Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

It worried Alexa, these unguarded waves of hostility toward the girls she was committed to helping. But ten years out of high school, she still had mixed feelings about the popular kids. Because Alexa was pretty and slender, the girls at Glendale had projected on her the mantle of a once popular girl, and after a few token protests, she had allowed that false impression to stand. She should have been popular in high school. She was pretty enough. She did well in her studies without being a competitive grind. But she simply did not have the money to keep up with the upper-middle-class kids who dominated her school. Part-time jobs at the Gap and Banana Republic had helped Alexa hold her own in terms of clothes, but some things-a car, for instance-could not be faked in a single-parent household where the child-support checks seldom arrived. While her brother was home, they had kept up appearances, just barely. Once he left, the house had rotted quietly around them. Today location alone meant that the ugly old Cape Cod was worth almost four hundred thousand dollars, and Alexa had encouraged her mother to sell it, buy a little condo, and sock away the equity. But her mother refused to budge. It was as if she still expected Alexa’s father to show up for the scolding she had never been able to give him. Alexa wasn’t even sure if her father was alive, although she sometimes studied those lists of unclaimed property. It would be so like him to die without a will, failing to care for his children in his death as he’d failed to care for them in life.

Do you realize Kat is dead? she wanted to scream at the girls. (The boys, sullen and uncommunicative, were less appalling to her.) Dead because of you, because of the inadequacies bred in girls like Perri, who are driven insane by the no-win games you play. You killed Kat.

But she was being ridiculous, venting her anger toward Barbara on these innocent girls. Just an hour before she was to leave for the funeral, Barbara had convened yet another meeting, one for Perri’s teachers. They had been told, in no uncertain terms, to sit on Perri’s grades. The logic, if one could call Barbara’s twisted thinking logic, was that Perri’s diploma couldn’t be awarded if her records were incomplete. And it turned out that the Kahns were keen for their daughter’s name to be called from the stage Thursday night, arguing that she was not under indictment, so how could her diploma be withheld? Meanwhile Dale Hartigan was just as intent for Perri’s name to go unspoken, and Barbara had tended to do things Dale Hartigan’s way even before he had the moral advantage of a dead child.

“You know how it is when parents take notions about graduation into their heads,” Barbara had told Perri’s teachers. “We’ve already had to forgo the traditional valedictorian address because-well, you know how insane it got. So the easiest thing to do is just say she had incompletes in a subject or two. Surely she must have owed some of you work.”

Only it turned out she hadn’t-except to Alexa and the trig teacher, Maureen Downey, who had given seniors a take-home. Maureen couldn’t remember if Perri had turned it in or not, but she was happy to obey Barbara’s orders even if she did find the test among her papers. Alexa, however, wanted no part of it.

“It’s a cover-up,” she began, only to be shushed by Barbara. Literally shushed, a finger held to her lips, as if Alexa were some troublesome child.

“Think of it this way,” the principal said. “Perri violated school policy by bringing a firearm onto school property. That’s automatic expulsion. So even if she did submit those final papers to you both, she would be barred from the ceremony.”

“But it still hasn’t been established that Perri brought the gun to school,” Alexa had said, feeling dangerously close to tears. The other teachers seemed embarrassed for her, except for Ted Gifford, who appeared just as upset.

“Did she turn in her work to you?”

“I’m not sure.” Alexa still had not gone through all her final papers, given that the teachers had until the end of the day Wednesday to submit seniors’ grades.

“Then it’s moot anyway. She’s shy two credits. Even under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have walked.”

She had seen Perri’s final paper, Alexa decided now. Hadn’t it been in her box that Friday morning? She tried to re-create the scene in her mind, but those moments of normalcy could not be brought back. She had been sorting papers, reading Barbara’s memo-and then Anita had started to scream.

Anita, who was here at the funeral, despite being out of work on a doctor’s note. The gall, as Alexa’s mother would say. The un-mitigated gall.

Peter pulled at his collar.He hadn’t worn a tie, off-stage, for a long, long time, and the day was vicious hot. He was such a bonehead, lurching at Kat’s uncle that way, but the resemblance was pretty strong and he hadn’t seen Mr. Hartigan for almost three years. Peter had spent far more time with Mrs. Hartigan, who honestly liked him, and the feeling was pretty mutual. A hot mom, a total MILF. Oh, shit, that was probably the kind of thought that got you struck by lightning, standing at your exgirlfriend’s grave and thinking about how sexy her mom was. I didn’t mean it, he assured God. It was just an observation. Besides, anyone could see that Kat’s mom was appealing. Mr. Hartigan’s girlfriend was nice, too, but Peter preferred Mrs. Hartigan. Her eyes had that little downward droop, so sad and sexy, and her hair was always slipping out of this semi-topknot she wore. There was something about Mrs. Hartigan that made it very easy to imagine her naked, as if her clothes would give way as easily as her hair, sliding to the floor, and there she would be. No, wait, this was really wrong. He had to stop thinking like this. Listen to the minister. Focus on the words. “We”… “Kat”… “special”… “extraordinary”… “before her time.”

Bit by bit the words assembled themselves into sentences, and Peter willed himself into an appropriate state of grieving.

Josie stole a quick glanceover her shoulder, curious to see who had shown up. Peter Lasko was beet red-it looked almost like sunburn, but she had seen him just yesterday at the assembly and he hadn’t been red then. One nice thing about her darker skin-it was very hard to detect a blush. When Josie was nervous or embarrassed, her cheeks flared prettily, two spots of pink on the bone, perfect as a painted doll’s, but only her parents recognized her color as embarrassment or nervousness. The police officers, for example, hadn’t noticed she was blushing at all, especially when they kept asking her about that stupid Tampax.

Josie could tell by the heat in her face that she was blushing now, in her own way. Why had she said that thing to Mrs. Hartigan? Had anyone overheard? When her lawyer had told her that the cops wanted her cell phone to review her text messages from the day of the shooting, Josie had kept calm, handing over her phone as if she didn’t think it was any big deal-and it wasn’t. But that meant they were going to look for Kat’s and Perri’s phones, too. What if they found them? And why had that cop been asking about her Pumas? She had thought she could keep her sandals, wear them again, but maybe not. She shouldn’t have improvised. Definitely not her strong suit. She should have stuck to the plan.

She had never missed Kat or Perri more. Kat would have soothed her, told her it was all going to be all right, while Perri would have had a strategy to deal with those police officers, something far more inventive than just droning “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” over and over. She felt so lost without them.