Page 61 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
As the Winters approached, Akash’s mood grew erratic. He tracked Lucy’s every interaction with the swim team, especially Alec Nye and Noah Landry. He posted a heart eye emoji under the photo of the dress she’d bought, then immediately added a string of arbitrary emojis to soften the messaging. He spoke about skipping the dance. He wondered if the DJ would take requests. He suggested asking Lucy to the dance—as a joke. There was a kind of manic desperation in his use of exclamation points.
All along, he swore that Lucy hadn’t entered her name into the raffle. He insisted that she had zero interest in buying a dance with one of the Sharks.
@kash_money:Lucy’s not a fan
@kash_money:she only goes to meets because everyone else is so into it
@nononycky:so ... she’s cosplaying fandom?
@kash_money:yeah, exactly. Like an anthropology experiment
@mememeup:how meta
@spinn_doctor:I don’t buy it
@spinn_doctor:she’s playing you
@spinn_doctor:she loves the attention
@kash_money:Lucy’s not like that
@kash_money:she just wants to fit in
We didn’t bother to argue with Akash. But privately, we were beginning to have our doubts.
Later that would prove important.
Three
Rachel
There was, according to Lucy, only one place to buy a dress for the Winters Dance: Angela’s Formal, an emporium-size outfitter of tuxes and formal wear that had been in Granger “forever, like since the eighties.” In fact, the day Rachel accompanied Lucy and her friends Bailey and Savannah to the store, she saw a pack of boys she immediately identified as swimmers looking over rental tuxes. With some amusement, she observed the odd, coded way the boys and girls acknowledged each other—lots of shorthand and arch glances, a studious attempt to appear disinterested. The boys turned their eyes on Rachel next with a curious, flat kind of detachment that she did, in fact, find vaguely sharklike. But maybe that was just in her head.
“That’s Jeremiah Greene,” Bailey informed her. Bailey was growing on Rachel. She was bright and bold and energetic. A little bit wild, Rachel suspected, but she took her schoolwork and the dance team very seriously. And she seemed loyal to Lucy. “He just made the club team this year. He’s not half as good as he thinks he is.”
“And Mia’s obsessed with him,” Savannah said, giggling.
“And Mia’s obsessed with him,” Bailey confirmed.
They moved into a thicket of dresses: floor-length prom gowns with ruffles and trains, skintight minidresses with plunging necklines, lots of sequins.
“No,” Rachel said firmly when Lucy reached for a scrap of cloth so sheer and insubstantial, it hardly counted as clothing.
“Mom, I was justkidding.” She rolled her eyes and turned to Bailey. “See what I mean about her? She’s soeasy.”
“Don’t worry, Ms. Vale.” Bailey put her arms around Lucy and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Lucy’s one of the good ones.”
Savannah laughed. Lucy blushed. She shot Rachel a pleading look, as if Rachel might otherwise be tempted to blurt out the truth: Actually, Lucy almost failed eighth grade.Actually, she was buying off-script antianxiety meds from some loser she met online who called himself her boyfriend. Oh, yeah. And she sent him naked pictures on her thirteenth birthday ...
While the girls loaded up a shared dressing room, Rachel wandered through the racks. She found herself wondering whether Nina had shopped here and what kind of dress she might have chosen. Something modest probably, to appease her mother. But with a small hint of rebellion—a slit up to the thigh or a plunging back. Something she could easily conceal with a shawl or a safety pin before she was out of the house. A normal teenage girl, pinioned like a butterfly between childhood and adulthood, doing her best to appease both worlds.
She thought again of Nina’s two final texts, sent within minutes of each other. To her mother:I’m on my way home now.
To Tommy:I know you want me out of your life. I’m leaving for a while. Don’t look for me.
Had Nina sent one? Both? Neither?
Why had she lingered at school so late? Where had she been for the hours before Woody Topornycky saw her in the parking lot? Who was she with?
