Megan Abbott - The Fever

“When the doctor put tongs down her throat,” Skye added, “the girl spat out a cinder as big as a chestnut and so hot it burnt his hand.”

Taking the phone back from Gabby, Skye showed them a picture of a stern-faced doctor, his hand out, a scythe-like scar in the center of his palm.

“What’s a cinder?” Kim asked, teeth tugging at her lip. “Like a rock?”

“This is all very helpful,” Deenie said. Gabby couldn’t really want Skye here. She was only making it worse. Worse than even the pictures on the Internet. “Thanks, Skye.”

“So then what happened?” Gabby asked, Larue’s tail tickling her neck.

Skye shrugged. “I didn’t read it all. Maybe they burned a bunch of people in the town square. That’s what they usually do.”

“No,” Gabby said, “I mean to the girl. What happened to her?”

“Oh,” Skye said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”

Deenie sat down on the roll-arm next to Gabby.

“Mrs. Daniels came to our house this morning,” Deenie said.

Gabby looked up at her. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Deenie said, realizing it herself.

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Skye was kneeling on the sofa, looking out the window. Larue leaped from Gabby’s lap and winnowed between Skye’s calves and scuffed boot heels.

“Gabby, are you going back to the doctor today?” Kim asked.

“We’re waiting and seeing,” Gabby said, her fingers flying back to her scalp. “For some results or something. I can’t think of what more they could do. Or ask. ‘Have you visited a foreign country recently? Have you been camping? Could you be pregnant?’”

There was a banging sound from somewhere in the house.

“That’s Mom,” Gabby said, jumping to her feet. “She’s probably not going to like you guys cutting.”

Skye didn’t move, so Deenie didn’t either. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Gabby and she had to before it was late.

“Gabby,” she asked abruptly, “did they ask you anything about the lake?”

“The lake?” Kim looked at Deenie, her face animating. “What about it?”

Deenie watched the back of Skye’s head, which didn’t move.

“We were there last week,” Skye said, looking at Deenie. “Isn’t that what you mean, Deenie?”

And then something happened.

Gabby’s jaw jolted suddenly to the left, then jolted again and again.

Grabbing the chair arm, she pressed her face against the back cushion to try to stop it.

Kim was watching, her fingers to her mouth as Gabby’s jaw slammed into the cushion over and over.

They were all watching.

“Don’t tell my mom,” Gabby said, her jaw popping like a firecracker. “Deenie, don’t.”

Sitting in the parking lot, Tom spread the newspaper across the steering wheel and read the article. He hadn’t wanted to read it in front of Deenie and he didn’t want to be seen reading it in school.

There was a large photo of Lise and Gabby, cropped. In the original version—slapped, milk-spattered, to Tom’s refrigerator door the previous fall—Deenie stood beside Gabby. In the newspaper, only Deenie’s hand remained, resting on Gabby’s shoulder like a ghost’s. The three girls, tanned and triumphant during trip to WaterWonders last fall. Lise bursting from a star-spangled halter top that, no matter how she shifted or twisted, always seemed to land one of its biggest star in the center of a breast, a bull’s-eye.

He’d taken the girls himself, with Eli as company, both pretending not to hear the high frenzy of the backseat, the girls talking the whole eighty-minute drive in a language impenetrable and self-delighted. On the ride back, their bodies chlorine-streaked to numbness, a torpor set in and he and Eli could watch the twilit horizon stretched across the windshield, and not say a word.

…Lise Daniels, 16, remains unconscious at St. Ann’s Hospital. Doctors would not confirm a connection between her condition and that of her best friend and fellow orchestra member Gabrielle Bishop, also 16. Bishop was given an EEG, among other tests. An unnamed source tells the Beacon that the results were “in the normal range,” suggesting no seizure had occurred…

Midway down was another photo inset. A creamy lavender brochure he recognized.

HPV and Your Daughter: Vaccinate Today, Protect Her Forever

Oh no, he thought. Here it is. What Sheila was raving about this morning. Alongside the photo came the subhead:

…school and hospital officials have been tight-lipped. “It is not our role to speculate,” Hospital Superintendent Bradford noted in an e-mail. “It’s our job to get to the bottom of this and to see that these girls receive the best possible care.”

This stance appears to carry little weight with Sheila Daniels, 43, mother of the first afflicted girl, who is still waiting for answers, especially about a controversial new vaccination that has had many parents nationwide crying foul…

There was a quote from Mindy Parker’s father, Drew Parker, Esq., who was now speaking on Sheila Daniels’s behalf.

“The situation has escalated beyond one mother’s personal tragedy to a potential public health crisis,” he said. “We can’t rely on the public health department as our sole information source. After all, they were the ones who promoted this particular vaccination.”

While officials at the health department had not returned calls at press time, one source there, speaking off the record, said the vaccine in question is “very safe. As safe as these things get.”

Tom looked at the brochure inset again. Protect her forever. It had accompanied the letter all the parents in the school system had received the prior summer.

Parents of all rising sixth-grade girls are required to submit evidence of immunization or an opt-out notice, but all parents are strongly urged to vaccinate their daughters. The main cause of cervical cancer, HPV is easily transmitted via skin-to-skin contact during sexual activity. It is far more effective if girls get the vaccine before their first sexual contact. For your convenience, the department of health will conduct vaccinations on school grounds on the following dates…

So she’d done it, the whole series. Three boosters over six months. They sent text-message reminders. The final one had been just a few weeks ago.

He’d been glad for it, though he tried not to think about it for long. He knew his daughter would eventually have sex. That any day now she might find a boyfriend and then it was inevitable. That wasn’t the part that bothered him. It was the peril out there. Infections, cancer, a havoc upon his sweet daughter’s small, graceful little body. One she held so closely, so tightly. Even hugging her, he felt her smallness and delicacy.

She liked the high dive and played soccer and, in gym class or touch football with Eli and himself, was always bold and fearless. Skinned knees, bruised elbow, I can play too . But sometimes he wondered if that was by necessity, a girl living with two males, a girl who might rather be up in her room with Gabby, with Lise, or with her books, that endless pile of novels with limp-bodied girls on the cover. Girls in bathtubs, in dark woods. Girls underwater.

And when he touched her, he couldn’t help but think: What happens when someone touches her someday and doesn’t understand these things about her? That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

And now, with Lise and Gabby, he was more glad than ever that he’d done what he could to take care of her. Whatever theories Sheila Daniels held in her fevered head, the shots were not to blame.