by Megan Abbott
But the third booster round came after Gabby and Tyler Nagy. They’d had sex twice, but Gabby wasn’t even sure it worked the first time, though she’d spent four summers at horse camp, so it was hard to know.
After the second time, Tyler broke up with her while she was still putting her jeans back on. “I should never have done it,” Gabby said. “And now it’s gone.”
Around then, she’d started to spend lots of time with Skye, who sent Tyler a text message calling him an abuser of women. She told them there were secret codes embedded in the text and it was a hex. She shook the phone when she sent it, to increase the mayhem. And when Deenie thought about it now, it was then that Gabby and Skye’s friendship was sealed.
Later, the brief reign of Gabby and Tyler—had it really only lasted a month?—became a sign to Deenie that there were entire dark corridors too awful to ponder. It wouldn’t be that way for her, she decided. And she never would have dated anyone like Tyler, or any hockey player.
But it wasn’t just Gabby. There was Lise, her body bursting with power and beauty, mere seconds away from a wealth of thrilling boyfriend possibilities, which would surely lead to romantic sex and never anything to feel bad about, ever.
Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None.
Every Monday, another girl’s debut.
* * *
A sharp burst of screams erupted from inside the gym.
“Put your fingers in her mouth,” someone was shouting, and A.J. and Scotty Tredwell were rushing down the hall, pulling Eli with them through the locker-room exit, following the noise.
The doors pitched wide, but all Eli could see was a band of girls’ legs in all those colored tights like Gabby’s, like the bright pegs in a game board, grouped so closely he couldn’t see past them to whatever they were staring at on the floor.
Mrs. Darger, whistle jammed in her mouth, was shoving them aside like a pro lineman, and when the last clenched-face girl stumbled sideways, Eli spotted a pair of rainbow-colored sneakers twitching on the floor, heard the rapid sound of someone’s head hitting hard wood, rat-a-tat-tat.
It was the red-haired girl, Kim someone, who used to trail after Gabby when she came to watch that jackass Nagy play. Laugh-filled braces, she’d flashed her shirt upward at him, but only as high as her white belly, freckle-sprayed. Once Gabby stopped coming to the games, Kim did too.
Suddenly there was a strong smell, a geyser of vomit from the girl’s mouth, carrot-colored to match her hair.
“It’s me,” her voice came. “Oh no, it’s me.”
Eli had long gotten used to the screams of girls, their faces ruddy and ecstatic behind the throbbing Plexiglas.
You could never really distinguish them from the noise of everything else in the rink, the seashell roar under his helmet, the double-tap of a stick, the whistle shrieks, the sounds of his own breathing, ragged and focused.
But this wasn’t the same anyway, the sound that came from the girl’s—Kim Court’s—mouth as she saw the paramedics arrive.
It wasn’t a scream, really.
More like a howl, a moaning howl that reminded him of something he couldn’t name. An animal dying, something.
When they sat her up, there was a spray of blood down the back of her shirt from where her head had hit the floor.
“You’re okay,” Mrs. Darger had said, her face a funny shade of green. “You just spooked yourself.”
Like you might say if she had gotten hit in the head with a volleyball.
“What happened,” someone whispered, and Eli could smell the vomit on the floor. One of the paramedics stepped on it, smearing it as he wheeled Kim Court away.
“She was standing and then she wasn’t.”
“That is so gross.”
“She was standing next to me,” someone said, “and she was saying, ‘Why are you so gray?’”
* * *
There was a long message from Gabby, broken across seven, eight texts.
Standing outside the east breezeway, Deenie read them, one eye on her cell phone signal, her thumb pressing anxiously on the screen, refresh-refresh-refresh, for the next one.
I was scared he’d do this.
It was about Gabby’s dad. Only he could make her like this.
She said he’d just showed up at the house, had learned what happened from Mrs. Daniels. Couldn’t believe he had to hear it from a stranger on his voice mail. And wasn’t that typical, Gabby said, because Mrs. Daniels was no stranger. Had in fact called the police on Mr. Bishop once, a year ago, when he’d come to pick up his daughter and driven right onto the front lawn, tearing out a porch light and insisting Gabby get in the car, now.
He went to hosp. looking for me, Gabby wrote. He just wants to show off. He doesn’t care. He was yelling and mom wouldn’t come from behind the dining rm table.
Then:
He started crying, big shock. Mom said what are you gonna do? Cry your whole life?
But Gabby’s final text wasn’t about her dad. It was short and the words seemed to flash at Deenie, her screen catching the sun’s glare.
Also: I’m thinking about the lake. What if u r right. What if it was in the lake. What if it is in us.
Deenie looked at the words, which seemed to float before her eyes.
But I’m okay, she wanted to say, to type. But she just looked at the screen instead.
That was when she heard the funny pant, someone rushing up to her, the hall echoing with new noise.
Keith Barbour was charging down the hall with another senior boy, both their necks ringed by monster headphones.
“Did you hear?” he barked, shoving Deenie in the arm. “Kim Court’s getting wheeled out on a gurney.”
“Kim?” Deenie asked, her phone smacking the floor. “What happened?”
“You’re all going down.” The other boy laughed, beats thrumming through the open mouths of his headphones. “One by one.”
* * *
The whole school had a rabid energy, like nothing would settle again.
And then, a few minutes before sixth period began, Eli showed up at Tom’s classroom door.
Tom hadn’t even had a chance to talk to him about what had happened that morning.
The dangers our girls suffer at your hands, Sheila Daniels had said to poor Eli. Eli, the sweetest boy in the world. We know and we’ll do anything to protect them. Anything.
A woman who laid that charge at the feet of his son, a boy who couldn’t even enjoy the girls, their avid eyes always on him, seemed outrageously cruel.
“Dad,” Eli said, face pale, one hand tight on the door frame. “I need to talk to you.”
Tom stepped outside the classroom and Eli told him what he’d just seen, the redheaded sophomore on the gym floor.
“The one with all the braces,” Eli said.
“That must be Kim Court,” Tom said. “It sounds like Kim Court.”
Kim had been in his class last semester. She was one of the ones always trailing behind Gabby and who seemed years younger than her, mouth thick with orthodontia, skittering in her tennis shoes, spinning in the hallways like a red top.
“She didn’t look good,” Eli said. His eyes were glazed and wouldn’t quite meet Tom’s.
“This is just crazy,” Tom said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
Eli didn’t say anything.
The bell rang.
“Okay,” Eli said, swinging his backpack up behind him.
Something in his face when he turned away made Tom pause. An expression he’d almost forgotten. Back when Eli was ten or eleven, that time when he stopped sleeping. Georgia would hear him moaning, go to his room, and find Eli sitting in the dark, his arms wrapped around his shins. He’d say his bones felt like they were popping. The doctor said it was growing pains, which Tom hadn’t realized was a literal thing.
“Kids can become very emotional when they don’t sleep,” the doctor had told them. “I
t’s natural.”
The only thing that seemed to help was when Georgia rubbed his legs, which she would do for a half hour or more, coming back to their bed her hands slippery with vitamin oil.
Driving him to school in the morning in those days, Tom would watch him in the rearview mirror, eyes ringed gray. It was hard to see. This, his easy child, none of the sweeping emotions of his daughter, her warmth and sorrow both heavy things. He wasn’t used to it on Eli.
“Dad,” Eli had asked one morning, “what if you woke up one day and you were gone?”
“If you woke up and I was gone? That wouldn’t ever happen, Eli.”
“No, what if I woke up and I was gone.”
Tom had looked at him in the backseat, his limbs growing so long, his face changing so fast you could almost watch it happen, and felt a fierce loss and didn’t know why.
10
Eli sat, playing it and replaying it in his mind. The girl’s head slapping the floor, the glare from all those braces, like a mouth full of tinfoil.
Horse. Now he remembered. That’s what they called her.
Language lab should have started five minutes ago, but Ms. Chase, who gave out the peeling headphones, was nowhere to be found. Under the faded poster of the Eiffel Tower, A.J. and Stim, both in their jerseys, were sitting on top of their desks, speculating loudly that school would be canceled.
“They gotta do it now,” A.J. said. “Quarantine. Lock your daughters up!”
“I’m telling you, it’s some kind of mutant STD,” Stim said, flapping the edge of the long gauze pad on his forearm, an acrid smell wafting from it. “I won’t be hitting any of that. I’m sticking with Star-of-the-Sea girls.”
“Oh, man, those girls all have STDs. They don’t believe in condoms.”
Eli looked longingly out the classroom door. Maybe he could just leave.
“Why don’t you ask Nash?” Stim said, spinning the dials on the ancient analog tape deck. “He’s the one who got a booty call from Mo McLoughlin after the Brother Rice game.”
Maureen. The one who’d chugged hard cider on the way over and thrown up in his wastebasket after. So tiny, school gymnast, her fingernails looked like one of Deenie’s old dolls’, tiny as baby’s teeth.
“I doubt Horse gets enough play to get a mutant STD,” A.J. said, baring his teeth like a donkey, “or even a regular one.”
“Speaking of, Nash,” Stim said, still plucking at the gauze, “I saw your sister take off with her this morning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before everything. Your sister and K-Court were in a car, driving toward the woods.”
A.J. smiled. “She’s getting to be quite the little rebel, that sister of yours.”
Eli placed his palm over his textbook, a different picture of the Eiffel Tower on it. French in Action! L’Avenir Est à Vous, it was called.
“It’s evolution,” Stim said. “With Lise Daniels and Gabby Bishop on the DL, somebody’s gotta step up.”
“Not even,” A.J. said, shaking his head and laughing. “She’s his sister, man.”
Stim shoved a pencil under his gauze, scratching thoughtfully. “Did you see Lise in her bikini last summer? The top, it was just like triangles over her tits, and when she walked past…and sometimes the fabric, it’d kinda buckle. Man, I loved that suit.”
“I think you should shut the fuck up,” Eli said, throwing his bag down with a thud that made everyone in the lab look up. “I think it’s time you do that.”
Stim looked at him carefully.
Eyes darting between the two of them, A.J. seemed to be waiting for something, grinning a little.
Stim shrugged. “Lise isn’t your sister, Nash,” he said. “They’re not all your sisters.”
* * *
The teachers’ lounge was the liveliest Tom had ever seen it, at least since Mr. Tomalla had been fired for taking photographs of female students’ feet with his cell phone beneath his desk. He had posted them online and had twenty thousand hits, far more than Nat Dubow’s YouTube science videos.
Everyone was waiting for Principal Crowder.
Laptops open, several teachers were hovering and gasping over photos of Lise and Gabby that had been posted online. A frightening snapshot of Lise’s white thigh, her fingers locked around it. And one of Gabby, mid-seizure and curiously glamorous: jaw struck high, the auditorium’s stage lights rendering her a pop singer, a movie star.
Tom didn’t want to look, and didn’t want to join in the tsk-tsking or the bemoaning of our social media–ridden culture.
Checking his e-mail at the communal workstation, he saw three messages from Georgia:
Why won’t Deenie call me back? Is it true about Gabby?
What’s happening?
Have D. call me ASAP, okay?
He told himself he would call her as soon as he could.
“A few other girls—I mean, has anyone else seen anything odd?” asked June Fisk, one of the scarved social-science teachers—there were three of them, and they liked to sit in the lounge and drink from their glass water bottles and talk about the decline of grammar, the rise of bullying, the dangers of fracking.
“Jaymie Hurwich,” said Brad Crews, rapping his fingers on his business-math textbook. “She kept blinking through all of sixth period.”
“What, she shouldn’t be blinking?” Tom asked.
“That’s not what I mean,” Brad said, looking slightly dazed—though he always did, the father of six-month-old twin girls who seemed to have ravaged him. “It was constant. And really hard. She’s an intense girl to begin with.”
Everyone knew vaguely about Jaymie’s family situation, a long-estranged mother with emotional problems of some unspecified nature, which meant everyone was easy on her even when she was hard on them, crying over A minuses, over class critiques.
“They’re scared,” said Erika Dyer, the health teacher, snapping her laptop shut loudly. Tom couldn’t look at her now without thinking of her presentation to parents last year: HPV and Your Daughter.
“Maybe because they feel like everyone’s watching them,” she added, poking her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “Their own teachers, maybe.”
“I couldn’t concentrate,” Brad said, wiping his face, staring down at his shoes. “It was…unsettling.”
“Of course it was,” piped up Liz somebody, who wasn’t even a teacher but an ed student from the community college. “You feel like any one of them might fly from their chairs at any moment.” Tom couldn’t help but notice how hard Liz was blinking.
“The sympathy in this room is affecting,” Erika said. “Truly.”
“I have nothing but sympathy for Lise Daniels,” June Fisk insisted. “And as if Gabby Bishop didn’t have enough trouble. But how are we supposed to teach like this? Pretend like nothing is going on?”
Carl Brophy groaned loudly. “Teenage girls fidgeting, high-school students trying to get out of class. Clearly, it’s a supervirus. Call the CDC. Alert the World Health Organization.”
At that moment, Ben Crowder swung open the door, which felt like a relief, though the look on his face, gray and tight, reminded Tom of the final years of Ben’s predecessor, who’d retired at age seventy, skin like wet paper.
“First, an update on Kimberly Court,” he said. “Her doctor said it looks to him like a panic attack. And the parents, in this case, seem to understand that. They had trouble at her old school with a few boys who teased her. Some bullying. They say she’s always been a high-strung girl.”
It seemed a funny thing for parents to say about their own child under these circumstances. Even if they might think it.
“So they released her?” Erika asked.
“She’s probably heading home as we speak,” he said, nodding firmly.
“But you don’t know?” June Fisk said.
“I’ve been on the phone with the superintendent,” Crowder continued, ignoring her, “and spent the past hour talking to the health department. W
hat’s important is this: Do not speculate, especially with students or parents. If parents come to you with questions, please direct them to me or the superintendent. And, in particular, if you have any contact with Sheila Daniels, please alert us immediately.”
There was much exchanging of looks, but Tom kept his eyes on Crowder, trying to read him. He wondered if Sheila Daniels planned to sue the school district along with the health department.
Fleetingly, he wondered if it was possible that she did know something none of the rest of them did. It wasn’t a thought he wanted to hold on to.
“But this vaccine stuff she’s talking about is everywhere now,” Brad said. “I’m the parent coordinator and I have thirty-two e-mails about it in my inbox. What am I supposed to say to parents?”
Crowder took a deep breath, lifting his arms as if encouraging everyone to breathe with him.
“Our primary goal as educators,” he said, his shirtsleeves furrowed with sweat, “needs to be containment of panic.”
Erika Dyer, fingers still pushing those glasses up that dainty nose, hurried along next to him as they walked into the east corridor.
“Lise Daniels’s mother called me,” she whispered, not looking at him.
Tom felt like he had somehow been elected universal reassurer.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “She’s all over the place right now, and—”
“She told me I’d poisoned her daughter just as surely as the vaccine itself.”
“She’s just swinging wildly at anything. She came to my—”
“It’s my job, you know?” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “To protect those girls. Girls like Lise. She came to my office just last week. I was trying to help her understand her body. The feelings she had. Things happening to her. And now…”
“These girls trust you. Sheila should be thanking you. And when she settles down, she’ll realize you don’t have any say in public-health policy for the school system.”
Erika looked at him, fingers cradled around her ear in a way that reminded him of Deenie.
