Page 34 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
The next day, Lucy Vale came to school in a SpongeBob SquarePants costume, and we all lost our shit.
We snuck photos of Lucy trying to fumble her locker open with enormous white gloves and maneuvering the crowded hallway in a six-foot-tall cube of smiling Styrofoam. We got a video of Lucy sidling through the portico doors sideways. We bowed to her in the hall.
We couldn’t get enough.
We found out that Nick Topornycky did the best SpongeBob impersonation in school. We were shocked by how good it was. How did a committed gamer with a known alien fetish pull off a SpongeBob impression like that?
We asked him if he even liked SpongeBob SquarePants.
@nononycky:who the fuck doesn’t like Spongebob squarepants?
It was a good point.
Word spread quickly to Admin about Lucy’s costume; it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that went unnoticed. We would have given anything to see Vice Principal Edwards shit a brick when he realized that Lucy was not technically in violation of the school’s new standardsfor dress, had reported to all of her usual classes, and was taking notes as usual—kind of. Her costume was so unwieldy that she couldn’t actually fit the Styrofoam bulk behind a desk, and bulbous white mitts made it impossible to type or hold on to a pen.
Still, she played the whole thing straight. She requested that someone help her press record on her iPhone at the start of every period. And she wasn’t milking it for comedy or attention either. When she raised one of her bulbous hands, it was because she had to ask a question, always on topic.
It was absolute legend.
Lucy made it all the way to third period before she was once again called to Vice Principal Edwards’s office. This time she was sent home to change. By the afternoon, the dress code had been amended by hand—sad work for Keith, the school’s head janitor, who had to go flyer by flyer with a Sharpie—to include a prohibition against costumes. Administration posted a hysterical new message to the portal. Mrs. Steeler-Cox oozed into the font selection, a serif-heavy mess that reminded us of her signature on the summons she had her army of recruits distribute with increasingly liberal abandon.
Lucy’s punishment galvanized a miniature revolt. It was Bailey Lawrence, in fact, who led the charge. Lucy Vale’s outfit, Bailey argued, violated none of the new dress code rules. So what was the problem? Why had she been sent home?
To us, it reeked of sabotage. Was Admin trying to divide us, to repress our spirit, to bury us under so many rules and restrictions that we couldn’t even focus on the upcoming swim season? Somehow the idea got floated that Mrs. Steeler-Cox was having an affair with someone from Jalliscoe and trying to rig the season in their team’s favor.
Admittedly, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Jalliscoe was solid, but they weren’t as good as, say, Willow Park, which almost always made states alongside us. And Mrs. Steeler-Cox was clenched so tightly around her uncle’s legacy, it was a miracle she hadn’t shat out a state trophy by now. On the other hand, we knew that behind the veneer ofschool solidarity, affirmed with soul-deadening regularity on the official school social media accounts—which we followed only out of fear of reprisal—were political currents squalling over huge sums of money. Occasionally tension bubbled into view; the Tellers, for example, were considering bringing a lawsuit against the school board, and tension was ratcheting up over the planned construction of the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion in the Aquatics Center and whether his name would still grace the frontispiece. And for all the attention on the Woodward Sharks and the Granger Club Team, the swim teams and their operations were obscure to all of us, sheeted behind the warping influence of committees, subcommittees, boards, and the legacy booster fund.
Still, on an emotional level, the conspiracy theory was compelling. Besieged by homework assignments and laws about how we talked and dress and even chewed, trapped in the eddies of a system that turned us to its will, we suspected an unseen current of power was at work beneath the surface of our lives.
As freshmen, we’d tolerated it. What choice did we have? We were fresh meat. We were newly hatched. We were the Minnows, finning frantically around a threshing of dangers, just trying to survive.
But things were different now. We’d had a party. We’d even had alcohol. Topornycky knew where to score Adderall. Nate Stern sold weed out of his locker. Hannigan could get us a discount at Baskin-Robbins.
We were sophomores. We were turning sixteen and getting our learner’s permits. We were practically adults—and just before swim season, we were all coming down hard with a violent case of giving-zero-fucks.
Forget our rivals. Forget the championships.
We entered October at war.
Ten
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On Pajama Day, Lucy showed up wearing an enormous grain sack that covered her from shoulder to ankle. We had no idea where she’d gotten it or how she’d made it into a dress overnight. We didn’t yet know that Lucy Vale could be like that sometimes: focused. Maybe she didn’t know whether she belonged in chess club or debate, yearbook or the dance club. Maybe she liked most kinds of music.
But when she set her mind on something, Lucy Vale could be savage.
This time Admin acted quickly. By the end of first period, Lucy Vale was missing from biology and the rumor had whipped through the school: the new girl had been suspended for the day.
Bailey Lawrence spoke of fascism, a concept we’d recently studied in European history. She talked about freedom of expression, sexism, double standards, and the fact that the dance team had been unjustly banned from performing at the pep rally, which meant by syllogism that we wouldn’t get to see any twerking. But mostly she talked about the Student Leadership Department’s growing campaign of terror: the new rules and hall monitors, the new system of merits, the dress code, and the random locker searches.
It was all adding up to some serious Mussolini shit.
Bailey and Savannah led the charge into Vice Principal Edwards’s office. Most of the dance team rallied behind Bailey Lawrence—no surprise—as well as some other Echelon girls we suspected were using the excuse to skip class. A handful of us went with them. Kaitlyn and Ethan Courtland had decent leverage with Administration; they had both volunteered to be parking lot ushers for the season’s home meet and swore to report everything back in real time.
The rest of us followed the action the way we usually did: through our cell phones. Tucked into textbooks, palmed under desks, our phones were our tethers to reality and an antidote to the blunt-force trauma of ritual education.
According to Kaitlyn, Principal Hammill had to be called in to serve as backup. With students packing every square inch of available space in his office, Edwards had the desperate look of a fish trying to tail its way across fifty feet of sand.
