Megan Abbott - The Fever

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.

Mike Meister, that was his name. Always a new boy, even last week, Lise at the lake, whispering in Deenie’s ear. How could you believe any of it was real?

Lise, her head, her body, her flighty, fitful heart, were like one thing, and always changing.

But it was different with Gabby. Deenie knew all her beats and rhythms, had seen her through everything with her dad, her mom, her bad breakup. And this was not the way stresses played themselves out on her body. Everything stayed inside, her body folding in on itself.

“Well,” Deenie said. “You’re home now. That’s good.”