Page 14 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“Kelly is not a trad wife,” Rachel said. “She runs her own business.”
“Sellingcandles,” Lucy said. She poked ferociously at the ice cubes in her water, dunking them toward the bottom of the glass. “I bet all the cheerleaders at Woodward are blond.”
“What’s wrong with blond cheerleaders?”
“A time warp,” Lucy said. “That’s what’s wrong with it. It’s a time warp, and a cliché.”
“Well, maybe you should try out for the team. That way they’d have a little diversity.”
Lucy rolled her eyes.
The waitress returned for their order: a tuna melt for Lucy, a salad and black coffee for Rachel. It was good to see Lucy eating again. She’d gotten so skinny last year, her breasts had all but vanished, snuffed back into her rib cage.
“What about Akash? Akash isn’t an athlete. And he seems to like you.” Rachel had a good feeling about the Sandhus. A quiet family, thoughtful. Respectful. They hadn’t asked a single question about what had brought Rachel and Lucy to the area, and tothat housespecifically. And yet, Rachel had felt the topic resting carefully beneath their conversation, like a courteous absence.
Rachel was less enthused about their neighbors on Lily Lane. She’d caught one of them, a balding man with a liver-spotted complexion, snooping around their gates. She could have sworn he’d been into their mailbox too. And the postman had warned them about Mrs. Gorsuch at number 82.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Lucy said, brightening a little. “I could be friends with Akash.”
“Maybe you can join the coding club,” Rachel said. “You like computers.”
“I like video games,” Lucy corrected her. “There’s a difference.”
“Well, maybe you could start a video game club.”
“Or an anticlub club,” Lucy said. “We don’t know what we like, and we never have any meetings.”
“Just be yourself,” Rachel said, hating the words even as she said them. She sounded like one of those posters she’d seen hanging around the school’s Student Leadership Department when they had submitted Lucy’s paperwork. “You’ll be fine.”
“Oh, Mom.” Lucy sighed. “It’s high school. That’s, like, the one thing I’mnotsupposed to be.”
Eleven
We
We were dying to meet the new girl. Even seeing Lucy from a distance counted as gossip, and launched frenzied speculation about the possible significance of the Vales’ clothes, car, groceries, gas station purchases. It felt like the beginning of a game, like online Mafia, or one of the escape room experiences they built every Halloween in the old Sears on 87. It felt like an obvious cue, an imperative to look forsomething, so that we would know what we needed to find.
We found excuses to hang out on Lily Lane. Kyle Hannigan spent so long pretending to stretch a cramp outside the Vales’ front gates, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lucy, that a woman with a rifle shouted to him from number 82 to ask if he needed help with something. Harper Rowe lost her nerve with one foot on the front path when she saw Lucy’s mom aggressively pruning the honeysuckle bush around the infamous apple tree where Lydia Faraday’s body was found swinging. Will Friske stuffed the mailboxes on Lily Lane with promotional flyers for his cousin’s landscaping business, even though we all knew it was a front.
@badprincess:Does your cousin even have a landscaping business?
@badprincess:I thought he just sold weed
@stopandfriske:weed is a plant
@stopandfriske:You have to grow it
@stopandfriske:on land
@brentmann:when do you scape it?
Akash, we agreed, had gotten stupid lucky. He reported almost daily interactions with the new girl and her mother. He’d observed Lucy Vale on her hands and knees, trying to coax Maybe out of the overgrown thicket that almost entirely concealed the screened porch. He’d spotted Lucy Vale pumping air into her bike tires, and she’d waved and shouted hey. He’d seen Rachel Vale sweeping debris off the back porch, and she’d come down to the service road to introduce herself.
We wanted to know what Lucy’s mother was like.
@kash_money:young
@spinn_doctor:he means hot
