Megan Abbott - The Fever

A middle-aged woman bucked past them, a frizz of blond hair, her bright down coat flapping.

“Oh God,” she said, spotting Deenie. “Oh, honey.”

It was Lise’s mom.

Rushing toward Deenie, she seemed to envelop her in the coat’s puffy squares.

“My baby,” she said, pushing herself against Deenie, a gust of perfume and sweat. “You should see what they’ve done to my baby.”

At first, it was like on television.

On TV, this is when you find out your friend is dead. Her face punched through a windshield in a drunk-driving accident. Strangled by her jealous boyfriend. Locked in a cage by a man she met on the Internet.

Even though it didn’t seem real, Deenie found herself wanting to do what they did on TV, maybe sink to her knees, the camera overhead swirling away from her, the music cueing up.

But then a doctor arrived to talk to Mrs. Daniels.

And hearing him, it became real.

“Deenie,” her dad was saying, “it’s okay.”

He was holding on to her shoulder, which was shaking. She felt her whole body shaking and wondered: Is this how it felt for Lise?

“We’re very lucky she was here when it happened,” the doctor was saying to Mrs. Daniels. “You did the right thing calling 911. Every second counted. A cardiac event of this kind at home…”

“Her heart stopped,” Mrs. Daniels said, her face damp, mascara ashed across her left cheekbone. “I could feel it in my hands.”

Seconds later, Mrs. Daniels and the doctor disappeared behind the swinging doors, and her dad kept trying to explain things to her.

“Lise had a seizure at home,” he said, “a bad one. And her mom called an ambulance. Something happened to her heart, but they were able to stabilize her. They’re taking good care of her.”

Deenie nodded and nodded, but all she could think was she wished he weren’t there with her. All the smiling-at-nurses in the world wouldn’t get her behind those doors to see Lise. She believed if her dad were gone she could find a way to get back there. She and Gabby always found ways to get places: behind the tall fences at the shuttered train depot, into that room in the school’s basement where they kept old VCRs so they could watch a mildewed cassette of Romeo + Juliet during Back to School Night.

“We can wait,” he said, “if you want.”

“Okay.”

“Let me just drive over to the school and set it up with my classes. And tell Eli.”

Deenie nodded.

“Are you going to be okay here, by yourself?” He looked worried.

“I am, Dad,” she said, keeping her voice even, steady. “I have to stay.”

Sitting in one of the metal chairs, as far from the angry man with the droopy mustache as possible, she tried to text Gabby but couldn’t think what to say.

Then she saw a couple, the woman with a crying toddler in green overalls sobbing at her hip. They were talking to a doctor and nurse in front of the same double doors Lise’s mom had exited.

Behind them, somewhere inside the belly of St. Ann’s, was Lise.

She couldn’t believe no one saw her walk in, but then many times she felt invisible. At school, the mall, she could feel people walk right through her. Sometimes, with boys, she realized they could see straight behind her head, to blond-lashed Lise, to long-legged Gabby, to anyone else but her.

His leg shook a little on the gas. He was thinking about Deenie in that waiting room with the growling man with the coffee-damp mustache and who knew what new arrivals. Downriver bikers with meth mouths, suburban predators prowling for teenage girls.

Lately, when he read the crime-beat section of the paper, he’d begun to feel his once-gentle town, their little Brigadoon, was teeming with endless threats imperiling his children.

He could hear Georgia’s voice buzzing in his head.

So you left her there? You couldn’t just call the school? Call our son?

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

At least his version of it.

It was just before lunch and the corridors were swollen with students, dozens of hunch-hooded sweatshirts, the boys shoving one another into lockers while the girls glided by in low-tops, skirts, and three layers of tights, their smiles nervous and intricate. He spent half his day feeling sorry for girls.

His phone vibrating, he thought it might be Deenie, but the minute he moved past the front entryway, the screen went black, his signal lost.

When he stepped out again, he couldn’t get it back.

He waited at Eli’s locker, and waited, and then the second bell rang, and everyone scattered, backpacks like cockroach shells.

There was a slight ripple in his chest. Where is Eli, anyway? As if Eli were as reliable as an elevator and not his shaggy, perennially late son.

He’ll be here any second , he told himself, but a nagging fear came from nowhere: What if, what if?

Rounding the corner, he spotted was his son’s blaring-blue hockey jersey.

There he was, standing in front of his calculus class, shoving folded papers into a textbook.

Tall and carefree and more handsome than any son of his had a right to be. And late as ever, for everything. It was hard to explain the relief he felt.

“Dad?” Eli said, looking up, surprised. “Dad, why are you smiling?”

Walking through the cafeteria, Eli Nash was thinking about Lise, whom he’d known since she was bucktoothed and round as a tennis ball. She’d grown into the teeth, but not all the way, and the overbite made her look older, like her new body did, like everything did. She’d been one of those baby-fatted girls who laughed too loudly, covering their mouths, squealing. Then, at some point, overnight, she’d done something, or God had, because she was so pretty it sometimes hurt to look at her.

It felt like, whatever happened now, Lise was maybe gone. That maybe it’d be like his friend Rufus, who’d hit his head on the practice rink last year and who seemed okay but never laughed at anyone’s jokes and sometimes couldn’t smell his food.

“Eli,” his dad had said, finding him before calculus. Wearing a funny smile like the one he’d have after Eli had had a rough game, a cut over his eye, a stick across the face. “Can you do something for me?”

He said of course he would.

Right away, he spotted Gabby in the cafeteria’s far corner, where she always sat, usually with his sister, their heads together as if planning a heist.

Gabby was the one all the girls puppy-dogged after at school, the kind other girls thought was “gorgeous” and guys didn’t get at all. Or they got something, which made them nervous. Made him nervous.

All the stuff that had gone down with her family, it seemed to give her this thick glaze, like the old tables in the library that shone golden-like, with dark whorls, but when you got close and touched them, they felt like plastic, like nothing. All they did was push splinters into your hand.

Eli didn’t much like sitting in the library either.

She was spinning a can of soda between her palms, that girl Skye lurking behind her, the one with all the bracelets and heavy skirts, the one who got suspended once for coming to health class with a copy of the Kama Sutra, which she said was her aunt Sunny’s, as if it were something everyone had at home, like the dictionary.

“Gabby,” he said, tapping her shoulder.

Gabby’s head whipped around and she looked at him, eyes wide.

“Oh!” she said. “Eli. You scared me.”

Skye was looking at him, her eyes narrow, and Eli removed his fingers quickly from Gabby’s shoulder.