by Megan Abbott
Then, through the fog of his head, Skye spoke.
“Have you gone to see her?”
“Who?”
“Lise.”
“Lise,” he said, her name sounding funny in his mouth. A picture of her coming to him, that pudgy Lise with her shirt always lifting above her belly.
“I heard she might be talking now. I wondered if she’d talked to you.”
“Me?” he said. “Why would she talk to me?”
“Oh,” she said, and he turned his head to her, her face suddenly so close, and the smell of something rotten from that dark berried mouth. It was like that fig, he thought. With something inside you didn’t expect. “I heard some things. Maybe I was wrong.”
“What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. Something sexy. About you two.”
“What?” He started to prop himself up on his elbows, one of them tugging on her long hair.
She didn’t move, her stomach still bare, her fingers dancing along it. “That you two were doing something. Before school.”
“What do you mean, doing something?”
“By the practice rink, behind the bushes. You and Lise. You were both lying on the grass and you were taking off her tights. They said.”
Those bushes, he knew them, their toothed leaves, thick-veined, and the seed pods laced with thorns. They grew wild and it was a place you could drink beer or do things.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head, shaking the image of Lise, bare-legged, her skirt hitched high, from his thoughts. “Lise, she’s a sister to me.”
“Oh,” she said, fingertips making circles just above the waist of her skirt. Wider and wider circles.
“A sister,” he repeated.
He looked at her. There was something scratching again, in the corner above his eye, like those metal probes at the dentist clawing at your teeth.
“Who told you that?” he asked, his voice lifting to a new place. He didn’t sound like himself. “Who’s ‘they’?”
Skye looked over at him, and in his head he could see the wasps.
“Listen,” he said, grabbing for his bag. “I gotta get to class.”
* * *
“Mr. Nash, we’d like to talk to your daughter.”
She said she was Sue Brennan, deputy public-health commissioner.
“About what?”
They were sitting in Principal Crowder’s vacant office.
Her bra strap was sliding down her shoulder and her hair looked dirty. She was wearing latex gloves. Her wrists were red.
“We’re trying to trace as closely as possible Lise Daniels’s movements prior to the attack.”
“But why? You’ve got a public-health crisis here and—”
“We’re looking into whether she may have come into contact with or been exposed to something.”
“You think it might be something toxic?” Tom asked.
“Mr. Nash, we’d really just like to talk to your daughter.” She folded her hands, then seemed to realize she still had the gloves on. Looked at them, not sure what to do.
“So you’re talking to everybody?”
“We know Deenie was one of the last people with Lise before the event.”
Tom looked at her, squinted. “So was a class full of other kids. A school full of people. Are you talking to everyone?”
“There’s many parties involved, and we’re pursuing all avenues.”
“Who’s the ‘we’ here?”
“You have nothing to be concerned about.”
She was giving him a blank face. Like the woman at a car-rental desk, or an airline check-in. Calm down, sir.
“I have nothing to be concerned about?” Tom said. “Pardon me, but have you looked around you? Do you see what’s happening here?”
“Mr. Nash,” she said as she finally stripped the gloves from her hands, ashed with powder and trembling slightly. “We need to find out everything about Lise. About all these girls.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“Why now, why three days later? Why weren’t you talking to Deenie before? Do you have some new information?”
She crimped her file folders in her hand.
“Mr. Nash, I would think it would be important to you. To try to help our investigation. Don’t you want to understand what’s happening to these girls? What if your daughter was next?”
“She won’t be,” he said, his voice suddenly hard.
She looked at him, paused. “No?”
“I know my daughter,” he said, rising. He had no idea what he was talking about. What did it have to do with knowing his daughter? And was his answer, precisely, true?
“Of course you do,” she said, glancing at her phone. “Anyway, it looks like they may have already gotten what they need from her.”
* * *
They took her to the music room, empty except for a pair of orchestra stands on the floor. Deenie wondered which girl’s raging spasm had knocked them down, emptying the room, which now smelled of fresh bleach.
“Did something happen to Lise?” she asked. “Something else?”
The woman in the parka shook her head. The man with Lise’s uniform had left. So had Assistant Principal Hawk.
“We’re trying to get some information about what Lise was doing before she got sick,” the woman said. “Since you’re pals, maybe you can help.”
There were no chairs, so they sat on either end of Mr. Timmins’s coffee-ringed desk.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Deenie said. “She was in class, and she jumped up and then she fell down.”
“Did you see her before class?”
“No.”
“Did you usually see her before class?”
“Not really,” Deenie lied. She didn’t want to explain that she hadn’t gone to Lise’s locker like she usually did. That she hadn’t wanted to talk about what had happened with Sean Lurie. And she’d been worried Lise might see her and just know.
“And did Lise use any drugs that you know about?”
“What? No!”
“It’s okay. No one’s in trouble. Not even the occasional joint?”
“No,” Deenie said, shaking her head.
“Is it possible Lise had been experimenting with someone else?” the woman asked. “Did you have the sense Lise didn’t tell you everything?”
“She told me everything,” Deenie said coolly. “She tells me everything.”
“And that day…had you talked on the phone? Exchanged texts?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Deenie replied, which was sort of a weird response and she wasn’t even sure what she meant by it.
“I’m sure it doesn’t,” the woman said. “And how about Lise and boys?”
Deenie felt her body seize slightly, her shoulders clenching hard, a string pulled in the center of her, tight, and her dad’s voice seemed to rise up from inside her, though it was really from the hallway, loud and meaningful.
* * *
“They wouldn’t let me go home,” Brooke Campos whispered to Eli, across the aisle. “The sub nurse is a class-A bitch.”
Eli looked over at her. Beneath the desk, her jeans were unsnapped, her brown pelvis exposed.
“It hurts so bad,” she said, rubbing her stomach. “They said it was stress. Stress seems to mean ‘everything.’”
It might have been the smartest thing Brooke Campos ever said.
“You should go home,” Eli said.
She pressed her fingertips on her pelvic bones, jutting from her low-slung jeans.
“It’s like something’s burning inside me.”
“Miss Campos, Mr. Nash,” called out Mr. Banasiak from under the blue haze of his PowerPoint presentation.
Looking up, they waited for him to say more, but that seemed to be the sum of it.
The lights dimmed and Eli watched Brooke, shifting in her seat.
“Brooke,” he whispered. “Did you ever hear anything about me and Lise?”
“What?” she said, her teeth bright white against her tan skin, teeth sunk into her lips. Like a bronzed beaver, he thought.
“Any stories, about us?”
“No,” she said, slowly. Then added, “Well, yeah. I mean, I heard stuff about Lise. But it doesn’t have to do with you.”
“Who does it have to do with?”
“Some guy from another school. A hockey player.”
* * *
“Mr. Nash, there’s nothing cloak-and-dagger about this,” Sue Brennan was calling out, still far behind him. “I’ve told you where she—”
Later, Tom wouldn’t even remember walking, or running, he guessed it was, from the catch in his breath, the wet feeling around his shirt collar, the thump in his chest when he finally arrived in the music room.
His hand rattling loudly on the locked doorknob, he could see Deenie inside, eyes large through the door pane.
Some woman in a dark parka hovering over her like a crow.
“Open this goddamned door,” he heard himself say, a voice distinctly his father’s rather than his own.
The parka woman turned, a flash of recognition on her face, as if she knew him.
She was saying things, telling him to calm down.
Suddenly, all he could think of was Sheila Daniels’s face under the garage-door light, her mouth open, braying.
The door opened, the parka woman saying things to him, and Deenie behind her saying, “It’s okay, Dad. I promise.”
Before they left school, Principal Crowder caught Tom, made some kind of assurances as they stood at Deenie’s locker, Deenie sliding on her jacket.
“You should have been present when they spoke to her, obviously,” he said. “Things are just happening very quickly right now.”
Tom didn’t say anything, grabbing Deenie’s book bag, slamming her locker door.
“And, Tom,” Crowder added, “I know I can count on you at the PTA meeting tonight.”
“PTA meeting?” he asked, stopping himself from tugging up Deenie’s jacket zipper as if she were five.
“Didn’t you get the announcements? There’s an emergency meeting,” Crowder said, eyes darting back and forth between them. “We need you there.”
“I’ll be there,” Tom said. “But why tonight?”
“Didn’t you hear?” Crowder looked at Deenie, hesitating. “Can we speak alone for a second?”
Crowder’s face, up close, sweat-varnished, as they stood in front of his computer in his office, Deenie waiting outside anxiously.
“It’s all over the news,” Crowder said. “It’s on CNN.”
Leaning over, he unpaused the video flickering there.
It was Kim Court again.
“I saw this,” Tom said.
“No. This is a new one.”
On the screen, Kim looked even more haggard now, her face lit green, her mouth open.
“Don’t believe the lies!” she said in that lisping, tongue-rasping voice. “I won’t keep silent anymore. This isn’t about some stupid vaccine. Because guess what, everyone? I never had the shot. I’m allergic and I couldn’t get the shot.
“So listen! Listen!”
Leaning closer.
“Whatever’s happening to us, it’s bigger than any shot.”
Voice scurrying up her throat, eyes rolling back.
“It’s bigger than everything.”
Driving home with Deenie, he took the shortcut through the back roads, skipping the lake.
“It wasn’t anything, sweetie,” he said. “Just another of those videos.”
“Okay,” Deenie said.
“So tonight, I just want you to stay home and stay off the computer. And the TV,” he said. Which was ridiculous, but it must have been a sign of how crazy he was acting that Deenie just nodded. “And no more talking to anybody without me there, okay? Anybody.”
Deenie nodded.
He hadn’t ever wanted to be one of the hysterical parents, the handwringers, the finger-pointers. But wasn’t this different? It felt different in every way.
“And you’re sure all they asked you was if you had seen Lise that morning?”
Deenie nodded, eyes turning to the window.
They drove in silence for a moment.
“But Dad,” Deenie said, abruptly, “who was that woman, anyway? The one in the big parka?”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t have the health department thing around her neck. Who was she?”
“She didn’t identify herself?” Tom couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked.
His phone trilled on the gear panel between them. Missed calls: Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.
“I don’t remember,” Deenie said. “There’s so many people at the school now.”
“I’m just glad I found you,” he said.
She looked at him, and he guessed he wanted a smile or something, but she was staring at his phone, her mother’s name flashing.
13
From her bedroom window, Deenie could see her dad standing in the backyard, smoking, which she hadn’t seen him do ever, except in the browning snapshots in the photo albums in the hall closet, the ones with the pages tacky to touch, the binding peeled and cracked like everything from the 1980s.
He was leaning against the house, so hidden he was nearly under a corner gutter downspout.
His head turned and she jumped back. She couldn’t bear the thought that he’d see her seeing him.
She was afraid to look at her phone. There was something on it. A text Julie Drew had sent, with a new YouTube link.
What if it was Skye? Then she’d be the only one left from the lake.
But she knew it wasn’t going to be Skye. Skye would never record a video of herself for the world. Not Skye, who hardly ever let anyone inside her house because her aunt had tinnitus. Not Skye, who told everyone she didn’t even have a Social Security number because that was like being in prison, or a concentration camp. You have to be in charge of your own numbers, she said. You can’t let them put a number on you.
But more so this:
Something in her said nothing could ever happen to Skye. She didn’t have that thing Lise had, Gabby had, even Kim and Jaymie had. That softness, that tenderness. Easy to bruise.
But then again, Deenie thought, I guess I don’t have it either.
* * *
Eli held back Brooke’s long hair, twined it in his hand, as she leaned over, bent at the waist.
The noise she made, low and guttural, didn’t even sound like a girl’s, sounded like the noises players made at the rink, stick in the gut, a wrister off the groin.
“Do you want me to get the nurse?” Eli asked, one hand on her shoulder, twig-brown but cold and goose-bumped in his hand.
“I don’t think so,” she whispered, looking down at her feet. “I thought I was going to throw up. But I didn’t.”
It was a funny thing to say, as if he hadn’t just seen her do it, his hands still in her hair as she righted herself.
She leaned against the wall, her face slick with saliva, her tank top riding up like a crumpled daffodil.
She was staring out the breezeway’s glass panels, fogged from the humidity.
Pointing at the tall hedges, her face whitened, her hands covering her mouth.
“That’s where. Right there,” Brooke said. “Last week. I saw Lise walking out from behind the bushes with some guy. I’ve seen him before, but I don’t know his name. She was sliding her skirt around so it faced front.”
Eli couldn’t imagine Lise doing what Brooke was suggesting. Anywhere. Much less in the bushes by school. He was sure it couldn’t be true.
“I guess I wasn’t the only one to see,” she said, eyes on the glass as if she were still seeing it.
“Wait,” he said. “Why would anyone think it was me?”
“I don’t know. He looked like you a little. And he was wearing one of those red interscholastic jackets like you sometimes wear.”
Eli didn’t s
ay anything, but she shrugged as if he had.
“Lise Daniels,” she said, eyes narrowing. “All the sudden she was so goddamned pretty. Some of us have been pretty forever.”
It was like she was talking to no one, or to the whole world.
“No one cares if you’ve always been pretty,” she said, palm stretched flat against the glass. “It’s the same old news. But if all the sudden you’re beautiful, you can do anything. That’s what she must’ve thought, anyway.”
Eli looked at her.
When he saw her expression, he thought she was going to get sick again, but then he realized she’d just heard herself. Heard aloud, for the first time, what had been in her head, maybe for a long time.
* * *
“Listen!” Kim Court shouted on the video. “Whatever’s happening to us, it’s bigger than any shot. It’s bigger than everything.”
The clip, which Deenie found on both CNN and Fox News, was only twenty seconds long, edited for the single revelation.
As the headline read, “Afflicted Girl Warns: It’s Bigger than Any Vaccine!”
Deenie searched around for Kim’s own YouTube channel and found a longer version.
Seven minutes long, with a staggering twenty thousand viewings, including thumbs-up (654) and thumbs-down (245) ratings.
It began with Kim muttering, like the words were sticky in her mouth.
“I told them not to put the glue in my hair,” she was saying.
The light was so dim that everything looked brown, murky, and her eyes, amid the haze, looked like black holes.
“Because that’s what they did to Gabby and I touched it.”
Her fingers were on her throat, and the voice like a gurgle, like she was underwater.
“If I sound weird,” Kim said, “it’s only because my tongue is so big and my mouth is so small. They’re giving me drugs. But if they want to help me, why did they put glue in my hair?”
For a painful moment, Kim seemed to have to gasp for breath. Then she breathed deep, a scraping noise lifting from her.
“I know I was dreaming,” she continued. “They said I was. But it was so real. The man with tornado legs. I always dreamed about him, since I was little. And Gabby too! She was pulling seaweed from her throat. The stones that were her eyes. She found Lise down there.”