The Fever (14 page)

At first Deenie thought she was hallucinating, that gigantic face at the car window, neck crooked down, hair like soft butter. A woman she recognized, something heavy in her hand like a metal flashlight, using it to tap on the glass.

“Deenie,” Gabby was saying, next to her, “Deenie, don't.”

There was an insignia on the flashlight, the numeral seven, with a lightning bolt like a superhero's, and she realized it wasn't a flashlight. It was a microphone.

“Don't open the window, Deenie!” Gabby said. “Don't talk to her!”

But Deenie had already pushed the window button, the woman's lips turning into a smile.

That's when she realized who the woman was. The lady from TV, the one who had emceed the big school fund-raiser to not quite pay for the new football field that never got built.

“Hey, I'm Katie,” she said, her voice bell-clear. “Are you a friend of Lise Daniels?”

Deenie didn't say anything.

“Can you come out and talk for a second?” the woman said. Then, craning down, she peered at Gabby, who quickly turned away, her neck twisted.

“You're the second,” the woman said, pointing with the microphone at Gabby. “You're Girl Two.”

A few minutes later, they were all standing by the car.

“Gabby,” Deenie had whispered, “it's the only way we'll find out.”

A man with a large camera hoisted over his shoulder appeared from nowhere, but the TV woman handed him the microphone and waved him away.

That was when Deenie noticed a truck and two vans with satellites like giant teacup saucers had pulled in behind them.

She looked at the TV woman, her hair crisp but eye makeup blurred in the mist.

“We got a tip from the Danielses' lawyer,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “He's friendly that way. He's going to give us some camera time. He's got a statement to issue.”

Deenie felt her chest pinch hard. “Something happened to Lise?”

“No. Not yet.” She shook her head, her eyes as white as pearls under the parking-lot lights. “The mother is trying to move her to the medical center all the way down in Mercy-Starr Clark. Looks like she's going to be suing. Suing everybody.”

“Suing for what?” Deenie said. “Over the vaccine?”

“You bet. We heard the state health department people were here today, someone from the DA's office, cops, who knows what's next.”

There was a slamming of doors somewhere and the camera guy, his face concealed behind the great black box slung on his shoulder, was suddenly there again.

“Now?” the TV woman asked him.

He nodded.

“Wait,” Deenie said. “But do you know about Lise, about how she is?”

The camera light went on and the woman's worn face sprang magically to life.

“Well, you two probably know more than anyone,” she said, her voice newly smooth, buttery as her hair. “How about we just talk a few minutes. Have you ever been on TV?”

“No,” Deenie said. “I—”

“Not you,” the woman said. “Her.”

Deenie turned to Gabby, who was facing the car.

“No,” Deenie said, watching Gabby's body, wire-tight, her elbows clamped to her sides. It looked like she was trying to hold herself together, to keep herself from blowing apart.

The front doors of the hospital opened loudly and all the lights seemed to go on everywhere.

Listening to Rick Jeanneret's cracking voice on ESPN Classic, Eli was thinking again about what Deenie had said about going into the lake. In some ways, what she'd told him
was
like the thing he'd noticed about her at the Pizza House that night, or other nights, other things. Because the Deenie he knew wasn't the kind to break rules, take chances.

The lake was the last place he'd want to go. The smell, even from the car, felt wrong. It reminded him of the basement of their house.

Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he'd sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985
Playboy
he'd found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform.

And through the chute, he could still hear the girls, two floors above. The basement's drop ceiling porous and seeming to breathe. After a long rain, it smelled just like the lake.

Once, a senior girl from Star-of-the-Sea tried to get him to climb the safety fence, but he said no. Wiggling out of her halter dress, she said, her tongue between her teeth,
It's okay. We can always skinny-dip right in your car. Who needs water?

“You're the luckiest mother I ever knew,” A.J. said when Eli told him about it. “Screw that pretty face of yours.”

Lying there, Eli fumbled for his phone before remembering it wasn't there.

“Dad,” Deenie said, answering her phone. “I'm coming home. I am.”

“You better be,” her dad said in a tone he rarely used.

The car thudding along the road, the spatter of light rain, she and Gabby didn't say anything for a mile or two.

Finally, Gabby spoke. “They're going to want to bring me back in again, aren't they? They're going to want to talk to me again.”

Deenie looked at her, passing headlights flashing across her face, and saw something pulsing there, from her temple to her jaw.

“Uh, I don't know. ”

It hurt to look at her, the way she was holding her body so tightly, her arms rigid at her sides, a girl made of wood. “Maybe not.”

When they entered Binnorie Woods, Deenie's heart started to slow down a little. No streetlights and the car dark, it was like being under your covers, your sleeping bag at camp. She'd always liked that feeling, and the smell of cedar coming through the vents.

“Maybe,” Deenie said, “this means Lise is doing better. If they can move her she must be doing better.”

Gabby nodded lightly, her head canting to one side.

“You know what I thought,” she said quietly, “when the reporter came over, you know what I thought she was going to tell us?”

“What?

“That Lise was dead.”

“It's okay, Lara. She's driving Gabby home to you right now.”

“Thank God. Tom, have you seen some of these pictures? And videos?”

“I saw a few,” Tom said, thinking of that striking one of Gabby. “Wait, videos?”

“There's a video of Kim Court. Some kid must've taken it while it was happening. It's all over. It's on the news now.”

Tom grabbed the remote from Eli.

There, on Channel 7, was a grainy YouTube video of Kim Court, body twitching on the gym floor.

The screen crawl read:
Mysterious Outbreak: Parents' Rush to Vaccinate to Blame?

And then, hands gripping her own neck, a blur of vomit, head thrown so far back you could only see the glint of her braces. The piano-tinkling score from
The Exorcist
played.

“Lara,” he said. “Turn off the TV.”

They were deep into the woods now and Deenie couldn't remember the way. Gabby had to keep saying, softly,
Right, right, left here. Left.

“Deenie, remember what Kim told us in the library,” Gabby said, resting her head on window. “About Lise having a boyfriend?”

Deenie looked at her, not even remembering for a moment.

“In the library. Kim told us something about Lise and some guy.”

“Why would Kim Court know anything about Lise? Gabby, why are we talking about this now—”

“I think it might be true.”

Gabby faced the window and Deenie could hear a faint rattling: Gabby's head against the glass.

“No,” Deenie said. “It's not true.”

Technically, it was not. There was the thing Lise had told her at the lake, the thing she'd done with the boy. But that boy was not Lise's boyfriend, not at all.

“Deenie, I've heard it from other people. I thought she might have told you. Sometimes she tells you things she doesn't tell me.”

“No,” Deenie said.

“Because lately, Skye and me, we've been noticing Lise has been kind of secretive. Like maybe she was hiding something. When I took her to the Pizza House the other night, I tried to talk to her, but—”

“Skye?” Deenie barked, so loud she surprised herself. “Skye doesn't know a goddamn thing about Lise. Why would you listen to her? Lise wasn't hiding anything.” Taking a breath, she tried to calm herself. Then added, “No one's hiding anything, Gabby.”

Gabby nodded, the worst, most thoughtless kind of nod Deenie could imagine.

Then she turned and faced Deenie. “I just remembered what I heard about you,” Gabby said. “The other day.”

Deenie looked over at her, the car swerving slightly. “What?”

“That you were in a car with some guy. You never told me that.”

Deenie faced the road again. “Because it's not true. It was probably Eli.”

“Stop!” Gabby shouted, her voice suddenly loud, Deenie nearly jumping in her seat, words rushing to her head, flooding her mouth without emerging.

“My house,” Gabby said, one hand dropping on Deenie's arm, the other pointing to driveway.

Deenie exhaled, turned the wheel.

The house blazing with lights, and Mrs. Bishop was running out, her legs and feet bare, the headlights making her scar look red, alive.

But any anger on her face seemed to break to pieces the minute her daughter exited the car.

Backing out, Deenie watched as Gabby slumped into her mother's arms wearily, a veteran home from battle. Mrs. Bishop folding her in her arms in such a mom way. In a way that made Deenie blink.

Face drawn, hair half caught in her rubber band, his daughter looked half and twice her age at the same time.

Nearly midnight, on either side of the kitchen island, Deenie told him about the hospital.

“And so the reporter said Mrs. Daniels is trying to move Lise to the medical center.”

“That probably means she's stable,” he said. “So that's something.”

Her mouth twisted, dubious, like Georgia somehow, that was the echo, and the way her shirt was riding up and her arm stretching tiredly and with dismissal.

“I'm going to bed,” she said.

“Did you call your mom?” he said, holding out his hand for the car keys. A gesture stolen, he was sure, from his own father, a century ago.

“No,” she said. “I didn't have time.”

“Deenie,” he said. “You were gone for hours.”

“The reporter wanted us to talk on camera,” she said. “She wouldn't leave us alone. But we wouldn't do it.”

He sighed. “How did Gabby seem?”

He watched her try to pull the rubber band from her hair, her eyes down, and he wanted to reach over and help her untangle it, but her body looked so closed off, a tooth clamp.

“I don't know, Dad.”

He found his hand reaching out to her anyway, and the flinch that came was sudden, terrible.

Trying to push herself, hard, into sleep, Deenie felt her toes cramp painfully, a pang in them she had to rub away, tangled under her own sheets, breathing hard until it stopped again.

Then her phone hissed:
SKYE.

She could have sworn she'd turned it off.

Yes,
Deenie typed. She never got texts from Skye and she almost wondered if she had fallen asleep.

U saw Gabby tonite?

Yeah. Why?

We need to protect each other,
came Skye's reply.
We R surrounded by bad energy.

Staring at the words blinking hard at her, almost spasming, she had a sick feeling in her stomach and turned her phone off.

What made Skye think she could text her? Because they were the only ones left? Skye's words always felt cryptic.
Shake it off
, she told herself.
Don't let her get under your skin.

And she grabbed for the bottle of antihistamine left over from the flu and drank three plastic cups.

Somewhere in the gluey Nyquil haze, the memory came of standing in the lake with Lise the week before, stomping their feet in the emerald thick of the water.

On the shoreline were Skye's hard-jeaned boys with the disappearing tattoos. They whistled at Lise, fingers hooked in their mouths.

Let's do it
, Lise whispered in her ear, her tongue showing between her teeth.
Let's go in
.

When she woke up, in the purple of four a.m., she could still hear Lise's voice in her ear, high as a little girl's.

We went behind those tall bushes. He took my tights off first. It was so cold, but his hands…

Who was it?
Deenie had asked, kept asking.

Then, finally, Lise whispered the boy's name, and Deenie was surprised.

Really? Him?

And Lise's smile filled with teeth, a giggle up her throat.

Like something inside opening
, she said as they sprawled on the shoreline, feet tangled in seaweed tickling up their legs,
and then opening something else.

Don't tell anyone,
she made Deenie promise.
They'll think I'm a slut.

No, they won't
, Deenie said. Though you could never be sure.

I told him not to do what he was doing. That it was disgusting. I don't know why I thought that, but I did. We put our mouths down there with boys, but…but he was down there and everything happened.

But she said his hands were cool, like a doctor's. And that made it seem okay. And soon enough she was so hot, a burning down there, and his mouth cool too, and the way, like—and she was so embarrassed to say it, to have even thought of it—like a flute, the flutter tongue. The one it takes so long to learn.