Megan Abbott - The Fever

“Sorry,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a second?” He looked at Skye. “Alone?”

“Okay,” Gabby said, slowly. “Sure.”

They walked over to one of the far tables. Gabby was almost as tall as he was and had a big heap of hair on top of her head, like Skye and so many of the other girls seemed to be copying. Sometimes they’d put their hair in heavy braids they’d wrap across their heads and he didn’t get it but figured it was a fashion thing beyond his grasp.

“Deenie’s at the hospital,” he said as they sat down, “with Lise. Something happened to Lise. I figured you might not know.”

“I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head.

Three tables behind, Eli could see still Skye, her ringed fingers clawed around her phone, head bowed, typing something.

“I mean, I didn’t know Deenie was at the hospital,” Gabby said. “Or that Lise was.”

He didn’t think he’d ever sat so close to Gabby, her skin pale and that serious expression she always wore. He had the sense of so many things going on behind that face.

“Yeah,” Eli said. “They had to call an ambulance, I guess. She’s there now.”

Gabby’s phone buzzed slightly on the table. They both looked at it.

“So, what happened? Is it…” Gabby started. “Is it mono again?”

Eli paused, licking his lips.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Once she got behind the double doors, Deenie had no idea how to find Lise. There was a feeling to the place like in the basement at school, where they held classes for a while when enrollment ran too high. A furnacey smell and uncertain buzzing and whirring sounds. Turning the corners, the floor sloping, you felt like you were going down into something no one knew about, had forgotten about.

At the end of the first long hallway she could see an old man sitting in a wheelchair, his white hair tufted high like a cartoon bird. He was wearing a very nice robe, quilted, like in an old movie. She wondered who’d bought it for him and where that person was now.

The man’s head kept drifting from side to side, his mouth open in a kind of perpetual, silent panic. How did this happen? Why am I here?

“Hi,” she said as she approached, surprising herself.

He looked up with a start, his swampy green eyes trying to focus on her.

“Not another one?” he said, his voice small and wavery. “Are you another one?”

One hand lifted forward from his silken lap.

She smiled uneasily, not knowing what else to do.

“Okay, well,” she said, and kept walking.

Maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re old, she thought. Always more young people, a parade of them going by. Here’s another one.

“I hope it will be okay,” he said, his voice rising as she passed. “I hope.”

Far down the hall now, her head feeling hot, she turned to look back at him.

“I… I…” he was saying, his voice like a creak.

She started to smile at him but saw his face—from this distance a white smudge—and stopped.

It took five minutes, and no one questioned her or even seemed to notice.

Rushing as if with purpose, she spotted Mrs. Daniels’s turquoise coat in an open doorway, hovering just inside the threshold, Lise’s grandmother beside her.

Walking in, she saw the hospital bed webbed with wires, a sickly sac hanging in one corner like a trapped mite. It reminded her of Skye once telling them that you should put cobwebs on wounds, that it stopped blood.

“Deenie,” Mrs. Daniels cried out. “Look at our Lisey.”

The puff of both women’s winter coats, the sputtering monitor, a nurse suddenly coming behind her, and Mrs. Daniels sobbing to breathlessness—Deenie pushed past it all to try to get closer to Lise. Like people did in the movies, she would push past everything. She would not be stopped.

But when she got to the foot of Lise’s bed, she halted.

All she could see was a violet blur and something that looked like a dent down the middle of Lise’s delicate forehead.

“What happened,” Deenie said, a statement more than a question. “What’s wrong with her.”

“She hit her head on the coffee table,” the grandmother said. As if that were the problem. As if the purple gape on Lise’s brow were the problem here. Were why they were all here.

Though it kind of felt that way to Deenie too because there it was. A broken mirror where the pieces didn’t line up. Splitting Lise’s face in two. Changing it.

“That’s not Lise,” Deenie said, the words falling from her mouth.

Everyone looked at her, Mrs. Daniels’s chin shaking.

But it felt true.

The nurse took Deenie’s arm roughly.

“They always look different,” the nurse said. “She’s very weak. You need to leave.”

Mrs. Daniels made a moaning sound, tugging on her mother’s coat front.

“But are you sure it’s her?” Deenie asked as the nurse walked her to the door. “Mrs. Daniels, are you sure that’s Lise?”

Pulling into the hospital lot, Tom found his daughter standing out front, pogo-ing on the sidewalk to keep warm.

She climbed inside the car.

“Dad, I don’t want to be there anymore, okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “No one likes hospitals.”

Her chin kept jogging up and down, but she wouldn’t look at him.

“I don’t like it there,” she said. “I really don’t.”

“I know,” he said, watching her scroll through text messages. One after another, they arrived, her phone sputtering in her hand.

She hadn’t met his eyes once.

“Deenie,” he said, “I think I should just take you home.”

“I think…” she started, then set her phone on her lap. “I want to go back to school, Dad.”

There was an energy on her that worried him, like right before she left for her mom’s place each month. Sometimes it felt like she spent hours putting things in and taking things out of her backpack. Blue sweater in, blue sweater out, Invisible Man in, then out, biting her lip and staring upward. What is it I need, what is missing.

“A lot’s happening,” he tried again. “We can go home. Watch a movie. I’ll heat up those frozen turnovers. Those fat apple ones you love. Your favorite Saturday-night special.”

“When I was twelve,” she said, like that was a million years ago. It had been their weekly ritual. She liked to watch teen movies from the ’80s and make fun of their hair but by the end she would tear up when the tomboy with the wrong clothes danced with the prom king under pink balloons and scattered lights. It turned out he had missed the perfect girl, right in front of him all along.

“I just want to be at school,” she said, softly. He guessed there might be something soothing about the noise and routine of school. Except she didn’t know yet that the school didn’t feel routine right now.

“Okay,” he said, after a pause. “If you’re sure.”

His mind was full of ideas, ways to comfort her, all of them wrong.

“But Deenie,” he said.

“Yeah, Dad.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. The eternal parent lie, a hustle.

She seemed to hear him but not really hear him.

“I don’t think it was even her,” she said, a tremble to her voice.

“Was who? Did you see her, Deenie? At the hospital?”

She nodded, her fingerless gloves reaching up to her face.

“Just for a second. But I don’t think that was Lise,” she repeated, shaking her head.

“Baby,” he said, slowing the car down. He wondered what she’d seen. How bad Lise looked. “It was her.”

“I mean, none of it was Lise,” she said, eyes on the traffic as they approached the school. “In class this morning too. Watching her. She looked so weird. So angry.”