by Megan Abbott
And she just shook her head, eyes wide and startled, mouth fixed.
“Because I have to show you something. You need to see something.”
Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the note, damp in his hands.
* * *
A blurry half hour after he’d left, Tom was back in the hospital waiting room, this time with Eli and Deenie.
Eli, glassy-eyed, an arm around his sister, her face colorless, mouth slightly open.
He hadn’t been able to get anything coherent from Deenie.
Like when she was little and would lose her breath and all he could do was say it would be okay, everything would be okay.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
Now, his heart still jamming against his chest, he tried to settle himself. He needed to be ready for anything.
There was something about seeing Eli, his hand on his sister’s arm, saying things in her ear, that was beginning to work on him.
To calm him.
To make his breaths come slow, to let him stand back and see them both.
* * *
When her dad went up to the reception window, Deenie turned to Eli. He had something in his hand and kept trying to show it to her.
It was a piece of paper, like a wet leaf, and she recognized Gabby’s tight scrawl.
She read in what felt like slow motion, each word shuddering a moment before locking into focus.
The first time I met you, back when Deenie and me were just freshmen, you wore a shirt with a dinosaur on it.
The things Skye said, they were true.
She thinks I need her but she’s the one who needs me. I make her feel more interesting.
She read it and thought of everything that had ever happened with her and Gabby, and all the things she’d held tight to her own chest. About her part of the story, about Sean Lurie. And how neither Gabby nor Skye would ever find out.
Why should she tell them?
Your sister’s a really good person, Gabby had written. But she doesn’t know me at all.
Maybe we don’t really know anybody, Deenie thought. And maybe nobody knows us.
* * *
The nurse was crazily beautiful, like a nurse in a porno movie, and Eli thought he must still be high, all these hours later.
Her breasts seemed to brush up against him every time she moved, checking his eyes, his pulse. Asking him a series of questions and then asking again.
Fifteen minutes before, he’d peed into a cup, handed it to her.
“Nothing here,” she said now, looking at the results. It seemed impossibly fast.
“I haven’t done any drugs,” he said. “I don’t use drugs.”
He wondered if his dad, standing just a few feet away, was also noticing how beautiful the nurse was. But his dad didn’t seem to notice anything, his eyes set on Eli, his gaze intent.
Another nurse, her scrubs dark with sweat, rolled a cart past them, the wheels screeching.
“I just don’t know how we get out of this,” she was saying to the beautiful nurse. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
There was a frenzy around him, a constant whir that didn’t seem to touch him. Or his nurse, her voice tut-tutting, the fine gold cross around her neck, hanging between the tops of her breasts.
And then, as she bent the arm of a light above him, he saw she wasn’t really crazily beautiful and was a lot older than he thought, but there was a tenderness and efficiency to her that made him feel like everything would be okay.
“We’ll still take some blood but—” Just then a crash came, followed by the yelp of a girl’s voice, the skidding of sneakers on the floor.
“Some help here!” a voice rose, deep and urgent.
“I’ll be back,” the nurse said to Eli’s dad, putting her hands on his shoulders to direct him to a narrow waiting area crushed with parents. “Sit tight.”
His dad just stood there, watching the unshaven men with pajama tops under their open coats, women wearing slipper boots, one father weeping into his lap.
“Eli,” his dad was saying, “I have to make a call, okay?”
No one was looking.
Eli was the only male and that made it easier. No one was looking, so he started walking, exploring.
Hearing a dozen conversations, voices pinched and frightened.
“…and her throw-up looked like coffee grounds. I heard that means…”
“…explains why she’s been this way for so long. All those ADD meds. Maybe this is why…”
“…all these clots when I was doing the laundry. And I asked her and she started crying…”
“…and heavy-metal poisoning, or mold? She kept saying everything smelled like meat. And then she’d throw up again.”
“…like I was floating, and a darkness was closing in on me.”
He had been sitting on a small chair, all the exam tables taken, when he spotted, under one of those rolling privacy screens, a pair of soggy bunny slippers.
And then the slippers started to move.
He saw her, the sophomore girl, walking toward the swinging doors.
And he couldn’t sit there anymore.
And no one stopped him.
A man in scrubs, his forehead wet, clipboard in hand, called out to him as he passed a nursing station.
“That’s my sister,” Eli lied, rushing past the man, who started to say something and then stopped.
* * *
“I think he’s fine. I don’t know. They think he’s fine.”
“Oh, Tom,” Georgia said, “what’s happened?”
And he didn’t know how to begin to answer that question.
He’d planned on telling her everything he knew, but it felt like so many enigmatic scraps, and all of it depended on her being here, on her knowing the teen-girl complexities of Deenie’s friendships, of the extraordinary something that had overtaken all these girls and everyone in their lives. How did you explain any of that?
He could tell her about finding Eli’s phone, and they could try to figure it all out, but he didn’t know how to tell her without explaining why he’d been with Lara Bishop at midnight.
“I was always afraid something could happen to Eli on the ice,” Georgia said. “That’s the thing that kept me up nights.”
“Georgia,” he said suddenly, “why aren’t you here?”
“Because,” she said, “I’d only make it worse.”
Then she told him she’d tried three times. Gotten in her car, driven nearly all the way to Dryden, three hours, before turning around and driving back. Now she was in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven twelve miles from her apartment.
“Drinking a can of beer,” she said. “Genny Cream. Which I haven’t done since I was twenty.”
And he laughed, and she laughed.
And everything felt mysterious and lonely and half forgotten.
He could hear her laugh in the center of his brain and he thought, That’s not her laugh. I don’t recognize that laugh at all.
* * *
Eli lost sight of the sophomore girl quickly.
But down a long hallway in Critical Care, he found what he was looking for.
It was the quietest spot in the entire hospital, a building smaller than their school, which it seemed to be trying to contain right now, its walls swelling and straining.
The doors are always open in hospitals, which seemed funny to him, but he was glad.
Because there she was.
Lise Daniels.
* * *
It felt like she’d been alone in the waiting room a long time, her thoughts scattering everywhere, jumping to her feet whenever either set of doors opened.
But then Deenie’s phone rang, and time seemed to stop entirely.
Gabby, the screen read.
She walked swiftly outside, into the back parking lot to a place hidden by a pair of drooping trees, and answered.
“Hey, girl.”
“Hey, girl.”
&nbs
p; And a pause that felt electric before Gabby spoke again.
“So I’m waiting for my mom. I told them I wanted my mom here before I tell them.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the police station,” she said, voice hoarse and faint. “I walked for an hour and when I got there, I knew I would do it.”
“But Gabby, listen to me—”
“Don’t hate me, Deenie, okay? Whatever you hear.”
“Gabby, I know what happened. I talked to Skye. It was Skye.”
“No,” Gabby said, with finality. The voice of someone who had decided many things, and now that she’d decided, she was done. I won’t see my dad, I won’t talk to him. I’m done with him forever. “It was me, Deenie. It was me. And I’m not going to tell them about her. You have to promise me you won’t either.”
“I won’t promise! Listen to me, Gabby,” she said again, trying to forget the things Skye had said, about Gabby not caring about Deenie, about how Deenie was in the way. “You wouldn’t have done it without Skye. It’s all her fault.”
Then Gabby said the thing Deenie hoped she wouldn’t say, never guessed she would.
“When I put the leaves in the thermos, I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t care.”
And Deenie could hear it, that click-click-click on the other end, Gabby’s jaw like one of those old wind-up toys, a spinning monkey slapping cymbals. Deenie could practically see her shaking.
Then, as if Gabby had wedged her hand under her jaw to hold it in place, the words came fast and Deenie tried to hold on to them.
“Deenie, if Eli didn’t love me, why would he have been so nice to me and played Ping-Pong with me and that time he gave me a ride on his handlebars? Why would he have treated me like I was special? Not like those hockey groupies, not like girls like Britt Olsen or those girls from Star-of-the-Sea or that slutty sophomore Michelle. But then I heard about Lise and the bushes by school.”
There was a long, raspy gulp, like Gabby couldn’t get air in. And when she started again, Deenie could feel everything falling apart for her. Gabby had many things to say, none of which could help her explain any of it.
“And the more Skye kept talking,” she said, “the more it seemed right. It was supposed to be me, Deenie. He was supposed to love me. But we did the love spell wrong. And Skye told me what she saw. It was like a loop in my head. And he was pulling down her tights, that’s what Skye said. Thinking of his hands on that…that-that-that skin of hers when it was supposed to be me.”
The way she said it, that skin of hers, her voice shaking with anger and disgust, Deenie had the sudden feeling she’d had with Skye. For a fleeting second, she thought it was all a trick, some black art, and it was Skye on the other end of the phone, casting a spell.
“After, Skye said we shouldn’t feel bad. She said it’s what was supposed to happen. It’s how the universe works. Lise’s bad energy came back on her. Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise’s thigh, it was a warning.”
Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything.
But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch’s mark, the blot on Lise’s body that reminded you of what she had been—a plump, awkward girl—before the lithesome beauty took her place. It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.
“But Deenie, I did feel bad. It was like it was meant to happen. The bad thing you’re waiting for, the thing you might do someday. And then you’ve done the thing, and there’s no going back.”
Once, after Deenie said something unbelievably awful to her mom, using a word she’d never even said aloud, shouting it so loud her throat hurt, her mom looked at her and said, Deenie, someday it’s going to happen to you. You’re going to do something you never thought you would. And then you’ll see, and then you’ll know.
I hope, she’d added, it’s not for a long time.
“But at the school concert,” Deenie said suddenly, remembering Gabby, her cello bow pitching, face scarlet. “Was that all fake?”
“No! I can’t make my jaw stop,” Gabby said, her voice cracking and a long, low sob. “I can’t make my head right. It’s like it’s everything about me now. It’s inside me and everywhere. It was always in me. I couldn’t stop myself.”
There was a long pause. Then Gabby whispered, “Deenie, I couldn’t stop myself. I had to do it. Can you understand?”
Deenie felt her mouth go dry, her head throbbing. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
The clicks started again, and an awful rattle, and Deenie felt the phone hot on her face, beep-beep-beep, her cheek pressed against the keyboard.
Then, suddenly, Gabby’s voice came again, low and strange.
“And now he’ll never love me,” Gabby said. “Now it’ll never be me.”
Deenie slowly lowered the phone from her ear.
“Deenie, did Eli read my letter? Did he say anything about me?”
* * *
At first Eli couldn’t see her past the wires tentacled over her, the room blue and lonely.
There was just a swoop of a girl’s cheek, and a flossy pile of hair, everything blue in the blue light.
And there was something resting in the middle of Lise’s head. Something dark. Like in a fairy tale, a black cat perched, a swirl of smoke.
But then he remembered something Deenie had said, about a fall.
She made it sound gruesome, but it wasn’t so bad.
Maybe it was because Lise’s eyes were so pretty, shining and looking directly at him.
Following him as he walked toward the bed.
Gentle and soft, like Lise. And the light from the open door falling on her, giving her a funny kind of radiance.
Her mouth slightly opening, lips pale but full.
Eyes seeming to smile, at him.
“Do you see?” came the softest of whispers.
And it was Mrs. Daniels behind him, and she was smiling, like watching Lise play “Für Elise” on her flute.
“Do you see?” Mrs. Daniels whispered, her hand gentle on Eli’s back. “She came back.”
* * *
Alone in the waiting room, Deenie sat, her phone gripped in her hand.
Everything that day at the lake, just a week ago, started to look different.
The way Gabby looked at Lise, her long legs, like milk glass, thighs so narrow you could see between, like a keyhole.
How Gabby and Skye had stood next to each other, their ankles flecked green from the lake’s creamy surface, and Gabby whispered something in Skye’s ear, and Deenie had that feeling that she’d had so often in recent months: They are sharing something without me, they are talking about me, Gabby doesn’t love me anymore.
And then Gabby wanted to leave, even though Lise was driving.
I can take you, Lise promised, but they were already walking away, their legs greened, never looking back.
And Skye said the lake had bad energy, arms folded, eyes on Lise.
Was that when Skye got the idea? Or had she and Gabby already decided by then?
It felt now like they had. Like it had already been too late.
Deenie wondered how it had felt for Lise, sharing her secret about Sean. Waiting for Skye and Gabby to leave to tell her. Wanting it to be theirs. A thing together. She couldn’t know what might happen. How different it might have been had she told all of them.
Deenie thought about what Skye had said, that the whole time, Gabby was so angry she couldn’t even look at Lise. Couldn’t bear Lise showing off her body in the water. And whispering to Skye, She stole him from me.
That day, Lise had been more beautiful than she’d ever been before, her lashes iridescent and her face with an almost unearthly glow. Her body, Deenie guessed, felt her own in a way it only can when you’ve made it yourself.
Lise did give off a strong energy that d
ay, but not like Skye meant.
And Deenie, she’d said, Don’t tell Gabby. Gabby’s weird about this stuff.
Deenie, you’re my best friend.
Deenie, I didn’t do anything wrong, right?
Deenie, am I bad?
Deenie, I hope you get to feel it. I hope it feels like that for you.
It was something powerful, and everyone wanted it.
17
Lise
It felt great, her hands on the wheel.
Lise almost never got to drive, but that day she got lucky and her mom let her drive the Dodge because she was at the ophthalmologist, getting drops in her eyes.
Gabby had been sad all day, like she was a lot. You would only find out later it was because her dad had called or it was the anniversary of something bad with Tyler Nagy.
“She won’t even talk,” Deenie whispered to her. “Let’s try to cheer her up.”
So they went for a drive, windows down and Gabby’s favorite music and Big Gulps it took two hands to hold. The warmest day in months.
They saw Deenie’s brother in the parking lot and Lise beeped her horn at him. Sometimes she wondered if Deenie knew how good-looking Eli was, if sisters could tell. Lise liked to watch him on the practice rink, his hair flying and the faraway look in his eyes. Her mom always said teenage boys only cared about one thing, but watching Eli, you just knew it wasn’t true.
On the drive, Gabby and Skye didn’t say a word the whole time, but she and Deenie sang loudly to the radio. It was fun.
As they drove past the lake, Skye started telling them this thing that had happened last week. She saw two guys wading in the lake, drinking beers, their car doors open and speakers gushing wild music that made her want to dance.
“They were sexy,” Skye said. “One had a tattoo of a gold panther. It went down his whole body, from his neck down below his waist, into his jeans. I wonder where it ended.”
Lise could picture the tattoo and the guy. In her head, his shirt was worn denim and he had aviator sunglasses and a wicked smile. And the panther, its gleaming haunches stretched along his torso, the panther’s teeth disappearing below his golden hip bone.