The Fever (15 page)

I don't know,
she said, her fingers curled over her mouth like eating a candy.
I don't know.
And then she said the thing about how it was like an opening, an opening, and forever opening.

She never even knew before what it meant to see stars.

That was all she could say. Deenie wanted her to say more.

Since it was a boy she knew, she wanted to picture it.

Is it disgusting?
Lise asked, but she was smiling as she said it, face red.
Was it bad?

Deenie didn't say anything. Their legs slimy from the water.

Deenie
, she said,
am I bad?

No,
Deenie said.
Not you, Lise.

Never you.

Friday

It was maybe five,
the light looked like five, but without his phone, Eli had no idea.

There was a freedom in it.

It was warmer than in months, as if the temperature had risen during the night, and the bike ride through town felt delirious and wonderful.

His hand kept reaching for his pocket, the phantom buzz.

But nothing.

Maybe he'd never have a phone again.

He was nearly to school before he remembered everything from the night before, all the beer and ruminations and sinking to drunken sleep on the floor of the den, carpet burn on his face.

When he walked in the locker room, everything was unusually quiet. No clattering sticks or ripping tape or the low din of players rousing themselves to life.

But he could hear something, the tinny sound of someone's computer speakers, a soft voice and panting.

“…my tongue is tingling, like, all the time. If you could see…”

He knew this was going to mean another speech from Coach about how important it was not to degrade women's bodies because what if they were your mothers, or your sisters.

“…something in my throat. And it's getting bigger…”

When he reached the last bank of lockers, he saw seven, eight players huddled around Mark Pulaski's laptop, transfixed. A.J. was grinning and shaking his head. A.J. was always grinning and shaking his head.

“Get a load, Nash. Get a fucking load of this.”

There was a stutter and hiss as the video began again.

It was the latest girl, that Kim girl, glowing from the light of her own computer screen.

Panting noisily, like her tongue was too big for her mouth, she couldn't seem to quite catch her breath. Her face looked wet, her eyes ringed vampire-brown and her mouth slickly red.

It was dark all around her, but you could see the green fluorescence of some light somewhere, the hospital corridor.

And she was talking straight into the camera, her phone.

Her words soft and slow and dreamlike.

“Hey, everybody, I know you're all probably worried about me and I wanted to let you know how I'm doing since it happened.”

Breathing, breathing.

“I'm still at the hospital. They won't let me go.”

Her fingers reached up to that glossy mouth.

“My tongue is tingling, like, all the time, and this side feels like it's got a lot of pressure and it's hard to keep my eye open on this side. It feels like this side of my face is slipping from me. I just feel really bad.”

She started clearing her throat, and once she started it was like she couldn't stop

“But most of all it's here,” she said, clawing at her neck. “It feels like there's something in my throat. And it's getting bigger.”

A scraping sound came from her mouth as she pushed her face closer to the camera, the lens distorting everything, fish-eyeing her.

When she opened her mouth, those teeth, enormous and iron-girded, were blue.

“I'm sure you're hearing lots of things. About what's happening. Let me tell you: No one here wants to know the truth. That's why they won't let me go.”

Suddenly, as if she had heard something, a muffled sound too fast to recognize, Kim flinched, her eyes jumping to her left, pupils gleaming.

There was a long, long pause, her face palsied. Eli felt something even in his own chest:
What did she hear? See?

Then her face turned slowly to the camera again, her throat a death rattle.

“But there's other girls out there. And they have it. Maybe ones you can't even tell. Who knows how many of us?”

“I know it by heart,” A.J. said, leaping onto one of the benches. “Brooke and her sister were watching it all night.”

“‘There's other girlth out there,'” he slurred, his tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth. “‘Who knowth how many of us?'”

Eli looked back at the screen, Kim's face caught. Beneath, there were 624 likes and dozens of comments:
oh, kim, be strong! kim, i've been feeling weird too, did u faint when you got the shot? Young lady: this is demonic possession. You can read about it in the New Testament. The solution is to find a True Man of God who can cast the demon out. Receiving Christ can cure you. Blessings to you and your family!

Eli fixed his eyes on the screen. It reminded him, in some obscure way, of those girls at the games, the younger ones who came in groups and banded behind the Plexiglas, bap-bap-bapping with open palms or the bottoms of their fists, their mouths sprung wide, their tongues between their teeth.
Me. Me. Me.

“I don't…” Eli started. “Is she wearing makeup?” He was trying to figure something out.

“Maybe she'll get her own reality show,” A.J. said.
“Kim's Wrecked World. My Toxic Sweet Sixteen.”

“And she didn't say anything about the shots,” Eli said, just realizing it. “About the vaccine.”

Mark Pulaski turned around to face Eli.

“You think she's faking it?” he said, his voice breaking. “Did you see her? My sister got her first shot last week. She woke up from a nap yesterday and couldn't turn her head. She's fucking eleven years old.”

Eli looked at him, not knowing what to say.

“Just because your sister's bouncing around the school while all her friends are fucking dying, man. Your sister…” Mark's voice trailed off. “Jesus, man.”

Eli watched Mark for a second, and everyone else watched Eli. He felt A.J.'s fist tap his shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” Eli said. “Sorry, man.”

He turned back to the computer screen, the big arrow over Kim's face, trembling.

Her backpack on her lap, Deenie talked to him the entire ride to school.

For the first miles, Tom let himself enjoy it. It felt almost like before, maybe a few years ago, when she always seemed to be bursting with giddy, nervous animation.
Dad, Dad, wait, listen, Dad, listen.
Telling him about a book, a science project.

But all the itchy squirming in her seat now, it was like she was trying to rally herself to get through the day to come. Or else she just needed to keep talking because she was afraid of not talking. He wondered if she felt guilty for the night before, for staying out late with the car.

“Dad,” she said finally, after seven solid minutes about the algebra quiz, the rancid grilled cheese in the cafeteria, the stink of Eli's gym bag, “what do you think will happen today?”

He looked at the road, the steam from the streets, the crazy late-winter heat wave that had landed, the temperatures rising above fifty-five degrees, and tried to think of something to say.

The school felt anarchic inside, like the time Paul Lozelle let a pair of chickens loose in the cafeteria, a prank that had been musty when Tom was in high school.

Everywhere he looked, there were long bands of girls in their colored minis and tights, ropes of them, like the friendship bracelets that covered their arms, their faces tense and watchful. And the boys, in their own swells of confusion and bravado, stood apart, almost like in middle school, elementary school. Like they were suddenly afraid to get too close. Though maybe that was how they always were and he'd never noticed.

The teachers, in turn, were either spring-loaded, grasping their dry-erase markers like emergency flares, or slouched against doorways, filled with louche contempt.

Walking toward his classroom, its familiar formaldehyde smell, he tried to imagine how any of them were going to make it to three o'clock without spontaneously combusting.

A free first period, he spent a half hour in the dark auditorium, drinking coffee and watching one of the custodians trying to buff away the scratch marks the EMS gurney had left on the stage.

He couldn't stop himself from walking past Deenie's ancient civ class. She was in the back, so he had to move very close to the door to see her, but there she was, pen in mouth, brow tightly triangled.

It was when he finally stopped by the teachers' lounge to check his e-mail that he saw June Fisk and her chubby-cheeked teacher's aide gaping at the monitor, their mouths open.

On the screen, Kim Court's blue-lit face.

“It's not the only one,” June said, rolling a chair toward him. “I've heard there's another one. Maybe more.”

Tom watched it three times, silently.

He thought of Deenie sitting in that classroom and wondered if she'd watched it too, and what she'd thought.

Back to hospital today for more tests,
Gabby's text read.

It felt a little like the days the orchestra went to regionals—no Lise, no Gabby at school. Except now there weren't even people like Kim, or Jaymie Hurwich, who would always quiz Deenie before a test, her fingers always on her tablet, her flying-flash-cards app, her virtual periodic table.

And Skye was nowhere in sight.

Deenie wondered if she and Gabby were hidden away at Skye's parentless house, playing music or reading tarot or whatever they did together. All their private conversations.

Maybe it was for the best that Gabby wasn't there. It felt easier somehow.

Not having a phone at school didn't matter at all. You couldn't get reception most places, and you weren't supposed to use it anyway.

But what Eli liked about it was that when someone asked him, “Why didn't you text me back? Didn't you hear about the plan?” he could say, “Sorry, I lost my phone.”

Except for the tickling sense in the back of his brain that there was something to it, that he might be missing something that mattered.

Like he'd felt after his mom left. All those days he'd walk past his parents' bedroom and still smell her smell, like those shiny orange soap bars she used.

Since then, his clothes had never felt the same, not soft like before, and no one ever slapped the kitchen table when they laughed hard, and all the blue flowers by the side door were gone. They smelled like grape candy.

He wondered if Deenie, who never seemed to miss anything about their mom, ever missed any of those things. After she moved out, two days after Christmas, Deenie piled her gifts into a trash bag and threw it down the basement stairs. For months, they were down there, the bag striped with mold.

The sound of the second bell jarred him and he was surprised to see the halls were empty, except for one freshman girl at the far end, leaning against the blasted brick.

One arm hanging to her side, she was breathing loudly, just like Kim Court in the video.

“Hey,” he called out.

Her head flew up, scraping against the brick.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She didn't move.

He started walking toward her, but before he'd taken three steps, she scurried away, off into some freshman-girl hiding place.

Sliding on his headphones, he began walking to fourth period.

As he approached the classroom, he saw another girl lurking, but this one didn't seem sickly or afraid.

It was Skye Osbourne, wearing a long scarf the same color as her mouth, like those dark figs that hung from the tree by the practice rink every fall, the ones that split under your skates.

And this time it felt like she was looking for him.

“Ditch with me,” she said, nodding her head toward the double doors.

He stopped, headphones still on.

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, a slanting smile. “I'm pretty.”

Funnily, Eli wasn't sure Skye was pretty.

If he saw her without all that hair, which looked like it'd been stripped from a corncob and massed thick, and without all the things she draped over and on top of herself, the scarves and snake rings and coiling bracelets, he wondered if he'd even recognize her at all.

“What's the point of here,” she added, waving something in her hand, a joint, a white Bic.

What's the point of here
, he thought, looking at that fig mouth of hers.

Pushing through the doors swinging behind her, he stepped outside. The air felt hard, good.

There was a low rumble everywhere, even coming from his own classroom. The thrum of confusion, skidding sneakers, a girl's lone yelp, a teacher trying to be heard.

He turned the corner and that's when he saw them.

A long line, like the one to get your school ID photo taken, your yearbook portrait. To get your shots.

Except they were all girls. Ten, twelve, he guessed, more than a twenty wrapped around the hallway in groups and individually. Drooping against lockers, slumped on the floor, their legs flung out, doll-like, one in the middle of the corridor, spinning like a flower child.

Danielle Schultz, her right arm swinging like a baton every third second, synched to her own loud breaths.

Brandi Carruthers, junior-class treasurer and weekend beauty queen, her face streaked with a kind of gray sweat.

Two freshman girls who looked all of eleven grappling each other in that way very young girls do, as if the whole world were conspiring to ravage them.

“Pins and needles, pins and needles,” stallion-legged track star Tricia Lawson was saying, over and over again, rubbing her long limbs.

Even strapping Brooke Campos was there, tan as ever in her buttercup-yellow tank top, but holding her pelvis in a way that made Tom look away.

The line hooked down one hall and then bottlenecked at the administration office.

Inside, Mrs. Harris, a swath of hair matted to her forehead, was hoarsely calling for quiet, the nurse's office door shut tight.

“He's not here,” she whispered to Tom, nodding toward Crowder's office.

“Oh?”

Leaning closer, smelling of Pall Malls and desperation, she added, “He had a seven a.m. meeting at Gem Donuts with the superintendent. He must still be with him.”