Megan Abbott: The Fever

No one said anything for a moment. Skye was somehow to be trusted in these matters. It was all part of her mystique. That white-blond hair, like a dream of a California girl, and thrift-store peacoats, the slave bracelets and green vinyl cowboy boots. Sunny, the artist aunt she lived with but whom Deenie had never seen and who taught classes at a glass studio three towns over and let Skye’s ex-boyfriend sleep over, even though he was supposedly twenty-six years old, though no one had ever actually seen him either. The rumor was he’d been one of her aunt’s students, or even her boyfriend. After they broke up, Skye wore his coat, a long leather Shaft duster, to school every day until a hard winter rain shredded it.

“Well, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with guys,” Kim said, facing them again, twisting her lips. “Maybe she’s just sick.”

Deenie picked up her phone and began typing.

[Eye roll], she texted Gabby, whose phone burbled immediately.

Gabby looked at her phone, grinned. Kim looked at both of them questioningly.

Nobody said anything, Kim’s eyes darting back and forth between them.

“Well,” Kim said, rising, tugging again at her tights, the ones just like Gabby’s favorite pair, silver striped, “I got stuff to do.”

“See ya,” Deenie said, and they all watched until she was gone.

Nestling next to Gabby, Deenie let her head knock against hers.

Skye stood up, grabbing her purse, and Deenie’s chest lifted in anticipation. At last, she’d have Gabby alone.

But then Gabby rose too, looping her arm in Skye’s to gain footing.

“Bye, Deenie,” Skye said, already turning away.

“See you, Deenie,” Gabby said, smiling apologetically. “Next semester I hope we get the same lunch period.”

“Yeah,” said Deenie, watching them walk away, their hair—Gabby’s dark to Skye’s bone-white—swinging in sync, their matching metallic tights. Those two leaving together again. Which happened a lot lately, like last week at the lake, and other times. Leaving together and leaving Deenie alone.

“Nash, get your ass to class.”

Coach Haller’s face was always red, like a tomato with a crew cut. Eli’s dad said he looked like every coach he’d ever known.

“Yes, sir,” Eli said, rising from the locker-room bench. He had that crazy cold-hot feeling from the practice drills in the makeshift rink outside, the hot shower after, the school always blasting with forced heat that seemed to groan through the building.

He’d been staring a long time at the picture on his phone, the girl in the purple underwear. Something about it.

And then there was the other thing. Something he’d overheard that morning, about his sister. Someone seeing her get into a car last night, with some guy. And then there was A.J., that smirk of his.

All of that and looking at the purple panties on his phone, the girl’s skin shining like girls’ skin always seemed to. He began to feel a little queasy.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have a sister, though he loved Deenie and still remembered the feeling he had when he caught that kid Ethan pushing her off the swing set in the school yard in fifth grade. And how time seemed to speed up until he was shoving the kid into the fence and tearing his jacket. The admiring look his sister gave him after, the way his parents pretended to be mad at him but he could tell they weren’t.

These days, it was pretty different. There’d be those moments he was forced to think about her not just as Deenie but as the girl whose slender tank tops hung over the shower curtain. Like bright streamers, like the flair the cheerleaders threw at games.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have a sister.

“Tell me again what Lise said,” Gabby said when they caught each other between classes. “When you saw her.”

“She wanted to know what happened to her,” Deenie said. “She was really scared.”

She couldn’t remember any more than that, it had happened so fast. And now Kim’s grimy insinuations, and Skye and her deadpan cool, were laid over her own bad feelings. She couldn’t think. She just kept picturing Lise’s face, the way her bare legs jerked when she went down.

“We should go check on her,” Gabby said, scratching her palm. “See how she’s doing.”

“Leave school?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get busted,” Deenie said. “You will.” Gabby had had two detentions in the last month, one for smoking clove cigarettes with Skye in the kiln room and one for wandering off school property, sneaking to Skye’s house, just a few blocks away.

“You, then. You won’t get in trouble,” Gabby said. “Your dad would understand.”

“I’m not sure,” Deenie said, but she knew she would go. Gabby was right. Someone had to see.

The bus ride was quick, and no one saw her.

Lise lived with her mom in a duplex on Easter Way. Despite all these years of being friends with her, Deenie had spent little time there.

“My mom doesn’t like me to make lots of noise,” Lise always said. Though they had never been noisy girls. At her own house, they spent most of their time watching movies and lying on Deenie’s bed, listening to music and talking about how someday they’d travel through Africa or hand-feed stingrays in Bora Bora or ride Arabian horses in some desert, somewhere.

But Lise’s mom usually preferred Lise to be at home with her, especially lately, when her daughter seemed to look more and more like she herself looked in her old modeling scrapbooks, posing in the Spiegel catalog and at trade shows, gold-shellacked hair and large breasts.

“Yes, she’s a lovely woman,” Deenie’s dad had said when Lise once suggested he date her mother. “Very lovely.”

He said it very politely, like the time Deenie showed him the two-piece bathing suit her mom had bought her last summer. After, Deenie hid it in the back of the drawer and never wore it.

“Mr. Nash, I think she’d be so happy if she found a boyfriend,” Lise had added, watching Mr. Nash as he focused intently on their English muffins, the toaster buzzing red beneath him.

“Lise,” Deenie said later, “you can barely stand her. Why should my dad have to?”

As soon as the words came out, she regretted them.

But Lise had just sighed, winsomely, her pretty face crumpling a little.

“I just wish she had something to do. Other than watch my Facebook page.”

Walking the three blocks from the bus stop, Deenie felt sure this was the right thing to do.

By the time she reached the front door, though, it felt like a big mistake. Except she’d promised Gabby, and, anyway, it looked like no one was home.

A long minute passed after she’d rung the bell.

She felt a grim thickness in the front of her head, a feeling of knowing something very important without knowing what it really meant. It reminded her of the day her mom decided to move out. The stillness in the morning, the house keys sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.

Her dad had spent hours shoveling the driveway, the front walk. She hadn’t thought he’d ever come back inside.

Suddenly, the front door swung open. It was an older woman, her short white hair closely cropped, coat half open, purse slipping from her arm.

Deenie was pretty sure it was Lise’s grandmother, but friends’ grandmothers all kind of looked alike.

“Oh!” the woman said, startled. “Honey, what are you doing here?”

“I came to see how Lise was,” Deenie said. “I was there when she—”

“She’s not here,” the woman blurted, her hands shaking wildly, car keys tight in red fingers. “They took her to the hospital. I’m going there now.”