Megan Abbott - The Fever

“I still can’t believe it,” Gabby said. “About Lise.”

They spotted Mrs. Bishop’s car, the only black one, like a carpenter ant.

“Yeah,” Deenie said. “Maybe…maybe the two of us could go to the hospital later, if—”

“I can’t go back there,” Gabby said quickly.

At first, Deenie wasn’t sure what she meant. But seeing Gabby’s mother pull up, she realized what it was. It’d been four years since Gabby’s dad did what he did, which wasn’t a long time, really. Four years since she and her mother were rolled into the emergency room of St. Ann’s. That was the last time anything big had happened in Dryden. A thought fluttered through her head: What are the odds that the two biggest things ever to happen here happen to my two best friends?

“I’m sorry,” Gabby said. “Am I a bad friend?”

“No,” Deenie said, pushing a smile through her frozen face. “I get it.”

Gabby tried for a smile too, but there was something under it, heavy and broody. You could feel it under your skin. In so many ways, knowing Gabby was like brushing up against something meaningful, pained, and grand. Before her, the only time Deenie had ever felt it was that time she was ten and the whole family went to the Cave of the Winds, which Deenie had read about in a book. Enfolded between a wall of rock and the falls, Deenie had held her mom’s hand and felt the water and the winds and the cataracts mix. A mysterious and indelible experience, the book had said, and that’s how it felt. A thing that marked you. Like Gabby’s history marked her, had marked, her mother.

“Gabby, she’s going to be okay,” Deenie said. “Lise is.”

Opening the car door to a blast of heat, Gabby turned and faced Deenie. “Definitely,” she said. “She’s our Lise.”

Deenie watched as Gabby slid into the car, her sparkling low-tops, her knit ballet tights bright and jaunty, a day begun in a different place.

“Bye, Mrs. Bishop,” Deenie said.

“Take care of yourself, Deenie,” Gabby’s mom said, waving a gloved hand, her sunglasses larger than Gabby’s even, almost covering her whole face.

DETENTION CANCELED, Tom wrote on the sign, slapping it on the classroom door. It felt like a day for executive decisions.

He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, leaving Deenie alone at the house after everything that had happened. And what if she decided to go to the hospital again?

Walking into the lot, he saw Eli had already returned his car, angled rather dramatically and nearly touching the French teacher’s perky Vespa. Tomato red.

Seated behind the wheel, he made the call before he could stop and plan it out. Didn’t want to always be readying himself to talk to her. Two years, it should be easier.

“Hey, Georgia, it’s Tom.”

He told her everything as quickly as he could, hearing her gasp, her voice rushing forward.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, and it was like no time had passed. Georgia, Eli fell off his bike, jammed his finger in gym, split his forehead on the ice. Her hand on his. Oh, Tom.

“I thought you should know,” he said.

There was a pause. He could hear her breathing. “I can’t believe it. Little Lise.”

And there it was: the immediate gloom in her voice, almost like resignation. Life is so goddamned hard . Near the end, she’d sounded like that a lot.

“I’m sure she’s going to be okay,” he said. “And Deenie’s doing fine.”

“Now all I can do is picture the girls in the backyard,” she said. “Lise with her little potbelly, running through the sprinkler in her two-piece.”

Tom felt his face warm. Last summer he’d seen Lise in a two-piece. From across the town pool, from behind, he’d mistaken her for one of Deenie’s swim instructors. Carla, the graduate student in kinesiology who always teased him about needing a haircut.

“I thought probably you knew already,” he said, his voice suddenly louder than he meant. “That Deenie’d called you.”

“No.” The drop in her voice gave him a second of shameful pleasure.

It had been a lousy thing for him to say. Deenie almost never called her.

“Bad reception at the school,” he said quickly. “You remember. The hospital too.”

“Right. God, that town,” she said, as if she had never lived here at all.

Turning the radio loud, listening to some frenzied music Eli had left for him, Tom drove home along Dryden Lake. There were other routes, faster ones, but he liked it.

He remembered swimming in it when they’d first moved here, before all the stories came out. He loved the way it shimmered darkly. It looked alien, an otherworldly lagoon.

Even then, there was talk of designating it a dead lake, the worst phrase he’d ever heard. At some point, people started calling it that, overrun by plants and no fish to be found, and the department of health coming all the time to take water samples.

It was almost ten years ago when the little boy died there, his body seizing up and his lungs filling with furred water. It was the asthma attack that killed him and the boy should never have been swimming alone, but it didn’t matter. After, the city threw up high sheet fences and ominous skull-and-crossbones signs. Eli used to have nightmares about the boy. All the kids did. It could happen to me, Dad. What if it’s me?

But for years, Georgia still liked to swim there at night when it was very warm. Sometimes, he would go too, if the kids were asleep. They felt like bad parents, sneaking out at night, driving the mile and a half, laughing guiltily in the car.

It was something.

The blue-green algal blooms effloresced at night. Georgia loved them, said they were like velvet pillows under her feet. He remembered grabbing her soft ankle in the water, radioactive white.

After a while, he stopped going. Or she stopped inviting him. He wasn’t sure which came first.

One night, she came home, her face deathly pale and her mouth black inside. She told him the algae was like she’d never seen it, a lush green carpet, and she couldn’t stop swimming, even when it started to hurt her eyes, thicken in her throat.

All night she threw up, her body icy and shaking, and by five a.m., he finally stopped listening to her refusals, gathered her in his arms, and drove her to the emergency room. They kept her for a few hours, fed her a charcoal slurry that made her mouth blacker still. She’d be fine in a day.

“I can’t breathe,” she kept saying. “I can’t breathe.”

Hey—U ok? Just saying…

That’s what the text said, but Deenie didn’t recognize the number.

She’d inherited Eli’s old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said—Deenie never forgot it—my pussy aches for u. It had to have been the worst thing she’d ever read. She’d read it over and over before deleting it.

Except this didn’t seem like one of those texts.

Who r u? Deenie typed back but stopped before she hit SEND.

She leaned back on her bed. The house felt quiet, peaceful.

Downstairs, Dad and Eli were watching TV. Something loud and somehow soothing on ESPN Classic. The constant hum of the household for ten years.

It was nine thirty, and she wanted to stay off the computer. Red pop-ups in the bottom corner of her laptop.

The worst was the picture of Lise everyone was posting. Someone must have taken it with a phone right after it happened. A blurred shot of Lise’s bare legs, a rake of hair across her face, that made Deenie almost cry.

There seemed no stopping all the texts jangling from her phone.