Page 56 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“Take what down?” Olivia Howard asked.
Rachel Vale squatted to fish a toolbox from beneath the wicker settee. “It’s so ridiculous,” she said. “I never would have hung it in the first place ...”
“Hung who?”
“That dummy over there. I just thought the tree seemed like a nice place for it. Visible from the road, kind of creepy ...” The toolbox waschaotic, and it took Rachel a minute to locate the garden shears. “I had no idea it would be considered disrespectful.”
“People say that Lydia Faraday hung herself in that tree,” Sofia Young blurted. We were all impressed, and embarrassed.
“So I gather,” Rachel Vale said.
“Did she?” Sofia pressed. We suspected her of being a little drunk. Her parents’ divorce, we agreed, was changing her. She had pink stripes in her hair now and often came to school smelling like weed. We weren’t sure what to do about it, and we couldn’t exactly ask her parents. “Did she kill herself in the apple tree?”
Rachel Vale pointed her garden shears at Akash who was returning with the ladder. “Lydia Faraday was found in the house,” she said firmly. “She was hanging from a belt tied to the banister.”
That was it. That was the whole story. We watched her cut the dummy from the branches in silence. The little girl in the unicorn costume was gone; her mom must have taken her away. We saw the Grim Reaper on his hands and knees, searching for something in the grass. A vampire crouched nearby was moving a hand through the rhododendron. Something was lost.
In the street, Lucy Vale was modeling her costume. We heard the Strut Girls shrieking laughter as Mia Thompson tried to shunt them into a photograph for a selfie. Alec Nye and the swimmers hung back a few feet, watching them.
We felt suddenly invisible, and cold. Lucy Vale looked somehow as if she were receding, drawn out by the tide of attention.
Or maybe we were the ones pulled backward. Behind us, in the recesses of the house, something dark gathered force in our imaginations. An idea taking form on the staircase; it swayed on the upstairs landing as if hesitating.
Rachel Vale, we realized, had answered Sofia’s question only in part.
“There’s Noah Landry,” Evie Grant announced into the silence, as if we’d all been waiting for him.
His arrival sent a visible ripple through the party. Everyone stirred slightly, angling toward the street. A kid dressed as Batman nudged shyly toward him, clutching a piece of paper for an autograph.
We saw Landry’s eyes gloss toward the other swimmers as they registered each other. Maybe we imagined the brief pause before he extended a fist to Alec Nye, the way his smile snagged slightly before touching his eyes.
We watched him greet Lucy with a one-armed hug. He was so big, she practically disappeared in his embrace. Whatever he said made her laugh, a sound that touched us all the way up on the porch.
Akash turned away and banged inside the house.
“Poor Akash,” Peyton Neely said.
“Where’s Spinnaker?” Sofia Young asked.
That was when we realized that Spinnaker, Meeks, and Topornycky weren’t with us on the porch. But we didn’t know for sure that they had, in fact, slipped past the rope and made it upstairs until hours later, when we saw the proof on Discord. By then we were all home, still working the chill out of our fingers, safely scrolling through photos of the attic.
We were scandalized when we found out that Spinnaker had peeled off from the others to venture not just into the attic but into Lucy’s bedroom. We called him a stalker and a creep.
@kash_money:seriously, wtf is wrong with you?
@spinn_doctor:hey. Don’t look at me. They’re the ones who decided to have an open house
@badprincess:you went into her drawers??
@meeksmaster:he got some of her drawers
@badprincess:omg
@badprincess:@spinn_doctor is seriously going to wind up on the news someday
@spinn_doctor:thank you
@gustagusta:it wasn’t a compliment, dude
