by Megan Abbott
Walking toward his classroom, its familiar formaldehyde smell, he tried to imagine how any of them were going to make it to three o’clock without spontaneously combusting.
A free first period, he spent a half hour in the dark auditorium, drinking coffee and watching one of the custodians trying to buff away the scratch marks the EMS gurney had left on the stage.
He couldn’t stop himself from walking past Deenie’s ancient civ class. She was in the back, so he had to move very close to the door to see her, but there she was, pen in mouth, brow tightly triangled.
It was when he finally stopped by the teachers’ lounge to check his e-mail that he saw June Fisk and her chubby-cheeked teacher’s aide gaping at the monitor, their mouths open.
On the screen, Kim Court’s blue-lit face.
“It’s not the only one,” June said, rolling a chair toward him. “I’ve heard there’s another one. Maybe more.”
Tom watched it three times, silently.
He thought of Deenie sitting in that classroom and wondered if she’d watched it too, and what she’d thought.
* * *
Back to hospital today for more tests, Gabby’s text read.
It felt a little like the days the orchestra went to regionals—no Lise, no Gabby at school. Except now there weren’t even people like Kim, or Jaymie Hurwich, who would quiz Deenie before a test, her fingers always on her tablet, her flying-flash-cards app, her virtual periodic table.
And Skye was nowhere in sight.
Deenie wondered if she and Gabby were hidden away at Skye’s parentless house, playing music or reading tarot or whatever they did together. All their private conversations.
Maybe it was for the best that Gabby wasn’t there. It felt easier somehow.
* * *
Not having a phone at school didn’t matter at all. You couldn’t get reception most places, and you weren’t supposed to use it anyway.
But what Eli liked about it was that when someone asked him, “Why didn’t you text me back? Didn’t you hear about the plan?” he could say, “Sorry, I lost my phone.”
Except for the tickling sense in the back of his brain that there was something to it, that he might be missing something that mattered.
Like he’d felt after his mom left. All those days he’d walk past his parents’ bedroom and still smell her smell, like those shiny orange soap bars she used.
Since then, his clothes had never felt the same, not soft like before, and no one ever slapped the kitchen table when they laughed hard, and all the blue flowers by the side door were gone. They smelled like grape candy.
He wondered if Deenie, who never seemed to miss anything about their mom, ever missed any of those things. After she moved out, two days after Christmas, Deenie piled her gifts into a trash bag and threw it down the basement stairs. For months, they were down there, the bag striped with mold.
The sound of the second bell jarred him and he was surprised to see the halls were empty, except for one freshman girl at the far end, leaning against the blasted brick.
One arm hanging to her side, she was breathing loudly, just like Kim Court in the video.
“Hey,” he called out.
Her head flew up, scraping against the brick.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She didn’t move.
He started walking toward her, but before he’d taken three steps, she scurried away, off into some freshman-girl hiding place.
Sliding on his headphones, he began walking to fourth period.
As he approached the classroom, he saw another girl lurking, but this one didn’t seem sickly or afraid.
It was Skye Osbourne, wearing a long scarf the same color as her mouth, like those dark figs that hung from the tree by the practice rink every fall, the ones that split under your skates.
And this time it felt like she was looking for him.
“Ditch with me,” she said, nodding her head toward the double doors.
He stopped, headphones still on.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, a slanting smile. “I’m pretty.”
Funnily, Eli wasn’t sure Skye was pretty.
If he saw her without all that hair, which looked like it’d been stripped from a corncob and massed thick, and without all the things she draped over and on top of herself, the scarves and snake rings and coiling bracelets, he wondered if he’d recognize her at all.
“What’s the point of here,” she added, waving something in her hand, a joint, a white Bic.
What’s the point of here, he thought, looking at that fig mouth of hers.
Pushing through the doors swinging behind her, he stepped outside. The air felt hard, good.
* * *
There was a low rumble everywhere, even coming from his own classroom. The drum of confusion, skidding sneakers, a girl’s lone yelp, a teacher trying to be heard.
He turned the corner and that’s when he saw them.
A long line, like the one to get your school ID photo taken, your yearbook portrait. To get your shots.
Except they were all girls. Ten, twelve, he guessed, close to twenty wrapped around the hallway in groups and individually. Drooping against lockers, slumped on the floor, their legs flung out, doll-like, one in the middle of the corridor, spinning like a flower child.
Danielle Schultz, her right arm swinging like a baton every third second, synced to her own loud breaths.
Brandi Carruthers, junior-class treasurer and weekend pageant queen, her face streaked with a kind of gray sweat.
Two freshman girls who looked all of eleven grappling each other in that way very young girls do, as if the whole world were conspiring to ravage them.
“Pins and needles, pins and needles,” stallion-legged track star Tricia Lawson was saying, over and over again, rubbing her long limbs.
Even strapping Brooke Campos was there, tan as ever in her buttercup-yellow tank top, but holding her pelvis in a way that made Tom look away.
The line hooked down one hall and then bottlenecked at the administration office.
Inside, Mrs. Harris, a swath of hair matted to her forehead, was hoarsely calling for quiet, the nurse’s office door shut tight.
“He’s not here,” she whispered to Tom, nodding toward Crowder’s office.
“Oh?”
Leaning closer, smelling of Pall Malls and desperation, she added, “He had a seven a.m. meeting at Gem Donuts with the superintendent. He must still be with him.”
The door opened and Tom glimpsed two nurses and a badged woman from the health department, the back of her hand resting on her forehead and something unsettling in her eyes. Like a medic on his first day in-country.
Mrs. Harris tapped Tom’s shoulder.
“They want to talk to you,” she said.
“Who?”
“Are you Tom Nash?” the health department woman said, approaching him. “You were next on my list.”
“Your list?”
“We’d like to speak to your daughter.”
* * *
Standing in the breezeway, Deenie watched both the videos back to back on Julie Drew’s smeary phone.
First there was Kim, her face sparkly with makeup.
Kim. Kim, a chilly voice inside her said, this is the best thing that ever happened to you, isn’t it?
All your hard preening and social ambition has finally paid off. Forever craving attention, always the one dying to know the secret you don’t, to have the gossip first, waving it like a peacock fan. And to use that gossip as her golden ticket to the inner circle, or its starry center: Gabby.
Except. Except the Kim on YouTube didn’t quite seem like that Kim.
In spite of the makeup, the dramatic way she’d tilted the camera to hide her braces, there was something that felt very, intensely real about the Kim on the screen.
The fear hovering in her eyes.
And that moment when she looked off camera, as if she’d heard something.
/> The way her body had been loose and liquid and then, in an instant, turned stiff.
She seemed to be looking intently at something for a moment. Whatever it was, it made her stop everything, her face frozen, her red mouth open, those glistening night eyes of hers.
The video had had 850 views since it had been posted, at two in the morning.
But then there was the second video, Jaymie Hurwich, who hadn’t come to school that day.
Jaymie, Deenie’s number-one study pal, who never, ever missed school, who once came even with strep because of a geometry test. Who came even the day after her sister overdosed on ecstasy at college.
Behind her the baby blue of her bedroom, the zebra lampshade by her bed, Jaymie was talking, and moving.
Blinking hard, so hard it hurt to look at it.
And incessantly stroking her hair. First with her left hand, then her right. Smoothing it over and over, her fingers moving as though playing a harp.
The video header read: DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE!
“I’m Jaymie. I’m sixteen and I live with my dad and I go to Dryden High and I love school and my friends and playing softball. I pretty much have a great life.”
Blinking rapidly, she let out a long sigh, tugging the fallen strap on her tank top.
“And I’m here to talk about the shots that changed my life forever.”
Deenie took the phone from Julie’s hand, pulling it closer.
“I’ve never done this before,” Jaymie was saying. “But I don’t know how else to deal with what’s happening! Two weeks ago, I had my first HPV shot…”
Her fingers wiggled as if plucking her imaginary harp.
“I was okay for a few days. Then all this started happening,” she said, her hand twitching, like she wanted to stop stroking her hair but her hand wouldn’t let her.
“I kept quiet about it. But now I know I’m not the only one. You probably heard about Lise Daniels.”
Blinking, blinking like an LED. Deenie felt her own eyes twitching.
“So my dad saw what was happening to me. He went and looked it all up and found out about the shots. About what they did to us. He got so scared. I’ve never seen him so scared.”
She looked down, shaking her head, her fingers still wiggling in the air in front of her mouth, then grabbing at her hair, tearing at it.
“The doctor told us it was stress. There’s no way that’s true. There was nothing wrong in my life. I had the best grades in my class. I studied all the time. My dad treated me like a princess. My life was perfect. Until I got the shots.”
Suddenly, her eyes snapped shut, then shuddered open, as if she’d startled herself. Her hand flew to her mouth, sparkle nail polish flashing, her head jerking hard three times, then her eyes rolled back in their sockets.
A beat, then Jamie’s eyes landed on the camera again.
Her eyes wide with alarm.
“There was nothing wrong,” she said, breathless now. “Everything was perfect. There was nothing wrong.”
Shaking her head, looking down. Voice breaking.
“I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
When it was over, Julie Drew wanted to watch both videos again. She said she’d heard there were more to watch, “lots more.” And she said this morning Jaymie’s dad had parked himself in front of some congressman’s district office and refused to leave until he got “some satisfaction.”
But I have nothing to do with Jaymie Hurwich, Deenie thought, walking to next period, her head fogged. All I ever did was study sometimes with her. We never shared anything. This one is nothing to me.
For thirty seconds, she felt a swell of relief.
But then both videos began playing again in her head, those slumber-party voices.
My life was perfect, Jaymie had said. Until I got the shots.
Her head so filled with thoughts of the lake, Deenie had barely let her mind rest on the vaccine. Could that really be it?
It was the thing they’d shared, all of them.
The same lilac-walled clinic, side by side in the tandem seating, the laminated chair arms locked together.
One by one, going into the little room behind the lilac-painted door.
Slow deep breaths, and don’t watch it go in. That was everyone’s warning.
They’d all talked about it for days, the first time.
After that, no one talked about it much. But now Deenie could remember how it burned and that was all, and how part of her felt a little sad when the burning went away.
How could all this be about those little shots?
It had to be something else. A thing you didn’t know you were waiting for.
Like something inside opening, and then opening something else.
The second bell rang, and she was going to be late.
Turning the corner fast, she nearly ran into the three of them, gloves on, clustered around Lise’s locker, its door swung open.
There was a man holding Lise’s gym uniform, wilted as a lily pad, and her thermos, its lip stained green from her morning health shakes.
The woman next to him, in a blue parka, was carrying a large bag with smaller bags inside.
The third person was Assistant Principal Hawk, his arms folded, missing the usual disdainful curl of the lip, the tan creases in his forehead thicker than Deenie had ever seen them.
“Is this yours?” the man said, pointing to Deenie’s locker. She could see what looked like the hard corner of Lise’s “purrfect cat” binder cutting into the bag’s bottom.
“Hey, that’s Lise’s private stuff,” she said, unsure where the defiance in her voice came from, the Hawk standing right there.
“That’s her,” Hawk told the others.
She drew her book bag close to her chest.
“She’s the one,” he added.
* * *
They were lying on the bed of Coach Haller’s pickup truck, Skye on her stomach, legs waving in the air, the bottoms of her boot heels slicked with grass.
Eli took a long drag, his first since the summer before, that long family trip to WaterWonders. After the marathon car ride—Gabby and Lise and Deenie, high on sugar and new bathing suits, babbling in the backseat the whole time—his dad took pity on him, giving him thirty dollars and letting him wander alone. He met the guy operating the Tadpole Hole who shared his joint, teased him by saying some girl was watching him. “That one’s in love with you, bro,” he’d said, but the girl turned out just to be Gabby.
That joint had felt weak, easy, but this one was different. Skye said it wasn’t pot but the leaves from a plant used by Cherokees and other tribes. If you smoked it before bed, you would have lucid dreams.
“It clears away darkness,” she said. “And banishes negative energy.”
That sounded okay, and he took a long drag, closing his eyes.
Something passed suddenly, wind rustling above them, and Skye was showing him her bare back, her sweater pulled all the way up so he could see her twisting spine.
“When I was little,” she said, “my uncle called me the Rattler. He said it looked like a rattlesnake.”
Leaning down, Eli gave it a long look, the pale skin, bra Mountain Dew–green, that pearly white canal from her neck to the waist of her skirt. The swooping curve of the spine, an S for Skye.
All right there, for him.
What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he set his hand there, flat on the center of that sloping spine?
Her skin would probably feel cool, like a smooth stone.
“When I was eleven they gave me the forward-bending test,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him, sharp shoulder blade arching. “Did you never have one of those?”
“No.”
“I guess it’s only for girls.”
Looking at her faint grin, he found himself speculating about figs. Sometimes he’d see one crushed open by the ice rink, its insides filled with dead wasps.
“He’s an artist,” she was saying. “My uncle. He to
ok out his paints and painted up my spine. A diamondback coiling with my coil.”
Coiling with my coil.
He was listening to her in a way, the joint working on him like warm hands. But he was wondering about something. Like what was stopping him from putting his hand on that skin of hers, displayed just for him.
“He told me to never be ashamed,” she said. “That it was beautiful.”
Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.
He started thinking something about her uncle, but the thought drifted away before it could take hold.
“He kept rattlers in the old rabbit hutch. Did you know that baby rattlers have this tiny little button on the tip of their tail? It doesn’t make any sound. It feels like velvet. I’ve touched it.”
She turned on her side but kept the sweater hitched high. He could see the bottom edges of her green bra, half moons. But he didn’t feel what he’d normally feel. It was like looking at a painting.
“They lose it when they shed their first skin,” she said, her fingertips grazing her stomach. “After that, they grow the hard rattle. The one that makes all the noise. It doesn’t sound so much like a rattle. It’s softer than that. More like this.”
She lifted her fingers over those dark lips of hers and made a sound.
To him it sounded like locusts deep in Binnorie Woods.
He didn’t know how long they had been lying there, his head going to places, like that time he fell in practice and his cheek split open and his mom had to pick him up in the middle of the day.
Sitting in his mom’s front seat, his skates on the floor in front of him, feeling the soft tickle of something, a pair of women’s underpants, ice-blue, on the floor of the car.
He would never forget the look on her face. His mom’s face.
Did that really happen? It did. Both of them sat there as if it hadn’t, the entire drive home, the dull thud of the car over the wet streets.
He never told anyone, they never spoke about it, and six months later, two days after Christmas, she’d moved out. Sometimes he could still feel it on his ankles, the sneaking sense that something had gone wrong and it was right there and it was touching you, rustling against you all the time even if you didn’t look.