The Fever

by Megan Abbott

  Which was funny to think of now, because those weeks Gabby stayed with them seemed to be the thing that had made them best friends. After that, they were closer than ever.

  “Deenie.” Gabby’s voice returned, a whisper. “What is it you’re trying to do?”

  Click, click, and Deenie felt her own lips, tongue. Was the sound coming from her own mouth?

  “Deenie,” Gabby said, “we’re all sick here.”

  Ten minutes later, her coat on, she was ready to go.

  If I text him, she thought, he’ll say no.

  Tearing a page from her spiral notebook, she wrote a note.

  * * *

  The minute Tom walked inside the school, he felt it.

  It was loud, louder than any school event he could remember.

  The pitchy clamor of nervous parents finding other nervous parents to be even more nervous together.

  A flurry of shouts at the door as the sole security guard tried to keep another reporter or producer from entering through the loading dock.

  The screeching of gym risers pushed down the hallway, veering hard into the rattling lockers, sending a rolling garbage can careering into the wall.

  Two sets of parents shouting at each other, something about a fender bender in the parking lot, and one of the fathers inexplicably crying, humiliating tears of frustration he tried to hide behind his shirtsleeve.

  At the gym’s double doors, the fleecy-haired student-council president stood as sentry, a name tag slapped across his navy blazer: PATRICK.

  “I don’t have any information. But don’t worry,” the boy said, his voice cracking, to the mother speaking fervently to him, her glasses crooked and fogged. “They’re gonna explain everything.”

  He couldn’t remember ever seeing the gym so full.

  Principal Crowder himself, shirtsleeves rolled up like a junior senator, was directing a letter-jacketed student-council type in how to push open the high windows with the extension pole.

  If it hadn’t been so hot already, the air outside so preternaturally mild and the school holding all the furnaced breath of months of winter, then maybe the two hundred or more parents packed so tightly would not have radiated so much heat.

  The air thick with it, the high windows wisped with condensation, Tom walked through, pushing past the straining masses, the gym starting to feel like some kind of torpid hothouse or sweatshop, the creaking hold of an ancient ship.

  And they were all there.

  A This Is Your Life of parents, current, recent, long past (what was Constance Keith doing there, both her rambunctious, teeth-flashing, hells-yeah daughters and her Adderall-dealing son long gone to state schools, possibly state prison?).

  There were the earnest parents, notepads and pens out, clasping copies of news articles printed from the Internet in their shaking hands.

  And there were the ones wearing vaguely stunned expressions, the same ones who could never quite believe their children were failing chemistry, had scorched their lab partners’ hair while swinging burners like flamethrowers, had referred to other classmates as “pass-around pussies.”

  And there were the ones, fewer than usual, with their eyes fixed on their phones, just like during Back to School Night, concerts, graduations, their faces veiled now so you couldn’t be sure if they were merely biding their time, reviewing the news reports, poised to pounce on the school officials, or if their thoughts were elsewhere (on work, on Scrabble, the Tetris slink).

  Standing room only, like a rock concert, and Tom tried to avoid them all, finding a corner by the boys’ locker-room doors, against the vaguely damp wall mats smelling strongly of mildew, spit, boys.

  Through the aluminum crossbars, fifteen feet away, he could see Lara Bishop in her own hideout, chewing gum with the vigor of a former smoker.

  He worked a long time to catch her eye and finally she nodded back, a half smile filled with knowingness. Sometimes she reminded him of one of those world-weary actresses in old movies, the ones who looked knocked around but instead of making them harder, it seemed to make them more generous-spirited.

  “You’re hiding too,” a voice beside him said.

  It was the French teacher, Kit, walking toward him, sliding off a tiny leather jacket, tomato red, like her Vespa.

  Where did this woman come from? he wondered. And where had she been when he was single? Then he remembered he was single.

  A sudden screech from the mike system made her wince, smiling, her shoulders pushing together in a way that reminded him, unnervingly, of Gabby, Lise, Deenie.

  “If I can have your attention…”

  Principal Crowder began, papers rolled in his hand, pen behind his ear. A cartoonist’s drawing of an important person. First, he introduced the murderers’ row of officials standing at his side. Deputy Commissioner Sue Brennan, next to the superintendent in his usual taupe suit, then a silver-haired woman introduced as the hospital’s “chief information officer,” flanked by an unidentified man in a three-piece suit, fingers tight around his cell phone.

  And poor Mark Tierney, the PTA chair and a pediatrician, his face crimped and flushed, like a man caught in the middle of a rope pull.

  “Thank you for coming tonight,” the superintendent began. “Concerned parents are involved parents, and involved parents make our district strong. The safety and well-being of our students is our utmost priority. We are working closely with the affected students, their parents, and health officials to gather all the facts. We ask the community to respect the privacy of the families involved as we progress and that any questions you may have be addressed to Principal Crowder directly.”

  It was a marvelous string of sentences containing no information at all.

  All eyes turned over to Crowder, who momentarily flashed his toothy grin, as if forgetting the occasion.

  “Thank you all for coming. While privacy laws prevent us from getting into specifics, we want to be clear that all girls have received or are receiving appropriate medical attention. The headline here is that there’s no evidence—and Mrs. Tomlinson from the hospital can back me up here—suggesting we are dealing with a contagious threat of any kind.”

  The silver-haired hospital woman stiffened visibly, locking eyes with Crowder. It was like watching a couple of battery men at a ball game, still working out their signals. Crowder caught her signal, only a little late.

  “But the investigation is ongoing,” Crowder said, eyes dropping down to a folded sheet of paper in his hands. “Essentially, what we’re trying to do here is walk the cat backward. The district and health officials are working together, trying to determine any commonalities the girls share that might explain their conditions.”

  “Here’s a commonality,” someone shouted from the throng. “They all attend this school.”

  There it was. It hadn’t taken long, but it almost felt like a relief to get it over with, to have someone start.

  Tom could feel the pressure in the gym release momentarily around him and, in seconds, build up again, random parents straining to move forward, others waving for the student with the microphone. The buzz of two dozen or more conversations vibrating louder.

  Crowder cleared this throat. “I was getting to that. The department of health is preparing to conduct a full review of the premises, and the deputy commissioner can tell you about that now. I know she’s happy to answer any questions.”

  Sue Brennan stepped forward to the mike stand, teetering ever so slightly on her heels.

  Tom focused closely on her, this woman who had spoken so inscrutably, so evasively, it seemed to him now, about his daughter.

  “After Ms. Bishop’s incident, our staff reached out to officials at the state department of health, including the environmental health and communicable diseases divisions. They’re helping us review all available medical tests and sharing epidemiologic, clinical, and environmental data. Several of you have asked about autoimmune conditions, like PANDAS, but none of the girls have recently had strep.
We’ve ruled out many standard infections—E. coli, staph. Also neurological infections—encephalitis, meningitis, late-stage syphilis.”

  You could feel the frenzy in the gym ramp up more and more with each word. Listing all these possibilities, even to dismiss them, seemed like a bad idea. The word syphilis felt like a fever in Tom’s own brain.

  “But it’s important to note,” she continued, “infections don’t discriminate. If this were an infection, we’d see more people affected and not just young girls. But the process is ongoing. The main thing we need is your patience.”

  “Why would we trust you now?” a voice bellowed from within the body of the twitching crowd. “Any of you? You’re the ones who pushed your poison down our girls’ throats.”

  Tom moved forward a few steps, closer to Kit now, and saw it was Dave Hurwich, a tankard of coffee in his hand, a sheaf of curling papers under his arm.

  “Lined them up like concentration-camp victims,” he added, rising to his feet as the student-council rep with the portable microphone ran toward him.

  “Sir,” Sue Brennan began, “if you are referring to the HPV vaccine—”

  “Principal Crowder, why did you give it to them?” a woman up front called out, voice shaking. “I’m not against shots, but this isn’t like the measles. My daughters can’t catch HPV in school. Why did you make it mandatory, given all the risks?”

  “Mrs. Dunn,” Crowder said, stepping forward quickly, “the vaccine was not mandatory. But HPV is a virus. No, you can’t catch it from a doorknob, but—”

  “Are you going to allow sex in the halls next?” someone shouted. “Because that’s the only way they could catch it at school.”

  Dripping with sweat now, the mounting anxiety in the gym crackling loudly in Tom’s ears, Tom shifted a few feet, hoping for more space, more room to breathe.

  It was an odd thing, to disagree with everything everyone was saying but at the same time share the dread behind it.

  “When are you going to admit we’re likely dealing with a hot-lot situation here?” It was Dave Hurwich again, shouting and waving papers in his hand. “You’ve been playing Russian roulette with our daughters!”

  “Sir, if you’re referring to rumors that there may have been a bad batch of the HPV vaccine, that’s highly unlikely,” Sue Brennan replied, her voice just starting to break as she tried to be heard. “Vaccine lots contain thousands of doses. If that were the problem, we’d be facing a citywide or even regional crisis.”

  Hot lot, bad batches—this was the first Tom had heard about any of it. He felt negligent, wondered if he should at least have been reading up on all this instead of just waiting for someone to tell him what went wrong.

  “I wonder what guys like Dave Hurwich did before the Internet,” Kit whispered, rubbing the back of her neck, the peacock-feather tattoo flaring. “Don’t you sometimes wish you could have a school without parents?”

  Tom looked at her and she seemed to catch herself, her eyebrows lifting in mild alarm. “I mean parents like that,” she added, nodding toward the rising noise up front.

  “Why are we even talking about the vaccine?” a woman shouted. “We know the Court girl didn’t get it. That’s all been a costly distraction.”

  There was a low roar of approval from all corners of the gym.

  “That’s true,” Sue Brennan began, her voice nearly drowned out by the noise. “Kimberly Court did not receive the vaccine. Due to a yeast allergy, she—”

  “The Court girl’s the one speaking the truth here,” the same woman interrupted. “Didn’t you hear her video?”

  “Are you a reporter?” a male voice barked from somewhere. “I’ve never seen you before!”

  The woman stood now, and Tom recognized her: Mary Lu, Bailey’s mother. A member of the Dryden Land Trust, of Energy Watch, of Safe Dryden. Tom had signed dozens of her petitions, had once even let her sucker him into a phone bank about pesticide drift.

  “My daughter attends this school,” Mary Lu was shouting at the man, voice breaking. “And I have as much right as you to—”

  Dozens of voices reared up across the gym, shouts and yeas and boos.

  “Can we please keep some kind of order here, please?” Crowder was saying, another screech from the sound system as he tried to drag the microphone stand to himself.

  A few yards away from Tom, Carl Brophy, the physics teacher, waved his hand vigorously until the student-council kid found him with the microphone.

  “Excuse me,” he rasped. “What about the obvious explanation? That this isn’t something coming from outside but from inside these girls’ heads?”

  “Hear, hear,” an exhausted-looking man in front agreed loudly but somehow wearily from his seat. “As a doctor, I’m pretty skeptical of any epidemiological event that affects only girls—”

  A billow of hisses, claps, and shouts swept through the gym.

  Tom glanced over Kit’s shoulder but could no longer see Lara Bishop.

  “It only affects girls because they were the ones shot up with poison,” Dave Hurwich said, face surging with blood.

  “—and from what I’ve heard, the affected girls have troubled home lives,” the doctor continued. “Girls without fathers in their lives, broken homes. Emotional issues.”

  A great ribbon of noise seemed to unfurl across the gym, and in the row closest to Tom, a woman leaped to her feet.

  “What does that have to do with my Tricia?” she said, nearly bounding forward, looking like she wanted to shake the doctor, any of them, by the lapels. “Until yesterday, she was always a happy, normal girl!”

  “Mrs. Lawson—” Principal Crowder tried, stepping toward her.

  “Ma’am,” the doctor said, “I don’t know your daughter, but do you?”

  More shouts and jeers.

  “How does a divorce or whatever explain why her head turned to one side so far I thought it might spin,” Mrs. Lawson cried out, her voice splintering. “She said it felt like her skin was burning off. I wanted to call a priest.”

  She snatched the microphone from the white-faced student-council rep and turned to the audience.

  “Tricia hasn’t had any trauma,” she announced, seemingly to everyone, the microphone piercing with feedback. “She’s a varsity athlete. She’s a beautiful girl. She never did anything wrong.”

  “Jaymie was just happy, going along,” Dave Hurwich said, rising beside her, voice breaking, touching the woman’s shoulder gently. “She was as happy as can be.”

  At just that moment, there was a loud snap from one of the high windows: its rusty prop rod had slipped loose.

  Suddenly, a spray of rainwater shot forth and landed, sizzling, on the audio speakers, which fizzled and crackled.

  “Be careful!” Tom called out as several sparks flew, a group of parents jumping back.

  The room burst into a new level of noise and confusion, the speakers popping and squealing, a sense of cascading panic.

  The superintendent hijacked the portable microphone from the student-council boy himself.

  “Everyone stand away from the equipment,” he said. “Can we all just try to stay on point here?”

  “But you’re not listening!” shouted Mary Lu. “This school district spends a king’s ransom on refrigerating a goddamn ice rink, but when it comes to protecting our—”

  “Mrs. Lu, we’ve received your e-mails and—”

  “You keep talking about what might be inside the girls,” she said, stepping forward, sneakers squeaking on the wet wood. “What about what’s inside the school. In the walls. Under the floors.”

  Tom looked down at his feet, at the splintery shellacked floor. It didn’t seem any more likely a cause than the vaccine, or at least not much more, but even he could feel the hysteria. All the things Georgia used to say. About this town, this rotting place.

  “The school passed all prior air- and water-quality inspections,” Sue Brennan said, her face looking slicker now under the lights.

 
“Isn’t it true that the school is heated by those natural-gas wells just a few hundred feet away?” Mary said, shouting even louder now, voice gaining confidence. “And that those tanks have leaked onto the football field? Some trees died. You walk through it and your ankles are covered with black powder. Wasn’t the school told to dig up the affected soil?”

  The stir was loud and immediate, the floorboards seeming to thrum, the gathered sense of gathering something.

  “That powder is just common grass smut,” called out Crowder, but without the microphone he could barely be heard, except for the word smut. “We sprayed—”

  “It’s important to note,” Sue Brennan interrupted, talking over him rapidly, “just like infections, environmental causes do not discriminate. If the cause were environmental, we would see a wide range of people affected, not just these few girls.”

  The cavernous space seemed to explode with diffuse panic: hollers and howls, countless arms raised above heads, fingers pointing like lightning bolts.

  Up front, Julie Drew’s mother was keeling as if about to swoon from the heat and terror.

  “Get her some water!” someone called out, inciting a new spasm of shoving bodies and tumult.

  More and more, Tom sensed that if he stayed a moment longer, he would start to feel it too. Feel this sense that nothing could protect his daughter from anything because everything was out to doom her. To annihilate her.

  Looking over Kit’s shiny head, he searched once more for Lara Bishop. She was definitely gone.

  In her place, a pair of oblivious students were making out with long, ravenous stretches of tongue, as if none of these dangers could ever befall them. The cluelessness he wished for all of them, amid this.