by Megan Abbott
* * *
I’m just thinking about the lake.
Deenie couldn’t believe Skye had said it. In front of all those girls. In front of Brooke Campos, who stopped talking only while texting and usually not then.
At the final bell, Deenie found her at her locker.
“Skye, why did you mention the lake?”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with any of this,” Deenie whispered. “So why bring it up?”
Skye looked at her, shrugged. Skye was always shrugging.
“I don’t think,” she said, closing her locker door, “we really know what this has to do with.”
They weren’t supposed to go into the lake. No one was. School trips, Girl Scout outings, science class, you might go and look at it, stand behind the orange mesh fences.
Every spring and at the end of the summer, the lake would give over to acid green. It was called “the bloom” and Deenie’s fifth-grade teacher warned them, pointing to the iridescent water, that it meant it was filled with bacteria and hidden species. With a stick, he would poke one of the large blades of algae that washed up on the shoreline. One year, during a conservation project for Girl Scouts, they found a dead dog on one of the banks, its fur neon, mouth hanging open, tongue bright like a highlighter pen.
When she was very young, she believed the slumber-party tales about it, that a teenage couple had gone skinny-dipping and drowned, their mouths clogged with loam, bodies seen glowing on the shoreline from miles away. Or that swimming in it gave you miscarriages or took away your ovaries and you’d be barren for life. Or the worst one, that a little boy had died in the lake and his cries could still be heard on summer nights.
A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frightened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid. Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
“It looks beautiful,” her mom had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. “It is beautiful. But it makes people sick.”
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilies, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don’t touch, don’t taste, don’t get too close.
And then, last week.
It had been Lise’s idea to go to the lake, to go in the water. She’d stood in it, waving at them, her tights stripped off, her legs white as the moon.
* * *
It was nine o’clock and Tom wasn’t sure where the day had gone, other than to ragged places, again.
Deenie was hunched over the kitchen island, eating cereal for dinner.
Outside, Eli was slamming a tennis ball against the garage door with his practice stick. Sometimes it was hard to remember his son without that stick in his hand, cocked over his shoulder. Even watching TV, he’d have it propped on his knee. It seemed to have happened sometime during early high school, when the other parts of Eli, the boy who liked camping and books about shipwrecks and expeditions and looking for arrowheads in Binnorie Woods after a heavy rain, had drifted away, or been swallowed whole.
His phone rang: Lara Bishop.
“Tom, thanks for your message.”
“Of course,” he said. “How’s Gabby?”
“We’re home. They were going to keep her overnight, but she seemed to be doing okay. And she hates that place so much. So here we are.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Really glad.”
He could feel Deenie’s stare, her hand gripping her own phone.
“Well,” she said, and there was a pause. “I guess I just wanted you to know. And, you know, to check in. See what you might have…I don’t know.”
“I understand,” he said, but he wasn’t sure what she was suggesting.
“I mean, we don’t know what this is,” she said.
“No,” he said, eyes on Deenie. “But I don’t know anything. You mean about Lise?” He wasn’t going to tell her what Medical Biller Diane had said.
“Or if maybe…Gabby’s dad didn’t call you, did he?”
“Charlie? No. No.”
“I was worried he might have found out. From the school maybe. I don’t want Gabby to have to deal with him right now.”
“Of course not.” But what he was thinking was, Weren’t they obligated to notify him? He was still her dad.
“Thanks. It’s just…” And her voice trailed away.
“And if he had called,” he added, though he wasn’t sure why, “I wouldn’t have told him anything.”
“Thank you, Tom.” He could hear the relief in her voice. It all felt oddly intimate, in that parents-in-shared-crisis way. Lightning hitting the Little League batting cage. Mall security agreeing not to call the police. Those “whew” moments fellow parents share.
After he hung up, he wondered how he would feel if he were Charlie Bishop. He would never, ever do what Charlie had done, even if it had been an accident. Once, before everything, they’d been teammates for a pickup baseball game, had cheered each other on, played darts after and drank shots of tequila with beer backs.
That was just a few weeks before the accident and it made Tom sick to think about now. How much he’d liked Charlie. How Charlie had slapped him on the back and said he knew just how hard marriage could be.
* * *
The minute her phone rang, Deenie began running upstairs to her room.
“Gabby—”
“Hey, girl,” Gabby said.
“Are you okay, what—”
“Hey, girl,” she repeated.
“Hey, girl,” Deenie replied, slowing her words down, almost grinning. “What’d they say at the hospital?”
She leaned back on her bed, feeling the soft thunk of her pillow.
“They did all these tests,” Gabby said. “They made me count and say who the last two presidents were. They gave me a tall drink of something that was like those candy orange peanuts that taste like banana. If you put a bag of those in a blender with gravel and old milk.”
“Yum, girl.”
Gabby snickered a little. “Then they strapped a mask on me and rolled me into this thing that was like the worst tanning bed ever. Everything smelled. Then they did this other thing where they put these little puckers all over my head and I had to lie there for twenty minutes while they shot electricity through my body.” She laughed. “It was awesome.”
“It sounds awesome,” Deenie said, forcing a laugh. “So.”
“So.”
“What is it? What happened to you?”
“They don’t know,” she said. “They even made me talk to a headshrinker. She asked if I was under stress. She told my mom that sometimes this happens. Like maybe I was upset and my body just freaked out.”
“Oh,” Deenie said.
“I asked her if she meant ‘stress’ like having your dad tear a hole through your mom’s face.”
Deenie felt her chest tighten, but Gabby was laughing, tiredly.
“So they don’t think it’s like with Lise?”
“I just need to relax,” Gabby said, not really answering, a funny bump in her voice. “I guess maybe if I light some geranium candles and take a bath, like the doctors used to tell my mom when she couldn’t breathe in the grocery store or the mall.”
It was interesting to think about, the slender filaments between the worry in your head, or the squeeze in your chest, and the rest of your body, your whole body and everything in it.
Lise, the summer before, had lost thirteen pounds in less than two weeks after something had happened at the town pool with a boy she liked. She’d thought he liked her, and maybe he did, but then suddenly he didn’t anymore.
She and Lise and Gabby had devoted endless hours to imagining him as Lise’s boyfrien
d and then to hating him and the girl with the keyhole bikini they’d spotted walking with him by the snack bar. Deenie was sure he’d be at the center of their thoughts forever. But right now she couldn’t summon his name.
Since then, there’d been so many boys they’d speculated about. Boys who liked them and then didn’t. Or maybe a boy they didn’t like until the boy liked someone else.
But Lise said the boy at the pool was worth it. Running her fingers over her stomach, she called it the Mike Meister diet.
Mike Meister, that was his name. Always a new boy, even last week, Lise at the lake, whispering about one in Deenie’s ear. How could you believe any of it was real?
Lise, her head, her body, her flighty, fitful heart, were like one thing, and always changing.
But it was different with Gabby. Deenie knew all her beats and rhythms, had seen her through everything with her dad, her mom, her bad breakup. And this was not the way stresses played themselves out on her body. Everything stayed inside, her body folding in on itself.
“Well,” Deenie said. “You’re home now. That’s good.”
“I guess everyone was talking about it,” Gabby said. “The whole school saw.”
Deenie didn’t say anything. She was thinking of Gabby on that stage, the way her body jerked like a pull-string toy. Like a body never moves, not a real body of someone you know.
“Deenie,” she said. “Say something.”
“What did it feel like?” Deenie blurted, her face feeling hotter on the pillow.
Gabby paused. Then her voice dropped low, like she was right there beside her. “There was this shadow,” she said. “I could see it from the corner of my eye, but I wasn’t supposed to look at it.”
Deenie felt her hand go around her own neck.
“If I turned my head to look,” Gabby continued, “something really scary would happen. So I couldn’t look. I didn’t dare look.”
Deenie pictured it. That smile on Gabby’s face after, when everyone surrounded her on the stage. Like something painted on her face. A red-moon curve.
“I didn’t look, Deenie,” Gabby whispered. “But it happened anyway.”
I’m okay, she’d said. I really am. I’m fine.
That smile, not a real thing but something set there, to promise you something, to give you a white lie.
* * *
He waited until he couldn’t hear the hum of her voice anymore through the floor. Then he knocked on Deenie’s door.
“Hey, honey,” he said, poking his head in.
“Hey,” Deenie said, cross-legged on her bed.
As ever, her bed like a towering nest, always at least two or three books tufted in its folds. Deenie never fell asleep without a book or her phone in her hands. Probably both. When Georgia used to make her clean, Deenie would hoist the bedding over her head, shaking all the books, folders, handouts onto the carpet.
“They told her it might be stress,” Deenie said. “Like you said.”
Walking toward her, his foot caught on her white Pizza House shirt, ruched in the quilt where it hit the floor.
“Well,” he said, picking up the shirt, sprayed with flour and forever damp, “when things like this happen, they can really knock around your body.”
“I guess,” she said, watching him closely. He wondered if he wasn’t supposed to pick up her things. He tossed the shirt onto the bed lightly.
“What about you?” he asked. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like Gabby to me.”
“I know, Deenie,” he said. “We just gotta wait and see.”
He sat down at the foot of the bed. She looked expectant, like she wanted something from him, but he had no idea what. He’d seen that look a hundred times before, from her and from her mother.
Then, nodding, she fumbled for her headphones, and he could feel her retreating, her face turning cloudy and inscrutable.
“Dad,” she said, sliding the headphones on, “maybe I shouldn’t go to work on Saturday. With everything that’s going on.”
He looked at her.
“I think maybe I just want to be home.”
He didn’t know what to say, her eyes big and baffling as ever, so he said yes.
* * *
The minute her dad left the room, Deenie wanted to jump up and throw the shirt in the laundry basket. She didn’t know why she hadn’t already.
But she didn’t want to touch it or look at it.
It reminded her of the car, and Sean Lurie, the shirt wedged beneath her on the seat.
And then all the other things she didn’t want to think about.
Lise’s face. The lake. Everything.
There was too much already, without thinking about that.
9
Thursday
Just after six in the morning, Eli stepped into the dark garage, slung his gear bag over the front handlebars of his bike.
As the garage door shuddered open, he saw something move outside, in the driveway.
For a drowsy moment, he thought it might be a deer, like he sometimes saw on the road at night if he rode far out of town, into the thick of Binnorie Woods.
But then he heard a voice, high and quavery, and knew it was a girl.
He ducked under the half-raised garage door and peered out.
All he could see was a powder-blue coat with a furred hood, a frill of blond hair nearly white under the porch light.
“Who’s there?” Eli asked, squinting into the misted driveway.
With a tug, she pulled the hood from her head.
Except it wasn’t a girl. It was Lise Daniels’s mom, the neighbors’ floodlight hot across her.
“Eli?” she called out, hand visored over her eyes. “Is that Eli?”
“It’s me,” he said.
He’d seen her at the house dozens of times to pick up Lise, had seen her at school events, hands always tugging Lise’s ponytail tighter, always calling after her, telling her to call, to hurry, to be on time, to watch out, to be careful. But Eli wasn’t sure she’d ever said a word to him in his life. He knew he’d never said a word to her.
“Eli,” she said, loudly now. “Tell your father I’m sorry I haven’t called him back.”
The halo of her hair, the pink crimp of her mouth. It was weird with moms, how you could see the faces of their daughters trapped in their own faces. Mrs. Daniels’s body was larger, her shoulders round and her cheeks too, but somewhere in there, the neat prettiness of Lise lay half buried.
“Okay. Mrs. Daniels, are you okay?” he asked, and she moved closer to him, coming out from under the flat glare of the floodlight. “Did something happen at the hospital?”
For a moment, the vision of Lise fluttered before him, twirling in her turquoise tights, skirt billowing as she bounded up the school steps.
“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she said. “I’ve been advised not to speak to anyone associated with the school, and your father is a school employee.”
He wondered how long she’d been standing out here. He thought of her looking up at the second-floor windows, waiting for a light to go on. Once, back when he played JV, he spotted a girl doing that after one of his games. A freshman on her bike, one sneaker flipping the pedal around, gazing up at his bedroom window. Until then, he hadn’t thought girls did those things. When he’d waved, she jumped back on her seat and rode away.
“Oh, Eli,” Mrs. Daniels said, shaking her head hard, her hood shaking too. “You’re going to hear things. But I’m telling you.”
“Maybe you should come inside,” Eli tried, the wheels of his bike retreating from her as if on their own. “I can wake Dad up. I bet he’d want to talk.”
But she shook her head harder, shook that pale nimbus of hair. “There’s no time for that. But I need you to pass along an important message. You know I’ve always thought of Deenie as a daughter.”
She was moving close to him, as if to ensure they were quiet, though her voice was
n’t quiet but blaring.
“What does this have to do with Deenie?”
“Oh, Eli,” she said, nearly gasping. “It has to do with all of them. All of them. Don’t you see? It’s just begun.”
Before he could say anything, before she could get any closer to him, he heard the door into the garage pop open behind him.
“Eli, who are you—”
“Dad,” Eli said, relieved, waving him over. “Lise’s mom is here.”
“My Lise,” she said, not even acknowledging Eli’s dad, her eyes, crepey and sweat-slicked, fixed on Eli. “It’s already over for her. Now all we can do is hope. But it’s not too late for the others.”
Arm darting out, her red hand clasped him. “What if we can stop it?”
“Sheila,” his dad said, walking toward her. “Did something happen?” He reached out to touch her shoulder gently, but the move startled her. She tripped, stumbling into Eli.
He tried to steady her, feeling her cold cheek pressed into his shoulder, a musky smell coming from her.
“Sheila,” his dad was saying, more firmly now.
“Oh, Tom,” she said, whirling around. “I need to tell you about Deenie.”
“What about Deenie?” Eli thought he heard a hitch in his father’s voice.
“They want us to believe they’re helping our girls. They’re killing our girls. It’s a kind of murder. A careless murder.”
“Sheila, why don’t you come inside?” his dad said in that calm-down voice that used to drive his mom crazy. “Let’s sit down and—”
“I can’t do that, Tom,” she said, her voice turning into a moan. “Our girls. I remember when I took Lise and Deenie shopping for their first bras. I remember showing them how to adjust the training straps. Those little pink ribbons.”
“Sheila, I—”
“Who would ever have thought in a few years we’d be poisoning them?”
His dad was saying something, but Eli wasn’t listening, couldn’t stop looking at her, her mouth like a slash.
As if sensing his stare, she turned to Eli again.
“The things we do to our girls because of you.”
Eli felt his hands wet on his bike handles.