The Fever (13 page)

“And—” She paused and Deenie could hear her breath coming faster. “And you.”

“You didn't touch my hair,” Deenie said, her hand stinging from the sink's hot water.

“We were together. You were in my car…”

Find some music. I can't think and drive.

“…and then it happened to me.”

Deenie pictured her fingers rubbing along the playlist on Kim's phone.

“It's not fair…” Kim gasped. “I didn't do anything wrong.”

“No one did,” Deenie said, coolly.

“And how come…” Kim let the question trail off for a second. “I mean, how come everyone but you, Deenie?”

Deenie looked down at her hands, red and raw in the dishwater.

“What did the doctors say?” she asked.

“They don't know,” Kim said, her voice dropping so low Deenie could barely hear it. “But I'm telling you: there was something inside me, and it was in my throat.”

“Vomit, Kim,” Deenie said roughly, her eyes stinging from the water.

“No, but that's why I threw up. Because I couldn't get it out. I couldn't stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“The way it felt, the things I knew.”

“Things you…What do you mean?”

“And it's
not
the vaccine, Deenie. That's what I wanted to tell you. Don't listen to them about the vaccine!”

“Kim, what—”

Through the phone, Deenie could hear the crackling PA of the hospital, paging someone. She felt a click in her own throat but stopped herself from clearing it.

“I have to go,” Kim said. “I can't explain it to you. It has to happen to you for you to understand.”

Lying on his bed, three warm beers heavy inside him, Eli wished he'd just gone home after practice.

Instead, he'd followed A.J. to Brooke Campos's house. They were all freaked out about Kim Court and everything, though no one would admit it.

Brooke took them to the basement, where there was a broken fridge. Laid flat like a glossy white coffin, it was packed with skunked Yuengling abandoned after her dad's poker game. They sat on it and drank and talked about everything.

Brooke said she used to go to camp with a girl who'd had the shots and her heart had expanded to the size of a grapefruit and she died. She said she always felt sorry for how she'd treated that girl and for pushing her off the diving board that time and now it was too late.

Then Brooke started crying, her head thrown back, just like Gabby in all those pictures. Leaning first against A.J., then Eli, with a kind of breathless warmth, she cried, her fingers clinging to their shirtfronts. Eli left before things got too crazy. Even A.J. seemed upset, talking about his brother, who died of septic shock when A.J. was five.

You never knew how things would make you feel. The kinds of people who might feel things.

That's what he was thinking, lying on his bed, eyes on the spider cracks in the ceiling.

Reaching over, he grabbed his backpack, trying to shake his phone free. He hadn't looked at it in hours, afraid it'd be his mom again, texting about Deenie. He felt sorry for her, a little. And for himself.

Maybe he'd had four beers.

And the phone wouldn't shake loose.

Finally, lifting his torso woozily against his pillows, he turned the backpack inside out, scattering loose-leaf, handouts, practice schedules all over the bed and floor.

“Deenie,” he said. “Can I come in?”

Through the door, he could hear her moving, thought he heard a sharp inhale, like she was deciding whether to answer.

“Okay,” she said. “You can.”

“You haven't seen my phone, have you?” he said, pushing the door open, surveying the room, the tangle of loose charger cords sprouting from the wall, jeans coiled at the foot of the bed, one long dust-streaked sock. And always the books, their covers creased, spines spread across the floor. He thought girls were supposed to be clean.

She was standing in the middle of the room, which surprised him. Her fingers were pinched red, latticed tight in the strings of her hoodie.

She stared the knotted string ends in her hand for a second.

Then she looked up at him.

“Don't tell Dad,” she said, voice so small.

“Tell Dad what?”

It was after seven o'clock, and Tom was sitting in the driveway looking at his house, holding his phone.

He'd just listened to another voice mail from Georgia:
Tom, maybe Deenie should stay with me. Maybe she'll be safer away from Dryden.

And now, still not moving, not even taking the keys out of the ignition, he looked once more at the three texts from Deenie, asking if he'd heard anything about anything.

I'll tell you when I get home,
he'd replied.

When r u coming home,
she'd answered, more than two hours ago.

The meeting with Crowder had gone late, everyone with had a great deal to say, and then talking to Erika and finally helping the French teacher—Kit was her name, he had to remember that—jump her scooter, stalled from the sudden damp in the air, the temperature rising twenty degrees or more since the day before in that weird way of Dryden.

“Isn't it something?” she'd said throatily, looking around, her cheekbones misted and her lipstick slightly smudged. “Like a fairy tale.”

He'd said he knew just what she meant.

And she'd mentioned Eli's
magnifique
attendance, and Tom pretended he knew, even though he'd been sure Eli took Spanish.

Finally, they had talked about the imaged of Gabby posted everywhere, that curtain of hair, the dramatic arc of her neck, the inflamed cheeks.

“Like a ballerina,” Kit said. “All the girls will want to steal that pose for their yearbook photos.”

And now it was after seven, and he was still sitting in the car.

Did they tell u what is happening,
Deenie's text read.
Do they know yet.

Taking a breath, he picked up his phone one last time.

“Medical billing, Diane speaking.”

“Diane,” he said, “it's Tom. I wasn't sure you'd still be there.”

“Tom,” she said. “Well, I'm twelve-to-eight today.”

“I'm sorry to keep calling,” he said, sensing a tightness in her voice. “I was just wondering if you had any news.”

There was a pause, then a sigh.

“Hey, I get it,” she said. “If I had a daughter at that school, I'd want to know everything too. And a lot's been happening.”

“A girl named Kim Court, she was there today, at the hospital, right?”

“Yes, she's here.”

“Still? I thought they were sending her home. That it was just a panic attack.”

“We have to keep her until she seems stable. After a seizure—”

“So it was a seizure?”

“No,” she said, then lowered her voice. “I didn't mean that. But they have to rule out some things.”

“Like what?”

“When teenagers come, and they're having hallucinations—”

“Hallucinations? I didn't know she was—”

“—we have to rule out drugs. Ecstasy, MDMA. There's a lot of ecstasy at that school.”

“There is?”

“Or it could be the onset of schizophrenia.”

“Jesus.”

“Can I call you back?” she said suddenly.

“Sure.”

A moment later, the phone rang.

“I'm calling from my cell,” she whispered, a nervous titter in her voice, “from the ladies' room.”

As if by magic, the smooth professional tone—professional biller, professional dater-slash-divorcée—was gone. She sounded suddenly younger, girlish.

“They wouldn't even let us leave for dinner because of the reporters out front,” she was saying. “We're not supposed to be talking about any of this. They made us sign something.”

“I'm putting you in a bad position,” Tom said.

“I have a friend in ER,” she said, words rushing, jumbling together. “She said the Court girl kept putting her hand in her mouth. She got her whole fist in there. And when they put the restraints on, she started screaming that something was touching her from the inside.”

“Touching her?”

“Well, people can say all kinds of things in that state. But they didn't find any drugs. I don't think.”

Tom took a breath.

“How's Lise Daniels?”

A pause.

“I can't talk to you anymore about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I just—” He heard the sound of another woman's voice, everything echoing, the rush of water. “I have to go.”

“Right,” he said. “I understand. It's just…when you have a daughter.”

Her voice cracked a little. “Oh, Tom, I know. I wish…”

“No, I don't want to get you in any kind of trouble.”

“It's just…Can I say something?” Whispering.

“Sure,” he said, feeling a churning inside. There was a long pause, then the thud of a door.

“Tom. It feels crazy in here right now.”

Tom could hear her breath catch.

“The mother, she walks the halls all night. That's what Patty, one of the nurses, told me. The mother walked by the nurses' station so many times last night, Patty thought she'd go crazy herself. She keeps telling them her daughter has been destroyed. That's the word she used.
Destroyed.
Like you do with an animal. After.”

It didn't seem so bad to him. Nowhere near as bad as Deenie seemed to think.

Sitting down on the edge of her bed, Eli watched his sister bobbing from foot to foot, just like she did during countless past confidences, shared reports of dirty deeds, stolen candy, a pilfered beer, running a bike over Mom's violets. Except that was a long time ago. It hadn't happened in a long time.

When she'd first started talking, he'd been afraid. He'd had this squinting sense, lately, of something. That she was different, changed.

A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he'd seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.

I didn't spit on it
, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps.

He'd stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands.

She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.

He couldn't stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat.

Next to her, by the ovens, was that guy Sean, the one who used to play forward for Star-of-the-Sea. Once, Sean had asked him about Lise, wondered if he knew her.
Her tits look like sno-cones
, he'd said.
Beautiful sno-cones.

And now Deenie stood before him, her body tight, the zipper on her hoodie pinching that tiny bird neck of hers, saying, “Don't tell Dad. Okay?”

But what she told him had nothing to do with what he'd noticed at the Pizza House, whatever that was. Or the other thing—the thing he'd almost forgotten. Someone at school saying he saw his sister getting into a car with some guy.

Instead, it was just some crazy story about the lake.

“But Eli, we put our feet in. Last week. What if it did something?”

He shook his head. “If it did something, you'd be sick too. And Skye Osbourne, she was with you, right? She'd be sick too.”

“Maybe it affected us in different ways.”

She looked at him. The look he'd seen since they were small, like camping, her pale face in the tent flap when he'd tell her there were bears out there, hidden in the green daze of Binnorie Woods.

“Deenie,” he said, “it's not the lake.”

“How do you know?”

He looked at her. It was one of those tricks his dad always pulled off. He used to watch him do it with Mom over and over.
I promise you, I promise you
, a smile, a coaxing shoulder rub, spinning her around like dancing,
everything will be okay.
Mom used to call it the Croc dance, to go with the Croc smile.

“The doctors would know, Deenie,” he said, the thought coming to him just as he needed it. “They've been doing tests, right? For toxins and stuff. They'd pick that up.”

“Oh,” Deenie said. “Right.”

He could see her shoulders relax a little. He was surprised how easy it was. Just like when they were little. Taking her hand and dragging her out of the tent, promising her there were no bears out there after all. They were safe.

“So you feel better?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then,” he said, leaning back, feeling his body loosen, the beer bloom returning.

Except there was something wedged under him, Deenie's Pizza House shirt, stiff with old flour or whatever it was they made pizzas with.

“Jesus, Deenie, don't you ever wash your uniform?” he teased, fingering the shirt, feigning throwing it at her.

She didn't say anything, her hands once more gripping the ends of her drawstring. Tugging it back and forth. It was like it had lasted only a second, that brief spasm of relief.

Girls never stopped being mysterious, he thought, tossing the shirt to the floor.

Sinking back onto her pillow, he lay there for a moment, staring at her ceiling, wondering about his missing phone, or something.

Sitting at the kitchen table,
Tom was trying hard to think of exactly nothing except the beer in front of him when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

His shoulder jerked, but it was just Deenie, her fingernails short and painted silver, like all the girls'.

“Dad,” she said, “Gabby called. Can I borrow the car?”

She almost never asked. With only a learner's permit, she wasn't supposed to drive without an adult.

But it was the first thing she'd said to him since he came home and told her what Principal Crowder had said, or insisted. That everyone was working very hard to figure this thing out and that it was important not to get caught up in all the rumors. She'd given him a look that suggested what he knew to be true: he didn't really have any information at all.

So now, when she asked him for the car, something in him stirred, and, without even saying a word, he found himself sliding the keys across the table and dropping them into her palm, which shut over them instantly.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, grasping them so tight it hurt to look.

“But Deenie,” he said, although she was already halfway to the door, “call your mom tonight, okay?”

She said she would.

It felt so warm outside, one of those weird nights when the temperature rises, making everything look strange and glowy.

Gabby's mom had taken pity on her and said she could go out for a while.

And, unaccountably, Deenie's dad had loaned her the car.

“The air,” Gabby said, taking a few tight, sharp breaths. “Even the air hurts.”

“It does?” To Deenie, it felt delicious. When she breathed, the warm seemed to swirl in her mouth. “At least your mom let you out.”

Once they'd gotten a few miles from her house, Gabby, her face pale and puffy, said she didn't want to be in the car.

So they decided to walk through town, hands shoved in pockets and the sky a ghostly shade of violet.

For a few minutes, Deenie forgot everything.

No one was out, and there was a ghost-town feel, like no one knew winter was over, at least for the night, and the streets had a kind of fuzzy beauty, the air briny from four months of rock salt, the pavement spongy under Deenie's feet.

Across the street was the orange flare of the Pizza House. She wondered if Sean Lurie was at the ovens, grip in either hand, smiling.

“I can't believe Kim called you from the hospital,” Gabby said. “I can't believe she's still there.”

“Yeah,” Deenie replied, shuttled out of her daydream. “They told my dad—they told all the teachers—that she's fine. It's stress.”

“Do you believe it?” Gabby asked, leading them toward the misty blur of the elementary school, its bricks streaked with salt.

“I don't know,” she said slowly. “I didn't see it. Eli said she just threw up.”

“But, I mean, what Kim said to you. About it being something in the lake. Do you think it's true?”

“Kim was never in the lake,” Deenie said, her new refrain.

They arrived at the square across from the school, its olden-times town pump splintered and gray. Back in fourth grade, their teacher said it was the spot where they whipped people centuries ago. For months afterward, every time they stood there, waiting for the bus, Deenie and Lise talked about it, pretended.

Lise, color high, howling upward, chubby arms wrapped around that old pump,
Forty lashes, forty lashes, no, kind sir!

“She wasn't in the lake,” Gabby said, her face hidden behind her hair, her sunken hat. “But maybe that's why she's not as sick as Lise. Why it isn't as bad for her.”

“But why would Kim be sick at all?”

“Because,” Gabby said, and then she said the thing they hadn't said, not aloud to each other, “because maybe it's inside us now. And she got it. From us.”

Deenie felt something twitch at her temple. For a moment, she felt like she had when she saw Skye at Gabby's house. Like everything was tilting and she'd only just realized it, but it had been tilting slowly for a while.

“But nothing happened to me,” she said. “I'm fine.”

“Well,” Gabby said, looking down as their feet dusted along the glistening grass of the square, “some people are just carriers. Maybe that's what you are.”

Deenie looked at her.

“Like those boys with HPV,” she added, still not meeting Deenie's eyes. “They never get sick. They just make everyone else sick.”

Deenie couldn't get anything to come out of her mouth, and they kept walking, and Gabby wouldn't turn her head, and then they were in the darkened center of the square, under the old elm.

It didn't even sound like Gabby and she wondered where it all came from.
Carriers
. In its own way, it didn't feel different from what Skye had said, all her talk about bad energy.

“So maybe that's what you are,” Gabby added.

And they kept walking. And as they did, Deenie's lungs started tightening. Pressing her palm on the cold of the tree trunk, she had to stop.

It turned out the air did hurt, and Gabby was right.

“I'm sorry,” Gabby said, stopping too, her eyes burning under the lamppost. Watching Deenie. “I'm sorry.”

When the phone rang, Tom was afraid it was Georgia again, asking why Deenie hadn't called. But it was Dave Hurwich, Jaymie's father, whose barking tone reminded Tom why he'd stopped coaching soccer.

“What kind of school endorses medical experimentation on its students?” Dave asked. “You're a man of science. I'm on the CDC website right now, Tom. I'm looking at the VAERS. Do you know what we're dealing with here with this vaccine?”

Tom sighed. There was no use talking epidemiology with Dave Hurwich, who always knew more about law than lawyers, more about cars than mechanics. And there was no use trying to explain the nuances of school-board recommendations versus forced government vaccinations of children.

A single dad, Dave prided himself on his parenting and on his daughter Jaymie's academic successes, which were due at least half the time to her ability to wear down all her teachers (
But I did the extra credit and I wrote twice as much and I never missed a class and I always contribute…
) as relentlessly as her dad. Whenever Tom began to lose his patience with either of them, he tried to remember the “family situation,” Jaymie's out-of-the-picture mother—was it something to do with postpartum? The details were vague and it never felt appropriate to ask.

“It was a stressful day for all of us, Dave. How's Jaymie doing?”

“Let me tell you how she's doing,” he said, a smacking sound like his tongue was dry from making phone calls all night. “She hasn't stopped blinking since she got home. It's like looking at a Christmas tree.”

So why are you calling me?
Tom wanted to ask. Except he got the feeling Mr. Hurwich was calling everyone, anyone.

“I've been reading all about that supposed vaccine. You're the chemistry teacher. You should know. It's loaded with aluminum and sodium borate. Do you know what that is? That's what they use to kill roaches. They treated my daughter like a roach. And yours.”

“Dave, I'm sure your doctor—”

“That goddamned doctor doesn't know anything. He prescribed vitamins. None of them know anything.”

There was a pause, a creaking sound.

“She says it's like a light flashing in the corner of her eye all the time. She's my little girl,” Mr. Hurwich said, and all the hardness broke apart in an instant. “She doesn't even look the same.”

Tom swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“I don't know,” he said, voice cracking. “The way she looks at me. Something. It doesn't look like my daughter.”

“Let's just drive, okay?” Gabby said. “Can we drive?”

And they both knew where they were going.

Looping back and forth along the lake, three, four times.

At first, they kept the windows shut tight.

Finally, the fifth time, Gabby opened hers, her hair slapping across the pane.

The raw smell from the water, like a presence. Something furred resting in your throat.

It reminded Deenie of something, some school-retreat middle-of-the-night story Brooke Campos had told Deenie and Lise and Kim Court about how, when she was thirteen, her big sister's boyfriend had offered her ten dollars to “taste something she'd never tasted.”

Clutching her throat as she told it, Brooke almost cried and couldn't finish telling it. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks. Kim kept asking everyone,
But did she? Did she do it?
And nobody knew. They'd never gotten to hear the end.

“I should go home,” Gabby said, looking down at her phone in her lap. “My mom's called twice.”

“Does she know you're with me?” Deenie asked.
Carriers. Maybe that's what you are.
“She'd let you be with
me?
”

“Of course,” Gabby said. “What—”

Before she could say more, Gabby's phone lit up:
Skye.

But Gabby didn't answer, just stared at it.

And then a text followed.

“What is it?” Deenie said, trying to sound even.

“She said there was something on the news. About something happening at the hospital.”

“With Lise? Is she okay?”

“I don't know,” Gabby said, staring at her phone. “But I better go home.”

“Gabby,” Deenie said, turning the wheel hard, “we have to go there now.”

“No, Deenie,” Gabby said, her voice rushing up over the radio, the wind charging from the window.

But Deenie decided she didn't care and she was the one driving anyway and the hospital was only a few miles up the road, lit like a torch.

Lise. Lise.
       

“You don't have to go inside, Gabby,” Deenie said, voice surprisingly hard. “But I am.”

Deenie was driving very fast, the stoplights shuddering above them and her foot pumping the gas.

“She's all alone,” Deenie said. “And we don't know what's happened.”

Gabby looked at her, chin tight, like wires pulled taut and hooked behind her ears. Like the ventriloquist's dummy that used to perform at the mall, Deenie thought, then felt bad about it.

“Okay,” Gabby said, as if she had a choice. “I'll go.”

The white steeple of the hospital's clock tower gleaming, Deenie was walking Gabby, directing her in a way that felt unfamiliar and powerful.

But it wouldn't be like before, wouldn't be so easy.

As soon as they walked in, a lady in a gold-buttoned suit jacket at the welcome desk recognized Gabby.

“Oh no,” she said, rising to her feet. “Not again. Let me page the ER.”

The alarm on her face stopped both girls.

“We're okay,” Gabby said. “We're here to see Lise.”

“Oh no,” she repeated, shaking her head, “that's not possible.”

So they sat in the parking lot, three spots behind Mrs. Daniels's wind-battered Dodge.

They had the idea that if she came out, she might let them see Lise.

“Maybe she sleeps there,” Gabby said. “Maybe she never comes out.”

“She has to come out,” Deenie said, flipping the radio dial, trying to find news. “Something's happening in there.”

She wondered if Gabby was thinking about the night her mother was wheeled in on a gurney. The way Deenie heard it, the hammer prongs almost severed an artery and Gabby had had to hold the hammer in place until the paramedics came or her mom would have died.

Deenie didn't know if it was true, but she always remembered the one detail Gabby had told her, that the sound coming from her mom reminded her of those slide whistles they'd give out at Fun Palace when they were kids.

Bad things happen and then they're over, but where do they go? Deenie wondered, watching Gabby. Are they ours forever, leeching under our skin?

She didn't even see the woman approach the car, and when the rapping on the window came, her body leaped to life.

Still thinking about Dave Hurwich's call, Tom was finishing his beer and considering a second, was half ready to ask his son to join him, when his phone rang again
: Lara Bishop.

“Tom, sorry to call so late. Is Gabby there?” she said, voice raspy and anxious.

“Lara,” Tom said, phone slipping slightly from his hand. “No. Deenie's not home either. Has it been that long?”

He looked at the clock over the stove and was surprised to see it was nearly eleven.

He didn't really know where the hours had gone, a stack of week-old tests on his lap watching a documentary about people dying on Mount. Everest along with Eli, whose eyes had a boozy luster, his long limbs heavy. There was a feeling of warmth about Eli, his peculiar brand of gloomy nostalgia (“Hey, Dad, remember that time you took us to Indian Cave and we found those frozen bones with hair?”).

“I keep calling Gabby,” Lara said, “and she won't pick up. Can you call Deenie?”

“Of course.” And he felt a surge of shame in his chest. The girls dropping like dainty flies at school, their limbs like bendy straws, their bodies collapsing, and he gives his daughter car keys and sends her out into the great dark nettles of Dryden with the girl who had violently collapsed in front of the whole school only the day before.

What made him think he could forget for an hour with his daughter out there, somewhere?

“Dad,” Deenie answered, almost before Tom heard the call go through. “I'm coming home. I am.”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“We went to the hospital.” Gulping, hectic. He thought he could hear someone in the background crying. “I think something happened.”