The Fever (8 page)

“A vampire walks among us,” whistled one of the girls, hooking her fingers under her mouth like fangs.

“So, Brooke, are you saying Lise bit Gabby too?” Deenie said, looking at Skye, trying to get some help. “Or that she just licked her?”

Brooke shook her head pityingly. “I know she's your friend. Both of them. But.”

“There's bats down by the lake,” Skye said quietly, looking in the mirror, lifting her hair from her brow.

Deenie looked at Skye, shaking her hands dry.

“If it were rabies, they would have known right away,” the most sensible senior girl asserted. “That's not hard to figure out.”

Tugging loose three paper towels, Deenie rubbed her hands roughly, until they turned red.

“We'd be lucky if it was rabies,” Skye said, twirling her bracelets back down her wet wrists. “They have a shot for that.”

“So what are you saying it is?” the senior girl said, eyeing Skye, trying to up-and-down look at her, but Skye was not the type to be chastened by that.

Shrugging lightly, she shook a cigarette loose from somewhere in the folds of her skirt. “I don't know,” she said. “I'm just thinking about the lake.”

Deenie looked at her.

The senior shook her head dismissively. “No one goes in the lake anyway.”

“No.” Skye nodded, letting her eyes skate across Deenie's face, and keep going. “They never do.”

Like after all school disruptions, there was a window during which you could do anything, and Eli took advantage, finding a corner in the back of the auditorium as teachers corralled the remaining students.

But soon enough, Assistant Principal Hawk—his real name, maybe—took Eli's shoulder in his talon grip and marched him to earth science.

No one was paying any attention to poor Mr. Yates talking about natural-gas extraction. Everyone in school had seen what happened to Gabby.

One girl, breathless, announced that Gabby's mother had arrived and that “her scar looked bigger than ever!”

“Let's try to keep our focus on the subject at hand,” Mr. Yates said, straining.

“Mr. Yates, maybe it's the drilling!” Bailey Lu exclaimed, her palm slapping her desk. “My mom says it's poisoning us!”

Slipping in his earbuds, Eli stared out the window at the practice rink, bright with cut ice.

He wondered if it was one of those superflus and was glad he and Deenie had had all those shots the month before, their arms thick and throbbing. Or maybe it was a girl thing, one of those mysteries, like the way the moon affected them, or like in some of the videos he'd seen online that, mostly, he wished he hadn't.

But it didn't matter what it was. It was going to be bad for his sister, who loved Gabby even more than she loved Lise. Who talked so much, always in a hushed voice, about the Thing That Happened to Gabby, about her cokehead father, who liked to show up at school every so often, begging to see his daughter.
Maybe you should have thought about that before you picked up the claw hammer
, Eli always thought.

The truth was, he didn't know Gabby very well, just as the tall, pale-faced girl all the other girls copied, her clothes, the streaks she'd put in her hair then dye away again, the way she spray-painted her cello case silver.

He did remember being surprised last fall when she started going out with Tyler Nagy, a hockey player from Star-of-the-Sea. Eli had never liked him, the way he was always talking about the screeching girls who came to all the games, the fourteen-year-old he said wanted him to do things to her with the taped end of his stick.

The only time Eli'd ever really spent with Gabby was when Deenie was a freshman and Gabby had stayed with them for a few weeks. Her mother was having a “hard time,” which had something to do with all the empty wine bottles in her recycling bin and not being able to get out of bed, but no one ever told him the rest. It was soon after their own mom had moved out, and it seemed like having Gabby there was good for Deenie too, who'd spent hours reading by herself in her room back then.

As far as he could tell, Gabby never really slept. More than once, he'd spotted her hiding on the sofa in the den, watching TV in the middle of the night. Hour after hour of the same show where they dressed middle-aged women in new outfits, dyeing all their hair the same shiny red.

His dad told him he kept finding gum wrappers, dozens of them, trapped in the folds of the quilt.

One night, not long before she went home, he found her in the basement, lying on the Ping-Pong table, crying.

Girls—at least, the girls he knew, not his sister but other girls—always seemed to be crying.

But Gabby's crying was different, felt wild and broken and hurt his chest to hear.

Drumming his fingers on the Ping-Pong table until it vibrated, he tried to talk to her, to make her feel better, but the things that worked on Deenie—recounting graphic hockey injuries, popping his shoulder blade, trying to rap—didn't seem right.

Finally, he had an idea. Took a chance. Pulled one of the Ping-Pong rackets from under her left thigh, reached to the floor for the ball.

“Come on, little girl,” he said, pointing to the other racket. “Show me what you got.”

The grin that cracked—with tortured slowness—across her face stunned and rallied him.

They played for forty-five minutes, flicking and top-spinning and crushing that hollow ball, until they woke up everyone in the house.

I'm just thinking about the lake.

Deenie couldn't believe Skye had said it. In front of all those girls. In front of Brooke Campos, who stopped talking only while texting and usually not then.

At the final bell, Deenie found her at her locker.

“Skye, why did you mention the lake?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn't have anything to do with any of this,” Deenie whispered. “So why bring it up?”

Skye looked at her, shrugged. Skye was always shrugging.

“I don't think,” she said, closing her locker door, “we really know what this has to do with.”

They weren't supposed to go into the lake. No one was. School trips, Girl Scout outings, science class, you might go and look at it, stand behind the orange mesh fences.

Every spring and at the end of the summer, the lake would give over to acid green. It was called “the bloom” and Deenie's fifth-grade teacher warned them, pointing to the iridescent water, that it meant it was filled with bacteria and hidden species. With a stick, he would poke one of the large blades of algae that washed up on the shoreline. One year, during a conservation project for Girl Scouts, they found a dead dog on one of the banks, its fur neon, mouth hanging open, tongue bright like a highlighter pen.

When she was very young, she believed the slumber-party tales about it, that a teenage couple had gone skinny-dipping and drowned, their mouths clogged with loam, bodies seen glowing on the shoreline from miles away. Or that swimming in it gave you miscarriages or took away your ovaries and you'd be barren for life. Or the worst one, that a little boy had died in the lake and his cries could still be heard on summer nights.

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frightened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid. Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.

“It looks beautiful,” her mom had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. “It
is
beautiful. But it makes people sick.”

To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilies, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.

And then, last week.

It had been Lise's idea to go to the lake, to go in the water. She'd stood in it, waving at them, her tights stripped off, her legs white as the moon.

It was nine o'clock and Tom wasn't sure where the day had gone, other than to ragged places, again.

Deenie was hunched over the kitchen island, eating cereal for dinner.

Outside, Eli was slamming a tennis ball against the garage door with his practice stick. Sometimes it was hard to remember his son without that stick in his hand, cocked over his shoulder. Even watching TV, he'd have it propped on his knee. It seemed to have happened sometime during early high school, when the other parts of Eli, the boy who liked camping and books about shipwrecks and expeditions and looking for arrowheads in Binnorie Woods after a heavy rain, had drifted away, or been swallowed whole.

His phone rang:
Lara Bishop.

“Tom, thanks for your message.”

“Of course,” he said. “How's Gabby?”

“We're home. They were going to keep her overnight, but she seemed to be doing okay. And she hates that place so much. So here we are.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” he said. “Really glad.”

He could feel Deenie's stare, her hand gripping her own phone.

“Well,” she said, and there was a pause. “I guess I just wanted you to know. And, you know, to check in. See what you might have…I don't know.”

“I understand,” he said, but he wasn't sure what she was suggesting.

“I mean, we don't know what this
is
,” she said.

“No,” he said, eyes on Deenie. “But I don't know anything. You mean about Lise?” He wasn't going to tell her what Medical Biller Diane had said.

“Or if maybe…Gabby's dad didn't call you, did he?”

“Charlie? No. No.”

“I was worried he might have found out. From the school maybe. I don't want Gabby to have to deal with him right now.”

“Of course not.” But what he was thinking was, Weren't they obligated to notify him? He was still her dad.

“Thanks. It's just…” And her voice trailed away.

“And if he had called,” he added, though he wasn't sure why, “I wouldn't have told him anything.”

“Thank you, Tom.” He could hear the relief in her voice. It all felt oddly intimate, in that parents-in-shared-crisis way. Lightning hitting the Little League batting cage. Mall security agreeing not to call the police. Those “whew” moments fellow parents share.

After he hung up, he wondered how he would feel if he were Charlie Bishop. He would never, ever do what Charlie had done, even if it had been an accident. Once, before everything, they'd been teammates for a pickup baseball game, had cheered each other on, played darts after and drank shots of tequila with beer backs.

That was just a few weeks before the accident and it made Tom sick to think about now. How much he'd liked Charlie. How Charlie had slapped him on the back and said he knew just how hard marriage could be.

The minute her phone rang, Deenie began running upstairs to her room.

“Gabby—”

“Hey, girl,” Gabby said.

“Are you okay, what—”

“Hey, girl,” she repeated.

“Hey, girl,” Deenie replied, slowing her words down, almost grinning. “What'd they say at the hospital?”

She leaned back on her bed, feeling the soft thunk of her pillow.

“They did all these tests,” Gabby said. “They made me count and say who the last two presidents were. They gave me a tall drink of something that was like those candy orange peanuts that taste like banana. If you put a bag of those in a blender with gravel and old milk.”

“Yum, girl.”

Gabby snickered a little. “Then they strapped a mask on me and rolled me into this thing that was like the worst tanning bed ever. Everything smelled. Then they did this other thing where they put these little puckers all over my head and I had to lie there for twenty minutes while they shot electricity through my body.” She laughed. “It was awesome.”

“It sounds awesome,” Deenie said, forcing a laugh. “So.”

“So.”

“What is it? What happened to you?”

“They don't know,” she said. “They even made me talk to a therapist. She asked if I was under stress. She told my mom that sometimes this happens. Like maybe I was upset and my body just freaked out.”

“Oh,” Deenie said.

“I asked her if she meant ‘stress' like having your dad tear a hole through your mom's face.”

Deenie felt her chest tighten, but Gabby was laughing, tiredly.

“So they don't think it's like with Lise?”

“I just need to relax,” Gabby said, not really answering, a funny bump in her voice. “I guess maybe if I light some geranium candles and take a bath, like the doctors used to tell my mom when she couldn't breathe in the grocery store or the mall.”

It was interesting to think about, the slender filaments between the worry in your head, or the squeeze in your chest, and the rest of your body, your whole body and everything in it.

Lise, the summer before, had lost thirteen pounds in less than two weeks after something had happened at the town pool with a boy she liked. She'd thought he liked her, and maybe he did, but then suddenly he didn't anymore.

She and Lise and Gabby had devoted endless hours to imagining him as Lise's boyfriend and then to hating him and the girl with the keyhole bikini they'd spotted walking with him by the snack bar. Deenie was sure he'd be at the center of their thoughts forever. But right now she couldn't summon his name.

Since then, there'd been so many boys they'd speculated about. Boys who liked them and then didn't. Or maybe a boy they didn't like until the boy liked someone else.

But Lise said the boy at the pool was worth it. Running her fingers over her stomach, she called it the Mike Meister diet.