by Eve’s locker at day’s end.

“Hey,” she said. She was a big girl, broad-shouldered, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes, a light, clear green.

“Hey,” said Eve, steeling herself for some new form of taunt she hadn’t imagined. Val had a legendary mouth, as quick and lethal as Perri Kahn’s. Unlike Perri, she used it only for her own amusement, refusing to join the debate or drama clubs.

“Some of us were going to get some coolers at Caribou Coffee. You want to come?”

“I take the bus home,” Eve said. “I live pretty far out.”

“This guy I know, Tom, he has a car. He could drop you home, after.” Val saw Eve hesitate. “He’s my friend, and he’d take you home if I told him to, and if he tried anything-not that he would with me in the car-I’d knee him in the balls. Okay?”

“I’d have to call my mom. I mean, I don’t have to ask for permission or anything. She’ll just need to know that I’m coming home in someone’s car.”

“Here,” Val said, proffering her cell.

It was that easy.Val liked Eve because she hadn’t broken down in the face of the diva girls who had been intent on humiliating her. And whomever Val liked, Lila liked and the other skeezers accepted. Val and Lila even knew why Eve had attracted the divas’ wrath. “You’re cute,” Val said, and Lila nodded a little reluctantly. “They hated that boys were looking at you.” Eve finally had the new start she had wanted. The divas’ only recourse was to go to Ms. Cunningham and tell the whole story, pretending it was because they were so very, very concerned about Eve.

Ms. Cunningham had summoned Eve’s parents to school, which was what the divas had wanted all along. Again-why? That was the part that Eve still didn’t get. Not even Val understood this strategy. Did they want her parents to come to school in hopes that their very queerness would destroy what she had with Val and Lila? Eve remembered a goat that had been born blind, the way the other goats had cowered in the pen, afraid of it, when it was the weakest and most helpless of all. Was she the blind goat of Glendale High School? No, she was just a girl who had been dumb enough to yearn openly for what she wasn’t supposed to have. That was the lesson Beverly and Thalia had been intent on teaching her. Know your place, redneck.

In Ms. Cunningham’s office, bracketed by her parents, Eve had a terrible moment. She was still more good girl than skeezer then-she had not started smoking, much less using pot, although she would learn to do those things over time-and she could not imagine the punishment her father would fashion when he learned what she had done with Graham Booth. Her father always said the punishment should fit the crime, by which he meant it should have a certain Old Testament logic. Would he bind her mouth with duct tape? Make her swallow something even more disgusting? Did her parents even know about oral sex? It seemed unlikely. As Eve understood it, the activity had been pretty much abandoned until the former president made it popular again.

But Ms. Cunningham did not tell. She had meant to, Eve was sure of it, perhaps had thought Eve would volunteer the story, which showed how little Ms. Cunningham knew of Eve. In the end, however, she could not form the words, and Eve certainly didn’t volunteer any information. Ms. Cunningham told Eve’s parents that she was worried about Eve’s thinness, to which her father had said, “You wouldn’t be if you could see our food bill. The girl eats like there’s no tomorrow.”

Her mother put in, “It’s just genes. I was built the same way, as a girl.”

Ms. Cunningham gave Eve’s parents some pamphlets on eating disorders. Her father glanced at them, then stared at Eve. “Do you do this? Eat good food and throw it up? Because that’s just wasteful.”

“No, sir,” she said. It was so easy, being sincere when telling the truth. It almost seemed like cheating. Then again, Eve was pretty sure she could be just as sincere when lying. Ms. Cunningham waited to see if Eve could be bluffed into saying anything, then finally sent the Muhlys on their way.

“That was a strange to-do over nothing,” Eve’s father grumbled. “Making a man come all the way up to the school just to ask why a girl is thin.”

Eve supposed that Ms. Cunningham thought Eve owed her now, which is why she kept asking her questions yesterday. But Eve didn’t see it that way. Besides, people didn’t really want to know the truth. They thought they did, then got mad at the people who insisted on it. It was a lesson Eve had learned over and over in high school. Stick to the official version of things. Say what people wanted to hear. And no one, no one, wanted to hear what she knew now.

Harold Lenhardthad made sergeant twice in his life, first in city homicide, where he got his twenty and got out when the new commissioner proved to be a jackass, and now he was a sergeant in the county, going on five years. Funny, that “new” commissioner back in Baltimore was almost ten years and four commissioners ago. Time flies, whether or not you’re having fun. His colleagues liked to tease him, ask if he was going to retire from Baltimore County when he got his second twenty, then head to Carroll, the next county over, and make sergeant yet again.

“It’s not out of the realm of statistical possibility,” he said this morning, as he and Infante reviewed their notes in preparation for a meeting with higher-ups who wanted to be briefed on the Hartigan shooting. “I’d only be eighty-three when I was done.”

“Qualifying on the range might get tricky,” Infante said. “They say the hands are the first thing to go.”

“Maybe your hands, Infante. Given how much extracurricular activity they see.” Lenhardt made a pumping motion with his fist, one universally understood by men everywhere. Or was it? Did, say, Chinese peasants or aborigines in the outback do the same thing? It was the kind of topic you never saw tackled on the Discovery Channel, but why not? It could be interesting-the rituals of male bonding around the world.

“I thought when Nancy went on leave, you wouldn’t be able to gang up on me,” Infante mock-complained. “I’m still the butt of every joke.”

“Not today,” Lenhardt said. “Today the joke’s on the guy who’s not getting overtime. And that would be yours truly.”

No overtime for sergeants, to paraphrase the title of a movie that Lenhardt’s father had loved beyond reason. Gary Cooper? No, he had been Sergeant York. Andy Griffith? Yes, that was it.