Page 23 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Perfect timing,she had said.We were about to do the cake.
Her voice canted over the music. Like a tailwind, the words swept away the momentary pressure of feeling bad.The cake,we echoed,the birthday cake. Like an incantation to ritual magic we all knew by heart.
We complimented Lucy on her wrapping job. Sofia suggested that she put the present with all the others, leaning a wink into her tone. Kyle Hannigan went to get the cake from the freezer. Evie Grant chased after him with the birthday candles.
We sang “Happy Birthday,” loudly, with drama. We were horribly off-key. But at least we all sang together.
We were athletes and anarchists, band geeks and gamers, virgins and sluts. We were actors and magicians.
We lied, and we protected our own.
Part 2
One
We
School didn’t start so much as engulf us, tsunami-style.
Three years ago, Principal Hammill had pledged to overhaul our academic program and bring improvements to Woodward’s overall ranking. This year he was on a bender of new initiatives through the Student Leadership Department, and determined to make every one of them our problem.
Mrs. Steeler-Cox, our SLD head and chief propagandist, was hell-bent on mind control. The Student Council, gestapo to Mrs. Steeler-Cox’s Adolf Hitler, frog-marched to the endless rhythm ofparticipation. We were cordoned with reminders, permission forms to forward to our parents. Health and vaccine certification notices attacked us with bold type. We were clobbered with opportunities for involvement—in new extracurriculars, in volunteer clubs, in petitions and information sessions and future bake sales. The student portal caved to a ritual onslaught of new rules and mandates, terms and conditions we scrolled through with our eyes crossed.
Our teachers were delusional with homework. The seniors were despotic. They colonized the student lounge. Senior pennants sprouted between the rafters; over the year, they would grow, a thickening of colorful felt, scrawled over with inside jokes, drawings, and iron-onpatches. Freshmen overran the halls like an infestation of rats in rotten corn.
We auditioned forThe Crucible. We pined for the dance team—to join it, to date its members, to get close to Bailey Lawrence, Savannah Savage, and Mia Thompson, the three sophomore Strut Girls, the most beautiful girls we’d ever seen outside TikTok. We signed up for Model UN and signed a petition to return saltshakers to the cafeteria.
We could notbelievethat Mrs. Jennings assigned Spanish II an essay on day one. Never mind that it was only a few hundred words. She clearly required medication.
Questions assaulted us from our homework; they startled us at our desks. We couldn’t get through dinner without an attack of hows and whys.
We rolled our eyes at the announcements and swiped memes under our desks. We juggled new classes, new clubs, and outrageous episodes of acne. We claimed our assigned lockers and bartered for better ones. We swapped stories that didn’t belong to us. We were Woodward insiders and professional informants. Bailey Lawrence and JJ Hammill were on again. Savannah Savage was dating girls now. Calum Caloway knocked a girl up over the summer.
September was for signing up, and signing in, and sleep deprivation.
But most of all: September was for Sharks.
After Labor Day, an infestation of team pride swept the county. The Four Corners, our collective constellation of towns, molted its summer skin and broke out in school colors.
We gossiped about Coach Jack Vernon and the Granger Club team, one of the best club teams in the Midwest. We imagined tension between Vernon and Coach Radner, an ossifying Woodward fixture who’d coached the high school team—and been vying for a position with Granger Club—ever since Coach Steeler was forced to abnegate both positions. We argued about whether Coach Steeler should indeed get his name on a memorial pavilion proposed for the Aquatics Center. We agitated for a sauna in the girls’ locker room under the guise ofgender equality, as we’d done the year before. We gossiped about the new swimmers and about Noah Landry, who’d shot up another four inches over the summer and would be competing for the high school team for the first time.
The county was invaded by swarms of great white sharks: sewn onto jackets, ironed onto T-shirts, painted in the windows of downtown Granger, swimming across the frosty windows of the fish aisle at Kroger. Pennant flags in our school colors—orange, yellow, and black—went up between telephone poles, suspended overhead like downward-pointing flames. The diner advertised its new autumn specials: Man-of-Steeler fish-and-chips and Shark Bait shrimp tacos. The post office was offering special edition Shark stamps. Spinnaker started talking about NFTs.
For the most part, we forgot about Lucy Vale. With our focus on surviving a new year, and on dominating a new swim season, we absorbed her into the mass of our student body with barely a ripple. We bounced her between the gamers and the vegans, left her oscillating between lunch tables. She was Akash’s problem, and his special project.
We figured they would get together any day.
Lucy Vale joined chorus, then switched to band, and then returned to chorus. She refused to sign up for mock trial, waffled about trying out for the soccer team, but ultimately opted instead to volunteer with the Student Justice League. She caved to Skyler Matthews’s pressure to join the literary magazine, which, as far as we knew, had never published an actual issue. She volunteered for the yearbook committee with Kaitlyn Courtland, challenged Evie Grant and Hannah Smith to games of Words with Friends, and shared Spotify playlists with Olivia Howard. She dropped in periodically to the after-school meetings of the coding club, mostly to kill time with Akash before they took the late bus home together.
Still, she didn’t quite belong. We wondered about who her father was, for example. Akash said that Lucy never talked about him, although she’d once mentioned an “ex-stepdad” and talked about having aunts and cousins in nearby Everest. We tracked with distanced curiosity theevolution of the Faraday House, its softening transformation under the Vales’ workmanship.
When Olivia proposed inviting Lucy to join our Discord, we quickly axed the idea. Akash was stridently against it. For one, he didn’t want Lucy Vale to know that we all participated in selling homework to the athletes. He doubted she would approve.
For two, if Lucy Vale joined our Discord, we couldn’t talk about her anymore.
In those early back-to-school weeks, when we saw Lucy Vale hunched over her laptop in the back of the student commons during free periods or heard her name over the loudspeaker, it was surprising, like a touch of static. Lucy Vale was still a foreign object, a misplaced LEGO underfoot.
September was a bad time for new girls and old ghost stories.
