by Megan Abbott
“Me?”
Something was turning in her face, like a Halloween mask from the inside.
“The dangers our girls suffer at your hands,” she said. “We know and we’ll do anything to protect them. To inoculate them. Anything.”
“Sheila, have you slept at all?” His dad put his arm on Eli’s shoulder, gave him a look. “Let’s get you some coffee and—”
She shook her head, eyes pink and large and trained on Eli.
“No one made you shoot yourself full of poison,” she said, voice rising high.
She pointed her finger at Eli, below his waist.
“All of you,” she said, eyes now on Eli’s dad. “Spreading your semen anywhere you want. That’s the poison. Your semen is poison.”
“Sheila, Sheila…”
“Don’t say I didn’t do what I could.” She turned and started walking away. “I hope it’s not too late.”
* * *
It had been a night of blurry, jumbled sleep. Deenie woke with a vague memory of dreaming she was at the Pizza House, standing in front of the creaking dough machine, Sean Lurie coming out slowly from behind the ovens, looking at her, head cocked, grin crooked.
What? she’d said. What is it?
It’s you, he said, standing in front of the blazing oven.
And she’d stepped back from the machine suddenly, the airy dough passing between her hands, soft like a bird breast.
It fell to the bleached floor, flour atomizing up.
Hands slick with oil, and Sean’s eyes on them. On her hands.
And she looking down at them, seeing them glazed not with oil but with green sludge, the green glowing, the lights flickering off.
Deenie stood at the kitchen island, phone in hand.
Mom wont let me go to school tday, Gabby’s text read. Sorry, DD.
After everything Gabby had been through, she was still worried about Deenie having to navigate the day without her. Because these were things they maneuvered together—school, divorces, faraway parents who wanted things. Boys.
The side door slammed and her dad came into the kitchen, shoving the morning paper into his book bag.
Something in the heave of morning air made her remember.
“Dad,” she said, “did you hear something earlier? A noise.”
Vaguely, she remembered looking out her window, expecting a barn owl screeching.
He turned toward the coffeepot.
“Mrs. Daniels came by this morning,” he said. “She couldn’t stay long, but Lise is doing okay. No change, but nothing’s happened.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“There wasn’t time,” he said, lifting his cup to his face. “She couldn’t stay. She had to go back.”
“But can we go over there now?”
“No,” he said, quickly.
Deenie looked at him, the way he held his coffee cup over his mouth when he spoke.
“I mean,” he added, “we’ll see.”
Outside, it was bitter cold, the sky onion white.
Eli came with them on the drive to school, which never happened.
Riding together, it felt like long ago, fighting in the backseat until Dad would have to stop the car and make one of them sit up front.
She felt a wave of nostalgia, even for the times he kicked her and tore holes in her tights with his skates.
“Eli Nash, skipping practice. I bet you broke Coach Haller’s heart,” Deenie said, looking at her brother in the backseat, legs astride, the taped knob white with baby powder, like Wayne Gretzky’s. But he wouldn’t look at her.
“I bet they didn’t even have practice without you,” she tried again. “I bet they all took their helmets off in your honor. I bet they hung black streamers over the rink and cried.”
“I overslept,” he said, facing the window. He didn’t look annoyed. He didn’t even seem to be listening to her.
She waited a moment, for something, then turned back around. The sky looked so lonely.
The car turned, and there was the lake.
“Deenie,” her dad said, so suddenly his voice startled her, “Lise and Gabby haven’t been in the lake lately, have they?”
* * *
He regretted it the moment he said it, and a hundred times more when he saw her body stiffen.
Wrung out from scant sleep, he wasn’t sure his mind was quite his own. All of Sheila’s ravings, he hadn’t quite pieced them together, but he could guess. It had something to do with vaccinations, a predatory attorney, the teeming Internet. She needed an explanation, badly, and he couldn’t blame her.
Driving, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling of something, some idea.
Then his eyes had landed on the lake, its impossible phosphorescence, even in the bitter cold, still half frozen over, the algae beneath like a sneaking promise. Remembering Georgia, her mouth ringed black that night years ago. She said she’d dreamed she put her own fingers down her throat, all the way down, and felt something like the soft lake floor there, mossy and wet and tainted.
She was never the same after that, he’d decided. Though he also knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been the same before that. No one was ever the same, except him.
So, his head still muddled, he’d found himself asking Deenie that ridiculous question about the lake, no better than Sheila’s speculations.
He could see her whole body seize up.
“We’re not allowed in the lake,” she replied, which wasn’t really an answer. “Why are you asking me that?”
“No reason,” he said. “I guess I’m just getting ready for today’s rumors.”
“Sometimes kids go in anyway,” Eli said from the backseat. “I’ve seen it.”
Deenie turned around to face him. “Like you, you mean. You and me.”
“What?”
“We used to go in it, before. We used to swim in it, remember?”
“That’s right,” Tom said. “We used to take you.”
When they were little, long before the boy drowned. Tom had a memory of pushing the corner of a towel in Eli’s ear, hoping it wouldn’t be another infection, that milky white drip down his neck. Why did he ever let them in that lake, even then?
He could hear Eli twisting his stick left and right. “But something happened to it. It doesn’t even seem like the same lake. And it smells like the bottom of the funkiest pair of skates in the locker room.”
“You mean yours?” Deenie said, like they were ten and twelve again, except there was a roughness in their voices Tom didn’t like.
And Deenie’s chin was shaking.
Tom could see it shaking.
He found himself watching it with exaggerated closeness, until she noticed him and stared back, her face locking into stillness.
“Dad!” she said. “You missed it. You missed the turn. It was back there.”
You’re a careless person, Georgia once said to him. He didn’t even remember why. He didn’t remember anything. She was always coming out of the water to say things, her mouth black.
* * *
@hospital did they ask u abt lake, Deenie texted Gabby. She was standing by the window in the second-floor girls’ room, the best place in the school to get reception. But it still wouldn’t go through.
It had been a week ago. Deenie and Gabby and Lise and Skye all in Lise’s mother’s Dodge with the screeching heater and the perennial smell of hand lotion. Lise said the steering wheel always felt damp with it.
As they drove along the lake, Skye told them she’d seen two guys in the water the week before, the first flicker of spring and their speakers blaring music from open car doors. One had a tattoo that began on his chest and disappeared beneath his jeans.
“Maybe they’re there now,” Lise had said, leaning forward eagerly, laughing. Boy crazy.
They all knew they wouldn’t be, really, and they weren’t. It was just the lake in front of them, its surface skimmed bright green.
And soon enough they were all i
n the water, just barely, ankle-deep, then a little more, all their tights squirreled away on the bank.
Wading deeper, Lise pulled her skirt high, and her legs were so long and skinny, with the keyhole between her thighs like a model.
You couldn’t help but look.
She had a moon shape on her inner thigh that Deenie had never seen before. Later, Lise would say it happened when she lost weight, a stretch mark that wouldn’t go away.
And then Gabby and Skye left, their calves slick with the water, thick as pea soup.
With Gabby gone, everything was less interesting, but it was easier. It was like before. Those days of just Deenie and Lise, and Deenie let herself settle into the sugar-soft of Lise’s voice, and how easy she was and the water so delicious and Lise with stories to tell.
Now, remembering it, standing at the bathroom mirror, Deenie looked at herself.
Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? she wondered. Do I look different?
Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn’t even see.
She walked to her locker and opened it, stood there.
If she had to sit through first period, she thought she might explode.
“K.C.,” she called out, spotting a familiar glint of braces in her locker-door mirror. “You have your car?”
Kim Court moved closer, smiling, nodding. Shaking her keys.
Gabby lived ten twisty miles from the school, an A-frame like an arrowhead snug in the Binnorie Woods. There was no regular bus route and the house was always hard to find. Deenie’s dad had picked her up there countless times but sometimes he still got lost, calling Gabby’s mom, who would laugh softly and give him the same directions again. No, that’s a right at the yellow mailbox.
Gabby said living out here made her mom feel safer, tucked away like a nest at the top of a tree. But whenever Deenie was in the house, with its creaking wood and big windows, she couldn’t imagine feeling more exposed.
“I always wanted to see it,” Kim whispered, leaning over the steering wheel, gazing at the roof, its edges weeping with purple ivy. “It’s like a gingerbread house.”
They stood on the porch, hopping in their sneakers to keep warm. Kim in her rainbow-glittered ones, like the ones Gabby wore all last year.
It seemed to take a long time. Gabby’s cat, Larue, watched them from the window with suspicious eyes.
Finally, Deenie saw a curtain twitch, and the door swung open.
“Hey.” It was Skye, wrapped up in one of her fisherman’s sweaters with the elbow torn through. “What’s going on?”
“Hi,” Deenie said, walking inside. She didn’t want to show her disappointment that Skye was there again.
At some point, Deenie was going to have to get used to it. This new alliance.
After all, you could never be everything to one person.
Across the living room, Gabby was perched in the roll-arm chair. Larue hopped from the windowsill and stretched across her lap.
Kim’s eyes were floating everywhere—at the helix of books stacked in one corner, Closing the Circle—NOW! on top, and up into the wooden eaves, dark enough for bats.
Gabby and her mom had lived here for two years, but it still looked temporary, the furniture for a different kind of house, modern and sleek, beneath the heavy wooden ceiling fan, the faded stained glass.
“Where’s your mom?” Deenie asked.
“Sleeping,” Gabby said, her fingers picking at her scalp. “Look how gross this is. I can’t get the glue out.”
“Glue?” Kim asked, using it as an excuse to hover over Gabby.
“From the EEG,” Gabby said as Kim leaned over Gabby, peeking through her long locks.
“It smells,” Kim said.
“It’s toxic,” Skye noted, gazing out the window behind the sofa. “So it smells.”
Kim shrank back from Gabby’s head, her fingers wiggling like she’d nearly touched a spider.
“I’ve been texting you,” Deenie said. “Gabby.”
Gabby turned and looked at her.
“My mom made me turn off my phone,” she said. “And computer. Because of the pictures and stuff.”
“Right,” Deenie said. She hoped Gabby hadn’t seen that video of her onstage. She’d heard it was on YouTube: “Cello Girl Possessed!”
“And Mrs. Daniels was calling me.”
“Mrs. Daniels?” Deenie wondered if she’d showed up here too. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” Gabby said. “She wants us to come see her lawyer and some special doctor.”
“So she thinks it’s the same thing? What happened to Lise and what happened to you?”
“I guess.” Gabby shrugged. “My mom says we shouldn’t get involved.”
“Sheila Daniels has a bad mojo happening,” Skye said. “You can feel it coming off her. Maybe she doesn’t want the truth. She just wants an answer.”
“What do you know about it?” Deenie asked. “Do you even know Mrs. Daniels?”
“Not really,” Skye said, walking to the sofa. “But maybe she’s just not someone to be around right now. She’s carrying a lot of pain.”
“Tell them about the girl,” Gabby said to Skye. “Skye was telling me this freaky story.”
Deenie and Kim looked at Skye.
“Oh, just something I read online,” she said. “This eleven-year-old girl a long time ago who got super, super sick. Her eyes sunk back in her head and she’d roll around on the floor. And her body started to do crazy things, like bending back on itself. So her parents called the doctor. And when he came, the girl opened her mouth and started pulling trash out of it.”
“Trash, gross,” Kim said.
“Not like our trash,” Skye said. “Straw, gravel, chicken feathers, eggshells, pine needles, bones of little animals.”
Kim’s fingers touched her lips, eyes wide. “She was eating animals?”
“No,” Skye said, shaking her head. “And she wasn’t just throwing up things from her stomach. Because everything was always dry. The doctor could blow the feathers in his hand.”
Kim gasped.
“Well, the Internet never lies,” Deenie said, but then Skye loaded up the page on her phone. She showed them a picture, a girl with big haunted eyes, her mouth open. You couldn’t really see anything, but her mouth looked gigantic, like a hole in the center of her face.
Gabby took the phone from Skye, stared at it, Larue spiraled on her lap, tail twirling.
“When the doctor put tongs down her throat,” Skye added, “the girl spat out a cinder as big as a chestnut and so hot it burnt his hand.”
Taking the phone back from Gabby, Skye showed them a picture of a stern-faced doctor, his hand out, a scythe-like scar in the center of his palm.
“What’s a cinder?” Kim asked, teeth tugging at her lip. “Like a rock?”
“This is all very helpful,” Deenie said. Gabby couldn’t really want Skye here. She was only making it worse. Worse than even the pictures on the Internet. “Thanks, Skye.”
“So then what happened?” Gabby asked, Larue’s tail tickling her neck.
Skye shrugged. “I didn’t read it all. Maybe they burned a bunch of people in the town square. That’s what they usually do.”
“No,” Gabby said, “I mean to the girl. What happened to her?”
“Oh,” Skye said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”
Deenie sat down on the roll-arm next to Gabby.
“Mrs. Daniels came to our house this morning,” Deenie said.
Gabby looked up at her. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” Deenie said, realizing it herself.
Everyone was quiet for a moment.
Skye was kneeling on the sofa, looking out the window. Larue leaped from Gabby’s lap and winnowed between Skye’s calves and scuffed boot heels.
“Gabby, are you going back to
the doctor today?” Kim asked.
“We’re waiting and seeing,” Gabby said, her fingers flying back to her scalp. “For some results or something. I can’t think of what more they could do. Or ask. ‘Have you visited a foreign country recently? Have you been camping? Could you be pregnant?’”
There was a banging sound from somewhere in the house.
“That’s Mom,” Gabby said, jumping to her feet. “She’s probably not going to like you guys cutting.”
Skye didn’t move, so Deenie didn’t either. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Gabby and she needed to before it was too late.
“Gabby,” she asked abruptly, “did they ask you anything about the lake?”
“The lake?” Kim looked at Deenie, her face animating. “What about it?”
Deenie watched the back of Skye’s head, which didn’t move.
“We were there last week,” Skye said. “Isn’t that what you mean, Deenie?”
And then something happened.
Gabby’s jaw jolted to the left, then jolted again and again.
Grabbing the chair arm, she pressed her face hard against the back cushion to try to stop it.
Kim was watching, her fingers to her mouth as Gabby’s jaw slammed into the cushion over and over.
They were all watching.
“Don’t tell my mom,” Gabby cried out, her jaw popping like a firecracker. “Deenie, don’t.”
* * *
Sitting in the parking lot, Tom spread the newspaper across the steering wheel and read the article. He hadn’t wanted to read it in front of Deenie and he didn’t want to be seen reading it in school.
Mystery Illness Strikes Best Friends at High School
There was a large photo of Lise and Gabby, cropped. In the original version—slapped, milk-spattered, to Tom’s refrigerator door the previous fall—Deenie stood beside Gabby. In the newspaper, only Deenie’s hand remained, resting on Gabby’s shoulder like a ghost’s. The girls, tanned and triumphant during a trip to WaterWonders last fall. Lise bursting from a star-spangled halter top that, no matter how she shifted or twisted, always seemed to land one of its biggest stars in the center of a breast, a bull’s-eye.