by Megan Abbott
There would always be things she’d never understand about Gabby. And that was the hardest part. That there would be mysteries impenetrable.
Had Gabby herself even known what she wanted, her fingers tucking Skye’s poison down into the bottom of Lise’s thermos, the same thermos that helped make Lise sylphlike and beautiful, her body so lovely and ready for wonder?
And then there was what Deenie herself had done. With Sean Lurie. And how different it was, and how the same. I want it too. I want what she has too. Why can’t I get that too?
Everyone wanted to be like Gabby. Her bright tights, the streak in her hair, the big glasses she wore when she read in class. Kim Court and Jaymie Hurwich, even Brooke Campos. Everyone.
Deenie wondered where all that frantic energy would go now. Did it just disappear, or did it go someplace else? She wondered about it for herself.
But Gabby was gone and probably wouldn’t ever be back in their school. Probably she would move away, no matter what happened.
So where did all of it go, the things she felt for her?
Because, to her, it was Deenie-Gabby-Lise, snuggled together in sleeping bags, behind the bookshelves in the library, on the soccer field, in the auditorium.
Lise was still there. Today, her first day back at school.
She’d survived poisoning, which led to a seizure, which led to a cardiac event, which led to a fall, which led to blunt trauma to the head.
Everyone called her the Miracle Girl.
Deenie’s dad called her Rasputin.
She said she didn’t remember anything about that day, not even the drive to school that morning with her mom. The doctors told her that would happen, and she said she was glad, but it was hard for her to believe about Gabby, and she wasn’t sure she ever would.
“What about the hospital?” Deenie asked her later. “Me visiting you?”
“No,” Lise said. Deenie pictured herself at the foot of Lise’s bed, trying to tell her about Sean Lurie. And we were in his car. And he…or I. Me. It was me. Lise’s gleaming eye. The whistle from her white mouth.
But Lise didn’t remember any of that, either. And the first time Deenie visited her at home, she tried again. A twice-told confession.
“No,” Lise interrupted, shaking her head, her hair oddly changed, a darker blond and not the same texture where it grew back, the center of her scalp where the dent terminated. “No, no. I don’t want to talk about any of it. If I talk about any of it, my mouth fills up.”
“Your mouth?”
“My chest, everything. I don’t know, Deenie,” she said, breathless. “Just stop.”
And Deenie’s dad told her that there could be emotional stuff for a long time, that it was a kind of trauma, and that Deenie shouldn’t take it personally.
The word trauma seemed to cover a lot, a whole world of things, and it was the word they’d always used for Gabby, before what happened to Lise. To Gabby and Lise.
But it wasn’t only Lise’s hair—nothing was the same. Even her walk, the jut of her hip, the weight of her feet on her bedroom rug.
And most of all, it was something in her eyes, like when Lise first collapsed to the classroom floor that day, like something black, like a bat flapping.
* * *
Every morning, Eli woke from the same dream. Of riding in the passenger seat of a car and feeling something catch around his ankle, soft, light as air. Reaching down, he never found it.
Sometimes, he felt it when he was awake, in class, or even during a game, sweeping down the rink and feeling, even through his thick hockey socks, the boot of the skate, something both delicate and tight there on his ankle, grappling for him.
He tried not to think much about Gabby.
In a funny way, he was angry, and he didn’t like the feeling. He’d always tried, very hard, not to feel mad at anybody, ever.
But there was someone he thought about more than Gabby, every time he walked by the double doors leading to the loading dock. Other times.
The night after Lise woke up, he and Deenie had stayed up late, sneaking beers from the fridge and talking. She told him about Skye, about everything. Or at least everything enough.
He could tell Deenie thought Skye was a monster.
But Gabby won’t tell on her. It’s all Skye’s fault but Gabby won’t tell. So now I can’t.
He didn’t point out that she didn’t have to do what Gabby said. She could do whatever she wanted.
Instead, he just nodded, and nodded, and teased her about slurring her s’s.
And then she said, I think Skye told me she gave you the jimson to get rid of me. And then she could run away. She knew I would have to find you.
And he thought that part was probably true.
Then they watched Meatballs on cable, which their dad always loved, and Deenie fell asleep and snored just a little.
It was the best night ever.
And they hadn’t talked about any of it since.
Stepping out onto the practice rink, he looked off into the backfield, the ground shorn of all its foliage, and the smell of ashes always now.
His skates hitting the ice, just starting to soften, he thought of Skye out there somewhere.
He’d heard her uncle had contacted the police, saying Skye had called him, collect, but he was already on probation and couldn’t risk any trouble with the law. And besides, he was worried about her out there. She was just a kid.
Sometimes Eli thought he spotted her, a white flash in the corner of his eye.
No one had seen her since Deenie left her in her backyard the night Gabby confessed. The police were looking for her as part of the presentencing, were unsure of her role, if any, in what Gabby had done. They were following rumors, mostly.
Skye was a rumor now, a whiff of smoke drifting.
Now he thought he kind of understood what she meant about energies, the way they can be passed to you, can live in you even when you don’t know it, until it’s revealed to you. She was wrong about Lise. She didn’t have any dark energy, or any powerful energy. Everyone else did, but not Lise.
When he got his phone back, he thought of Skye taking it, slipping it from his backpack as they sat on the loading dock. He wondered how long she’d had it before she gave it to Gabby.
Did she look at it, did she somehow see into him?
It was like his dream, Skye’s thighs locked tight around him as he lay still. And her mouth opened and he could see inside, and…
There was a witchiness to her that was terrifying. And there was something else. Part of him wished he had put his hand on her back that day, on that twisted spine of hers, which she’d offered to him, asked of him.
But those were early-morning, predawn thoughts, out on the ice, dreaming.
* * *
The early spring had meant everything arrived early: the school grounds bursting with red shoots, the lawns thick with creeping phlox, other things he couldn’t name.
Tom held the school door open for Deenie, her arms heavy with that monstrous book bag of hers.
The building smelled so different now. They had gone through the entire facility, the dropped ceilings in the basement, every stretch of the HVAC system. Scooped out every hidden cavity, scraped matter from each crease and furrow.
And they found many things.
Deep in the upper and lower corners of the old school they found pipes, fans, dampers, ducts coated with prehistoric sediments, gypsum board and ceiling tiles furred with mold, lead paint over older lead paint. PCBs in the caulk, the fluorescent lighting ballasts, the transformers that powered the school. Radon, mercury, arsenic in the water pipes, on the wood of the track hurdles, in the modular chairs, tables. The only thing they didn’t find, other than, maybe, uranium, was asbestos. Everyone got rid of that a decade ago.
Trace amounts of a dozen or more things, most of which they’d removed over Easter break. The rest to be removed over the summer.
None of it, officials pointed out, had anything to
do with what happened.
Because even if it isn’t any of these things, it could be, Lara Bishop had said.
We put them at risk just by having them. And the hazards never stop.
But now, everything just smelled like nothing.
You wouldn’t have thought nothing would have a smell.
“It’s time, Dad,” Deenie said, pointing to the old mounted clock, its brass casings stripped of green and newly shining.
“Right,” he said, reaching down to hand her the new scarf, which had drifted to the floor. “Have a good day, D.”
“Okay,” she said, smiling a little, a half smile that was new to him. Wise and wary and not a girl’s smile at all.
And he watched her walk all the way down the corridor, head lowered, hoodie half up her neck.
Each time her sneaker took a swivel on the bright polished floor, he felt his heart lurch.
* * *
There were only sixty seconds before the second bell, but everything seemed to slow down.
Shutting her locker, she put her hand on Lise’s door, wondered where she was.
Walking through the halls, she saw all the girls with legs bare now, even though it was still too cold. A few of the boys were even wearing shorts.
She’d worked only one shift with Sean Lurie since everything happened.
He hadn’t looked at her once, just took the order tickets, his nails greased. He was even wearing his cap, first time ever, so she couldn’t see his eyes.
She didn’t want to look at him anyway.
That night, a text came, the same unknown number as before. But this time, he said who he was:
Hey, u, Sean here. Sorry, k? we cool?
We cool, she’d typed back.
Then, somehow, they were never on the schedule again at the same time.
But he didn’t go to Dryden High, so it was like it never even happened. She’d never told anyone other than Lise, and Lise didn’t remember, so maybe it hadn’t happened.
Except she could still feel all of it, but that was okay.
Turning the corner into the east wing, the breezeway unusually warm, the sun pounding on the glass, she saw Brooke Campos, laughing loudly at something a boy had said, her mouth like a shark’s.
All those girls, she wondered what they felt now. No one said anything, really. No one talked about the girls who’d been so sick.
Except for one of them, Kim Court, who’d transferred to Star-of-the-Sea after staying a long, long time in the hospital. Her videos were the only ones still online, and once in a while, the address still stored in her browser, Deenie would start typing and the video would come up, and there was Kim, talking about the man with tornado legs, about Gabby pulling seaweed from her throat, about Deenie being in the hospital, about Deenie being the one.
“Are you ready, Deenie?” It was Jaymie Hurwich, books clasped to her chest. “It’s time.”
And Deenie nodded.
The classroom door was open, and there was Lise, seated at her desk. The same spot she’d been in nearly seven weeks before, her legs tangled beneath her. Her chin tilted, looking out the window.
It was Lise, but it wasn’t.
And Lise smiled at her, sort of. And Deenie sat down, and the bell rang, and everything shuttled back into place.
She’d never thought it would, that the fever would break. But the Lise who returned didn’t seem like the same Lise. There were all these different Lises and none of them was Deenie’s.
Looking out the window too, following Lise’s gaze, Deenie saw the hedges, shorn to the ground.
And she could see through to the other wing, and there was Dad, charcoal sweater and handsome, talking to the French teacher again, showing her something on his phone. Giving her the smallest of smiles, the one her mom used to call the Croc.
All the trees and foliage had been torn away during the investigation, the remediation. Bushes razed, the earth seemingly shaken to its core. You could see everything now, if you wanted.
And though homeroom had begun, Eli was out there, outside, jacket off, on the practice rink, skating.
It was almost like fall, branches strewn across the thawing ice. Prickly globes split, seeds spilling, white petals pulped, spores that split red onto ice.
Each turn, graceful and lithe and hypnotic, she watched as his blades ran over every one.
Acknowledgments
There are not thanks enough to offer the incredible Reagan Arthur, nor Michael Pietsch and the magnificent, creative, and generous-spirited Little, Brown team, especially Theresa Giacopasi, Miriam Parker, Sarah J. Murphy, and Peggy Freudenthal. I’m honored to work among them all.
Immense gratitude is also owed to Paul Baggeley, Kate Harvey, Sophie and Emma Bravo at Picador UK, and to Angharad Kowal, Maja Nikolic, and BakaraWintner at Writers House and Sylvie Rabineau and Jill Gillett at RWSG. Thanks also to James Lavish and Vicki Pettersson, for an invaluable assist.
And foremost to Dan Conaway, without whom, in all ways.
My debt to the following just grows and grows: Phil & Patti Abbott; Josh, Julie & Kevin Abbott; Jeff, Ruth & Steve Nase; and the one and only Alison Quinn. And, as ever, thanks to Darcy Lockman, Kiki Wilkinson, and, of course, to the FLs. This year, I’m particularly grateful to the good folks of Oxford, Mississippi, including Jack Pendarvis, Theresa Starkey, and Ace Atkins.
And, as writer and reader both, I’m certain the greatest debt is owed to booksellers everywhere.
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award–winning author of six previous novels. She received her PhD in literature from New York University. She lives in New York and currently serves as the John Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Also by Megan Abbott
Dare Me
The End of Everything
Bury Me Deep
Queenpin
The Song Is You
Die a Little
The Street Was Mine
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