Page 68 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Nye went to pull her close.
And Lucy started doing the chicken dance.
She startedreallydoing the chicken dance. She strutted and flapped. She knocked her knees together. She even squawked—right in his face.
For a second we were all too stunned to do anything but stare. Nye looked like he’d just gotten hit in the face with the back of a toilet seat. He lookedmortified.
Lucy dropped her purse; it was interfering with the motion of her right wing. And she just kept on doing the chicken dance.
“Freak,” Nye said finally. “You’re a fuckingnutjob.”
She did look crazy, for sure. She looked totally, absolutely, gloriously out of her mind.
And we will always swear, to this day, that when Noah Landry came through the crowd toward her, he was moving inside a single beam of perfect white light, carving through the colors and the crowd and the laughter like someone surfing a perfect wave.
“Looks like you could use a wingman,” he said. And Noah Landry—our Noah Landry, future Olympian, the boy who didn’t dance, didn’t break regimen, didn’t even Balladeer for the charity raffle—put his hands on his hips, started strutting, and let out a single triumphant squawk.
It was legend. It was magic. It was a real-life happy ending. That’s what we thought anyway.
Until almost exactly a year later when, sometime before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the Hawthornes’ guest bedroom, something happened to Lucy Vale.
Part 6
One
We
Once Lucy Vale and Noah Landry officially started dating our sophomore year, they quickly became Woodward’s it couple, even dethroning Bailey Lawrence and JJ Hammill. We didn’t know how Bailey felt about being upstaged by her best friend, but no one could deny that Noah and Lucy were perfect. They were the kind of couple we saw in the rom-coms we denied watching and read about in YA books we pretended to find cheesy.
As southern Indiana slowly thawed from the clutch of winter, as the fields greened and the sun elasticized the daylight, our moods turned from rivalry to romance. The Sharks swept the state championships, drawing a record turnout of more than a thousand people. We’d all joined the flotilla of traffic traveling to the event in Morgan County with Shark decals plastered to our bumpers and school flags snapping from our trunks. So many people showed up that the crowd overflowed into the parking lot. Some of the late arrivals were stranded outside in the cold, trying to decrypt the action inside from the cadence of cheering and the muffled resonance of the loudspeakers announcing the results.
Noah Landry had beaten two of his own record-shattering times in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle events. But JJ Hammill, Alec Nye, Ryan Hawthorne, and even Aiden Teller were also at the tops of theirgames. Alec Nye accepted an offer to swim for North Carolina. Aiden Teller was heading to Michigan. It was the last time either boy would compete for the Sharks, and their swim caps were decorated with send-off messages written in Sharpie by girls more popular than we were.
They were gods in the water. We were vindicated, triumphant, and taking home the trophy for our third year in a row.
We said goodbye to the official swim season for another year.
We went out for new teams and swapped extracurriculars. Cicadas came up in heavy swells, burrowing up from the dirt like an upward-banking tide. They infested our trees, blurring the bark behind the motion of their bodies. We crunched over their discarded shells in the parking lot. Between classes, we made games of swinging at them with our book bags.
Spring was a season of sex and mating rituals.
Akash and Delancey McNamara started hooking up right before Easter. We were happy for him, even if we sensed that he had never quite gotten over Lucy Vale. It was almost compulsive how he kept track of Noah Landry and Lucy’s relationship.
@kash_money:did anyone hear that Noah and Lucy had a fight this weekend?
We hadn’t.
@kash_money:Does anyone think it’s weird that Lucy goes toallof Noah’s club team practices? It’s like she doesn’t even have a life anymore
We didn’t think it was weird. We thought it was romantic.
@kash_money:Rachel Vale ran into my mom at the post office today and they started talking about Lucy. I don’t think Rachel likes Noah Landry
@gustagusta:why would she?
@gustagusta:Rachel Vale doesn’t like the Sharks
It was a difficult truth to accept. But in the early spring, as the tension between Rachel Vale and the Steeler-Coxes exploded into open warfare, we were forced to come to the same conclusion: Rachel Vale had radical views about Coach Steeler, about the Faraday case, and about the swim team in general.
