Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Out in the parking lot,Alexa realized that the timing of the incident would make it nightmarishly impossible to account for everyone. While teachers had brought their roll books, they had yet to take morning attendance. Ten minutes before the first bell, the school was just full enough to be chaotic. There was no way to determine who had been inside or if the three wings under evacuation had truly emptied.

The staff tried to organize the chattering students, directing them to their homeroom teachers, insisting they turn off their cell phones, but it was like trying to gather feathers in a breeze. Some of the stoner-skater crowd-known as skeezers, for reasons Alexa had never grasped-drifted across the athletic field, heading to the fringe of woods where they gathered in all but the most intolerable weather. Alexa wanted to call after them that this was probably not the best time to get high. Then again, maybe it was. Certainly the police would have more pressing things to do than round up a few pot smokers.

Meanwhile students continued to arrive by car only to turn around promptly, sometimes taking other students with them, even as teachers yelled at them not to go. Parents, pulling up with dawdling freshmen and sophomores who had missed their buses, behaved no more responsibly, fleeing the moment they caught the scent of the emergency. Alexa imagined the stories that were starting in their heads, the tales of ordinary lateness-oversleeping, finishing homework-that would now take on epic dimensions. These parents were the lucky ones. They had the advantage of knowing now that their children were safe. Other parents would have to endure that horrible gap between partial and full knowledge. Once the police arrived, the driveways to the school would be blocked and parents would be directed to the nearby middle school to wait for their children. That, too, was part of the procedure of a Level II emergency. But it had all seemed so theoretical, so remote, during the training.

The faculty and those students who remained in the parking lot studied the school, as if the building itself might explain what was going on. It stared back, blank-faced, secretive.

Eve Muhly approached Alexa, standing a little too close, as usual, so Alexa could feel the odd heat the girl always generated, like a toddler who had just awakened from a long yet unsuccessful nap.

“Ms. Cunningham?”

“You can call me Alexa, Eve. You know that.”

“Someone said it happened in the restroom?” Her voice rose on what should have been a declarative statement of fact. Eve often needed affirmation for the simplest assertions.

“ Who said, Eve?” It was Alexa’s automatic reply to anything that sounded like a rumor, even if she happened to know that the story was true. She never missed an opportunity to remind her students of the power of gossip, of mere words.

Eve looked around her feet, as if her informant were something she had temporarily misplaced or dropped. “Someone? I didn’t see, exactly? But I definitely heard someone behind me as we were leaving, and she said she, like, heard it, she heard something.”

“Those in the north wing were instructed to stay put.” Alexa would never fall into the trap of calling it “containment.” She eschewed jargon and euphemisms whenever possible, feeling it gave her more credibility with the students.

“Right. Like, if you were about to go into the bathroom and you heard shots, would you just stand there and wait for an announcement about what to do?”

Alexa looked at Eve closely. “Are you talking about yourself, Eve? Were you outside the bathroom when it happened? Did you call the office?”

“No, I’m just saying. Like, a hypo…hypo…hypothetical. If I heard shots, I wouldn’t just stand around. I’d run.”

“But you said ‘she.’ And you said she was going into the girls’ room. So you know that much.”

“Yeah. Well. I know a girl’s voice from a boy’s voice. And no one goes into the boys’ bathroom, not even the skankiest girls. The boys’ bathrooms are nasty .”

“Do you know anything else, Eve?” Alexa glanced at the girl’s hands, but Eve was the daughter of old farmers. They may have tolerated her alliance with the skeezer crowd, but they were too thrifty to allow their daughter a cell phone. Eve had neither called nor been called in the frantic minutes since the school was evacuated.

“Someone said a name?” Eve squirmed like an insect impaled on a pin, equal parts misery and defiance. The poor girl constantly sought attention yet was mortified once she got it.

“A name?”

“Of the person who’s, like, shot.”

Alexa waited.

“They said-” Eve leaned even closer to Alexa and whispered-“Kat Hartigan.”

“Kat? Are you sure?”

“It’s what she said.”

“Who, Eve?” But Alexa knew that even if Eve had any more concrete information, she wouldn’t share it, not under the watchful eyes of her friends.

“Someone? I don’t know. I didn’t see her? I only, like, heard as I was walking out.” Eve lifted up her hair and let it drop back on her neck, then disappeared into her group, blending in with them so thoroughly that she might have been a chameleon, taking on the protective coloration of a tree or a leaf.

And now that Alexa had the name-Kat Hartigan-it suddenly seemed to be everywhere, on everyone’s lips. “Did you hear? It was Kat Hartigan.” “Shut up!” “No, seriously. Kat.” Kat. Kat. Kat .

The students and teachers shared the rumor with horror, shock, and just a little bit of smugness-the smugness born of knowing, the smugness born of being alive. All information was gossip, Alexa thought, even in the mouths of the best-intentioned people. As she told her students, gossip was not about content, and it was not necessarily false. Gossip was about self-importance, the thrill of knowing something and telling others. Those who passed along Kat Hartigan’s name were not simply sharing a fact. They were establishing that they were inside the loop and therefore important. Later she would try to impress this fact upon her students, use this as a learning tool-assuming the school year hadn’t just come to a premature end. It was hard to know what the school district would choose to do.

What was she doing, making lesson plans in her head, when a student might be wounded in the school, or even dead? It had to be a rumor, Alexa thought. Kat Hartigan didn’t have an enemy in the world. She was the school’s figurative and literal princess, crowned at the prom just two weeks ago. Many students envied her, but no one disliked her. She had the kind of gentle prettiness and self-deprecating manner that girls find tolerable and boys find preferable.

The police arrived, and now the school property was officially sealed off, with no one permitted to enter or leave. Media vans lined the street just beyond the school’s driveway, and a few parents stood along the road’s shoulder, craning their necks, gesturing at the students, some of whom ran back and forth, relaying Lord-knows-what information. Alexa felt bad for these parents and others, the ones gathering at the middle school. Of course, many of them would have spoken to their children by now, thanks to the omnipresent cell phones. Even those who did not have phones, girls such as Eve Muhly, could find a way to get word to their parents, assuming that they understood how worried their parents would be. It was all too possible for teenagers to forget that the news of a shooting would scare their parents. Teenagers took their immortality for granted.

And it was still possible, wasn’t it, that everything would be okay? That Kat Hartigan would walk out of the school, tossing her hair and laughing in her apologetic way, embarrassed to have been the focus of so much attention, to have caused any interruption to the school day. Maybe it was a senior prank, a kind of emotional vandalism that Barbara Paulson hadn’t thought to outlaw. The official news was not bad, not yet. Nothing had been established for the record. Alexa held to that hope even as the Shock Trauma helicopter came and went, even as an ambulance drove across the grass and back again, then left the school parking lot with its lights flashing. These were vehicles for survivors, for those who could be saved.