Megan Abbott - The Fever

And she started unhooking all her exotic bracelets to wash her hands, her fingers moving gracefully over the hooks. It was strangely hypnotic.

“Hey,” Deenie said, thinking about what Kim had said about Skye being upset, curled up on the loading dock. She looked at Skye’s face, hunting for a sign: red eyes, swollen face. But you could never see much through all the hair.

“I mean, think about it. What if they slept in the same place?” Brooke said, blotting her mouth with a paper towel. “Gabby and Lise.”

“A place compromised by bats?” the same senior girl said, hand on hip.

“You can say what you want,” Brooke said, digging her heels in. “I just know what it looked like. Her mouth was foaming and her tongue went like this.”

Leaning into the mirror, she stuck her tongue violently to one corner of her mouth.

“That’s not what happened,” Deenie said, watching her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard Nurse Tammy got bit,” Brooke added, ignoring Deenie. “Lise bit her. And she has big teeth.”

“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.