Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

When Perri found out Dannon knew even more about theater and old movies than she did, their friendship really took off. She drew him into her family, invited him to attend Bounce at the Kennedy Center. (Dannon tried not to think about for whom that ticket had been purchased, months earlier. Kat? Josie? Some boy she had dated? But Perri never seemed to get that tangled up with her boyfriends.) The Kahns’ beaming attention was so seductive, relative to his own mom’s strong but spotty love. They sought his opinions and encouraged vigorous debate, as long as it was backed up with thoughtful reasons. They pushed him to take his ambitions seriously, whereas Dannon was pretty much used to being told by his stepfather that all his dreams were out of reach. Once Mrs. Kahn learned of his interest in fashion design, she began giving him college catalogs for places like RISD and Pratt Institute. A chance remark about film school brought a similar torrent of catalogs and books.

At times Dannon would find himself feeling overwhelmed by the Kahns’ cheerfully high expectations for him. And then he would wonder what it was like to be Perri, but he had never dared to ask, because the last thing he wanted to know was that the Kahns had any shortcomings. Because if Perri’s parents were wrong, then there were no good parents, and who needed to know that?

He had known about the gun. Should he tell her parents? Was it his fault? He had known about the gun, but Perri had said it was a caper. Well, she hadn’t used that word, but she had implied it. All Perri had said was “I stole a gun.” “Why?” “ ‘Seemed like a smile,’” she said, quoting one of their favorite actors in one of their favorite movies, Kevin Bacon in Diner . Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Perri and Dannon had loved that game, because their mastery of old movies made them unstoppable. Their Holy Grail was to link Kevin Bacon to Fatty Arbuckle, and just because they hadn’t done it yet didn’t mean they never would. Unless, of course-but he had to be hopeful. Perri alive was better than Perri dead, right? Even if she faced a lifetime in jail, her parents would want her alive. All the Kahns ever wanted was for their daughter to be the best at what she did.

Dannon had tried so hard to come up with a way to save Perri without ratting her out, which would have lost him her friendship. I tried, I tried, he thought frantically now, not sure if he sought to convince God or himself. But she didn’t tell me she was going to kill Kat. She didn’t say anything like that. “A little theater,” she had promised, nothing more. “Think Much Ado About Nothing .” There was no shooting in that play that Dannon knew of, although, granted, he wasn’t the Shakespeare fiend that Perri was. Still, if the Kahns knew that he had been Perri’s confidant before the fact…

“Here’s your food, Dannon,” Mrs. Kahn said, handing him a cardboard plate that was barely up to holding the two huge slabs of pizza. “What’s making you look so thoughtful?”

“Oh, thinking of that Kevin Bacon game,” he lied. “Still trying to make my way to Fatty Arbuckle.”

What would the Kahns have done if Perri had told them she had a gun, if she had told them she planned to make a rumpus? (That was another one of Perri’s sayings, when she planned mischief: “Let’s make a rumpus.”) Of course, Dannon knew they would have talked her out of it, sent her to a psychiatrist, gotten Perri whatever help she needed for whatever kind of breakdown she was having.

But a part of him, the evil part of him that Perri had so encouraged, couldn’t help imagining the Kahns reacting with their typical enthusiasm: You want to shock everyone in Glendale, dear? You want to kill your friend? Then you must be the best killer of your generation. They would have heaped books and documentaries on Perri, maybe hired a pistol expert to train her in shooting.

Dannon blinked back tears. He knew that voice in his head. It was Perri’s, sarcastic as ever. Get out of my head, Perri. Get back into yours, fix yourself, wake up, explain what happened. Please, Perri, please. Make this make sense. Tell us it’s not what it looks like.

And he saw her again, Mame on the staircase, trumpet in hand, her angular thinness rendered glamorous in the gold sequins he had found for her. Life was a banquet, and Dannon was the poorest son of a bitch of all, still starving despite the two huge slices of pizza he had crammed into his mouth, barely noticing their taste. What would Perri do? Would she want him to tell, or would she want him to be quiet for now? The answer only mattered if you thought she was going to be all right, and that was pretty much Dannon’s religion right now. Clap for Tinker Bell, boys and girls. Clap if you believe in fairies.

If Perri were here, she’d probably got a laugh out of that, Dannon Estes of all people, asking an imaginary audience to believe in fairies. Yet if anything ever got through to Perri, it was definitely applause.

The summer beforethe girls were to enter sixth grade, a new middle school was completed and the students in the Glendale subdivisions had to be split between the old and the new. Perri and Josie remained in the district for the original school, Hammond Springs, but Kat wound up on the other side of an invisible line and was assigned to Deerfield.

No one liked this idea, of course. Kat was terrified at the idea of being alone-separated not only from Perri and Josie but from virtually every classmate she had known since kindergarten, with the exception of Binnie Snyder. Perri had become so enamored of the idea of the three of them that she viewed the new school as a specific plot to break them up. Josie didn’t care so much if they were two or three, but if there were going to be just two, she would prefer it to be Kat and her. While she and Perri sometimes spent time alone-and even had fun that way, for Josie rather liked Perri’s cruel wit, as long as it was directed at others-she was nervous she wouldn’t be able to meet Perri’s standards, day to day. Kat was their anchor, the one who kept them steady.

“We’re a triangle,” Perri said. “And a triangle that loses one of its points is nothing but a line.”

“Wouldn’t we be two lines?” Geometry was not Josie’s best subject.

“No, just two points, a single line. It takes three points to make a shape.” Perri, like Kat, was in gifted-and-talented math.

“It won’t be so bad for you,” Kat said. “You’ll have each other, while I’ll be alone. What am I supposed to do, ride the bus with Binnie?”

“The new school is prettier, though,” Josie said, thinking that might be a consolation.

“You’re not going,” Perri assured Kat, but even her agile mind failed to concoct a plan. It was the beginning of summer, but the season’s normal joys were small consolation to them as they contemplated summer’s end.

Yet the girls had an unexpected ally in Kat’s father, who believed that Deerfield, despite its newness, was not as desirable as Hammond Springs. “Teachers are what make schools good,” he said. “Not buildings.” (Perhaps this was a lesson that he had learned from the high school, whose physical problems were manifest now that it was three years old.) Meetings were held, phone calls were made, and somehow, midway through August, the invisible line jumped over the Hartigans’ house and it came back into the Hammond district, along with the Snyder and Muhly farms.

So it was with giddy relief that the girls met at the Ka-pe-jos’ old campsite, the ceremonial grounds, although the tribal name had fallen into disuse over the last year. No one had said they should stop speaking of the Ka-pe-jos or relinquish their vows. A day just came when it seemed natural to stop doing those things. Josie assumed that a new game or ritual might replace the old, and she had waited hopefully to see where Perri’s imagination might lead them. But so far the abandoned campfire was a place to meet and talk, nothing more.