Megan Abbott - The Fever

“Where’s Eli,” she said and it wasn’t her voice now but her voice in an old home video, long-ago Christmas mornings, a canoe trip, the time she first rode a bike and fell elbow first onto the sidewalk. “Daddy, he’s poisoned.”

A two-liter nestled between his legs, Eli held Gabby’s letter in his hand.

He was drinking fast, trying to wake up, to shake off the final dregs of the smoke, to understand what he’d read and what it meant.

There were revelations tumbling through his head—so many moments that looked different now, how he’d read them all wrong—but he pushed them aside for the moment because of the sickly urgency he felt. Now I have to fix things , she’d written, a sentence that had a sense of purpose. And finality.

He picked up the kitchen phone again, realized he didn’t have her number.

Pulling his laptop out of his bag, he e-mailed Gabby, the first time he ever had.

Gabby, call me. come back.

Then he sat for a second, waiting, hoping.

All those times with Gabby, her stern and mysterious face. To matter so much to someone you hardly thought about. Someone who maybe didn’t even wonder about you, or check in much to see if you were okay because that person wasn’t thinking about you, not really, and maybe had moved far away, three hours or something, just far enough to be able to put you out of her mind whenever she wanted.

The phone rang.

“Eli, it’s Dad.”

“Hey,” Eli said. “Gabby left. And this thing happened. I don’t know—”

“Are you okay, Eli?” his dad said, his voice even more breathless than before. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, Dad, but Gab—”

“We’ll be right there, okay? Don’t—just sit still, okay? Just don’t do anything.”

“What?” Eli said, but all he heard was the smack of tires on a wet road, then a click.

She saw the car, the only car in the world, the streets desolate and haunted, like a town during a plague.

“Deenie,” her dad was shouting from the rolled-down window.

And the car nearly jumped the curb, spraying her with gathered water.

“You were supposed to go to Eli,” she shouted, holding her trapper hat on her head, heavy with rain.

“Deenie,” he said, “get in.”

She stood for a second, looking at her father, his face red and fevered, hands gripping the wheel.

She felt so sorry for him.

Eli kept trying to tell them he was okay, but they wouldn’t listen.

Knees up in the backseat, Deenie had her head buried in her arms, and he thought she might be crying.

Dad drove faster than Eli had ever seen anyone drive, faster even than A.J. drag-racing by the old wire factory outside of town.

“Did you drink something?” his dad kept asking. “Did someone give you something? How about in your thermos?”

“What? No. I don’t have a thermos,” he said. “I’m okay, Dad.”

“You’re not,” Deenie said from the back. “You think you are, but you’re not.”

The hospital was there, lit so brightly it hurt his eyes, the parking lot like the school’s before a big game.

Their headlights skated across a pair of girls, maybe ten or eleven, in flannel pajamas, their mother with an arm around each of them, rushing them inside. They both wore big slippers—lobsters and bunny rabbits—oozing with gray rain, so heavy they could barely lift their feet.

Time shuttered to a stop as Eli watched them, their faces blue in the light, looking at the windshield, at him. He squinted and saw they were older than they’d first looked. The one with the bunny slippers he recognized as the sophomore girl everyone called Shawty, the one who’d snuck into his bedroom months ago, the one who’d cried when it was over, worried she’d done it all wrong. After, she’d stayed in the bathroom a long time. When she came out, her face was bright with pain.

Girls changed after, he thought. Before, she’d been texting him all the time, pulling her shirt up at games, saying all the things she wanted to do to him, flashing that thong at him.

And then after. But it changed for him after too. Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters.

And now here she was, hair scraped back from her baby face, and she had stopped, and she was looking at him.

Recognizing him, remembering things. A hard wince sweeping across that soft face.

And he wasn’t sure what her real name was.

Then came the girl’s mother’s burly arm covering her face, hoisting her along, and the girl was gone, lost behind the hospital’s sliding doors.

“Deenie,” Eli said, turning around to face his sister, “did Gabby find you? Did you talk to her?”

And she just shook her head, eyes wide and startled, mouth fixed.

“Because I have to show you something. You need to see something.”

Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the note, damp in his hands.

A blurry half hour after he’d left, Tom was back in the hospital waiting room, this time with Eli and Deenie.

Eli, glassy-eyed, an arm around his sister, her face colorless, mouth slightly open.

He hadn’t been able to get anything coherent from Deenie.

Like when she was little and would lose her breath and all he could do was say it would be okay, everything would be okay.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

Now, his heart still jamming against his chest, he tried to settle himself. He needed to be ready for anything.

There was something about seeing Eli, his hand on his sister’s arm, saying things in her ear, that was beginning to work on him.

To calm him.

To make his breaths come slow, to let him stand back and see them both.

When her dad went up to the reception window, Deenie turned to Eli. He had something in his hand and kept trying to show it to her.

It was a piece of paper, like a wet leaf, and she recognized Gabby’s tight scrawl.

She read in what felt like slow motion, each word shuddering a moment before locking into focus.

The first time I met you, back when Deenie and me were just freshmen, you wore a shirt with a dinosaur on it.

The things Skye said, they were true.

She thinks I need her but she’s the one who needs me. I make her feel more interesting.

She read it and thought of everything that had ever happened with her and Gabby, and all the things she’d held tight to her own chest. About her part of the story, about Sean Lurie. And how neither Gabby nor Skye would ever find out.

Why should she tell them?

Your sister’s a really good person , Gabby had written. But she doesn’t know me at all.

Maybe we don’t really know anybody, Deenie thought. And maybe nobody knows us.

The nurse was crazily beautiful, like a nurse in a porno movie, and Eli thought he must still be high, all these hours later.

Her breasts seemed to brush up against him every time she moved, checking his eyes, his pulse. Asking him a series of questions and then asking again.

Fifteen minutes before, he’d peed into a cup, handed it to her.

“Nothing here,” she said now, looking at the results. It seemed impossibly fast.

“I haven’t done any drugs,” he said. “I don’t use drugs.”

He wondered if his dad, standing just a few feet away, was also noticing how beautiful the nurse was. But his dad didn’t seem to notice anything, his eyes set on Eli, his gaze intent.

Another nurse, her scrubs dark with sweat, rolled a cart past them, the wheels screeching.

“I just don’t know how we get out of this,” she was saying to the beautiful nurse. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”