by Megan Abbott
“I’d see her around. I tried asking her out, but her mom’s not cool. She wouldn’t let her out of her sight. Dropped her off at school, picked her up. So I asked her if I could come before school and we could hang out. She was afraid someone would see us. We found this place behind these big bushes.”
“People saw you anyway,” Eli said.
“We didn’t fuck,” Sean said again. “We just messed around. She’d never done anything. She kept laughing and covering her face.”
He paused, a far-off look in his eyes.
“It was funny,” he said. “She wasn’t like I thought. She was so…young.” He said the last word softly, confusion on his face.
Eli didn’t say anything. Picking up a shorn branch end, he poked into the grate beneath him, spotting the glint of Sean’s car keys.
“Anyway, it was only a few times. Last week, I guess, and Tuesday. Was that the day she got sick?”
“Yeah.”
“She seemed fine,” Sean said, shaking his head. “There was nothing wrong with her.”
Eli nodded.
“Except,” Sean said, scratching the back of his neck. “This weird thing happened.”
* * *
“This way,” Lara whispered.
His elbow caught a hard corner as they stumbled to her bedroom.
The crisp smell of night air and pine needles, and the quilt? comforter? on the bed was the softest thing he’d ever felt.
There was the crashing sound, a water pitcher, and a muffled laugh and her hands on his belt buckle.
The sinking sense of future regret hurtled away the instant he saw her tug off her shirt with such vigor a button popped, skittering across the floor.
His hand seemed to hit the warm flesh of her stomach the minute the sound came, the bray of guitar so loud he thought a band had kicked up in the living room.
“My kids,” he blurted.
“What?” she whispered, hand on the tongue of his belt.
“My phone,” he said. “It’s for me.”
* * *
“I didn’t mean it,” Deenie said, looking down at her hands, not looking at Lise, that open eye. “But you didn’t like him, exactly. He wasn’t your boyfriend.”
She kept starting to say Sean Lurie’s name, but it only came out as a lispy hiss.
“And it was after work and we were in his car. I don’t know why I did it, Lise. But I just had to.”
Which was true. In his car, all the breathing and hands and power of it. Like her body had known something her head never would. Nothing could have stopped her.
Not even knowing Sean was the boy who’d taken off Lise’s tights the week before.
And guess who it is, Deenie? That’s what Lise had said at the lake, wriggling closer, her fingers over her mouth. Guess who the guy is. It’s Sean. Sean Lurie.
Waving the milfoil under her chin, throwing her head back, telling her the thing Sean had done to her and how it made her feel.
Hearing it made something inside Deenie twitch, her whole body wanting to squirm. Her face red and hot, like watching a movie with her dad and suddenly there’s a scene you don’t want to watch with your dad.
That night, though, trying to sleep, all she could think about was how it might feel to have Sean Lurie put his hands there, his mouth.
Watching him at the pizza ovens Monday night, all she could think of was what Lise had told her.
When he offered to drive her home, it felt like it was meant to be.
She never thought of Lise once.
So she didn’t meet Lise at her locker the next morning.
In fact, the next time Deenie saw her, Lise was jumping from her desk chair, falling to the floor.
And now here Lise was, or the thing that had been Lise, lying under the cage of wires.
“I’m sorry,” Deenie said. “For everything. It’s all my fault.”
Which couldn’t be true, but felt utterly true.
And that’s when she saw it. The way Lise’s eye gaped, an oily egg rolling.
“Lise?” Deenie said, nearly yelped.
And a sound coming, like a high whistle.
She’s saying something, Deenie thought, inside.
Like that comic book Eli loved as a kid, The Count of Monte Cristo, the corpse with living eyes.
His face is like marble, Eli would read aloud, scaring her, but from it burned a rage that could not be contained.
Lithe and cherry-lipped, the real Lise was locked inside this dented and bloated thing, this blow-up toy, but what she was saying inside was You, you, you.
And now here she was, her right eye large and gaping and staring at her.
As if she were saying, Deenie, how could you? He wasn’t my boyfriend, but he was mine. I told you and then you had to have him too. And now look what happened. What you’ve done.
* * *
Eli couldn’t figure out what it all meant, but he knew it meant something.
“All the sudden she got really nervous,” Sean explained. “She said she lost her backpack. No, wait. She said she thought someone took it.”
Listening, thinking, Eli felt the branch hit something inside the street grate, heard a jingle.
“She kept saying, Someone’s watching, I know it. Finally, she just jumped up. She didn’t have time to put her tights back on. She jumped up like she saw a ghost.”
Eli felt for the key ring, caught it with the branch.
“You…” Sean said, watching Eli delicately lift the key ring up through the iron spokes, “you don’t think it has anything to do with what…happened to her? To all of them?”
“I don’t know,” Eli said, the keys hanging from the twig. “Did you take them all out by the bushes?”
“No,” Sean said, looking suddenly very tired, shaking his head. “I didn’t.”
With a clean move, like the faintest of wrist shots, Eli flicked the branch back over the grate, Sean’s keys falling soundlessly down the bottomless sewer.
Sean started to say something but stopped.
“Sorry,” Eli said, then rose to his feet and began walking away.
“Hey,” Sean called out. “By the way, how’s your sister? She’s okay, right?”
“Yeah, she’s fine.”
“I’ve been texting her, but she won’t text me back.”
Eli stopped and looked at him. “Why are you texting my sister?”
Sean stood, shaking his head, not looking at Eli. “I heard she wasn’t working this weekend. Just wondering.”
Eli looked at him. Slowly nodded.
* * *
“You have to leave,” Lise’s grandmother rasped from the doorway. “They’re coming. People are coming.”
“I am,” Deenie said, walking out. “I’m sorry. But she…she was looking at me.”
“I know you love our Lise,” she said, not even seeming to hear Deenie. “But things have gotten bad today.”
“Bad?”
“That other girl upset her!” she whispered, holding Deenie’s arm. “I could just tell. A grandmother knows.”
“What other girl?”
“The one who came earlier.”
“Gabby?” Deenie asked. “She didn’t tell me she—”
“No, some girl with hair white as a witch,” she said. “She was in there and we didn’t even know how she got in.”
Deenie felt her flesh tingle.
“And when she came out, she was crying, like an animal. Her whole body. Have you ever seen a snake sidewinding? That’s what it looked like.”
Deenie didn’t say anything, just nodded. She didn’t know what it was about, but she knew it was very wrong.
Lise’s grandmother leaned closer, so close Deenie could smell her medicinal moisturizer.
“Who was she?” she asked. “Tell me.”
“Her name is Skye,” Deenie said. “And you shouldn’t let her back in.”
* * *
No one was home and the house had that spooky feel it always had when the
weather changed suddenly. The squeaking and wheezing of floorboards, the walls inhaling and exhaling like a sleeping giant.
Eli read Deenie’s note on the kitchen table, the wild lope of her handwriting.
Turning on the TV loud, he collapsed on the sofa.
He was trying to think through everything, but before he knew it, he was asleep.
It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, but everything felt different when he woke up, with a jolt. A noise in the house, in the basement.
It must have been a dream, but it wasn’t like any dream he’d had, at least not since he was a kid when he’d run a high fever and go to all kinds of places in his head—the South Pole, Madripoor, Mutant Town, as vivid as comics, as life, but more so—and wake up feeling as though he finally understood everything.
In the dream, whatever it was, he was still on the couch, but Skye Osbourne was with him, her arms hidden in her long sweater, which was like tendrils, and the light came and he could see through it to her breasts, her nipples like gold coins.
One hand, tiny and clawed, suddenly appeared through the bottom of her sleeve and she was holding his phone, as though it had never been lost.
Climbing on top of him, she wrapped her legs tight, waving his phone in front of his face, the picture there. The faceless girl with the purple nails and purple panties.
“You should delete it,” she said, craning her neck down, her breasts swinging. He’d never known her breasts were so large. “What if she dies? Then she’s on your phone forever.”
“Who? Who’s the girl? Is it—”
“Maybe it’s your fault,” she said. “The camera stole her soul.”
Her hair falling onto his face as she arched her neck, as she looked at the photo glimmering in her own hand.
“Look,” she said. “You can see her heart.”
16
When’s the next bus?” Deenie asked a pair of hospital employees smoking out back. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Where you going, honey?” one asked, a lady with pouched eyes and a lab coat under her puffer.
“Over by the high school.”
“I’m leaving. I’ll take you,” she said, throwing her cigarette to the ground.
On the way, the woman talked without stopping.
She told Deenie how the pharmacy had never had a day like this, the dispenser beeping ceaselessly, the premixed IVs gone by four o’clock, a tech fainting and splitting her scalp, four girls an hour admitted at first, double that by the time she left.
“I saw you and I thought, Not another one. All day, each of you acting crazier than the last.”
“I was visiting a friend.”
Mind racing, somersaulting, Deenie was trying to piece it all together: Why was Skye visiting Lise? What did it all mean?
The woman glanced over at her in a way that made Deenie’s eye twitch.
“A girl came in to visit her sister, and ten minutes later she was spinning around on the floor. We can’t get this tiger by the tail. Your eye always do that?”
“I’m okay,” Deenie said. “What happened at the press conference?”
The woman kept looking at her, “They canceled it,” she said. “Everything’s changed.”
“What do you mean? What happened?” Deenie felt her eye throbbing, wanted to put her finger to it, make it stop.
“Because of the police investigation.”
“What?”
“They found something in the girl’s locker. The first girl.”
Deenie thought of the people digging through Lise’s locker, their gloved hands on Lise’s gym uniform, her thermos, her binder.
“What did they find?”
“Look, I can’t talk about it,” the woman said, eyes returning to the road. “They made us sign all these papers.”
The feeling came over Deenie like a rush of water to the mouth, rimy and overflowing.
Please tell me, she tried to say, but her mouth wouldn’t do what it was supposed to, and the woman looked at her as if deciding something.
“I don’t really know, honey,” she said. “But I heard they think someone gave her something that made her sick. Very sick.”
Deenie sat for a moment, thinking.
“Like a roofie?” she asked, remembering from health class.
“No. We check for that right away.”
“So…so that’s what happened to everyone? To the other girls too?”
“No. Their tox screens came back negative.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Deenie said, twitching, the vein at her temple like a wriggling worm, her hand jerking up, trying to hide it. “It can’t be just Lise.”
At that moment, the road rose and the school loomed on the horizon.
“You can stop right here,” Deenie said, pointing hurriedly to the nearest corner.
“I can’t leave you,” the woman said, squinting out the window, the empty parking lot. “It’s not safe.”
Deenie looked at her. Then it was like she’d touched a frayed plug. She felt something like sparks, her head jerking against the car window.
She looked at her hands, which tingled.
“Honey, you…” the woman started, her eyes leaping to Deenie.
“My dad teaches here. He’s inside waiting for me,” Deenie said, gritting her teeth to make the shaking stop, which only made it worse. She reached for the door handle. “Stop the car. Let me out now, please.”
The woman slowed the car to a stop, looking down the empty street.
“I don’t see anyone…” she began, but before she could say more, Deenie felt her shoulders vault forward, jaw percussing.
Swinging open the door, she jumped out of the car. And then she ran.
* * *
It was a little click-click sound and seemed to be coming from below.
Standing at the top of the basement stairs, Eli wondered if it was the dryer, or if it was a raccoon, like once before. For months after, Deenie wouldn’t go down there without singing loudly or raking one of Eli’s old hockey sticks across the rail.
“Deenie?” Eli called out. “Dad?”
“No,” a voice came, throaty, cautious.
Three steps down, he stopped.
She was sitting on the Ping-Pong table, purple rain boots dangling off the edge.
At first he could barely see her face, long hair catching the light and her face tucked behind it.
But then she turned, and he saw her eyes widen, heard the smallest gasp.
“Gabby,” he said, walking down the remaining steps.
“I’m sorry for coming in,” she said quickly. “Did I scare you?”
“No,” he said. “No problem.”
“It was raining,” she added. Under the lightbulb, her hair glistened from within its deep pockets. All the girls loved Gabby’s hair, but Eli always thought it looked so heavy, so complicated, like one of those leathery cocoons you stare into at the science center.
“I had a key from before,” she said.
“Good thing,” he said. “I was wondering what happened.”
“What do you mean?” she said, clasping her phone between her palms.
“To you and Deenie. Where is she?”
Gabby just looked at him.
“Deenie left a note that she was with you,” Eli said, walking over to the Ping-Pong table.
She said something, but with her voice so soft and the furnace kicking up, he couldn’t hear, so he moved closer.
“No. I was just trying to find her,” she said, almost leaning back from him, as if he were standing too close. “I came here to find her. I really need to see her.”
There was the smell on her of something, something in her hair that reminded him of his dad’s classroom.
He must have made some small gesture because she said, “They put glue in, for the EEG.”
“No, I—” he began.
“I can’t get it out,” she said, touching it. “Witch hazel, aspirin crushed in water, nail po
lish remover. I tried everything. Maybe I’ll just cut it all off.”
“Don’t cut it off,” he said, smiling.
She didn’t say anything, looking down at her phone. He was a little sick, thinking of Gabby in the house while he was having that dream. Skye and her golden nipples and grinding hips.
“I guess they’re all still at the meeting at the school,” he said, eager to make conversation, to get the noise out of his head. “Things were crazy over there. I saw them digging around outside.”
Her eyes lifted. “Saw who?”
Eli shrugged. “I don’t know.” He thought about it. The dark coats and the blue plastic gloves. The one with a rain cover stretching over his hat brim. “The cops, I think.” And then, fitting pieces together in his head, he added, “By the breezeway. By those big bushes. I guess it had to do with Lise being back there.”
“What do you mean?” Her eyes back down on her phone.
He didn’t want to tell her, but he was trying to see what the pieces meant.
“Lise,” he said, his brain churning, attempting to make sense of it. “She was back there. With a guy. Screwing around, I don’t know. What I don’t get is why the police…”
He stopped.
The look on her face, the way it seemed to collapse upon itself, to wither inside that cocoon of hair. He was the biggest jerk in the world. No one wanted to hear stuff like that about her friend.
“Wait, stop,” she said, shaking her head so forcefully it startled him. “I don’t understand. Why are you telling me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. What if she was having another seizure, or whatever that thing was? “I shouldn’t have said anything. I only found out because there was a mistake. People thought it was me back there with Lise. People were saying it was me.”
Her head shot up.
“What?”
“But it wasn’t me. I’d never—well, it wasn’t me.”
“It was you,” she said, looking at him, eyes black and obscure.
“You heard that too, huh?” He hoped Deenie hadn’t. “No way, ever. This guy just looks like me, sort of. This guy, Sean, from the Pizza House.”