Then an unthinkable rumor began, and the two stories merged in a way that no one could have predicted. Josie heard it first at a cheerleading practice that Kat had missed because she was being tutored for the AP tests. As soon as she got home, she IM’ed Kat, eager to be the first to tell her the latest gossip.
J: have u heard?
K:?
J: S, C and K = incident at Snyder farm. Blood on clothes not theirs. May be PIG blood.
K: NO.
J: Yes.
K: That’s just stupid gossip. Don’t spread it. U know what
Ms. Cunningham says.
J: Perri calls her Ms. Cunnilingus. Cuz she’s all about the mouth.
K::O! Gross!
J: Audrey sez her mom heard from someone at school.
K: Audrey is an idiot. Gotta go-c u later.
Later Josie remembered that Kat had dated Seth once or twice, back in sophomore year, her rebound relationship after Peter Lasko. Like most of the boys Kat dated since that summer with Peter, Seth had ended up being more of a friend, but a devoted one. Josie had pretended to like him, because life was easier that way. It didn’t pay to be too obviously at war with any of the jocks. But Seth had always creeped her out. Where other girls saw his silent style as cool-still waters running deep-Josie had sensed a real meanness in him. And everyone knew Chip was a thug.
But Kenny-well, Kenny had always reminded her of herself, and not just because they were both short. His energy, his bounciness, his clownishness, were not unlike hers. He was the kind of boy who tried hard to please others. In the same situation, if Kat had been drinking-or Perri, although Perri was uninterested in alcohol, perhaps because her parents had given her permission to drink as long as she promised to call them should she ever need a ride-there was no doubt in Josie’s mind that she would take the wheel.
The rumors about the accident continued to whip through Glendale with the same hit-or-miss velocity of the breezes that cut through the courtyard at the high school. Everyone’s information seemed to be fourth-or fifth-hand; each new piece of gossip had the life span of a soap bubble. People did not seem to care if the boys had really done what they were suspected of doing. Their primary concern was whether it was fair to pursue such an inquiry in the wake of their deaths. People were people and pigs were pigs; their lives should not be equated in any way.
The gossip spun ’round and ’round like a child in a tantrum, reckless, indifferent to its own strength. The Snyders wanted an investigation. The Glendale families wanted the controversy buried with the boys. The matter was resolved in an unexpected way when an anonymous benefactor stepped in and made restitution to Cyrus Snyder. The police dropped the inquiry-after all, there was no one to charge, and the murder of a pig, unlike the murder of a person, was not a statistic that demanded a clearance. In the end no one in Glendale really knew if the boys’ clothes had been tested for the presence of nonhuman blood, as rumor had it. Or if a bag of poison had been recovered from the wreckage of the car. It probably wasn’t true either that Kenny Raskin, dying slowly behind the wheel of his overturned SUV, had attempted to make a full confession to the firefighters attempting to extract him. His injuries had been much too severe for him to speak.
Once everything settled down, Alexa Cunningham tried to use the tragedy as a learning exercise, explaining to her students that spreading such rumors was irresponsible and cruel, that people could even be sued for making false allegations about private citizens.
“In your history class,” she had told her girls, “you are taught the difference between primary and secondary sources. In the media there are distinctions among knowing something first-, second-, and thirdhand. Primary, or firsthand, refers to things you have observed. The moment you rely on someone else’s account of an event, no matter how authoritative, you open yourself up to errors. Even in retelling the details of an event that you have seen, you may make mistakes, large or small. Memory is imperfect.”
She told them about the fallibility of eyewitnesses in criminal cases, reading from a piece in the New Yorker. She put them through an exercise, asking half of the students to leave the room while the others watched Ms. Cunningham and the history teacher, Mr. Nathanson, act out a skit. The other students were then summoned back to the room and paired with those who had seen the skit. Based on the retelling, they had to write short reports about what happened.
“It’s like Telephone,” Ms. Cunningham had concluded after sharing some of the funnier errors with the students. “Only it’s not a harmless game. Misinformation can ruin a person’s life.”
A girl’s voice called from the back of the room, “But what if a story is true? Can someone sue you for telling the truth?”
A few girls gasped, but it was a fake shock, a form of mockery. The girl who had asked the question was Eve Muhly, and everyone knew that the stories about her were true. Who was she going to sue, when sixty other sophomores had seen exactly what she did?
“The point of this exercise is just how hard it is to know the truth of anything. If you don’t have firsthand information from primary sources, you shouldn’t gossip about it.”
“What if you talked to the victim?” Eve persisted. “Because I did.”
“I didn’t know,” Ms. Cunningham said, “that you were a pig whisperer, Eve.”
Everyone laughed, and Ms. Cunningham looked uncomfortable at the success of her joke, clearly aware that she had been less than teacherlike in her demeanor. But Eve didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed.
“I mean the Snyder family. We live next to them. My dad went over there after he heard what happened. Would my dad count as a firsthand source?”
“No, he would be secondhand, unless he told you about something he observed directly, not what Mr. Snyder told him. But really, Eve, the point is not to talk anymore about this horrible incident, the point is-”
“My dad saw it. So it’s firsthand. He saw the letter with his own eyes.”
“Eve-”
“They used blood to write a note. It said, ‘We’re coming for your pig daughter this summer.’”
This gasp was real. This information was new, and quite provocative. Binnie Snyder was not as pink and red-eyed as she had been in grade school, but she was still an odd girl with carroty hair, a girl so advanced in mathematics that she took extra classes at Johns Hopkins. When she spoke in class-and she spoke often-her voice was too loud and strangely inflected. And she still had a way of squinching up her face when thinking hard. “Pig” would have been unkind, but not altogether untrue.