The Fever

by Megan Abbott

  The bell rang, the class clattered to life, and Brooke rose to her feet.

  Looking down at Deenie, she grinned. “But I don’t believe it.”

  “What?” Deenie said, looking up at her, her face hot. “What?”

  Her winter hat yanked over her long hair, hair nearly to her waist, Gabby was standing at her locker. Again, with Skye.

  Until last fall, Deenie never really knew Skye, even though she’d been in classes with her since seventh grade. Skye was never in school choir, yearbook, French club, plays. She never helped decorate the homecoming float.

  But she became Gabby’s friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school’s water fountains—you knew they would find each other. And, about a year ago, they had.

  At first, Gabby told Deenie she liked to spend time at Skye’s house because her aunt was never home and you could just hang out, listen to music, drink the fogged jugs of Chablis in the fridge or a stewed-fruit concoction her uncle used to make in the basement and called prison wine.

  But Deenie knew it was more than that. Saw the way they’d exchange looks, how Gabby would come to school wearing Skye’s catbird ring. She worried Gabby maybe shared things with Skye, personal things, like about her dad. Things she’d only ever shared with Deenie.

  It’s like you with Lise, Gabby once said. You guys have this thing. Which Deenie guessed was true because she’d known Lise forever and Gabby only since middle school, and Lise was part of her growing up and Gabby was part of everything newer, more exciting. And everything to come.

  “Deenie,” Gabby called out. “What happened?”

  “It was bad,” Deenie said. And then stopped. You couldn’t talk about it the way you’d talk about a pop quiz or shin splints from gym. Your words had to show how big it was.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Gabby asked.

  “Did you talk to her?” Skye asked.

  “Talk to her? No. You don’t get it. She’s…”

  Skye looked at her. They both were looking at her, both so tall and heavy-haired and clustered close. Waiting.

  She didn’t know how to talk about it, about what she’d seen. Her face, it wasn’t hers. It wasn’t her. It was two pieces that didn’t go together and neither of them was Lise.

  “Something happened,” she finally said. “To her heart.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” Gabby asked, her chin shaking. “Is she, Deenie?”

  Deenie didn’t know what to say. Her mouth opened and nothing came out.

  * * *

  “We haven’t been able to find out much,” Principal Crowder said to Tom. “The hospital won’t release information without her mother’s permission, but Mrs. Daniels hasn’t returned our calls. Understandable, of course.”

  “Right,” Tom said, recalling the way Sheila Daniels had looked in the waiting room. He’d tried phoning her twice, thinking that’s what one did. “If I can help…”

  A teacher for nearly two decades, Tom still felt vaguely uncomfortable in the principal’s office. Even though the principal—Ben Crowder, a shiny-faced former “curricular specialist” from the state education department—was only a few years older. Once, he’d flagged Tom down at a local gas station as he struggled to remove the frozen fuel cap from the tank of his Volkswagen.

  Help a brother out? he’d asked, a desperate gleam in his eye.

  “I’ve talked to all Miss Daniels’s teachers,” Crowder said, tapping his fountain pen on the desk, “but I wanted to talk to you too. I heard you left campus to see her.”

  “Yes,” he said, noticing his phone was flashing with that red zigzag of a missed call, something that always snagged at his nerves. “My daughter’s best friends with her. But I guess I know about as much as you. It was a pretty chaotic scene.”

  “We followed all the procedures on our end,” Crowder said. “But apparently things took a turn when she got home. Some kind of arrhythmia brought on by a seizure. Of course, there’s already rumors.”

  “Rumors?”

  “I wondered if you’d heard anything.”

  “No,” Tom said. “Like what?”

  But Crowder only leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “What a thing. I’ve only met the mother once, at a school-board meeting last fall. She seemed like a…cautious woman. The anxious type. So this has to be especially challenging.”

  “Well,” Tom said, his fingers resting on his phone, “I guess all we can do is wait. I’m sure we’ll know more soon.”

  “Right,” Crowder said, tapping his pen on the legal pad in front of him. “That’s right.”

  From the entrance of the breezeway, Tom watched the throngs of woolly-hatted kids and pink-necked seniors pushing their way out of the school and over to the parking lot, the slightly rusting bus-stop sign quaking in the hard wind.

  He sent Eli a quick text, hoped he’d get it.

  Can you take D home and bring car back before yr practice?

  He wanted to take her home himself, but he had detention duty.

  And there was the missed call: Lara Bishop.

  Gabby’s mom.

  “Lara,” he said, “how are you?”

  It seemed like a silly question, but he didn’t know what she’d heard about Lise. And he’d never felt particularly at ease with her. She had a look about her, a wariness, a watchfulness. He’d once heard the phrase cop eyes, and when he looked at Lara Bishop he thought maybe that’s what cop eyes looked like. Or maybe it was just that he knew what she’d been through.

  Maybe, really, it was the way he looked at her.

  “Tom,” she said, in that low voice of hers, always barely above a whisper, “how scary. I got a message from Sheila. I don’t even know her very well. I called back, but I just got voice mail.”

  “Maybe an allergic reaction?” Tom said. “Maybe epilepsy?” It was the first time all day he’d speculated out loud. It felt like a relief.

  “She sounded kind of…off,” she said. “But how else would she sound, right? She kept saying her daughter was the healthiest girl in the world and hadn’t done anything to deserve this.”

  “People say all kinds of things,” Tom said, but he felt a slight twinge behind his left eye. He was remembering Sheila from that school-board meeting now. Going on and on about vaccinations and autism. She had had some kind of petition.

  “Is Deenie doing okay?” she said. “Did she talk to her mom?”

  Tom paused for a second, realizing he had no idea.

  “Everything’s been happening so fast,” he said, feeling a burr of irritation he couldn’t identify.

  “Of course,” Lara replied quickly. “I haven’t even had a chance to talk to Gabby. I’m heading over there now to get her.”

  “I’m sure everything’s going to be fine,” he found himself saying for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day. Each time, he felt like he made it worse.

  “Well,” she sighed, and Tom thought he could hear the click in her throat, a vestige from the tracheostomy after the accident. (The accident—is that what you called a claw hammer to the face?) She always wore a thin pearl choker to try to cover the scar, two curved lines, like an eye. Every time Tom had ever seen her, she’d put her fingertips to her throat at least once. Sometimes he saw Gabby do it too. That scar was so small compared to the one on her face, but she tried to cover that too, with a swoop of her dark red hair.

  “Well,” he said, offering a faint laugh—the nervous laughter worried parents share when they realize, jointly, there’s nothing they can do. You can’t stop them, you can only try to keep the lines of communication open. “I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” she said, the rasp there. “This stuff happens—you just want to see them, you know?”

  * * *

  Walking from the west faculty lot, hoping her brother’s unprecedent
ed offer would wait, Deenie hunted for Gabby.

  Amid the crush of pink-puffer freshmen, she found her by the front circle, talking on her phone, her eyes covered by large green sunglasses.

  “Hey, girl,” Deenie said. “Wanna ride?”

  “Hey, girl,” Gabby said, shoving her phone in her pocket. “My mom’s on her way. She heard about everything.”

  “Too bad. Eli offered. He must’ve gotten hit in the head with a puck today.”

  “That is too bad,” Gabby said, smiling a little. And they were both quiet for a second.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Gabby said. “About Lise.”

  They spotted Mrs. Bishop’s car, the only black one, like a carpenter ant.

  “Yeah,” Deenie said. “Maybe…maybe the two of us could go to the hospital later, if—”

  “I can’t go back there,” Gabby said quickly.

  At first, Deenie wasn’t sure what she meant. But seeing Gabby’s mother pull up, she realized what it was. It’d been four years since Gabby’s dad did what he did, which wasn’t a long time, really. Four years since she and her mother were rolled into the emergency room of St. Ann’s. That was the last time anything big had happened in Dryden. A thought fluttered through her head: What are the odds that the two biggest things ever to happen here happen to my two best friends?

  “I’m sorry,” Gabby said. “Am I a bad friend?”

  “No,” Deenie said, pushing a smile through her frozen face. “I get it.”

  Gabby tried for a smile too, but there was something under it, heavy and broody. You could feel it under your skin. In so many ways, knowing Gabby was like brushing up against something meaningful, pained, and grand. Before her, the only time Deenie had ever felt it was that time she was ten and the whole family went to the Cave of the Winds, which Deenie had read about in a book. Enfolded between a wall of rock and the falls, Deenie had held her mom’s hand and felt the water and the winds and the cataracts mix. “A mysterious and indelible experience,” the book had said, and that’s how it felt. A thing that marked you. Like Gabby’s history marked her, had marked her mother.

  “Gabby, she’s going to be okay,” Deenie said. “Lise is.”

  Opening the car door to a blast of heat, Gabby turned and faced Deenie. “Definitely,” she said. “She’s our Lise.”

  Deenie watched as Gabby slid into the car, her sparkling low-tops, her knit ballet tights bright and jaunty, a day begun in a different place.

  “Bye, Mrs. Bishop,” Deenie said.

  “Take care of yourself, Deenie,” Gabby’s mom said, waving a gloved hand, her sunglasses larger than Gabby’s even, almost covering her whole face.

  * * *

  DETENTION CANCELED, Tom wrote on the sign, slapping it on the classroom door. It felt like a day for executive decisions.

  He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, leaving Deenie alone at the house after everything that had happened. And what if she decided to go to the hospital again?

  Walking into the lot, he saw Eli had already returned his car, angled rather dramatically and nearly touching the French teacher’s perky Vespa. Tomato red.

  Seated behind the wheel, he made the call before he could stop and plan it out. Didn’t want to always be readying himself to talk to her. Two years, it should be easier.

  “Hey, Georgia.”

  He told her everything as quickly as he could, hearing her gasp, her voice rushing forward.

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, and it was like no time had passed. Georgia, Eli fell off his bike, jammed his finger in gym, split his forehead on the ice. Her hand on his. Oh, Tom.

  “I thought you should know,” he said.

  There was a pause. He could hear her breathing. “I can’t believe it. Little Lise.”

  And there it was: the immediate gloom in her voice, almost like resignation. Life is so goddamned hard. Near the end, she’d sounded like that a lot.

  “I’m sure she’s going to be okay,” he said. “And Deenie’s doing fine.”

  “Now all I can do is picture the girls in the backyard,” she said. “Lise with her little potbelly, running through the sprinkler in her two-piece.”

  Tom felt his face warm. Last summer, Lise in a two-piece. From across the town pool, from behind, he’d mistaken her for one of Deenie’s swim instructors. Carla, the graduate student in kinesiology who always teased him about needing a haircut.

  “I thought probably you knew already,” he said, his voice suddenly louder than he meant. “That Deenie’d called you.”

  “No.” The drop in her voice gave him a second of shameful pleasure.

  It had been a lousy thing for him to say. Deenie almost never called her.

  “Bad reception at the school,” he said quickly. “You remember. The hospital too.”

  “Right. God, that town,” she said, as if she had never lived here at all.

  Turning the radio loud, listening to some frenzied music Eli had left for him, Tom drove home along Dryden Lake. There were other routes, faster ones, but he liked it.

  He remembered swimming in it when they’d first moved here, before all the stories came out. He loved the way it shimmered darkly. It looked alien, an otherworldly lagoon.

  Even then, there was talk of designating it a dead lake, the worst phrase he’d ever heard. At some point, people started calling it that, overrun by plants and no fish to be found, and the department of health coming all the time to take water samples.

  It was almost ten years ago when the little boy died there, his body seizing up and his lungs filling with furred water. It was the asthma attack that killed him and the boy should never have been swimming alone, but it didn’t matter. After, the city threw up high sheet fences and ominous skull-and-crossbones signs. Eli used to have nightmares about the boy. All the kids did. It could happen to me, Dad. What if it’s me?

  But for years, Georgia still liked to swim there at night when it was very warm. Sometimes, he would go too, if the kids were asleep. They felt like bad parents, sneaking out at night, driving the mile and a half, laughing guiltily in the car.

  It was something.

  The blue-green algal blooms effloresced at night. Georgia loved them, said they were like velvet pillows under her feet. He remembered grabbing her soft ankle in the water, radioactive white.

  After a while, he stopped going. Or she stopped inviting him. He wasn’t sure which came first.

  One night, she came home, her face deathly pale and her mouth black inside. She told him the algae was like she’d never seen it, a lush green carpet, and she couldn’t stop swimming, even when it started to hurt her eyes, thicken in her throat.

  All night she threw up, her body icy and shaking, and by five a.m., he finally stopped listening to her refusals, gathered her in his arms, and drove her to the emergency room. They kept her for a few hours, fed her a charcoal slurry that made her mouth blacker still. She’d be fine in a day.

  “I can’t breathe,” she kept saying. “I can’t breathe.”

  * * *

  Hey—U ok? Just saying…

  That’s what the text said, but Deenie didn’t recognize the number.

  She’d inherited Eli’s old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said—Deenie never forgot it—my pussy aches for u. It had to have been the worst thing she’d ever read. She’d read it over and over before deleting it.

  Except this didn’t seem like one of those texts.

  Who r u? Deenie typed back but stopped before she hit SEND.

  She leaned back on her bed. The house felt quiet, peaceful.

  Downstairs, Dad and Eli were watching TV. Something loud and somehow soothing on ESPN Classic. The constant hum of the household for ten years.

  It was nine thirty, and she wanted to stay off the computer. Red pop-ups in the bottom corner of her laptop.

  The worst was the picture
of Lise everyone was posting. Someone must have taken it with a phone right after it happened. A blurred shot of Lise’s bare legs, a rake of hair across her face, that made Deenie almost cry.

  There seemed no stopping all the texts jangling from her phone.

  People she barely knew but who knew she was friends with Lise.

  Kim C says she heard Lise was on Pill was she

  Why did everything have to be about sex, she wondered. Didn’t it make a lot more sense that it was something else? Like in sixth grade when Kim Court ate the frozen Drumstick and Mrs. Rosen had to inject her with the EpiPen in front of everyone. After, everyone called her EpiGirl or, worse, Nutz Girl, and since then no one could eat nuts anywhere at all.

  Have u heard of toxik shok? tampax can kill u

  Then came crazy thoughts, like what if, trying to help Lise dislodge that crooked tampon a few days before, she’d done something wrong? What if it was her fault?

  She kept thinking about what Gabby had said: Am I a bad friend?

  That morning, Deenie hadn’t even met Lise at her locker. She hadn’t wanted to see her. Her head still muggy with thoughts of the night before, of Sean Lurie, she wasn’t ready to tell. And Lise would see her, and would just know.

  Tugging off her tights and jeans, she took a long bath, pushing her hand down on her pelvis until it burned.

  She still felt funny down there, like things weren’t right.

  When you thought about your body, about how much of it you couldn’t even see, it was no wonder it could all go wrong. All those tender nerves, sudden pulses. Who knew.

  Right now, she couldn’t even picture Sean Lurie’s face.

  She remembered, though, the oven grit under his fingernails, the grunt from his mouth, the rough shudder, jerking her back and forth beneath him so she thought something had gone wrong. And then the soft sigh, like everything was good at last.

  It made her head hurt, and she put it all away in a high corner of her thoughts, where she wouldn’t have to look at it for a while.