Page 22 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
The sky was a pale, leached blue, the clouds the raw pink of entrails. We suffocated on our own excitement. It seemed to take forever for Akash and the new girl to move out of the trees. But at last, they did, and our anticipation collapsed around the reality of Lucy Vale. She had a wrapped present for Olivia under one arm—a pink sweatshirt with a stitched cat on the chest next to the zipper, we later saw—and as sheand Akash started across the lawn, she kept freeing one hand from the box to tug at her shorts.
She wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t short. She wasn’t thin, and she wasn’t plus. Her hair was brownish. Not long. Not super short. But shortish.
Afterward we could never quite agree.
That was the thing about Lucy Vale. That’s what frustrated and baffled us about her, and later drove us crazy trying to figure her out, twisted us into knots trying to get our hands around her shape. That’s what drives us crazy even now, so many years after it happened: the neither-here-nor-thereness of her.
It wasn’t that she was shy exactly. We soon discovered that Lucy had plenty of questions about Woodward, and our extracurriculars, and which teachers we thought were the hardest. She wasn’t afraid of controversial opinions—such as hating ketchup, which was close to insane, or feeling ambivalent about swimming as a sport, which was wrong and would have to change. She told Will Friske that the best hot dogs came from Chicago but she didn’t believe in deep-dish pizza, which was more like calzone cake.
The real problem with Lucy Vale was that shewasn’t one thing or another. She told Riley French that she’d played soccer in middle school but wasn’t very good. She couldn’t even say what kind of music she was into; she told Meeks that it wasall over the placeanddepended on the vibe.She talked a lot about her cat, Maybe, but denied being a cat person. But when Brent Manning asked if she was a dog person, she said no, definitely not. Too slobbery. Plus, she’d been bitten by a neighbor’s terrier when she was a kid.
But she liked some dogs. She liked some cats.Really,Lucy said,it all depends.
On the one hand, Lucy’s answer was totally reasonable. The Thompsons’ chihuahua was an actual reincarnated serial killer, for example. And Mr. Mole, the now-obese tabby who lived in the Student Leadership Department Tutoring Center, would sit purringand drooling on our shoes until we gave him scratchies. Mr. Mole was the friendliest cat we’d ever met.
But the question wasn’t actually about preferences. It was about personality. It was aboutbeingcat or dog people. Dog people were, for the most part, extroverts. They were social and fun, and possibly narcissistic. They might be sporty. They probably had nice hair. Cat people, on the other hand, were smart, shy, and prone to dreaming. They might be into theater or fan fiction. They wore scarves and loved thrifting.
The question was: What type of person are you?
And Lucy’s answer—it depends—was a cop-out.
Lucy did like horses—from a distance at least. We couldn’t believe it, but Lucy had never been on a horse before, unless a pony ride at the petting zoo counted, which it didn’t. She was equally shocked to find out how many of us had horses. Scarlett Hughes’s family stabled broncos for the rodeo in Pewter Falls; the Howards rehabilitated rescues; Kaitlyn Courtland and her cousin Ethan both competed in junior rodeo and stabled their horses with the Hughes. And that wasn’t evencountingthe working farm horses.
Well, Toto,Lucy said,I guess we’re not in Lansing anymore. We couldn’t tell whether she sounded disappointed. We didn’t figure out until after the party that Lucy Vale had moved from a university town, practically a city. That explained why she couldn’t ride a horse.
The Vales were northerners.
We were desperate to know how she and her mom had chosen the Faraday House, and whether Lucy knew its history. But none of us were brave enough to straight-up ask her, even after the three six-packs were divided among all of us. It was hard to find a casual way to ask if she’d noticed a body hanging from the apple tree yet, or if there was any disembodied weeping coming from the attic. We were even afraid to use the wordsFaraday House, in case it led to awkward questions. If the Vales really didn’t know about the Faradays, and the storm of theories about what had happened to Nina, we didn’t want to be the ones to tell her.
Instead we edged as close as we could to the topic, hoping that Lucy Vale would take the hint and open up on her own. Jackson Skye pointed out that his dad had a paint and tile business, if the Vales needed help getting the house in shape ...?
When Lucy only said,Thank you,Evie Grant tried to salvage the opportunity, jumping in to say they must have their work cut out for them, seeing as the home had been so longabandoned.
But Lucy Vale simply replied that the inside of the house was a thousand times better than the outside made it seem. The owners, she said, had made sure to keep it clean and had hired a caretaker to regularly turn on the lights, flush the toilets, and run the heat so that the pipes didn’t freeze in the winter—all of which was news to us.
Still, we refused to give up entirely. Even if Lucy didn’t have much to say about the house, there was no way she could duck the topic of the garden: a ravenous, colonizing jungle that crawled up the front porch and snaked up the colonnade porch and looked as if it were determined to haul the house down into a grave. Between the apple tree, the ghostly apparition of the tormented Lydia Faraday, and rumors that a phantom Nina Faraday still wandered the old rose garden, the Faradays’ ruined gardens were the most haunted botanicals in the Midwest, possibly the whole country.
We persuaded a stoned Will Friske to mention the flyer he’d slipped into the Vales’ mailbox, the one advertising his cousin’s landscaping business that largely served as a front for growing weed, in the hopes that Lucy might admit to knowing more about the property and why it had fallen into such disarray.
But it was useless. Lucy simply thanked Will Friske for the offer of help and told him that her mother had big plans for the garden. Then she told us a random story about the time her mom had planted false sunflower instead of Maximilian in her college co-op garden and, over the next two years, watched the Napoleonic conquest of the entire quad by colonies of yellow blossoms.
My mom learned her lesson, for sure,Lucy said.
Plants were social beings, just like people. They lived in carefully calibrated balance with their neighbors.
Introducing a new one could be dangerous.
After the party, we tried to hold on to an impression of Lucy.
What resurfaced again and again was the memory of Lucy Vale and Akash, arriving on foot from the direction of Hickory Lane, blurred at first behind a kaleidoscope of leaves that cut them into moving colors.
She looked nervous.
And for that first second when we saw Lucy Vale—nervous, pretty, and holding a wrapped gift, while the sun bled out into the trees behind her—we hated ourselves for lying.
But we hated her even more for believing us.
Then Olivia freed herself from the crowd and plunged toward Lucy, arms outstretched.
