Page 28 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
By dinnertime we’d heard that one of Jalliscoe’s swimmers was in the hospital, claiming the need for stitches and alleging he’d been hit with a bottle. Meanwhile, the Wolverines and their loyalist stans were already grumbling about a lawsuit. The worst part was that, for once, we couldn’t dismiss Spinnaker’s ranting as paranoia. More and more, it was looking like the Sharks were under attack by coordinated forces.
We were so desperate for news about Aiden Teller, we even turned to our parents. Eventually we confirmed through Evie Grant’s aunt, who knew Aiden’s grandmother from the historical society, that Aiden had in fact been sprung from jail. But his socials were ominously quiet.Noneof the Sharks were posting, and that made us more nervous than anything. In the silence, we sensed a hefty dose of Administrative influence.
We didn’t trust it. We knew we could defend the Sharks’ behavior only to a point—especially if it turned out that some of the swimmers had been drinking like a few people were saying online.
Then, midmorning, Jackson Skye spotted Vice Principal Edwards ushering two Willard County deputies into the office, and we started hearing the poisonous whisper ofdisciplinary action. The words soured the atmosphere and filled us with dread. First Meet was in less than a month, and Aiden Teller was one of our best swimmers.
We didn’t know what was worse: that Jalliscoe now had Administration in a headlock or that we had to admit that Spinnaker was right. Weshouldhave readThe Art of War, or at least skimmed it, or skimmed the SparkNotes online. Because that’s what this was. Not a competition. An attack.
Jalliscoe was trying to take what was ours by right.
The Sharks weren’t a symbol. They were a line in the sand.
We vowed to protect them, no matter what.
Over the weekend, an epidemic of school colors turned the campus violent shades of yellow and black. An infestation of shark decals gnawed the walls of the cafeteria, followed us to our lockers, and leered at us from the bathroom mirrors. A local news crew suddenly materialized in our parking lot; college recruiters drifted into Vice Principal Edwards’s office. Reese Steeler-Cox and the Student Council Mafia were sutured to their cheer uniforms.
Woodward pride was so extreme, it bordered on punishing. We were a seething, concentrated force ofwinningand grimly determined to have the greatest week ever.
At the same time, we noticed symptoms of a surprising change: somehow, when we weren’t paying attention, Lucy Vale had started nudging towardpopular.
Layla Lewis first reported that Savannah Savage had invited Lucy to sit next to her in math class. We felt a sudden premonition of dread, as if some key fact about the new girl had eluded us. As soon as we were alert to the possibility that Lucy Vale had attracted the attention of the school’s Echelon, we saw proof of it everywhere. We tracked Lucy’s rising clout by the people who said hi to her—or went out of their way to give her dirty looks—in the hallway. Eli Franklin, the best player on the admittedly mediocre basketball team, started circling around her locker. The rest of the team hooted her name whenever they saw her in the cafeteria.
Most telling was the way Reese Steeler-Cox and the Student Council Mafia started side-eyeing her. Gone were the veneer of friendliness and the fake smiles spackled on in the new girl’s direction.
The final proof of Lucy Vale’s new popularity hit like a stomach virus: suddenly, violently, and in the bathroom.
At issue: whether Lucy Vale was wearing the wrong shark.
We didn’t know that the Student Council Mafia had cornered Lucy Vale about the hammerhead shark on her sweatshirt until Aubrey Barnes saw her crying between third and fourth periods.
Akash lost his shit.
@kash_money:WTF what do you mean crying??
@kash_money:what happened??
@kash_money:where is she??
No one knew; Lucy Vale wasn’t answering her texts.
We were outraged, appalled, and stymied by helplessness. We drowned in our respective seats across campus, fending off the assault of irrelevant education coming at us from our teachers. We thumbed messages under our desks. Ethan Courtland managed to send a desperate SOS before Mr. Harte confiscated his phone for the remainder of the day. We observed our customary moment of silence when we lost him on the chat.
Within the hour, details of the confrontation began to materialize. We constructed a picture from discrete facts, dropped at random like errant pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we had to fit together without a reference. There was the fact that Lucy Vale was absent from fourth period, and Aubrey Barnes reported that Lucy had been wearing nothing but a tank top by the time she was seen red-faced and puffy-eyed outside the cafeteria. There was the backed-up toilet in the girls’ locker room and the janitor called to clean up the water seeping into the hall. There was Scarlett Hughes’s cousin’s text asking if Lucy Vale was okay. There was the shrill, hysterical voice of Mrs. Steeler-Cox piercing our eardrums through the loudspeaker, reminding all students that we at Woodward had a code of conduct that we would pledge to obey or risk losing our school privileges—e.g., the right to attend.
Our best intel came from Ceecee, a Woodward graduate and our Administration mole. Ceecee was related to the Steeler-Coxes through marriage to Lieutenant Steeler, which made her pretty much unfireable. She was also a raging alcoholic who dosed her sodas with vodka stashed in old Pepto-Bismol bottles and was so lazy that she rolled her chair from the filing cabinets to the copy machine and the front desk like an oversize Ping-Pong ball.
But she was a willing accessory to most of our usual misdemeanors, largely because she was so lazy—the forged late notes, which she pretended to believe had actually been signed by our parents; the claims of nonexistent symptoms that kept a rumored pop quiz off our schedules and landed us in the nurse’s office for a forty-five-minute nap.
Plus, she had access to all the school’s disciplinary files and a front-row seat outside Vice Principal Edwards’s office. She was the one who leaked the news of Aiden Teller’s four-week team suspension, for example—days before it was made public in the local news—and had long hinted that the Steeler-Coxes had plenty of skeletons in their closet. Although we were never sure if that was just the vodka talking.
According to Ceecee, Lucy had been cornered by the juniors between periods and forced to turn over her sweatshirt. We found out later that Charlotte Anderson, Reese Steeler-Cox’s sworn appendage, had shoved it into the toilet—aftershe’d peed. Topornycky joked that this explained the cleanup in Stall 12. But we were too furious to think it was funny.
Technically every class was allotted a particular variety of shark: reef sharks for the freshmen; goblin sharks for us; hammerheads for the juniors; and for the seniors, great whites. We couldn’t have told you who’d made this rule or how we’d learned it. It was just one of those unspoken laws that we absorbed together, like a giant oxygenated lung.
Nothing but wearing the seniors’ great whites was a serious infraction. For example, Lana Mueller, a sophomore, was always parading around in her boyfriend’s work jacket that had a hammerhead patchsewn on to one shoulder, and she’d never been aggressed by a marauding pack of juniors.
Clearly something deeper was at play.
