by Megan Abbott
When he stepped out again, he couldn’t get it back.
He waited at Eli’s locker, and waited, and then the second bell rang, and everyone scattered, backpacks like cockroach shells.
There was a slight ripple in his chest. Where is Eli, anyway? As if Eli were as reliable as an elevator and not his shaggy, perennially late son.
He’ll be here any second, he told himself, but a nagging fear came from nowhere: What if, what if?
Rounding the corner, he spotted his son’s blaring-blue hockey jersey.
There he was, standing in front of his calculus class, shoving folded papers into a textbook.
Tall and carefree and more handsome than any son of his had a right to be. And late as ever, for everything. It was hard to explain the relief he felt.
“Dad?” Eli said, looking up, surprised. “Dad, why are you smiling?”
5
Walking through the cafeteria, Eli Nash was thinking about Lise, whom he’d known since she was bucktoothed and round as a tennis ball. She’d grown into the teeth, but not all the way, and the overbite made her look older, like her new body did, like everything did. She’d been one of those baby-fatted girls who laughed too loudly, covering their mouths, squealing. Then, at some point, overnight, she’d done something, or God had, because she was so pretty it sometimes hurt to look at her.
It felt like, whatever happened now, Lise was maybe gone. That maybe it’d be like his friend Rufus, who’d hit his head on the practice rink last year and who seemed okay but never laughed at anyone’s jokes anymore and sometimes couldn’t smell his food.
“Eli,” his dad had said, finding him before calculus. Wearing a funny smile like the one he’d have after Eli had had a rough game, a cut over his eye, a stick across the face. “Can you do something for me?”
He said of course he would.
Right away, he spotted Gabby in the cafeteria’s far corner, where she always sat, usually with his sister, their heads together as if planning a heist.
Gabby was the one all the girls puppy-dogged after at school, the kind other girls thought was “gorgeous” and guys didn’t get at all. Or they got something, which made them nervous. Made him nervous.
All the stuff that had gone down with her family, it seemed to give Gabby this thick glaze, like the old tables in the library that shone golden-like, with dark whorls, but when you got close and touched them, they felt like plastic, like nothing. All they did was push splinters into your hand.
Eli didn’t much like sitting in the library either.
She was spinning a can of soda between her palms, that girl Skye lurking behind her, the one with all the bracelets and heavy skirts, the one who got suspended once for coming to health class with a copy of the Kama Sutra, which she said was her aunt Sunny’s, as if it were something everyone had at home, like the dictionary.
“Gabby,” he said, tapping her shoulder.
Gabby’s head whipped around and she looked at him, eyes wide.
“Oh!” she said. “Eli. You scared me.”
Skye was looking at him, her eyes narrow, and Eli removed his fingers quickly from Gabby’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a second?” He looked at Skye. “Alone?”
“Okay,” Gabby said, slowly. “Sure.”
They walked over to one of the far tables. Gabby was almost as tall as he was and had a big heap of hair on top of her head, like Skye and so many of the other girls seemed to be copying. Sometimes they’d put their hair in heavy braids they’d wrap across their heads and he didn’t get it but figured it was a fashion thing beyond his grasp.
“Deenie’s at the hospital,” he said as they sat down, “with Lise. Something happened to Lise. I figured you might not know.”
“I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head.
Three tables behind, Eli could see still Skye, her ringed fingers clawed around her phone, head bowed, typing something.
“I mean, I didn’t know Deenie was at the hospital,” Gabby said. “Or that Lise was.”
He didn’t think he’d ever sat so close to Gabby, her skin pale and that serious expression she always wore. He had the sense of so many things going on behind that face.
“Yeah,” Eli said. “They had to call an ambulance, I guess. She’s there now.”
Gabby’s phone buzzed slightly on the table. They both looked at it.
“So, what happened? Is it…” Gabby started. “Is it mono again?”
Eli paused, licking his lips.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
* * *
Once she got behind the double doors, Deenie had no idea how to find Lise. There was a feeling to the place like in the basement at school, where they held classes for a while when enrollment ran too high. A furnacey smell and uncertain buzzing and whirring sounds. Turning the corners, the floor sloping, you felt like you were going down into something no one knew about, had forgotten about.
At the end of the first long hallway she could see an old man sitting in a wheelchair, his white hair tufted high like a cartoon bird. He was wearing a very nice robe, quilted, like in an old movie. She wondered who’d bought it for him and where that person was now.
The man’s head kept drifting from side to side, his mouth open in a kind of perpetual, silent panic. How did this happen? Why am I here?
“Hi,” she said as she approached, surprising herself.
He looked up with a start, his swampy green eyes trying to focus on her.
“Not another one?” he said, his voice small and wavery. “Are you another one?”
One hand lifted forward from his silken lap.
She smiled uneasily, not knowing what else to do.
“Okay, well,” she said, and kept walking.
Maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re old, she thought. Always more young people, a parade of them going by. Here’s another one.
“I hope it will be okay,” he said, his voice rising as she passed. “I hope.”
Far down the hall now, her head feeling hot, she turned to look back at him.
“I…I…” he was saying, his voice like a creak.
She started to smile at him but saw his face—from this distance a white smudge—and stopped.
It took five minutes, and no one questioned her or even seemed to notice.
Rushing as if with purpose, she spotted Mrs. Daniels’s turquoise coat in an open doorway, hovering just inside the threshold, Lise’s grandmother beside her.
Walking in, she saw the hospital bed webbed with wires, a sickly sac hanging in one corner like a trapped mite. It reminded her of Skye once telling them that you should put cobwebs on wounds, that it stopped blood.
“Deenie,” Mrs. Daniels cried out. “Look at our Lisey.”
The puff of both women’s winter coats, the sputtering monitor, a nurse suddenly coming behind her, and Mrs. Daniels sobbing to breathlessness—Deenie pushed past it all to try to get closer to Lise. Like people did in the movies, she would push past everything. She would not be stopped.
But when she got to the foot of Lise’s bed, she halted.
All she could see was a violet blur and something that looked like a dent down the middle of Lise’s delicate forehead.
“What happened,” Deenie said, a statement more than a question. “What’s wrong with her.”
“She hit her head on the coffee table,” the grandmother said. As if that were the problem. As if the purple gape on Lise’s brow were the problem here. Were why they were all here.
Though it kind of felt that way to Deenie too because there it was. A broken mirror where the pieces didn’t line up. Splitting Lise’s face in two. Changing it.
“That’s not Lise,” Deenie said, the words falling from her mouth.
Everyone looked at her, Mrs. Daniels’s chin shaking.
But it felt true.
The nurse took Deenie’s arm roughly.
“They always look different,” the nurse said. �
�She’s very weak. You need to leave.”
Mrs. Daniels made a moaning sound, tugging on her mother’s coat front.
“But are you sure it’s her?” Deenie asked as the nurse walked her to the door. “Mrs. Daniels, are you sure that’s Lise?”
6
Pulling into the hospital lot, Tom found his daughter standing out front, pogo-ing on the sidewalk to keep warm.
She climbed inside the car.
“Dad, I don’t want to be there anymore, okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “No one likes hospitals.”
Her chin kept jogging up and down, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“I don’t like it there,” she said. “I really don’t.”
“I know,” he said, watching her scroll through text messages. One after another, they arrived, her phone sputtering in her hand.
She hadn’t met his eyes once.
“Deenie,” he said, “I think I should just take you home.”
“I think…” she started, then set her phone on her lap. “I want to go back to school, Dad.”
There was an energy on her that worried him, like right before she left for her mom’s place each month. Sometimes it felt like she spent hours putting things in and taking things out of her backpack. Blue sweater in, blue sweater out, Invisible Man in, then out, biting her lip and staring upward. What is it I need, what is missing.
“A lot’s happening,” he tried again. “We can go home. Watch a movie. I’ll heat up those frozen turnovers. Those fat apple ones you love. Your favorite Saturday-night special.”
“When I was twelve,” she said, like that was a million years ago. It had been their weekly ritual. She liked to watch teen movies from the ’80s and make fun of their hair but by the end she would tear up when the tomboy with the wrong clothes danced with the prom king under pink balloons and scattered lights. It turned out he’d missed the perfect girl, right in front of him all along.
“I just want to be at school,” she said, softly.
He guessed there might be something soothing about the noise and routine of school. Except she didn’t know yet that the school didn’t feel routine right now.
“Okay,” he said, after a pause. “If you’re sure.”
His mind was full of ideas, ways to comfort her, all of them wrong.
“But Deenie,” he said.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. The eternal parent lie, a hustle.
She seemed to hear him but not really hear him.
“I don’t think it was even her,” she said, a tremble to her voice.
“Was who? Did you see her, Deenie? At the hospital?”
She nodded, her fingerless gloves reaching up to her face.
“Just for a second. But I don’t think that was Lise,” she repeated, shaking her head.
“Baby,” he said, slowing the car down. He wondered what she’d seen. How bad Lise looked. “It was her.”
“I mean, none of it was Lise,” she said, eyes on the traffic as they approached the school. “In class this morning too. Watching her. She looked so weird. So angry.”
Her voice speeding up, like her mother’s did when she got excited. Trying to help him see something.
“Like she was mad at me,” she went on. “Even though I knew she wasn’t. But it was like she was. She looked so mad.”
“Why would she be mad at you, Deenie?” he said, stopping the car too long at the blinking red, someone honking. “She wasn’t. You had nothing to do with this.”
She looked at him, her eyes dark and stricken, like she’d been hit.
* * *
It just wasn’t a day for going to class.
It was nearly sixth period and, so far, Eli had made it only to French II—he never missed it, spent all forty-two minutes with his eyes anchored to the soft swell of Ms. Loll’s chest. The way she pushed her hair up off her neck when she got frustrated, her dark nails on that swirling tattoo.
He never missed French.
But the idea of going to history, of sitting in class with everyone gripped in the talk of Lise Daniels and her rabid-dog routine and his sister seeing it—it all knotted inside him.
He didn’t like to imagine what Deenie must have been feeling to ditch school, which wasn’t something she ever did. She was the kind of girl who burst into tears when her fourth-grade teacher called her Life Sciences folder “unkempt.”
So he found himself back behind the school, where the equipment manager kept the rusting bins of rubber balls, hockey pucks, and helmets.
The air heavy with Sani Sport and ammonia and old sweat, it reminded him of the smell when he’d put his skates on the radiator after a game, scorching them to dryness. As cold as it was, he could still smell it, and it soothed him.
He was sitting on the railing of the loading ramp when he heard a skitter, then the shush of a heavy skirt.
“You want some?” a crackly voice said.
He turned and saw that Skye girl again, leaning against the brick wall, a beret tugged over her masses of blond hair.
She was holding a brown cigarette in her hand, a sweet scent wafting from her, mixed with girl smells like hairspray and powder.
“What?” he said, stalling for time, watching her walk closer to him, her vinyl boots glossy and damp.
She waved the cigarette at him.
He wasn’t sure what it was, but it didn’t smell like pot. He wouldn’t have wanted it if it was. It affected his play. A few times, though, he’d smoked at night, at a party, then picked up his skates, headed to the community rink. Coach had given him a key and he could go after closing, the ice strewn with shavings from the night’s free-skate, the hard cuts from a pickup game. He could go as slow as he wanted.
He’d spin circuits, the gliding settling him, the feeling in his chest and the black sky through the tall windows.
Sometimes he felt like it was the only time he truly breathed. It reminded him of being six and his mom first taking him out on the ice, kneeling down to hold his quaking ankles with her purple mittens, stiff with snow.
“It’s all-natural,” Skye said, returning the cigarette to her mouth. Her lavender lips. “I don’t believe in putting bad things inside me. It’s musk root. It helps you achieve balance.”
“My balance is good,” he said, the smell of her cigarette drifting toward him again. Spicy, cloying. He kind of liked it but didn’t want to. “But thanks.”
“I heard Deenie went to the hospital,” she said. “And that Lise’s mom’s freaking out and that Lise almost died.”
Everyone knew things so fast, phones like constant pulses under the skin.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “You’d have to ask her.”
She nodded, then seemed to shudder a little, her narrow shoulders bending in like a bird’s.
“It’s funny how you never think about your heart,” she said.
“What?”
“About your real heart,” she said. “Not when you’re young like us. I heard her heart stopped for a minute. I never thought about my heart before. Have you?”
Eli didn’t say anything but slid off the ramp. Looking at her hands, he saw they were shaking, and he wondered for a second if she was going to be sick.
“It’s funny,” she said, “because it’s almost like I felt it before it happened. I’ve known Lise awhile. We used to share bunks at sleepaway camp. She has a very strong energy, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said, heading toward the door, the blast of heat from inside.
“This morning I was waiting for Lise at her locker. I had my hand on the locker door and it was so freaky. I felt this energy shoot up my body.”
She lifted her free hand and fluttered it from her waist to her neck.
He watched her.
“Like a little jolt. Right to the center of me.”
She let her hand, blue from the cold, drift down to her stomach and rest, the dark-red tassels of her scarf
hanging there.
“But that’s how I am,” she said. “My aunt says I was born with dark circles on my feet, like a tortoiseshell. Which means I feel things very deeply.”
* * *
There was only one period left and suddenly Deenie couldn’t remember where she was supposed to be.
She’d thought school would be easier, busier. She was trying to get the picture of Lise out of her head. The angry crack down her face. Lise was never angry at anyone. Even when she should be.
But now Deenie wished she were at home instead, sitting on the sunken L-shaped sofa watching movies with her dad, her fingers greased with puff pastry.
And so she walked aimlessly, the sound of her squeaking sneakers loud in her ears. A haunted feeling to go with the hauntedness of the day.
It wasn’t until Mrs. Zwada, frosted hair like a corona, called out to her from the biology lab that she realized that was where she was supposed to be.
For a moment, Deenie just stood in the doorway, the room filled with gaping faces. The penetrating gaze of Brooke Campos, her useless lab partner who never did the write-ups and refused to touch the fetal pig.
“Honey, I think you should sit down,” Mrs. Zwada said, her brightly lacquered face softer than Deenie had ever seen it. “You can just sit and listen.”
“No,” Deenie said, backing up a little.
Everyone in the class seemed to be looking at her, all their faces like one big face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to find Gabby.”
She began to edge into the hall, but Mrs. Zwada’s expression swiftly hardened into its usual rictus.
“There’s going to be some order to this day,” she said, grabbing Deenie by the shoulder and ushering her inside.
So Deenie sat and listened to all the talk of mitosis, watched the squirming cells on the PowerPoint. The hard forks of splitting DNA, or something.
A few minutes before class ended, Brooke Campos poked her in the neck from behind.
Leaning forward, breath sugared with kettle corn, she whispered in Deenie’s ear.
“I heard something about you. And a guy.”