Page 32 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“It’s Shark Week, Mom. It’s, like, the most important week of the whole year.” Lucy leaned a heavy dose of sarcasm into her words. “He just wants to be sure I’m okay.”
Rachel felt a tug of something in her chest. That old pain, the Gordian’s knot of worry that had seethed in her chest for the past year and a half. She turned to Lucy and impulsively grabbed her wrists. They were still so small, so fragile feeling. She thought of bird bones, breaking against the sky.
“Are you okay?” Rachel asked. “Do I need to worry about you?”
Lucy looked at her for a moment. Then she belted a laugh, clear and loud, startling two wrens from their perch. Rachel watched them fleck up against the waning light.
“I’m fine,” she said. She sounded triumphant. “I’m the new Lucy. Besides,” she added teasingly, “Ihave friends.”
She wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and kissed her.
Seven
We
In the end, no one could prove that the Strut Girls had filled Reese Steeler-Cox’s gym locker with cat litter. In a way, it didn’t make sense, not as retaliation for what had happened in the bathroom. Technically Reese Steeler-Cox hadn’t been on-site, although Aubrey Barnes swore she saw Reese texting outside the bathroom at the same time Lucy was getting stripped down inside. But this was controversial; Aubrey Barnes was a notorious pick-me girl and always trying to insert herself into drama.
Some of us suspected Olivia Howard, for obvious reasons. She had ready access to cat litter and lived on a commune with a guy who made jewelry out of scavenged deer teeth. There was no telling what she was capable of. On the other hand, we didn’t think she’d necessarily be motivated to revenge on Lucy’s behalf. She was devastated that Lucy Vale had punked her invitation to join the Humane Society Club and blamed all the attention of the Echelon for changing her. Olivia even suspected—correctly, it turned out—that the reason Lucy Vale was hedging about yearbook was because she’d been invited to audition for the dance team by Bailey Lawrence, even though she’d technically missed the window for new recruits. Plus, we didn’t know when Olivia would’ve had time to get to the gym before homeroom since she rode the longest bus fromHousataunick, and Nick Topornycky insisted they’d arrived just as first bell was sounding.
The evidence against the Strut Girls, on the other hand, was circumstantial but damning. The crime had been committed sometime between 7:30 p.m. on Monday, when Reese Steeler-Cox locked up after cheer practice, and 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, when she’d run down to grab face paint from her gym locker and found the lock clipped with bolt cutters. Since the gym complex was locked every night at 8:00 p.m., and accessible only via the Aquatics Center, also locked from the outside, the window of opportunity narrowed to the hours before second period on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately—or maybe by design—Bailey Lawrence, Savannah Savage, and Mia Thompson had called the dance team to an early rehearsal for their pep rally routine in the auditorium. From there it was just a short sprint down the hill to the gym complex.
It didn’t help that Savannah Savage’s last TikTok included several cat emojis in the caption, or that Bailey and Mia had replied with devil and tears of laughter emojis, respectively.
The fact that the whole dance team swore they’d walked up from the locker room and back as a group might have saved the Strut Girls from suspension but was ultimately meaningless. The Strut Girls owned the dance team, like everything they touched. We knew the team covered for them.
In their favor was the fact that none of the girls had a cat or easy access to a litter box. Unfortunately this wasn’t definitive; Mia Thompson had been lingering in the Student Leadership Department Tutoring Center, which had both, on Monday afternoon. Mia claimed that she’d simply been waiting on her boyfriend to finish a tutoring session. This was highly suspect, however, since her boyfriend bought all his homework through Spinnaker and Akash.
It wasn’t clear whether the cat litter had for sure gone missing from Mr. Mole’s box in the SLD Tutoring Center, but that was the general assumption. The school’s sixteen-year-old tabby, Mr. Mole, had been rescued as a kitten from an underground cistern duringthe last major renovation of the Aquatics Center and found a permanent home in one of the unused conference rooms just outside Mrs. Steeler-Cox’s office. According to Ceecee in Admin, who’d been a student at the time, Mr. Mole had found his way into the sewer drainage system during construction of the new pool, which is how he’d gotten his name. There was some debate about whether Mia could have smuggled the cat litter out of SLD and, if so, what she had bagged it in overnight. But we had no doubt the Strut Girls were capable of anything they put their minds to, especially when it came to retaliation.
Lucy Vale, on the other hand, was technically alibied. She’d skipped out on an after-school yearbook meeting on Monday and taken the early bus home; Akash confirmed that he’d walked with her to the parking lot after final bell.
All in all, it was a nearly perfect crime.
In the end, the announcement linking Lucy Vale to the most popular girls in our class did nothing but add to the buzz around the new girl and the growing feud between the junior Mafia members and the sophomore Strut Girls. Without hard proof, Admin couldn’t penalize any of the girls. We made jokes all day about the dangers oflittering, especially when Mrs. Steeler-Cox was within earshot, and we imagined that Reese Steeler-Cox looked a little bit wilted. For once, it seemed, the Student Council Mafia had taken a hit and reached the end of their power. For once, the Student Leadership Department was ineffectual.
We should have expected Admin to retaliate.
Eight
Rachel
On Tuesday, Lucy came home flush with excitement, bouncing her backpack on her shoulders as she trotted, breathless, from the bus stop. Rachel was sitting on the porch, lost in old reporting, trying to get her hands on an image of the mother and daughter who’d come before her. And then there was Lucy, bounding like a puppy up the newly laid walk, cleaving through the muddle of the past.
“You won’t believe it,” Lucy said, dropping cross-legged next to her backpack and pulling out her laptop. “Admin has gone fascist. All because of a stupid T-shirt.”
“What are you talking about?” Rachel said, setting aside her reading. Still, she felt the Faradays skirting like a black spot at the edges of her vision, calling her attention back to something huge and bright and terrible, something so large it could not be looked at directly. “What T-shirt?”
“Bailey’s T-shirt,” Lucy said. Her face was white with heavy pancake makeup and her eyes lidded with thick, dark eyeliner. It was Come as You Aren’t Day. The night before, Lucy had spent an hour debating all the things that she wasn’t: an athlete, a cheerleader, a beauty queen, a band geek. But finally she’d determined to go emo. She still had thewardrobe and makeup, Lucy pointed out. Besides, it would be a kind of trick.
Come as you aren’tanymore,she’d said. Rachel could hardly stand to see her daughter morph back into the sullen, pale replica who, for two years, had seemed to swallow her daughter whole. At the same time, Lucy was delighted to wear her old clothes and posture like a costume.I can’t believe I thought this was actually okay,she said.I look like a Halloween prank.Rachel had forced a smile that felt more like a grimace. It was still too painful to be funny.
What she wanted to say was,I thought I almost lost you.
“Who’s Bailey again?” Rachel asked, her fingers fidgeting toward her notebook.
Lucy gave her an incredulous look. “Bailey Lawrence? She’s captain of the dance team. As a sophomore. She has like four thousand followers on TikTok.”
“And what was so wrong with her T-shirt?”
