by Megan Abbott
“She said as sure as if I’d held the poison syringe in my fingers, I had harmed her daughter.”
“She’s hysterical,” he began, then paused a moment. “Hold on. Lise came to see you last week?”
She looked at him. “Yes.”
Tom waited a second.
“Of course, whatever she said, that’s private,” she added.
“Of course,” Tom said, a little embarrassed. What did it matter now?
But it felt like it might.
Erika looked at him, her right eyelid trembling behind her clever glasses.
“You can’t let it get to you,” he said. “None of it’s your fault.”
* * *
Maybe it’s from the funky ooze out by football field after it rains
Touretts like my uncle Steve no one likes him lost IT job after
Deenie wanted to turn her phone off, to stop the texts nearly rattling her phone off the kitchen island.
But it might be Gabby.
Let’s meet up, she’d texted Gabby an hour ago, to talk abt Kim & lake.
So she was left with bad thoughts.
One, two, three girls. The way it was moving, like the way pink eye or strep would tear through the school, a blazing red mouth swallowing them one by one, it didn’t feel like a vaccine. It felt like a virus, a plague.
She clicked to the latest news article and read it while she ate dinner, toaster waffles that were still cold inside.
Of the two hundred and seven girls in the school, the article pointed out, more than half had been vaccinated.
In her head, she kept running numbers. More than a hundred girls had had the vaccine. But what were the odds that she would be friends with all three of the Girls. The Girls. The Afflicted Girls.
“Police and public-health officials,” the article said, “are working together to determine commonalities among the girls: hobbies, medications, health histories, personal histories.”
“Me,” Deenie found herself saying out loud, washing her dinner plate, gluey with syrup, her fingers grating through it.
Lise to Gabby to Kim, and what did they all have in common?
They’re friends with each other, sort of.
But how long before someone said, All of them are friends with Deenie.
Deenie is the thing they have in common.
It’s Deenie.
“At that age, it’s all about yourself,” she’d overheard her mom say once. “You think the whole world spins around you.”
Deenie had missed the context. All she knew was how it felt to hear that coming from her mom, the woman who’d overturned the family like a box of garage-sale toys to suit herself.
Maybe that’s what this thinking was, her maternal inheritance. Something happened, anything, and it was all about me, me, me.
Her phone shot to life, buzzing across the counter.
The number flashing: Kim C.
Deenie grabbed for it.
“K.C., are you okay?”
“I can’t talk long,” came the choked whisper. “I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”
“Why not? What happened?”
“I’m still at the hospital. They won’t let me go.”
“Why? They let Gabby go after. Are you…”
“I don’t have time, Deenie. I just—look, I’m gonna have to tell them.”
Deenie set down her fork, sticky in her hands. “Tell them what?”
“About the lake.”
“Kim, you weren’t at the lake. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It might be why,” she said. “It might be why it happened to me.”
“Why what happened to you? Why you threw up in the gym? Someone throws up in gym every week.”
Deenie knew it was mean to say. But what happened to Kim just didn’t sound scary, like with Gabby or with Lise. At least not the way Keith Barbour had described it, twirling in a circle and gagging. And, privately, the thought had come to her: it’s just Kim Court, anyway. Kim Court, who copied Gabby’s tights, Gabby’s shoes, lapped up everything Gabby ever said.
Kim didn’t say anything, clearing her throat in a raw way that hurt Deenie to hear.
“You weren’t even in the lake, Kim,” Deenie added, dropping her plate in the sink, her right hand in the hot dishwater, swirling.
“But I was with Gabby. In her house. I touched her hair. You saw me.”
“What?” Deenie asked, even as she remembered Kim’s stubby fingers digging in Gabby’s scalp, that dark swarm of Gabby hair threaded with glue from the plugs on her head. Frankenstein’s creature.
“And—” She paused and Deenie could hear her breath coming faster. “And you.”
“You didn’t touch my hair,” Deenie said, her hand stinging from the sink’s hot water.
“We were together. You were in my car…”
Find some music. I can’t think and drive.
“…and then it happened to me.”
Deenie pictured her fingers rubbing along the playlist on Kim’s phone.
“It’s not fair…” Kim gasped. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No one did,” Deenie said, coolly.
“And how come…” Kim let the question trail off for a second. “I mean, how come everyone but you, Deenie?”
Deenie looked down at her hands, red and raw in the dishwater.
“What did the doctors say?” she asked.
“They don’t know,” Kim said, her voice dropping so low Deenie could barely hear it. “But I’m telling you: there was something inside me, and it was in my throat.”
“Vomit, Kim,” Deenie said roughly, her eyes stinging from the water.
“No, but that’s why I threw up. Because I couldn’t get it out. I couldn’t stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“The way it felt, the things I knew.”
“Things you…What do you mean?”
“And it’s not the vaccine, Deenie,” she said, voice rising. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Don’t listen to them about the vaccine!”
“Kim, what—”
Through the phone, Deenie could hear the crackling PA of the hospital, paging someone. She felt a click in her own throat but stopped herself from clearing it.
“I have to go,” Kim said. “I can’t explain it to you. It has to happen to you for you to understand.”
* * *
Lying on his bed, three warm beers heavy inside him, Eli wished he’d just gone home after practice.
Instead, he’d followed A.J. to Brooke Campos’s house. They were all freaked out about Kim Court and everything, though no one would admit it.
Brooke took them to the basement, where there was a broken fridge. Laid flat like a glossy white coffin, it was packed with skunked Yuengling abandoned after her dad’s poker game. They sat on it and drank and talked about everything.
Brooke said she used to go to camp with a girl who’d had the shots and her heart had expanded to the size of a grapefruit and she died. She said she always felt sorry for how she’d treated that girl and for pushing her off the diving board that time and now it was too late.
Then Brooke started crying, her head thrown back, just like Gabby in all those pictures. Leaning first against A.J., then Eli, with a kind of breathless warmth, she cried, her fingers clinging to their shirtfronts. Eli left before things got too crazy. Even A.J. seemed upset, talking about his brother, who died of septic shock when A.J. was five.
You never knew how things would make you feel. The kinds of people who might feel things.
That’s what he was thinking, lying on his bed, eyes on the spider cracks in the ceiling.
Reaching over, he grabbed his backpack, trying to shake his phone free. He hadn’t looked at it in hours, afraid it’d be his mom again, texting about Deenie. He felt sorry for her, a little. And for himself.
Maybe he’d had four beers.
And the phone wouldn’t shake loose.
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Finally, lifting his torso woozily against his pillows, he turned the backpack inside out, scattering loose-leaf, handouts, practice schedules all over the bed and floor.
“Deenie,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Through the door, he could hear her moving, thought he heard a sharp inhale, like she was deciding whether to answer.
“Okay,” she said. “You can.”
“You haven’t seen my phone, have you?” he said, pushing the door open, surveying the room, the tangle of loose charger cords sprouting from the wall, jeans coiled at the foot of the bed, one long dust-streaked sock. And always the books, their covers creased, spines spread across the floor. He thought girls were supposed to be clean.
She was standing in the middle of the room, which surprised him. Her fingers were pinched red, latticed tight in the strings of her hoodie.
She stared at the knotted string ends in her hand for a second.
Then she looked up at him.
“Don’t tell Dad,” she said, voice so small.
“Tell Dad what?”
* * *
It was after seven o’clock, and Tom was sitting in the driveway looking at his house, holding his phone.
He’d just listened to another voice mail from Georgia: Tom, maybe Deenie should stay with me. Maybe she’ll be safer away from Dryden.
And now, still not moving, not even taking the keys out of the ignition, he looked once more at the three texts from Deenie, asking if he’d heard anything about anything.
I’ll tell you when I get home, he’d replied.
When r u coming home, she’d answered, more than two hours ago.
The meeting with Crowder had gone late, everyone with a great deal to say, and then talking to Erika and finally helping the French teacher—Kit was her name, he had to remember that—jump her scooter, stalled from the sudden damp in the air, the temperature rising twenty degrees or more since the day before in that weird way of Dryden.
“Isn’t it something?” she’d said throatily, looking around, her cheekbones misted and her lipstick slightly smudged. “Like a fairy tale.”
He’d said he knew just what she meant.
And she’d mentioned Eli’s magnifique attendance, and Tom pretended he knew, even though he’d been sure Eli took Spanish.
Finally, they had talked about the image of Gabby posted everywhere, that curtain of hair, the theatrical arc of her neck, the inflamed cheeks.
“Like a ballerina,” Kit said. “All the girls will want to steal that pose for their yearbook photos.”
And now it was after seven, and he was still sitting in the car.
Did they tell u what is happening, Deenie’s text read. Do they know yet.
Taking a breath, he picked up his phone one last time.
“Medical billing, Diane speaking.”
“Diane,” he said, “it’s Tom. I wasn’t sure you’d still be there.”
“Tom,” she said. “Well, I’m twelve-to-eight today.”
“I’m sorry to keep calling,” he said, sensing a tightness in her voice. “I was just wondering if you had any news.”
There was a pause, then a sigh.
“Hey, I get it,” she said. “If I had a daughter at that school, I’d want to know everything too. And a lot’s been happening.”
“A girl named Kim Court, she was there today, at the hospital, right?”
“Yes, she’s here.”
“Still? I thought they were sending her home. That it was just a panic attack.”
“We have to keep her until she seems stable. After a seizure—”
“So it was a seizure?”
“No,” she said, then lowered her voice. “I didn’t mean that. But they have to rule out some things.”
“Like what?”
“When teenagers come, and they’re having hallucinations—”
“Hallucinations? I didn’t know she was—”
“—we have to rule out drugs. Ecstasy, MDMA. There’s a lot of ecstasy at that school.”
“There is?”
“Or it could be the onset of schizophrenia.”
“Jesus.”
“Can I call you back?” she said suddenly.
“Sure.”
A moment later, the phone rang.
“I’m calling from my cell,” she whispered, a nervous titter in her voice, “from the ladies’ room.”
As if by magic, the smooth professional tone—professional biller, professional dater-slash-divorcée—was gone. She sounded suddenly younger, girlish.
“They wouldn’t even let us leave for dinner because of the reporters out front,” she was saying. “We’re not supposed to be talking about any of this. They made us sign something.”
“I’m putting you in a bad position,” Tom said.
“I have a friend in ER,” she said, words rushing, jumbling together. “She said the Court girl kept shoving her hand in her mouth. She got her whole fist in there. And when they put the restraints on, she started screaming that something was touching her from the inside.”
“Touching her?”
“Well, people can say all kinds of things in that state. But they didn’t find any drugs. I don’t think.”
Tom took a breath.
“How’s Lise Daniels?”
A pause.
“I can’t talk any more about her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen, I just—” He heard the sound of another woman’s voice, everything echoing, the rush of water. “I have to go.”
“Right,” he said. “I understand. It’s just…when you have a daughter.”
Her voice cracked a little. “Oh, Tom, I know. I wish…”
“No, I don’t want to get you in any kind of trouble.”
“It’s just…Can I say something?” Whispering.
“Sure,” he said, feeling a churning inside. There was a long pause, then the thud of a door.
“Tom. It feels crazy in here right now.”
Tom could hear her breath catch.
“The mother, she walks the halls all night. That’s what Patty, one of the nurses, told me. The mother walked by the nurses’ station so many times last night, Patty thought she’d go crazy herself. She keeps telling them her daughter has been destroyed. That’s the word she used. Destroyed. Like you do with an animal. After.”
* * *
It didn’t seem so bad to him. Nowhere near as bad as Deenie seemed to think.
Sitting down on the edge of her bed, Eli watched his sister bobbing from foot to foot, just like she had during countless past confidences, shared reports of dirty deeds, stolen candy, a pilfered beer, running a bike over Mom’s violets. Except that was a long time ago. It hadn’t happened in a long time.
When she’d first started talking, he’d been afraid. He’d had this squinting sense, lately, of something. That she was different, changed.
A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he’d seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.
I didn’t spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps.
He’d stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands.
She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.
He couldn’t stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces swathed with sweat.
Next to her, by the ovens, was that guy Sean, the one who used to play forward for Star-of-the-Sea. Once, Sean had asked him about Lise, wondered if Eli knew her. Her tits look like sno-cones, he’d said. Beautiful sno-cones.
And now Deenie stood before him, her body tight, the zipper on her hoodie pinching that tiny bird neck of hers, saying, “Don’t tell Dad. Okay?”
But what she told him had nothing
to do with what he’d noticed at the Pizza House, whatever that was. Or the other thing—the thing he’d almost forgotten. Someone at school saying he saw his sister getting into a car with some guy.
Instead, it was just some crazy story about the lake.
“But Eli, we put our feet in. Last week. What if it did something?”
He shook his head. “If it did something, you’d be sick too. And Skye Osbourne, she was with you, right? She’d be sick too.”
“Maybe it affected us in different ways.”
She looked at him. The look he’d seen since they were small, like camping, her pale face in the tent flap when he’d spook her, telling her there were bears out there, hidden in the green daze of Binnorie Woods.
“Deenie,” he said, “it’s not the lake.”
“How do you know?”
He looked at her. It was one of those tricks his dad always pulled off. He used to watch him do it with Mom over and over. I promise you, I promise you, a smile, a coaxing shoulder rub, spinning her around like dancing, everything will be okay. Mom used to call it the Croc dance, to go with the Croc smile.
“The doctors would know, Deenie,” he said, the thought coming to him just as he needed it. “They’ve been doing tests, right? For toxins and stuff. They’d pick that up.”
“Oh,” Deenie said. “Right.”
He could see her shoulders relax a little. He was surprised how easy it was. Just like when they were little. Taking her hand and dragging her out of the tent, promising her there were no bears out there after all. They were safe.
“So you feel better?”
She nodded.
“Okay, then,” he said, leaning back, feeling his body loosen, the beer bloom returning.
Except there was something wedged under him, Deenie’s Pizza House shirt, stiff with old flour or whatever it was they made pizzas with.
“Jesus, Deenie, don’t you ever wash your uniform?” he teased, fingering the shirt, feigning throwing it at her.
She didn’t say anything, her hands once more gripping the ends of her drawstring. Tugging it back and forth. It was like it had lasted only a second, that brief spasm of relief.
Girls never stopped being mysterious, he thought, tossing the shirt to the floor.
Sinking back onto her pillow, he lay there for a moment, staring at her ceiling, wondering about his missing phone, or something.