The Fever

by Megan Abbott

  And through the chute, he could still hear the girls, two floors above. The basement’s drop ceiling porous and seeming to breathe. After a long rain, it smelled just like the lake.

  Once, a senior girl from Star-of-the-Sea tried to get him to climb the safety fence, but he said no. Wiggling out of her halter dress, she said, her tongue between her teeth, It’s okay. We can always skinny-dip right in your car. Who needs water?

  “You’re the luckiest mother I ever knew,” A.J. said when Eli told him about it. “Screw that pretty face of yours.”

  Lying there, Eli fumbled for his phone before remembering it wasn’t there.

  * * *

  “Dad,” Deenie said, answering her phone. “I’m coming home. I am.”

  “You better be,” her dad said in a tone he rarely used.

  The car thudding along the road, the spatter of light rain, she and Gabby didn’t say anything for a mile or two.

  Finally, Gabby spoke. “They’re going to want to bring me back in again, aren’t they? They’re going to want to talk to me again.”

  Deenie looked at her, passing headlights flashing across her face, and saw something pulsing there, from her temple to her jaw.

  “I don’t know.”

  It hurt to look at her, the way she was holding her body so tightly, her arms rigid at her sides, a girl made of wood. “Maybe not.”

  When they entered Binnorie Woods, Deenie’s heart started to slow down a little. No streetlights and the car dark, it was like being under your covers, your sleeping bag at camp. She’d always liked that feeling, and the smell of cedar coming through the vents.

  “Maybe,” Deenie said, “this means Lise is doing better. If they can move her she must be doing better.”

  Gabby nodded lightly, her head canting to one side.

  “You know what I thought,” she said quietly, “when the reporter came over, you know what I thought she was going to tell us?”

  “What?”

  “That Lise was dead.”

  * * *

  “It’s okay, Lara. She’s driving Gabby home to you right now.”

  “Thank God. Tom, have you seen some of these pictures? And videos?”

  “I saw a few,” Tom said, thinking of that striking one of Gabby. “Wait, videos?”

  “There’s a video of Kim Court. Some kid must’ve taken it while it was happening. It’s all over. It’s on the news now.”

  Tom grabbed the remote from Eli.

  There, on Channel 7, was a grainy YouTube video of Kim Court, body twitching on the gym floor.

  The screen crawl read: Mysterious Outbreak: Parents’ Rush to Vaccinate to Blame?

  And then, hands gripping her own neck, a blur of vomit, head thrown so far back you could only see the glint of her braces. The piano-tinkling score from The Exorcist played.

  “Lara,” he said. “Turn off the TV.”

  * * *

  They were deep into the woods now and Deenie couldn’t remember the way. Gabby had to keep saying, softly, Right, right, left here. Left.

  “Deenie, remember what Kim told us in the library,” Gabby said, resting her head on the window. “About Lise having a boyfriend?”

  Deenie looked at her, not even remembering for a moment.

  “In the library. Kim told us something about Lise and some guy.”

  “Why would Kim Court know anything about Lise? Gabby, why are we talking about this now—”

  “I think it might be true.”

  Gabby faced the window and Deenie could hear a faint rattling: Gabby’s head against the glass.

  “No,” Deenie said. “It’s not true.”

  Technically, it was not. There was the thing Lise had told her at the lake, the thing she’d done with the boy. But that boy was not Lise’s boyfriend, not at all.

  “Deenie, I’ve heard it from other people. I thought she might have told you. Sometimes she tells you things she doesn’t tell me.”

  “No,” Deenie said.

  “Because lately, Skye and me, we’ve been noticing Lise has been kind of secretive. Like maybe she was hiding something. When I took her to the Pizza House the other night, I tried to talk to her, but—”

  “Skye?” Deenie barked, so loud she surprised herself. “Skye doesn’t know a goddamn thing about Lise. Why would you listen to her? Lise wasn’t hiding anything.” Taking a breath, she tried to calm herself. Then added, “No one’s hiding anything, Gabby.”

  Gabby nodded, the worst, most thoughtless kind of nod Deenie could imagine.

  Then she turned and faced Deenie. “I just remembered what I heard about you,” Gabby said. “The other day.”

  Deenie looked over at her, the car swerving slightly. “What?”

  “That you were in a car with some guy. You never told me that.”

  Deenie faced the road again. “Because it’s not true. It was probably Eli.”

  “Stop!” Gabby shouted, her voice suddenly loud, Deenie nearly jumping in her seat, words rushing to her head, flooding her mouth without emerging.

  “My house,” Gabby said, one hand dropping on Deenie’s arm, the other pointing to driveway.

  Deenie turned the wheel.

  The house blazing with lights, Mrs. Bishop was running out, her legs and feet bare, the headlights making her scar look red, alive.

  Any anger on her face seemed to break to pieces the minute her daughter stepped from the car.

  Backing out, Deenie watched as Gabby slumped into her mother’s arms wearily, a veteran home from battle. Mrs. Bishop folding her in her arms in such a mom way. In a way that made Deenie blink.

  * * *

  Face drawn, hair half caught in her rubber band, his daughter looked half and twice her age at the same time.

  Nearly midnight, on either side of the kitchen island, Deenie told him about the hospital.

  “And so the reporter said Mrs. Daniels is trying to move Lise to the medical center.”

  “That probably means she’s stable,” he said. “So that’s something.”

  Her mouth twisted, dubious, like Georgia somehow, that was the echo, and the way her shirt was riding up and her arm stretching tiredly and with dismissal.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said.

  “Did you call your mom?” he said, holding out his hand for the car keys. A gesture stolen, he was sure, from his own father, a century ago.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t have time.”

  “Deenie,” he said. “You were gone for hours.”

  “The reporter wanted us to talk on camera,” she said. “She wouldn’t leave us alone. But we wouldn’t do it.”

  He sighed. “How did Gabby seem?”

  He watched her try to pull the rubber band from her hair, her eyes down, and he wanted to reach over and help her untangle it, but her body looked so closed off, a tooth clamp.

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  He found his hand reaching out to her anyway, and the flinch that came was sudden, terrible.

  * * *

  Trying to push herself, hard, into sleep, Deenie felt her toes cramp painfully, a pang in them she had to rub away, tangled under her own sheets, breathing hard until it stopped again.

  Then her phone hissed: Skye.

  She could have sworn she’d turned it off.

  U still ok, right?

  Yes, Deenie typed. She never got texts from Skye and she almost wondered if she had fallen asleep.

  U saw Gabby tonite?

  Yeah. Why?

  We need to protect each other, came Skye’s reply. We R surrounded by bad energy.

  Staring at the words blinking hard at her, almost spasming, she had a sick feeling in her stomach and turned the phone off.

  What made Skye think she could text her? Because they were the only ones left? Skye’s words always felt cryptic. Shake it off, she told herself. Don’t let her get under your skin.

  And she grabbed for the bottle of antihistamine left over from the flu and drank three plastic cups.
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br />   Somewhere in the gluey Nyquil haze, the vision came of standing in the lake with Lise the week before, stomping their feet in the emerald thick of the water.

  On the shoreline were Skye’s hard-jeaned boys with the disappearing tattoos. They whistled at Lise, fingers hooked in their mouths.

  Let’s do it, Lise whispered in her ear, her tongue showing between her teeth. Let’s go in.

  When she woke up, in the purple of four a.m., she could still hear Lise’s voice in her ear, high as a little girl’s.

  We went behind those tall bushes. He took my tights off first. It was so cold, but his hands…

  Who was it? Deenie had asked, kept asking.

  Then, finally, Lise whispered the boy’s name, and Deenie was surprised.

  Really? Him?

  And Lise’s smile filled with teeth, a giggle up her throat.

  Like something inside opening, she said as they sprawled on the shoreline, feet tangled in seaweed tickling up their legs, and then opening something else.

  Don’t tell anyone, she made Deenie promise. They’ll think I’m a slut.

  No, they won’t, Deenie said. Though you could never be sure.

  I told him not to do what he was doing. That it was disgusting. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. We put our mouths down there with boys, but…but he was down there and everything happened.

  But she said his hands were cool, like a doctor’s. And that made it seem okay. And soon enough she was so hot, a burning down there, and his mouth cool too, and the way, like—and she was so embarrassed to say it, to have even thought of it—like a flute, the flutter tongue. The move it takes so long to learn.

  I don’t know, she said, her fingers curled over her mouth like eating a candy. I don’t know. And then she said the thing about how it was like an opening, an opening, and forever opening.

  She never even knew before what it meant to see stars.

  That was all she could say. Deenie wanted her to say more.

  Since it was a boy she knew, she wanted to picture it.

  Is it disgusting? Lise asked, but she was smiling as she said it, face red. Was it bad?

  Deenie didn’t say anything. Their legs slimy from the water.

  Deenie, she said, am I bad?

  No, Deenie said. Not you, Lise.

  Never you.

  12

  Friday

  It was maybe five, the light looked like five, but without his phone, Eli had no idea.

  There was a freedom in it.

  It was warmer than in months, as if the temperature had risen during the night, and the bike ride through town felt delirious and wonderful.

  His hand kept reaching for his pocket, the phantom buzz.

  But nothing.

  Maybe he’d never have a phone again.

  He was nearly to school before he remembered everything from the night before, all the beer and ruminations and sinking to drunken sleep on the floor of the den, carpet burn on his face.

  When he walked in the locker room, everything was unusually quiet. No clattering sticks or ripping tape or the low din of players rousing themselves to life.

  But he could hear something, the tinny sound of someone’s computer speakers, a soft voice and panting.

  “…my tongue is tingling, like, all the time. If you could see…”

  He knew this was going to mean another speech from Coach about how important it was not to degrade women’s bodies with pornography because what if they were your mothers, or your sisters.

  “…something in my throat. And it’s getting bigger…”

  When he reached the last bank of lockers, he saw seven, eight players huddled around Mark Pulaski’s laptop, transfixed. A.J. was grinning and shaking his head. A.J. was always grinning and shaking his head.

  “Get a load, Nash. Get a fucking load of this.”

  There was a stutter and hiss as the video began again.

  It was the latest girl, that Kim girl, glowing from the light of her own phone screen.

  Panting noisily, like her tongue was too big for her mouth, she couldn’t seem to quite catch her breath. Her face looked wet, her eyes ringed vampire-brown and her mouth slickly red.

  It was dark all around her, but you could see the green fluorescence of some light somewhere, the hospital corridor.

  And she was talking straight into the camera, her phone.

  Her words slow and dreamlike.

  “Hey, everybody, I know you’re all probably worried about me and I wanted to let you know how I’m doing since it happened.”

  Breathing, breathing.

  “I’m still at the hospital. They won’t let me go.”

  Her fingers reached up to that glossy mouth.

  “My tongue is tingling, like, all the time, and this side feels like it’s got a lot of pressure and it’s hard to keep my eye open on this side. It feels like this side of my face is slipping from me. Like it’ll slip right off.”

  She started clearing her throat, and once she started it was like she couldn’t stop.

  “But most of all it’s here,” she said, clawing at her neck. “It feels like there’s something in my throat. And it’s getting bigger.”

  A scraping sound came from her mouth as she pushed her face closer to the camera, the lens distorting everything, fish-eyeing her.

  When she opened her mouth, those teeth, enormous and iron-girded, were blue.

  “I’m sure you’re hearing lots of things. About what’s happening. Let me tell you: No one here wants to know the truth. That’s why they won’t let me go.”

  Suddenly, as if she’d heard something, a muffled sound too fast to recognize, Kim flinched, her eyes jumping to her left, pupils gleaming.

  There was a long, long pause, her face palsied. Eli felt something even in his own chest: What did she hear? See?

  Then her face turned slowly to the camera again, her throat a death rattle.

  “But there’s other girls out there. And they have it. Maybe ones you can’t even tell. Who knows how many of us?”

  “I know it by heart,” A.J. said, leaping onto one of the benches. “Brooke and her sister were watching it all night.”

  “‘There’s other girlth out there,’” he slurred, his tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth. “‘Who knowth how many of us?’”

  Eli looked back at the screen, Kim’s face caught. Beneath, there were 624 likes and dozens of comments: oh, kim, be strong! kim, i’ve been feeling weird too, did u faint when you got the shot? Young lady: this is demonic possession. You can read about it in the New Testament. The solution is to find a True Man of God who can cast the demon out. Receiving Christ can cure you. Blessings to you and your family!

  Eli fixed his eyes on the screen. It reminded him, in some obscure way, of those girls at the games, the younger ones who came in groups and banded behind the Plexiglas, bap-bap-bapping with open palms or the bottoms of their fists, their mouths sprung wide, their tongues between their teeth. Me. Me. Me.

  “I don’t…” Eli started. “Is she wearing makeup?” He was trying to figure something out.

  “Maybe she’ll get her own reality show,” A.J. said. “Kim’s Wrecked World. My Toxic Sweet Sixteen.”

  “And she didn’t say anything about the shots,” Eli said, just realizing it. “About the vaccine.”

  Mark Pulaski turned around to face Eli.

  “You think she’s faking it?” he said, his voice breaking. “Did you see her? My sister got her first shot last week. She woke up from a nap yesterday and couldn’t turn her head. She’s fucking eleven years old.”

  Eli looked at him, not knowing what to say.

  “Just because your sister’s bouncing around the school while all her friends are fucking dying, man. Your sister…” Mark’s voice trailed off. “Jesus, man.”

  Eli watched Mark for a second, and everyone else watched Eli. He felt A.J.’s fist tap his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Eli said. “Sorry, man.”

>   He turned back to the computer screen, the big arrow over Kim’s face, trembling.

  * * *

  Her backpack on her lap, Deenie talked to him the entire ride to school.

  For the first miles, Tom let himself enjoy it. It felt almost like before, maybe a few years ago, when she always seemed to be bursting with giddy, nervous animation. Dad, Dad, wait, listen, Dad, listen. Telling him about a book, a science project.

  But all the itchy squirming in her seat now, it was like she was trying to rally herself to get through the day to come. Or else she just needed to keep talking because she was afraid of not talking. He wondered if she felt guilty for the night before, for staying out late with the car.

  “Dad,” she said finally, after seven solid minutes about the algebra quiz, the rancid grilled cheese in the cafeteria, the stink of Eli’s gym bag, “what do you think will happen today?”

  He looked at the road, the steam from the streets, the crazy heat wave that had landed, the temperatures rising above sixty degrees, and tried to think of something to say.

  The school felt anarchic inside, like the time Paul Lozelle let a pair of chickens loose in the cafeteria, a prank that had been musty when Tom was in high school.

  Everywhere he looked, there were long bands of girls in their colored minis and tights, ropes of them, like the friendship bracelets that covered their arms, their faces tense and watchful. And the boys, in their own swells of confusion and bravado, stood apart, almost like in middle school, elementary school. Like they were suddenly afraid to get too close. Though maybe that was how they always were and he’d never noticed.

  The teachers, in turn, were either spring-loaded, grasping their dry-erase markers like emergency flares, or slouched against doorways, filled with louche contempt.