Megan Abbott - The Fever

And, stepping farther back under the black canopy of the tree, Skye seemed to draw herself into herself, a tiny white flower.

There, hidden, her voice low and forceful and insistent, almost a chant, she told Deenie a story, the way only Skye would tell it.

Of how she and Gabby became friends, true friends, because they both knew how to keep secrets. How one night last year, Skye caught her hiding in the tall trees by the school, watching Eli Nash skating by himself on the practice rink. She was so embarrassed, and Skye said she shouldn’t be and invited Gabby to her house to do the love tarot.

They sat for hours and Gabby told Skye she’d loved Eli since the day she met him, and he was all she thought about. And that she loved Deenie but that she’d mostly become friends with her because of Eli, whom she loved so much she wanted to die.

It never stopped, the feeling, and watching him with all those girls, once or twice hearing them in Deenie’s house, was almost too much for Gabby to bear. Sometimes she even thought that if it weren’t for Deenie…

But Skye had told her it didn’t matter. That was how guys were, trapped for years in the mindless mojo of lust. And together they cast love spells from the Internet, mixing honey, oils, and leaves with things—hair, pens, stick wax, a roll of grip tape—stolen from Eli’s backpack, his house.

Once, they used a dove heart Skye’s cat carried in from the backyard.

Once, they used menstrual blood.

And then one day it happened, or they thought it did.

I saw him in the hallway, Gabby said, and you should have seen it, the way he looked at me. I know it worked. I know it.

To bind it, Skye cautioned, they would have to send him a picture. If it stays on his phone for twelve days, the spell will work. And Gabby said she’d do it. She was not afraid.

But the spell didn’t work in time. Or it worked the wrong way. It worked for Lise.

Because one morning, a week ago, Skye was walking to school, late, head full of bad dreams like always, and she saw it all. Saw the secret. Behind the bushes. Lise and Eli Nash.

She told Gabby what she’d seen. And Gabby could think of nothing else: I want to die , she told Skye. I’m dying now.

The next day, they’d all gone to the lake.

Gabby was so angry, couldn’t even look at Lise, Lise showing off her body in the water. And that spot on the inside of her thigh, like a moon, a kiss, a witch’s mark. The whole time, Gabby kept whispering to Skye, She stole him from me.

And so Skye promised to reverse it. And she knew just how.

Sulfur, honey, and dried jimson flowers from the bushes out back, the kind that bloomed at night. They’re called love-will. She’d found it in a book. A spell to scare a faithless lover into repentance.

She made the mixture and gave it to Gabby and Gabby put it in Lise’s thermos. It was important that Gabby do it herself. It was the only way the spell would work.

And they couldn’t be responsible for what happened. In fact, didn’t Lise’s reaction show that it was Lise who was a faithless lover? Was holding some bad energy inside that needed to be released?

Deenie listened and listened and finally broke in.

“But you gave Lise… sulfur?”

“Jimson. It runs wild back here. If you dry the leaves and smoke them, you can have visions,” Skye said, stepping back even farther under the heavy branches, only her mouth and chin visible now. “But it only makes visible a darkness that’s already there. Maybe eating it like that…”

She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie’s brain. “Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.”

Deenie felt herself sinking, her hand reaching out for the tree beside her, knuckles pressing into its hard bark.

“They’ll find it,” Deenie said, huskily. “They’re finding everything.”

“I burned it all,” she said, head tilting toward the dredged ashes mixing with the sawdust by the rabbit hutch. That smell Deenie had caught, now nearly gone. “The plants were so beautiful. It’s all done.”

Pressing her hand to her chest, Deenie tried to get a breath that wouldn’t come.

“I’m going to tell,” she whispered.

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

A wind came and Skye’s head dipped down from the tree’s shadow and Deenie saw her face, hair blown back. Her face bare and clean as she’d never seen it. She looked small and dangerous.

“Skye,” she said, softly, “Lise is going to die.”

There was a pause. Deenie couldn’t look at her, her face so naked, her eyes like hard green marbles.

“I’m not sorry, Deenie,” Skye was saying. “And you shouldn’t be. We don’t owe anybody anything.”

Deenie couldn’t imagine anything less true. The hardest part was how much we owed everyone.

“You poisoned her,” Deenie said, feeling her neck throb from its seizing bursts, her whole body aching from it. “You poisoned everybody.”

“No,” Skye said. “She was the only one.”

Deenie looked at her, trying to puzzle it all out, including the long, fevered lurches of her own body, heart. How was it possible?

“And it’s not poison,” Skye said, stepping forward, so close to Deenie she could smell the sawdust, the ashes. “Your brother had some, he smoked some today and he didn’t get sick.”

Deenie lifted her head, eyes on Skye, the white smear of her face. It seemed to happen instantaneously, her body moving fast across the lawn.

“Sheila Daniels, please return to ICU.”

The crackle from the ancient PA system.

“Maybe she’s awake,” Tom said, rising, helping Sheila to her feet.

Her body bobbled between his forearms, her hair slipping from its clip, he grabbed for one shoulder to try to keep her upright.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, “you…”

But she had pulled away from him and charged through the double doors with surprising suddenness and strength.

All Sheila Daniels’s constant, exhausting vigilance over the years looked different now. It made you wonder if, in some obscure way, she had known what was coming and spent all her days raising the ramparts, doing whatever she could to forestall it, or at least prepare for it.

Except what, or who, had she been protecting Lise from? He couldn’t imagine why anyone in the world would want to hurt that sweet girl.

And now he was bounding through the front doors, not stopping to think where he could find Deenie, just knowing he would.

His phone started ringing just as he reached his car.

“Hello?” he answered, not even looking.

“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe and I…”

And it was Deenie’s voice, one he hadn’t heard in a thousand years, and she was saying things, frantically, breathlessly, but with the sound of everything in the world roaring in his ear, he could only hear “Daddy.”

It was five miles or more, even if she found the right shortcuts, iron spreading through her chest as she ran.

There was no guessing about it, but a picture kept coming: Eli’s head hitting the ice, like she’d once seen happen at a practice, his helmet shorn off, two teeth knocked out. Deenie had been there, felt her heart stop.

And her mom running onto the ice, arms around him in seconds. Scrambling to find both teeth. Deenie watched as she foisted them back in Eli’s open mouth. And he was fine. Because Eli was always fine, wasn’t he?

Running faster, breathing harder, her face slicked from the damp, her sneakers nearly twisting off her feet, she pressed her phone against her ear.

Her dad was telling her to slow down, to breathe.