Page 30 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
@goodnightsky:it’s an optical illusion
@lululemonaide:?? she is definitely pretty
@goodnightsky:see? that’s what you think
@goodnightsky:so of course you see her as pretty
@goodnightsky:because you’re expecting her to be pretty
@goodnightsky:It’s called confirmation bias
@kash_money:I think it’s called jealousy, actually
Sofia Young signed off.
Some of us messed around trying to circumvent our biases, to see if we could trick our brains into seeing the real Lucy. A few excruciating minutes of early American history, and we were easily falling off the New World into a thick fog of boredom so complete, it felt almost like clarity. Then, when we’d for sure cleared our minds of all Lucy thoughts, we’d sneak a glance at her. Or we’d try and rearrange Lucy’s features in our heads to imagine her ugly, bunching her nose and eyes and mouthtogether in our imaginations, doubling her forehead and sharpening her chin to a knifepoint, whittling her nose into a hook. We’d carry this image with us in the halls, between classes, into the cafeteria, holding it like a shield against our expectations, hoping to startle off the mask of Lucy’s prettiness whenever we first saw her.
The exercise was fruitless. None of us could be sure that the Lucy Vale we saw was, in fact, the real Lucy.
The day after the Sharks and Minnows list made the rounds, Lucy’s name made a sudden leap through the loudspeaker just before third period: Bailey Lawrence, Savannah Savage, and Lucy Vale were to report to the vice principal’s office immediately.
The announcement touched the whole school like a cattle prod. Some of us were in D-wing, looking across the slope of pavement to the Aquatics Center and the single construction trailer moored next to the fence. Some of us were in the cafeteria, teetering on the threshold minutes of our last free period of the day. Some of us were pulled back from a daydream. Some of us, from a doubt. Some of us were thinking of Jalliscoe. Others of the Sharks.
Lucy Vale, Bailey Lawrence, and Savannah Savage, please report to the vice principal before your next class.
The school shivered. We froze. Some of us held our breath.
Lucy Vale, Bailey Lawrence, and Savannah Savage, please report to the vice principal’s office.
A surf of noise rose toward the halls from every classroom across campus, like the throaty gasp of an approaching wave.
Lucy Vale, Bailey Lawrence, and Savannah Savage, please report to the vice principal’s office.
It was done. We agitated into motion and poured into a wave of movement without noticing that the binding spell had worked on us, instantly cauterizing the three names into a single concept, a joint action.
That’s how all magic works: a spell that binds words to a belief. A belief that binds the world to the word, and the power of its magic.
Right away, we flooded onto Discord, unified by a single thought and a question mark. But Evie Grant beat us to it.
@badprincess:wait wait
@badprincess:Is Lucy Vale a Strut Girl now????
It made sense of what had happened to Lucy Vale in the bathroom, and why the junior girls were suddenly giving her the stink eye; obviously Lucy was a threat.
In the silence, we all said a brief prayer for Akash and his chances with Lucy Vale.
Six
Rachel
Lucy wanted to know when her mother was going to make friends.
“I have friends,” Rachel said. “I speak to Billy Flescher almost every day.”
“He’s yourhandyman, Mom,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “I meanrealfriends.”
It was seven o’clock on a Tuesday. They were eating dinner at the wrought iron table they’d dragged out into a cluster of azalea bushes. For more than a month, the boys from Friske Landscaping had been working to clear the overgrowth of weeds, bushes, and Jurassic-size ferns from the two-acre property. They’d filled half of four dumpsters with yard debris: fallen branches, pulpy leaves, snarls of kudzu, armfuls of uprooted dandelions, which Lucy had mourned for their cheerful faces. Now, slowly, the garden was reemerging. Lanes of mulch wound in rivulets around the house, mounded softly like tended graves where dozy perennials could sleep until springtime. Rachel was surprised by all the beautiful plantings they’d uncovered, quietly withstanding the encroachment of hungry neighbors: a peony bush, for example, and a slender Japanese maple. Valleys of climbing rose bushes, so overgrownthey hadn’t flowered in years. And a semicircle of azalea bushes forming a natural enclave that opened out toward the service road.
