by Megan Abbott
He’d taken the girls himself, with Eli as company, both pretending not to hear the high frenzy of the backseat, the girls talking the whole eighty-minute drive in a language impenetrable and self-delighted. On the ride back, their bodies chlorine-streaked to numbness, a torpor set in and he and Eli could watch the twilit horizon stretched across the windshield, and not say a word.
…Lise Daniels, 16, remains unconscious at St. Ann’s Hospital. Doctors would not confirm a connection between her condition and that of her best friend and fellow orchestra member Gabrielle Bishop, also 16. Bishop was given an EEG, among other tests. An unnamed source tells the Beacon that the results were “in the normal range,” suggesting no seizure had occurred…
Midway down the page was another photo inset. A creamy lavender brochure he recognized:
HPV and Your Daughter: Vaccinate Today,
Protect Her Forever
Oh no, he thought. Here it is. What Sheila was raving about that morning. Alongside the photo came the subhead:
A Mother’s Heartache Raises Serious Questions
…school and hospital officials have been tight-lipped. “It is not our role to speculate,” Hospital Superintendent Bradford noted in an e-mail. “It’s our job to get to the bottom of this and to see that these girls receive the best possible care.”
This stance appears to carry little weight with Sheila Daniels, 43, mother of the first afflicted girl, who is still waiting for answers, especially about a controversial new vaccination that has had many parents nationwide crying foul…
There was a quote from Mindy Parker’s father, Drew Parker, Esq., who was now speaking on Sheila Daniels’s behalf.
“The situation has escalated beyond one mother’s personal tragedy to a potential public health crisis,” he said. “We can’t rely on the public health department as our sole information source. After all, they were the ones who promoted this particular vaccination.”
While officials at the health department had not returned calls at press time, one source there, speaking off the record, said the vaccine in question is “very safe. As safe as these things get.”
Tom looked at the brochure inset again. Protect her forever. It had accompanied the letter all the parents in the school system had received the prior summer.
Parents of all rising sixth-grade girls are required to submit evidence of immunization or an opt-out notice, but all parents are strongly urged to vaccinate their daughters. The main cause of cervical cancer, HPV is easily transmitted via skin-to-skin contact during sexual activity. It is far more effective if girls get the vaccine before their first sexual contact. For your convenience, the department of health will conduct vaccinations on school grounds on the following dates…
So she’d done it, the whole series. Three boosters over six months. They sent text-message reminders. The final one had been just a few weeks ago.
He’d been glad for it, though he tried not to think about it for long. He knew his daughter would eventually have sex. That any day now she might find a boyfriend and then it was inevitable. That wasn’t the part that bothered him. It was the peril out there. Infections, cancer, a havoc upon his sweet daughter’s small, graceful little body. One she held so closely, so tightly. Even hugging her, he felt her smallness and delicacy.
She liked the high dive and played soccer and, in gym class or touch football with Eli and himself, was always bold and fearless. Skinned knees, bruised elbow, I can play too. But sometimes he wondered if that was by necessity, a girl living with two males, a girl who might rather be up in her room with Gabby, with Lise, or with her books, that endless pile of novels with limp-bodied girls on the cover. Girls in bathtubs, in dark woods. Girls underwater.
And when he touched her, he couldn’t help but think: What happens when someone touches her someday and doesn’t understand these things about her? That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.
And now, with Lise and Gabby, he was more glad than ever that he’d done what he could to take care of her. Whatever theories Sheila Daniels held in her fevered head, the shots were not to blame.
Vaccines, like all great scientific discoveries, are counterintuitive. You must take the very thing you are protecting yourself against. So your body remembers it, knows how to fight it.
You have to do whatever you can to shield their bodies. And sometimes that means you have to expose them to the very thing you want to protect them from. Which is the most unfair thing in the world.
* * *
“Oh my God, Deenie, did you see her?” Kim said, tearing open a bag of gummy worms from a warm spot under her car’s heat vent. “Did you see what happened to her face? That sound?”
Nerves, Gabby had insisted, laughing lurchingly. Stress.
And now, heading back to school, Deenie wished she hadn’t gone in the first place. She was going to make it just in time for third period and she hadn’t even gotten to talk to Gabby alone. And she wished she hadn’t brought up the lake.
“And why doesn’t she want her mom to know?” Kim asked, teeth tearing noisily at the green worm dangling from her braces.
“I don’t know,” Deenie said. “Turn left.”
“Here,” Kim said, handing Deenie her phone. “Find some music. I can’t think and drive.”
Deenie scrolled down the playlist mindlessly with her thumb.
“You know,” Kim said, mind-reading, “that lake water is in everything. It’s not just in the lake. If you know what I mean.”
“Is that some kind of riddle?”
“Do you ever drink from the water fountains in the school?” Kim said. “It’s the same stuff. And remember that day in gym, when we played soccer in the field and we all got that orange stuff on our shoes?”
Deenie looked at her thumbprint seared onto Kim’s phone, set it down on the gear panel.
“No,” Deenie said, “I wasn’t there.”
Deenie’s own phone began humming on her thighs. It was another text from the number she didn’t recognize.
if I have the wrong # u can tell me
Who r u, she started to type. Then stopped.
The thought came: Could it be Sean Lurie?
And then she pushed it away. Nearly shaking her head as if to shake the idea loose. She didn’t have time to think about any of that.
“So,” Kim said, looking at her from the corner of her eye. “You guys went in the lake?”
“We were just there,” Deenie said. “We weren’t doing anything.”
“But did you get near the water?”
“No,” Deenie lied.
“Huh. Well, you’re okay, right?” she said, looking at Deenie, maybe squinting a little.
“Don’t I look okay?” Deenie replied.
Kim looked at her for a moment longer, then turned her eyes back to the road, tugging at a gummy worm, letting it snap against her lip.
Deenie’s phone burred again, a text from Gabby, who must’ve gotten her phone back.
Don’t worry. we didn’t put our face under water. we were never all the way in.
But Deenie had. Though Gabby didn’t know it.
It’d been after she and Skye left, disappearing up the bank.
Leaning back, Lise kicked her legs, her breasts bobbling from her cotton bra.
Swim with me, Deenie, she said. Let’s do it, huh?
And she’d found she wanted to. Cool as Gabby and Skye were, with ex-boyfriends and birth control and complicated hair, maybe Lise and Deenie were cool too. Maybe they were lawbreakers. Rebels.
So they swam, even putting their heads under.
Afterward, lying on the bank, Lise had told her the story, whispering it in her ear. About the thing she had done with the boy, that he had done to her, in the bushes by the school. And she just had to tell Deenie about it. And how it had felt.
Deenie hadn’t been able to put it out of her head for days after. She guessed she hadn’t put it out of her head yet.
&nbs
p; * * *
All during class, every time he walked by the window, Tom saw it, from the corner of his eye. Amid all the hay-brown thatch of late winter, a flash of neon pink, just outside, by the tall hedges.
Soon, he found himself teaching from that corner, trying to get a better look.
It looked familiar and he couldn’t figure out why.
After the bell, in nothing but shirtsleeves, his face flushed from the cold, he crept along outside his own classroom windows like some kind of peeper.
Right by the dense, snow-furred hedges, there was a crumpled pile and first he thought it was a winter scarf swirling around itself, but when he reached out, he felt the thick knit of a pair of girl’s tights, Fair Isles like Georgia used to wear on winter mornings, long ago. Vivid pink with fat white snowflakes.
He thought about tugging the wool loose from the brambles, taking the tights to Lost and Found, but he didn’t.
Just looking at them, how small they were, he didn’t know what to do.
* * *
Is everything ok? Your sister won’t call/text me back. MOM.
it’s ok, Eli typed, she will.
He hoped she would. He could still remember Deenie’s tight, red-faced anger at their mom, all through the divorce. The way it sometimes seemed her forehead would split open. It had settled into something quieter, less vivid. Something worse, like grooves sunk deep, unfixable. It had been so much harder for Deenie. All because their mom couldn’t control herself, she said. Which is disgusting.
Thrusting his phone to the bottom of his backpack, he opened the door to the loading dock.
And there, once again, was Skye Osbourne, prowling up the ramp from the parking lot.
He was beginning to wonder if she lived out here. But he guessed she could wonder the same thing about him.
She smiled through a crest of smoke. It smelled like honey.
“Sometimes a girl’s gotta get some fresh air,” she said. “Or she might go crazy.”
He dropped his backpack to the ground, climbed up on the railing.
There was a heaviness to the sky, the whisper of something wet in the air.
“Hey,” she said, tugging a fraying scarf from her neck. “Feel how warm it’s getting.”
She dropped her bag and climbed up beside him.
“I heard Lise’s mom came to see you.”
“Who told you that?”
“Deenie.”
“Really?” he said. He had the impression Deenie wasn’t really friends with Skye. Friends of friends. Sometimes Eli felt like that’s all he had. Friends of friends.
“What did she want?”
“I don’t know. She was acting pretty crazy.”
“Huh,” Skye said. “Did she say stuff?”
All those layers of sweater and scarf, and beneath those, her legs, boots climbing to her midthigh. When she turned, her skirt whirled slowly, and, for a split second, he could see the inside of one of those thighs. Stark white through the skein of fishnets.
He watched her thigh. She watched him.
“Sort of,” he said. All that came into his head was Mrs. Daniels saying Spreading your semen anywhere you want. “I don’t remember.”
She looked at him and he thought he saw a funny kind of smile there. He tried to imagine having sex with Skye, to picture her body underneath all those folds and seams. To picture her eyes rolling back, her skin flushed, her body giving way. He couldn’t.
It made him feel relieved.
He didn’t think he’d ever be interested in Skye, but he was glad girls like her existed. Ones who didn’t need him to feel good, pretty, forgiven, safe.
* * *
There were marks on Lise’s locker, like from a big claw.
“They didn’t have her combination,” Jaymie Hurwich told Deenie breathlessly. Class salutatorian and Most Self-Motivated Student, Jaymie said everything breathlessly. “The janitor opened it with a bolt cutter.”
Deenie put her finger on the metal-scrape scar.
“They looked, but then they didn’t touch anything,” Jaymie said, hand on the large padlock hanging from it now. “You missed geo, Deenie. How come?”
Deenie didn’t say anything. She knew exactly what was inside Lise’s locker: packs of highlighters, wild-berry hand sanitizer, the dented thermos containing sludgy remnants of yesterday morning’s health smoothie. What could they learn from that?
Then Jaymie told her the other news: a silver-haired woman in a pantsuit had been spotted in the nurse’s office. No one knew whether Nurse Tammy had quit or been suspended or fired, but she was gone. And the silver-haired woman was maybe not even a nurse at all but someone important. The lanyard on her neck read Dryden County Health.
“Do you think they’ll cancel midterms?” Jaymie asked.
Deenie didn’t answer. She was reading the newspaper article that had been making the rounds, the paper greased to near silk by now.
The picture of Gabby and Lise, best friends forever.
Which was all she could see at first until Jaymie spread her hand like a spider over the photo of the lavender brochure.
“It could happen to any of us,” Jaymie said gravely. “We all have it in us.”
The first shots were six months ago.
HPV vaccines are more effective if administered before sexual debut.
That’s what the department of health poster in the nurse’s office said. Gabby had read it aloud, making wide eyes at Deenie until she’d laughed.
Debut. Take a bow after. Hold your applause till the end, please.
Freshman girls were now required to have it before enrolling.
Brooke Campos said most of the fifth-grade girls had already had it. “Sluts,” Brooke had said, annoyed at being beaten by her eleven-year-old sister. “The little sluts.”
And here they were, high-school juniors with condoms hurled at their feet wherever they turned, it seemed. And they hadn’t gotten the shots.
“The human papillomavirus can infect you anywhere,” Ms. Dyer, the health teacher, announced before the first round of shots in September, “and can cause everything from benign warts on the hands and feet to cancer of the cervix, anus, mouth, and throat.”
A papilloma, she explained, grows outward like a projecting finger and looks like cauliflower.
Deenie didn’t see how a finger could look like a cauliflower but, watching Ms. Dyer holding up her pinkie, she knew she didn’t want either of them inside her.
And then Ms. Dyer said that HPV had been around forever, even in those fairy tales you read as a kid, when the witches and trolls have bumps on their faces and hands.
“Can’t warts just be warts?” Brooke Campos asked, grimacing. “Let’s not get crazy.” Brooke was always the person in English class who complained that Ms. Enright was “reading too much into things.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Ms. Dyer said. No one would ever assume anything Ms. Dyer said was a joke. Twenty-eight years old with a master’s in female adolescent something, she paused before she answered any question, pushing her oversize blue-framed glasses higher on her nose thoughtfully. Deenie’s dad said, with women like her, a sense of humor comes a few years later.
“See how wide this area is?” she said, holding a diagram of a cervix across her pelvis, making the girls in the front row flinch. “At your age, this is the area most vulnerable to invasion. It’s utterly exposed. In a few years, it will retract. You’ll be safer.”
Lise whispered that it made her feel like her insides were on the outside and anyone could touch them.
“Until then,” Ms. Dyer said, pointing to the sink handle on the lab unit, “you are as open as the mouth on that faucet.”
Skye looked up for a moment from mild contemplation of her own fingers, bundled with rings—arrows, snakes, a silver seahorse.
“Ms. Dyer, I read something,” she said. “Most people with HPV have issues with feeling grounded, with self-judgment, with their sexual energies.”
“Wher
e’d you read that, Skye?” Ms. Dyer asked, her fingers wrapped around the sink handle. Teachers never knew what to do with Skye, Ms. Dyer least of all. Whenever Skye spoke, Ms. Dyer tended to shift the weight on her feet back and forth until it made Deenie dizzy.
“Online,” Skye replied. “It has to do with repression. Warts mean you’re holding something back that needs to be released.”
“Like what? Pus?” Deenie asked. Everything was always so easy for Skye, with her older boyfriends, the way her aunt bought her cool old-time lingerie from vintage shops, the strip of birth control pills she once unfurled for them like candy.
“No,” Skye said. “Sexual hang-ups. Hiding your erotic powers. Fear. Secrets. You have to release all that.”
“But how?” Lise peeped from behind Skye. “What are you supposed to do?”
Everyone started giggling except Lise, her face puzzled and reddening.
“Don’t worry, Lise,” Skye said, not even turning around to look at her. “You’ll know just what to do.”
The first round of shots, Deenie was surprised how little it hurt, and disappointed.
All the rumors were that it hurt more than any other vaccine, ever.
She remembered Jaymie Hurwich. It had taken her ten minutes because the nurse couldn’t calm her down.
Finally, she told me to watch the ladybug on the window, Jaymie said after. And I said, What window? By then she’d stuck it in.
Back then, the prospect of her or Gabby or Lise having sex seemed remote. None of them had boyfriends and there had been the dramatic cautionary tale of a girl Deenie worked with at the Pizza House. The one who’d confided that she thought she was pregnant by the assistant manager at the ear-piercing booth at the mall. It turned out she wasn’t pregnant but did have gonorrhea, which was disgusting to all of them in ten different ways, “starting with the name,” Lise had said, shivering a little.