In high school, we were known as the three musketeers. You never saw three people so mismatched in your life. First, there was Marta, a Scandinavian blonde. She just had to walk from one shadow to the next and she was tanned. Then there was Lily. Her parents were Chinese and they gave her jet black hair and beautifully kind eyes. And, lastly, there was me, Kelly. I'm Irish with red hair, blue eyes and a stubborn streak a mile wide. Or at least according to my folks.
We met, three scared new kids, on our first day in high school and it was like we instantly formed a pact. We would look out for each other and make it out alive. By the end of the first semester, there was nothing that could tear us apart.
Because of that, we looked upon graduation with a sense of dread. We'd spent our time working in the school library, but none of us had any real plans for anything else. I couldn't afford college, Lily's parents could. Yet they insisted that nice girls didn't need to be smart, just pretty. Lily was plenty of both, but she would never go against her parents' wishes. Marta had no interest in college. She had been told at four that she had a very short lifeline and would die early. The fact that she believed it scared me a little as it gave her a reckless view of life. She was a good worker, but after work, she was a party animal. Lily and I frequently went along, mostly just to make sure she got back in one piece.
So after all the excitement and 'this is the first day of the rest of your lives' speeches died down , we sat in the park and tried to figure out what we could do. I loathed the idea of not being with my friends every day. Lily loathed the idea of having to get married and spend the rest of her life cooking and taking care of babies. Marta wanted to cram as much as she could into what she saw as her very short life.
"Okay, so what are we good at?" I asked, tossing a peanut to a squirrel. There was an old guy sitting on the bench beside ours, but he was more engrossed in his paper than three kids
"Math!" Marta said, having the good sense to eat her peanuts.
"Remembering stuff!" Lily never forgot anything she read and could find some obscure passage in a book she'd read five years previously. She'd been valedictorian of our class, but Marta and I were second and third. There was only a separation of a few tenths of a percentage.
"Okay, what is the molecular weight of a rocket going a hundred miles an hour towards a meteor that was traveling two hundred miles an hour towards it?" Marta asked. She loved math and that was the reason she skunked me out of the number two spot. Still, my English skills left both of them in my dust.
"Who's driving?" Lily was very practical.
"What difference does that make?" I countered.
"Loads. If it's a guy, the weight will be zippo because he'd smash into the rocket trying to prove he's stronger. If it's a woman, she'd have the common sense to get out of the way."
"Unless it's Shelly."
"Unless it's Shelly," Lily agreed and we all laughed. " Shelly was one of those vaporous beings who drifted from class to class and never raised her hand, never answered a question, and never took a test, yet she always managed to somehow pass the class. I'm afraid that our reason for it wasn't very nice. It's just that she was too perfect. She had too many friends, mostly guys, her family had more money than they knew what to do with - she'd gotten a new car and a trip to Europe as a graduation gift. I'd gotten a cake. We all hated her and desperately wished we could be just like her.
"Okay, so maybe we should see if the library is hiring."
"You need a degree to be a librarian." Lily was nothing if not practical.
"But not to work in a library, my friends. We could shelve books, tidy up, stuff like that. It would be just like in school." I was grabbing onto the one thing we'd all excelled at. "I just want us to, you know, be together. We were good and we helped people find what they needed. "
"But how are we going to find that kind of work. Most libraries don't have the money to hire one, much less three people for something like that."
"There is a way, if you are up to the challenge." Our heads swiveled as if they were all connected to a single rod to the old guy on the bench as he looked at us from his paper.
"A way what?" Marta reached down and grabbed my hand and squeezed hard. I winced, but kept quiet.
"What kind of challenge?" Lily added.
"That you could work together." Slowly he stood. My back ached just watching him. "I work for a company and we are always interested in recruiting people who want to work to help others." He offered us each a business card. "This is a legitimate job offer, but I can understand how it must seem. Take my card home and discuss it with your parents. It would be a way for you to work together and help others."
Thus, we began our career with UNCLE. Except that no one outside our family knew it was UNCLE. They thought we maintained a small private library, which we did, sort of.
The three of us became responsible for a growing library of reference material. For a long time, it had been crammed into a corner of a sub basement, ignored except when someone needed something. Then there was no rhyme or reason. If they found what they were looking for, it was more by chance than anything else. UNCLE wanted to put an end to that and we were that end.
We didn't have much experience with the Dewey decimal system, so we created something that could work. Lily and I sorted things into categories and Marta, being very number oriented, cooked up something that would make sense to us, if not anyone else.
It took us months to make any kind of inroads. People started to come by and were amazed that we could actually find the information they were looking for. We were on top of the world - or we should have been. I mean, we were together every day, but something shifted along the way. We weren't kids anymore.
I got my own tiny apartment and I thought it would be great to have a place we could call our own. At least it was until Marta showed up with a boy in tow and asked if I could take a walk for about a half hour. At first, I thought she just wanted to have a spot where they could talk privately, then I found a used condom in the trash and a stain on my sheets. I lowered the boom and things became quite strained. Strike One.
One day at work I came around the corner and heard Lily talking, "You know I graduated top of my class. She really is dead wood and is holding back the whole project." I was about to say, "Hey, don't take about Marta like that" when she added, "It's not Kelly's fault, though. She's not really good at anything." Then she went on to take credit for our color coding system, which I had developed completely on my own. Strike Two.
Nothing exciting ever happens on Wednesday, or so I thought. I came in through the employee entrance in the parking garage and went down into the lower level of HQ. I can't even remember who I saw or what we talked about. It would be a regular morning with two people I hardly knew anymore. We were civil enough, but our friendship was quickly crumbling into dust.
"Hey, Lily," I said, still laughing about something. She jumped about a foot and I smiled. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."
"What are you doing here?" Her tone was harsh and I was sort of taken aback.
"What do you mean?" I said. "It's Wednesday. It's a work day."
"You need to take the day off."
It slipped. I hadn't meant it to, but her tone was so nasty that out it came. "Why, so you can take credit for something else I did?"
Her face paled and she knew that I knew what she'd done. Instead of apologizing, her mouth pursed. "You are a slacker and we're tired of pulling your weight!" Yet all the time she was yelling this, she kept looking down, off to her left. There was something very wrong and I should have realized that, but I didn't care. I was hurt and mad. I was usually the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave. I worked through my lunch more times than I could remember while they went out clothes shopping. It just wasn't fair.
I stormed off and headed for the Canteen to nurse my hurt pride. Drinking the Canteen coffee didn't help, in fact, it made the pain in my gut even worse. I knew after this I had to go to see if I could be reassigned somewhere else and that thought made me want to cry. How had everything gotten so bad so quickly? Six months ago, we were inseparable. Now we couldn't even look at each other.
"I have never seen anyone who looks more as if they had lost their best friend." I glanced up and there was a dark-haired guy smiling down at me. I recognized the badge. It was yellow and that meant enforcement. "Well, they say misery loves company. May I join you?"
I smiled back and nodded, but inwardly I cringed. This guy was flirting with me and he had to be at least a hundred years old. Yuck, I'm not into dinosaurs. "Sure." I offered my hand. "I'm Kelly."
"Hello, Kelly, I'm Napoleon."
Oh, I'd heard about this guy. He was dating half the secretarial pool and had dumped the other half. Not that I'm into old guys, but he had a partner who was very easy on the eyes and who seemed this guy's other half, if you know what I mean. I also knew he was one of Mr. Waverly's Poster Boys. He shouldn't have a care in the world, yet his eyes looked so sad. "Hi, Napoleon. I'm pleased to meet you. What's wrong?"
"Why would anything be wrong?"
"Your eyes. You're smiling, but they aren't. And you as much admitted that you were as miserable as I am."
"Well, let's just say not all partnerships sail on smooth seas all the time."
From what I'd heard on the grapevine, the friendship these two shared was tighter than tight. I wondered what happened. "It can't be all that bad. He's your partner."
"He is that, warts and all." Napoleon sipped his coffee and made a face. "Speaking of such, I wonder if that's the Canteen's secret ingredient in this."
"How do you do it?"
"Do what, Kelly?"
"You are sad, but you are still able to joke."
"I guess by knowing that a sailor can ride out the roughest seas without losing his love for sailing." He smiled again. "He's difficult, but I trust him with my life... and my friendship, even when I think mine means nothing to him. I hope I'm wrong and I just have to be patient. Then my eyes will be happy again."
"Your eyes…" That's when it hit me.
"Kelly, what's wrong? You've gone white."
"She wouldn't look at me."
"What? Who?"
"My friend, Lily. She was yelling at me, but she kept looking to the left and down."
"Well, in my line of work, that usually means trouble."
"And I just took off and left her, just like a big fat-"
"Hey, now, none of that. Why don't we both pay her a visit? Perhaps this can all be cleared up with a little talk."
"I hope so."
We were leaving the Canteen when Marta came storming it. She took one look at me, then Napoleon, then back to me.
"What the hell is wrong with Lily?" She demanded, as if this was all my fault. "What did you do to her, Kelly?"
"Why is it my fault? Why is it always my fault?" I yelled back and got right up in her face. If she wanted a fight, I'd give her one. I took a swing and the next thing I knew I was looking at the pattern of a grey silk suit jacket. Napoleon has stepped between us.
"Okay, let's stop before we start." Napoleon's tone was no nonsense and even Marta had to respect it. "It's time to see what Lily has to say about all of this."
"Fine with me." I knew Marta wanted to say a lot more, but we were attracting seven kinds of attention and even she knew better than to push our superiors too far.
"Where do you two work?"
"We're the ones putting the research library together."
"Ah, the little mice we've been hearing about." Something seemed to occur to him at that moment. "Hmm, what is the date?"
"The 16th?"
"We're just about due for an outside guest. Let's go see Lily."
We headed back down to the basement, but as we neared the room, Napoleon held up a hand. "You two stay here."
"But Lily…"
"I need to see what is going on in there. This is what I do for a living. For now, the safest spot for you both is right here. Watch the door and make sure no one comes."
"We will." Marta linked her arm with mine and I nodded. Fear had trumped the anger we'd both been feeling and made us wary companions again.
He walked over to the sliding door and hit a button so that it would stay open after he entered.
"Good morning!"
"Ah, we're not open." Lily's voice was thin with fear. "You need to leave."
"Well, I have it on the best of authority that you have some books on hostage taking. I'd like to check one out."
"No, we have no books like that at all."
"But you have stacks and stacks piled up around here." That was true enough. There never seemed to be enough floor space when we were sorting a topic. We had the area in front of the desk cluttered with piles of books. "How do you know?"
Then there was some muffled conversation, then there was this weird noise, like a cough, and Marta looked at me with wide eyes. We both knew what the sound was.
"Oh! Oh, my word!" Marta whisper-shouted. "Kelly, he's been shot. What do we do?"
I eased over to the door and peeked in. There was a guy standing at the counter and Napoleon was sprawled out on the floor amid toppled stacks of books. Lilly was hysterical and the guy was shaking her and yelling.
"We're gonna do what we should have done all along. If we hadn't been so busy fighting, we would have known something was wrong from the first. We're gonna rescue our friend." I pointed and tried not to let my hand shake. "There's a fire alarm inside. If we pull it, this place will be crawling with people within thirty seconds."
"What about that guy with the gun? If he shot that old guy, he won't have a problem shooting us."
"What about him? I'm willing to risk it for her."
"No!" I'd never heard that tone before and I'm sure my face showed my surprise. "I'll do it, Kelly. After all, I'm the one who was supposed to die young."
"No, Marta, you're crazy."
"Yup, but it's all I've got." Without another word, she raced into the room and headed for the alarm. Lily screamed and the guy fired. Marta's outstretched hand had been just an inch or two from her goal when she collapsed and I'm afraid I lost it.
I saw red, literally. I stormed in that room, screaming like a wild woman. The guy just about wet his pants. I grabbed the nearest book I could get my hands on and screamed, "You bastard!" I threw that book with all the strength I could muster. I had been a pretty good softball pitcher in high school and the talent didn't fail me. That book caught him square between the eyes and he dropped like a rock.
I ran to Marta, but she didn't move. There was blood and I tried to see past my tears as I cradled her and looked up as Lily joined me. She pulled the alarm and she fell to her knees, hugging both of us. Our world would never be the same again. Our friend was dead.
Or so we thought. See, the guy had stolen a gun from reception and it was filled with sleeper darts. Marta and Napoleon weren't dead; they were just sleeping. Thank God. I lit a dozen candles that night in church.
I got a citation for bravery and the research library got a security system. No one had ever though someone would invade us through the basement and I guess Mr. Waverly wasn't too happy about it.
The guy shot Marta in her hand and she needed surgery to repair the damage. It left her with a scar and now she has a lifeline twice the length of ours. With it came a new appreciation of life.
When I went to see Napoleon, his partner was there and they were talking in quiet tones. I could see they were having a private moment, something that was just them, so I didn't bother them.
Right then and there I knew what we had to do. We worked through our problems. It wasn't easy, but we did it. We yelled and cried, but in the end, we were better and our friendship was stronger. You see Napoleon was right. We've lived through the storm and nothing was going ever going to stop us again, not even ourselves, for we are now seasoned sailors on the ocean of Life.