Megan Abbott: The Fever

Sometimes it was annoying. The way the three of them would be like this little knot in the house. He could hear them through the wall at night, laughing.

Lately, Lise and Gabby didn’t seem to come over as much, or maybe he’d just stopped noticing. But it always felt weird when girls were laughing together and you didn’t know why. Sometimes it was like they knew all these things he didn’t.

Other times he wondered if they knew anything at all.

They didn’t know about guys, as far as he could tell. At least not the things he wished his sister knew. He would catch her looking at Ryan Denning or that guy who won Battle of the Bands. That dreamy expression she wore, her face showing everything she was feeling. Imagining big love and romance, he guessed. But she didn’t realize what they saw, looking back at her: a girl, lips slightly parted, her head tilted hungrily. What they saw was I’m ready. Let’s go.

“Nash,” a voice rang out.

Eli looked up and saw A.J., the team captain, baseball cap low to cover his cigarette.

“Bro,” he said, “you missed it. I got an eyeful of Lise Daniels’s pretty white ass this morning.” He tilted his head toward the school. “Come on. Who knows what’s next?”

Eli felt the cold in his lungs, the ache of it. It felt good out here, and just looking at A.J. made him tired. All the effort, hat brim angled, jacket open. Smirk.

“Nah,” he said. “Not yet.”

A.J. grinned. “I feel you,” he said.

Eli nodded, pushing off on his skates, gliding backward.

“Say hi to your sister for me,” A.J. shouted.

Turning his head, Eli felt his skate catch a fallen branch.

The library was quiet, a glass-walled hothouse overlooking a narrow creek dense with mud.

Deenie found Gabby behind the gray bank of computers at the far wall. She was sitting on the floor, her sneakers pressed against the tall reference volumes on the lowest shelf, knees bent.

As always, she wasn’t alone, was bookended by two girls.

To her right crouched thick-braced Kim Court, in her usual pose, whispering in Gabby’s ear.

And to her left sat Skye Osbourne, her blond hair spanning the moldy world atlases behind her. Lately, Skye was always around, that web of hair, her long mantis sleeves.

All three looked up when they saw Deenie.

“What did you hear?” Gabby asked, fingers tapping on her lip.

“Nothing,” Deenie said, sliding down to the floor next to Kim.

She wished it were just her and Gabby. No one else to hear them and they could talk about Lise alone.

This was their favorite place to meet. It always felt hidden, forgotten. The gold-lettered World Book encyclopedias from the 1980s. The smell of old glue and crumbling paper, the industrial carpet burning her palms.

It reminded her of what you did when you were a little girl, making little burrows and hideaways. Like boys did with forts. Eli and his friend, stacking sofa cushions, pretending to be sharpshooters. With girls, you didn’t call them forts, though it was the same.

This was the place Deenie and Gabby first really spoke, freshman year, both of them hiding back here, heads ducked over identical books (something about angels, back when that was all they read). They’d snuck looks at each other, smiled.

“Did you see her before school?” Deenie asked Gabby.

“No, I was late,” Gabby said. “Skye couldn’t find her purse.”

“Is she pregnant?” whispered Kim, her tongue thrust between her wired teeth.

“What?” Deenie said. “No. Of course not.”

“Pregnant people faint all the time,” Kim said, tugging her tights up her legs, inching as close to Gabby as she could without landing in her lap.

“She’s not pregnant,” Deenie said. Then, turning to Gabby: “Her mom came and took her home.”

Gabby nodded, looking down at her hands, clasped over her notebook. Deenie knew she wished they were alone too. Ever since that first week of school freshman year, it had been hard to find Gabby alone—at least at school, where girls hung from her like tassels.

“How can we go to class when this is going on?” Kim said. “We should go to her house.”

“Have you ever even been to her house?” Deenie said. Kim and Lise occupied starkly opposite poles in a group of friends. A year younger, filled with hard sophomore ambition, Kim was eager to spread herself wide, offering car rides, expensive eye shadow swiped from her mother, free gift cards from her job at the mall. She was the kind of girl you end up being friends with just because. The opposite of Lise, whom Deenie had known since third grade, whom she traded clothes, even underwear, with. Three days ago even helping her unwedge a crooked tampon, Lise laughing the whole time, wiggling her pelvis to assist.

That was how she knew Lise wasn’t pregnant. That, and other reasons, like that Lise was still a virgin, mostly.

“The point is,” Deenie said, “they’re not going to just let us leave school.”

“Maybe it was an allergic reaction,” Skye said, tufting her hair against her cheek thoughtfully. “Don’t you get those?”

Everyone looked at Kim, who was in fact allergic to everything, a special page in the school safety manual devoted to her. Nuts, eggs, wheat, yeast, shellfish, even some kinds of paper.

“I don’t think that was it,” Kim said, unwilling to share her special status. Then, swiveling closer to Gabby, eyes widening, “Oh God, maybe it’s something to do with that one guy.”

Deenie paused. “What guy?”

“You know,” Kim said, dropping her chin, lowering her voice. “Don’t you know?” Her lips were shining, like when she had her sister’s car, waving the keys at everyone like they changed everything. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“There’s no guy,” Deenie said. “So stop making stuff up.”

Boy crazy , that’s what Ms. Enright, the English teacher, called Lise. But who could blame her? No guy had ever looked at Lise until suddenly they all did. Last summer, she wore a white bathing suit hooked with bamboo rings to the big Fourth of July barbecue and someone’s older brother, who was in college, started calling her La Lise and even e-mailed her a song he wrote about her and her Lise-a-licious bikini.

Lise’s mother would never have let her go out with him, but it set something off among the other boys and a fever in Lise, who suddenly decided that all boys were a-mazing, every one.

After that, Lise had vowed she’d never get that baby fat back, and every morning she’d chew on parsley or drank swampy green shakes out of her Dryden Wind & Strings thermos. It was the only way, because her mom made her finish a full glass of buttermilk at night, which, no matter what her mom said, she was sure was full of fat. Maybe she wants me to be fat , Lise said, because she always makes monkey bread too and she knows I can’t stop eating it.

“You must’ve heard,” Kim said, looking to Gabby, then Skye, who didn’t even seem to be listening, her fingers running along the lacy hem of her many-tiered skirt, vintage and complicated.

Gabby shook her head. “Lise didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said, looking at Deenie.

“Okay,” Kim said, smiling enigmatically. “But I didn’t say he was her boyfriend .”

“What would a guy have to do with her fainting anyway?” Deenie asked. “She’s not pregnant.”

“It could be a lot of things that aren’t pregnant,” Skye said, gaze still resting on her hair, webbed between her ringed fingers.

“Like what?” Kim asked, squirming onto her knees with fresh vigor.

“I knew this girl who got this thing from this guy once, an older guy, a club promoter,” Skye said. “He had a big house on the lake and he gave her all this great red-string Thai stick. He leaves for the Philippines, she wakes up with trich. That’s a sexual parasite. It crawls inside you.” She reached down for her bag, tangled with fringe. “So.”