Page 110 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Within days, national media channels had picked up the story. News vans from all over logjammed traffic in downtown Granger and circled outside the high school for interviewees like prowling scavengers. We saw our school fractalized across dozens of news stories and then thousands of subsequent video commentaries. TikTok was virulent. Nina Faraday’s name began to trend. Lucy Vale’s too.Blood in the Waterrocketed to number forty-five on the Apple Podcast charts.
The Sharks’ Facebook page was apparently inundated with so much hate speech that Administration disabled comments and then removed it altogether. Alex Spinnaker reported a near constant flow of traffic in and out of Green Gables Ridge, the gated community where both the Steeler-Coxes and Ryan Hawthorne lived. Reese’s messages were erratic in those days, her TikToks almost unwatchable. We felt sorry for her. We sent her heart emojis.
So much had changed since January.
In early May, as the search for Lucy Vale stuttered, petering into sporadic and largely worthless online tips, we peeled away from Rachel Vale’s grief, from her continued agitation to get answers, explanations, some closure that we knew would never come. Ominous graffiti appeared on the side of the Aquatics Center:Where are the girls?Days later, the message had spread like some kind of fast-growing mold to colonize downtown buildings and even the Byron Park gazebo.Where are the girls?
We weren’t even sure whether to blame the graffiti on outsiders. As news about Coach Steeler’s relationship with Rachel Vale and possibly Nina Faraday exploded across the internet, our attitudes toward the swim team cracked, exposing a rot of hidden resentment. We sent pictures of our windshields, denuded of their Sharks decals after hours of work. We soaped and scrubbed our bumpers to clean them of their Sharks stickers, leaving a film of shredded plastic behind as evidence. It wasn’t unusual in those days to see garbage cans full of Sharks merchandise dragged out to the curb for pickup. It even became a trend to demonstrate support for the Vales and the other women who seeped forward to report creepy interactions with Coach Steeler—at Woodward High School and later at the University of Arizona, where he’d taken a position after Nina’s disappearance.
Of course, many people shifted the opposite direction, shaking out Sharks banners, staking team colors in their yards—even displaying posters of Coach Steeler in their windows to gaze benevolently down on us like some long-dead cult leader. We rifted across generational lines. The athletes banded together and largely threw in with the Sharks. Riley French attempted to strike some middle ground by suggesting that Coach Steeler’s questionable behavior over the years had been the product of his environment and the backward morals of the world twenty years earlier. She was roundly ridiculed on the general thread for being an apologist. Charlotte Anderson reportedly had a screaming fight with her grandfather, who referred to both Nina Faraday and Rachel Vale as home-wreckers. She didn’t see how she could bring herself to cash his graduation check.
We told her to go ahead and spend his money.
We shuddered and lurched toward the end of the school year. We reported to school bleary-eyed, paranoid, shell-shocked, like soldiers to another day at the front.
We eked through our homework. We drove with our windows down. We scraped bird shit off our windshields.
A slow seep of rumor darkened around Noah Landry and the reason for his record times.Noah Landry uses steroids. All the club swimmers cheat. Coach Vernon knows.Swimmers marauded through the halls looking ferocious and beleaguered like starved pack animals. We heard that the Aquatics booster fund was in danger of drying up; if the money vanished, so would our swim program.
Skyler Matthews dyed her hair.
Sofia Young came to school drunk and puked in third-period English.
Charlotte Anderson began picking out her eyebrows.
Reese dropped the Steeler from her last name, insisting that we call her Reese Cox.
Even Spinnaker began distancing himself from the swimmers after years of clamoring for their approval like some deranged lapdog. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that he believed all the stories about Coach Steeler. He reminded us that Rachel Vale had been twenty-two years old and an adult when she claimed he’d pressured her to have sex. He pointed out that being a dirtbag and a cheater weren’t the same as being a predator.
@badprincess:what about Nina Faraday?
@badprincess:she was seventeen
@spinn_doctor:we don’t know that he ever touched Nina Faraday
@spinn_doctor:all we have is Rachel Vale’s word for it
@swifty99:Nina was definitely pregnant
@bassicrhythm:there was a used pregnancy test in her duffel bag. She had it wrapped up in plastic
@badprincess:a used pregnancy test, gym shoes, and an SAT test prep book
@swifty99:ew
@swifty99:why
@badprincess:I guess she was studying for the SATs?
@swifty99:no I mean why the pregnancy test?
@skyediva:maybe proof? Or she didn’t want to throw it out at home
@spinn_doctor:just because Nina was pregnant doesn’t mean Steeler’s the one who knocked her up
@lululemonaide:Rachel Vale is a well-respected journalist
@lululemonaide:I doubt she’d lie
