Megan Abbott - The Fever

“Dad!” she said. “You missed it. You missed the turn. It was back there.”

You’re a careless person , Georgia once said to him. He didn’t even remember why. He didn’t remember anything. She was always coming out of the water to say things, her mouth black.

@hospital did they ask u abt lake, Deenie texted Gabby. She was standing by the window in the second-floor girls’ room, the best place in the school to get reception. But it still wouldn’t go through.

It had been a week ago. Deenie and Gabby and Lise and Skye all in Lise’s mother’s Dodge with the screeching heater and the perennial smell of hand lotion. Lise said the steering wheel always felt damp with it.

As they drove along the lake, Skye told them she’d seen two guys in the water the week before, the first flicker of spring and their speakers blaring music from open car doors. One had a tattoo that began on his chest and disappeared beneath his jeans.

“Maybe they’re there now,” Lise had said, leaning forward eagerly, laughing. Boy crazy.

They all knew they wouldn’t be, really, and they weren’t. It was just the lake in front of them, its surface skimmed bright green.

And soon enough they were all in the water, just barely, ankle-deep, then a little more, all their tights squirreled away on the bank.

Wading deeper, Lise pulled her skirt high, and her legs were so long and skinny, with the keyhole between her thighs like a model.

You couldn’t help but look.

She had a moon shape on her inner thigh that Deenie had never seen before. Later, Lise would say it happened when she lost weight, a stretch mark that wouldn’t go away.

And then Gabby and Skye left, their calves slick with the water, thick as pea soup.

With Gabby gone, everything was less interesting, but it was easier. It was like before. Those days of just Deenie and Lise, and Deenie let herself settle into in the sugar-soft of Lise’s voice, and how easy she was and the water so delicious and Lise with stories to tell.

Now, remembering it, standing at the bathroom mirror, Deenie looked at herself.

Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? she wondered. Do I look different?

Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn’t even see.

She walked to her locker and opened it, stood there.

If she had to sit through first period, she thought she might explode.

“K.C.,” she called out, spotting a familiar glint of braces in her locker-door mirror. “You have your car?”

Kim Court moved closer, smiling, nodding. Shaking her keys.

Gabby lived ten twisty miles from the school, an A-frame like an arrowhead snug in the Binnorie Woods. There was no regular bus route and the house was always hard to find. Deenie’s dad had picked her up there countless times but sometimes he still got lost, calling Gabby’s mom, who would laugh softly and give him the same directions again. No, that’s a right at the yellow mailbox.

Gabby said living out here made her mom feel safer, tucked away like a nest at the top of a tree. But whenever Deenie was in the house, with its creaking wood and big windows, she couldn’t imagine feeling more exposed.

“I always wanted to see it,” Kim whispered, leaning over the steering wheel, gazing at the rolled-edge roof, its edges weeping with purple ivy. “It’s like a gingerbread house.”

They stood on the porch, hopping in their sneakers to keep warm. Kim in her rainbow-glittered ones, like the ones Gabby wore all last year.

It seemed to take a long time. Gabby’s cat, Larue, watched them from the window with suspicious eyes.

Finally, Deenie saw a curtain twitch, and the door swung open.

“Hey.” It was Skye, wrapped up in one of her fisherman’s sweaters with the elbow torn through. “What’s going on?”

“Hi,” Deenie said, walking inside. She didn’t want to show her disappointment that Skye was there again.

At some point, Deenie was going to have to get used to it. This new alliance.

After all, you could never be everything to one person.

Across the living room, Gabby was perched in the roll-arm chair. Larue hopped from the windowsill and stretched across her lap.

Kim’s eyes were floating everywhere—at the helix of books stacked in one corner, Closing the Circle—NOW! on top, and up into the wooden eaves, dark enough for bats.

Gabby and her mom had lived here for two years, but it still looked temporary, the furniture for a different kind of house, modern and sleek, beneath the heavy wooden ceiling fan, the faded stained glass.

“Where’s your mom?” Deenie asked.

“Sleeping,” Gabby said, her fingers picking at her scalp. “Look how gross this is. I can’t get the glue out.”

“Glue?” Kim asked, using it as an excuse to hover over Gabby.

“From the EEG,” Gabby said as Kim leaned over Gabby, peeking through her long locks.

“It smells,” Kim said.

“It’s toxic,” Skye noted, gazing out the window behind the sofa. “So it smells.”

Kim shrank back from Gabby’s head, her fingers wiggling like she’d nearly touched a spider.

“I’ve been texting you,” Deenie said. “Gabby.”

Gabby turned and looked at her.

“My mom made me turn off my phone,” she said. “And computer. Because of the pictures and stuff.”

“Right,” Deenie said. She hoped Gabby hadn’t seen that video of her onstage. She’d heard it was on YouTube: “Cello Girl Possessed!”

“And Mrs. Daniels was calling me.”

“Mrs. Daniels?” Deenie wondered if she’d showed up here too. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Gabby said. “She wants us to come see her lawyer and some special doctor.”

“So she thinks it’s the same thing? What happened to Lise and what happened to you?”

“I guess.” Gabby shrugged. “My mom says we shouldn’t get involved.”

“Sheila Daniels has a bad mojo happening,” Skye said. “You can feel it coming off her. Maybe she doesn’t want the truth. She just wants an answer.”

“What do you know about it?” Deenie asked. “Do you even know Mrs. Daniels?”

“Not really,” Skye said, walking to the sofa. “But maybe she’s just not someone to be around right now. She’s carrying a lot of pain.”

“Tell them about the girl,” Gabby said to Skye. “Skye was telling me this freaky story.”

Deenie and Kim looked at Skye.

“Oh, just something I read online,” she said. “This eleven-year-old girl a long time ago who got super, super sick. Her eyes sunk back in her head and she’d roll around on the floor. And her body started to do crazy things, like bending back on itself. So her parents called the doctor. And when he came, the girl opened her mouth and started pulling trash out of it.”

“Trash, gross,” Kim said.

“Not like our trash,” Skye said. “Straw, gravel, chicken feathers, eggshells, pine needles, bones of little animals.”

Kim’s fingers touched her lips, eyes wide. “She was eating animals?”

“No,” Skye said, shaking her head. “And she wasn’t just throwing up things from her stomach. Because everything was always dry. The doctor could blow the feathers in his hand.”

Kim gasped.

“Well, the Internet never lies,” Deenie said, but then Skye loaded up the page on her phone. She showed them a picture, a girl with big haunted eyes, her mouth open. You couldn’t really see anything, but her mouth looked gigantic, like a hole in the center of her face.

Gabby took the phone from Skye, stared at it, Larue spiraled on her lap, tail twirling.