Megan Abbott - The Fever

At first, Gabby told Deenie she liked to spend time at Skye’s house because her aunt was never home and you could just hang out, listen to music, drink the fogged jugs of Chablis in the fridge or a stewed-fruit concoction her uncle used to make in the basement and called prison wine.

But Deenie knew it was more than that. Saw the way they’d exchange looks, how Gabby would come to school wearing Skye’s catbird ring. She worried Gabby maybe shared things with Skye, personal things, like about her dad. Things she’d only ever shared with Deenie.

It’s like you with Lise, Gabby once said. You guys have this thing . Which Deenie guessed was true because she’d known Lise forever and Gabby only since middle school, and Lise was part of her growing up and Gabby was part of everything newer, more exciting. And everything to come.

“Deenie,” Gabby called out. “What happened?”

“It was bad,” Deenie said. And then stopped. You couldn’t talk about it the way you’d talk about a pop quiz or shin splints from gym. Your words had to show how big it was.

“What’s wrong with her?” Gabby asked. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Did you talk to her?” Skye asked, head tilting.

“Talk to her? No. You don’t get it. She’s…”

Skye looked at her. They both were looking at her, both so tall and heavy-haired and clustered close. Waiting.

She didn’t know how to talk about it, about what she’d seen. Her face, it wasn’t hers. It wasn’t her. It was two pieces that didn’t go together and neither of them was Lise.

“Something happened,” she finally said. “To her heart.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Gabby asked, her chin shaking. “Is she, Deenie?”

Deenie didn’t know what to say. Her mouth opened and nothing came out.

“We haven’t been able to find out much,” Principal Crowder said to Tom. “The hospital won’t release information without her mother’s permission, but Mrs. Daniels hasn’t returned our calls. Understandable, of course.”

“Right,” Tom said, recalling the way Sheila Daniels had looked in the waiting room. He’d tried phoning her twice, thinking that’s what one did. “If I can help…”

A teacher for nearly two decades, Tom still felt vaguely uncomfortable in the principal’s office. Even though the principal—Ben Crowder, a shiny-faced former “curricular specialist” from the state education department—was only a few years older. Once, he’d flagged Tom down at a local gas station as he struggled to remove the frozen fuel cap from the tank of his Volkswagen.

Help a brother out? he’d asked, a desperate gleam in his eye.

“I’ve talked to all Miss Daniels’s teachers,” Crowder said, tapping his fountain pen on the desk, “but I wanted to talk to you too. I heard you left campus to see her.”

“Yes,” he said, noticing his phone was flashing with that red zigzag of a missed call, something that always snagged at his nerves. “My daughter’s best friends with her. But I guess I know about as much as you. It was a pretty chaotic scene.”

“We followed all the procedures on our end,” Crowder said. “But apparently things took a turn when she got home. Some kind of arrhythmia brought on by a seizure. Of course, there’s already rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“I wondered if you’d heard anything.”

“No,” Tom said. “Like what?”

But Crowder only leaned back in his chair and sighed.

“What a thing. I’ve only met the mother once, at a school-board meeting last fall. She seemed like a…cautious woman. The anxious type. So this has to be especially challenging.”

“Well,” Tom said, his fingers resting on his phone, “I guess all we can do is wait. I’m sure we’ll know more soon.”

“Right,” Crowder said, tapping his pen on the legal pad in front of him. “That’s right.”

From the entrance of the breezeway, Tom watched the throngs of woolly-hatted kids and pink-necked seniors pushing their way out of the school and over to the parking lot, the slightly rusting bus-stop sign quaking in the hard wind.

He sent Eli a quick text, hoped he’d get it.

Can you take D home and bring car back before yr practice?

He wanted to take her home himself, but he had detention duty.

And there was the missed call: Lara Bishop.

Gabby’s mom.

“Lara,” he said, “how are you?”

It seemed like a silly question, but he didn’t know what she’d heard about Lise. And he’d never felt particularly at ease with her. She had a look about her, a wariness, a watchfulness. He’d once heard the phrase cop eyes, and when he looked at Lara he thought maybe that’s what cop eyes looked like. Or maybe it was just that he knew what she’d been through.

Maybe, really, it was the way he looked at her.

“Tom,” she said, in that low voice of hers, always barely above a whisper, “how scary. I got a message from Sheila. I don’t even know her very well. I called back, but I just got voice mail.”

“Maybe an allergic reaction?” Tom said. “Maybe epilepsy?” It was the first time all day he’d speculated out loud. It felt like a relief.

“She sounded kind of…off,” she said. “But how else would she sound, right? She kept saying her daughter was the healthiest girl in the world and hadn’t done anything to deserve this.”

“People say all kinds of things,” Tom said, but he felt a slight twinge behind his left eye. He was remembering Sheila from that school-board meeting now. Going on and on about vaccinations and autism. She had had some kind of petition.

“Is Deenie doing okay?” she said. “Did she talk to her mom?”

Tom paused for a second, realizing he had no idea.

“Everything’s been happening so fast,” he said, feeling a burr of irritation he couldn’t identify.

“Of course,” Lara replied quickly. “I haven’t even had a chance to talk to Gabby. I’m heading over there now to get her.”

“I’m sure everything’s going to be fine,” he found himself saying for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day. Each time, he felt like he made it worse.

“Well,” she sighed, and Tom thought he could hear the click in her throat, a vestige from the tracheostomy after the accident. (The accident —is that what you called a claw hammer to the face?) She always wore a thin pearl choker to try to cover the scar, two curved lines, like an eye. Every time Tom had seen her, she’d put her fingertips to her throat at least once. Sometimes he saw Gabby do it too. The throat scar was so small compared to the one on her face, but she tried to cover that too, with a swoop of her dark red hair.

“Well,” he said, offering a faint laugh—the nervous laughter worried parents share when they realize, jointly, there’s nothing they can do. You can’t stop them, you can only try to keep the lines of communication open. “I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks, Tom,” she said, the rasp there. “This stuff happens—you just want to see them, you know?”

Walking from the west faculty lot, hoping her brother’s unprecedented offer would wait, Deenie hunted for Gabby.

Amid the crush of pink-puffer freshmen, she found Gabby by the front circle, talking on her phone, her eyes covered by large green sunglasses.

“Hey, girl,” Deenie said. “Wanna ride?”

“Hey, girl,” Gabby said, shoving her phone in her pocket. “My mom’s on her way. She heard about everything.”

“Too bad. Eli offered. He must’ve gotten hit in the head with a puck today.”

“That is too bad,” Gabby said, smiling a little. And they were both quiet for a second.