The Fever (10 page)

With Gabby gone, everything was less interesting, but it was easier. It was like before. Those days of just Deenie and Lise, and Deenie let herself settle into in the sugar-soft of Lise's voice, and how easy she was and the water so delicious and Lise with stories to tell.

Now, remembering it, standing at the bathroom mirror, Deenie looked at herself.

Had the water done something?
Did it do something to me?
she wondered.
Do I look different?

Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn't even see.

She walked to her locker and opened it, stood there.

If she had to sit through first period, she thought she might explode.

“K.C.,” she called out, spotting a familiar glint of braces in her locker-door mirror. “You have your car?”

Kim Court moved closer, smiling, nodding. Shaking her keys.

Gabby lived ten twisty miles from the school, an A-frame like an arrowhead snug in the Binnorie Woods. There was no regular bus route and the house was always hard to find. Deenie's dad had picked her up there countless times but sometimes he still got lost, calling Gabby's mom, who would laugh softly and give him the same directions again.
No, that's a right at the yellow mailbox.

Gabby said living out here made her mom feel safer, tucked away like a nest at the top of a tree. But whenever Deenie was in the house, with its creaking wood and big windows, she couldn't imagine feeling more exposed.

“I always wanted to see it,” Kim whispered, leaning over the steering wheel, gazing at the rolled-edge roof, its edges weeping with purple ivy. “It's like a gingerbread house.”

They stood on the porch, hopping in their sneakers to keep warm. Kim in her rainbow-glittered ones, like the ones Gabby wore all last year.

It seemed to take a long time. Gabby's cat, Larue, watched them from the window with suspicious eyes.

Finally, Deenie saw a curtain twitch, and the door swung open.

“Hey.” It was Skye, wrapped up in one of her fisherman's sweaters with the elbow torn through. “What's going on?”

“Hi,” Deenie said, walking inside. She didn't want to show her disappointment that Skye was there again.

At some point, Deenie was going to have to get used to it. This new alliance.

After all, you could never be everything to one person.

Across the living room, Gabby was perched in the roll-arm chair. Larue hopped from the windowsill and stretched across her lap.

Kim's eyes were floating everywhere—at the helix of books stacked in one corner,
Closing the Circle—NOW!
on top, and up into the wooden eaves, dark enough for bats.

Gabby and her mom had lived here for two years, but it still looked temporary, the furniture for a different kind of house, modern and sleek, beneath the heavy wooden ceiling fan, the faded stained glass.

“Where's your mom?” Deenie asked.

“Sleeping,” Gabby said, her fingers picking at her scalp. “Look how gross this is. I can't get the glue out.”

“Glue?” Kim asked, using it as an excuse to hover over Gabby.

“From the EEG,” Gabby said as Kim leaned over Gabby, peeking through her long locks.

“It smells,” Kim said.

“It's toxic,” Skye noted, gazing out the window behind the sofa. “So it smells.”

Kim shrank back from Gabby's head, her fingers wiggling like she'd nearly touched a spider.

“I've been texting you,” Deenie said. “Gabby.”

Gabby turned and looked at her.

“My mom made me turn off my phone,” she said. “And computer. Because of the pictures and stuff.”

“Right,” Deenie said. She hoped Gabby hadn't seen that video of her onstage. She'd heard it was on YouTube: “Cello Girl Possessed!”

“And Mrs. Daniels was calling me.”

“Mrs. Daniels?” Deenie wondered if she'd showed up here too. “What for?”

“I don't know,” Gabby said. “She wants us to come see her lawyer and some special doctor.”

“So she thinks it's the same thing? What happened to Lise and what happened to you?”

“I guess.” Gabby shrugged. “My mom says we shouldn't get involved.”

“Sheila Daniels has a bad mojo happening,” Skye said. “You can feel it coming off her. Maybe she doesn't want the truth. She just wants an answer.”

“What do you know about it?” Deenie asked. “Do you even know Mrs. Daniels?”

“Not really,” Skye said, walking to the sofa. “But maybe she's just not someone to be around right now. She's carrying a lot of pain.”

“Tell them about the girl,” Gabby said to Skye. “Skye was telling me this freaky story.”

Deenie and Kim looked at Skye.

“Oh, just something I read online,” she said. “This eleven-year-old girl a long time ago who got super, super sick. Her eyes sunk back in her head and she'd roll around on the floor. And her body started to do crazy things, like bending back on itself. So her parents called the doctor. And when he came, the girl opened her mouth and started pulling trash out of it.”

“Trash, gross,” Kim said.

“Not like our trash,” Skye said. “Straw, gravel, chicken feathers, eggshells, pine needles, bones of little animals.”

Kim's fingers touched her lips, eyes wide. “She was eating animals?”

“No,” Skye said, shaking her head. “And she wasn't just throwing up things from her stomach. Because everything was always dry. The doctor could blow the feathers in his hand.”

Kim gasped.

“Well, the Internet never lies,” Deenie said, but then Skye loaded up the page on her phone. She showed them a picture, a girl with big haunted eyes, her mouth open. You couldn't really see anything, but her mouth looked gigantic, like a hole in the center of her face.

Gabby took the phone from Skye, stared at it, Larue spiraled on her lap, tail twirling.

“When the doctor put tongs down her throat,” Skye added, “the girl spat out a cinder as big as a chestnut and so hot it burnt his hand.”

Taking the phone back from Gabby, Skye showed them a picture of a stern-faced doctor, his hand out, a scythe-like scar in the center of his palm.

“What's a cinder?” Kim asked, teeth tugging at her lip. “Like a rock?”

“This is all very helpful,” Deenie said. Gabby couldn't really want Skye here. She was only making it worse. Worse than even the pictures on the Internet. “Thanks, Skye.”

“So then what happened?” Gabby asked, Larue's tail tickling her neck.

Skye shrugged. “I didn't read it all. Maybe they burned a bunch of people in the town square. That's what they usually do.”

“No,” Gabby said, “I mean to the girl. What happened to her?”

“Oh,” Skye said. “I don't know. It doesn't say.”

Deenie sat down on the roll-arm next to Gabby.

“Mrs. Daniels came to our house this morning,” Deenie said.

Gabby looked up at her. “What for?”

“I don't know,” Deenie said, realizing it herself.

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Skye was kneeling on the sofa, looking out the window. Larue leaped from Gabby's lap and winnowed between Skye's calves and scuffed boot heels.

“Gabby, are you going back to the doctor today?” Kim asked.

“We're waiting and seeing,” Gabby said, her fingers flying back to her scalp. “For some results or something. I can't think of what more they could do. Or ask. ‘Have you visited a foreign country recently? Have you been camping? Could you be pregnant?'”

There was a banging sound from somewhere in the house.

“That's Mom,” Gabby said, jumping to her feet. “She's probably not going to like you guys cutting.”

Skye didn't move, so Deenie didn't either. She hadn't had a chance to talk to Gabby and she had to before it was late.

“Gabby,” she asked abruptly, “did they ask you anything about the lake?”

“The lake?” Kim looked at Deenie, her face animating. “What about it?”

Deenie watched the back of Skye's head, which didn't move.

“We were there last week,” Skye said, looking at Deenie. “Isn't that what you mean, Deenie?”

And then something happened.

Gabby's jaw jolted suddenly to the left, then jolted again and again.

Grabbing the chair arm, she pressed her face against the back cushion to try to stop it.

Kim was watching, her fingers to her mouth as Gabby's jaw slammed into the cushion over and over.

They were all watching.

“Don't tell my mom,” Gabby said, her jaw popping like a firecracker. “Deenie, don't.”

Sitting in the parking lot, Tom spread the newspaper across the steering wheel and read the article. He hadn't wanted to read it in front of Deenie and he didn't want to be seen reading it in school.

There was a large photo of Lise and Gabby, cropped. In the original version—slapped, milk-spattered, to Tom's refrigerator door the previous fall—Deenie stood beside Gabby. In the newspaper, only Deenie's hand remained, resting on Gabby's shoulder like a ghost's. The three girls, tanned and triumphant during trip to WaterWonders last fall. Lise bursting from a star-spangled halter top that, no matter how she shifted or twisted, always seemed to land one of its biggest star in the center of a breast, a bull's-eye.

He'd taken the girls himself, with Eli as company, both pretending not to hear the high frenzy of the backseat, the girls talking the whole eighty-minute drive in a language impenetrable and self-delighted. On the ride back, their bodies chlorine-streaked to numbness, a torpor set in and he and Eli could watch the twilit horizon stretched across the windshield, and not say a word.

Midway down was another photo inset. A creamy lavender brochure he recognized.

HPV and Your Daughter: Vaccinate Today, Protect Her Forever

Oh no, he thought. Here it is. What Sheila was raving about this morning. Alongside the photo came the subhead:

There was a quote from Mindy Parker's father, Drew Parker, Esq., who was now speaking on Sheila Daniels's behalf.

Tom looked at the brochure inset again.
Protect her forever.
It had accompanied the letter all the parents in the school system had received the prior summer.

So she'd done it, the whole series. Three boosters over six months. They sent text-message reminders. The final one had been just a few weeks ago.

He'd been glad for it, though he tried not to think about it for long. He knew his daughter would eventually have sex. That any day now she might find a boyfriend and then it was inevitable. That wasn't the part that bothered him. It was the peril out there. Infections, cancer, a havoc upon his sweet daughter's small, graceful little body. One she held so closely, so tightly. Even hugging her, he felt her smallness and delicacy.

She liked the high dive and played soccer and, in gym class or touch football with Eli and himself, was always bold and fearless. Skinned knees, bruised elbow,
I can play too
. But sometimes he wondered if that was by necessity, a girl living with two males, a girl who might rather be up in her room with Gabby, with Lise, or with her books, that endless pile of novels with limp-bodied girls on the cover. Girls in bathtubs, in dark woods. Girls underwater.

And when he touched her, he couldn't help but think: What happens when someone touches her someday and doesn't understand these things about her? That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

And now, with Lise and Gabby, he was more glad than ever that he'd done what he could to take care of her. Whatever theories Sheila Daniels held in her fevered head, the shots were not to blame.

Vaccines, like all great scientific discoveries, are counterintuitive. You must take the very thing you are protecting yourself against. So your body remembers it, knows how to fight it.