Page 64 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Over it.
Drunk.
We agreed that Bailey Lawrence was ten times hotter than Kennedy Myers, that JJ Hammill was an idiot, and that he and Bailey would be back together before Christmas.
There was no one on the dance floor when Lucy and Bailey stepped in front of the DJ stand, the lights briefly rotating colors through their hair. For a second, we saw angels haloed in blinding white; the next second, we saw demons silhouetted by a smoky red light.
On the dance floor, Bailey kicked off her heels and did a perfect pirouette in bare feet. She landed soundlessly on the beat of a new song, falling through the final repetition of a chorus we had tired of already. Mia Thompson was teasing Jeremiah Greene and Aiden Teller into attempting to twerk.
Suddenly JJ seized hold of Kennedy’s hand. He trotted her to a spot on the dance floor directly next to Bailey and Lucy, even though there was a basketball court of unclaimed space.
We made jokes about end-times and hell freezing over. We felt a little drunk, even if most of us weren’t drinking. We felt a little dizzy, a little sugar-high, a little delirious.
In all our accumulated years of school dances, we’d never seen JJ Hammill so much as nod his head to a beat.
Now he swept Kennedy into a dip and then twirled her. The incredible was happening. The impossible. The unheard of.
Something was changing, and it wasus.
We poured onto the dance floor. We lost our shit. We discovered that we reallycouldfeel the beat, even those of us who obviously couldn’t. We felt like we were part of a single throbbing heartbeat, a shuddering rhythm that soared up through the floor and trembled us all the way to the tips of our fingers.
The next song was our favorite. Until the song after that. That song was really our favorite, holy shit.
This is my song,we shouted at each other until we were hoarse from shouting how much we loved it and the lyrics, which we shouted even louder.This is my shit.
But no. No, no. Compared to the next song? Forget it.
The next song was our blood, our heartbeat, our whole life turned into a chorus and a bass line and a beat. It jacked all our nerve cells, exploded our hearts, burst us out of our bodies. It was a fist, and a fuck-you, thrown up at the walls, at the sky, at our parents, at our feelings. For almost forty-five minutes, we did transform. Wedidbecome something more beautiful. We became a single song, a single rhythm, nameless and wordless, without memory or fear.
We would be ourselves again as soon as we stopped dancing. The raffle was coming up, and we would all go back to our places, and then we would go home.
But for a little while, we belonged to the music, and the night belonged to us.
We saw Akash and Lucy dancing together. Lucy was laughing. Akash was skimming her waist with his hands as she twirled. Then they were standing close, and he had a hand in her hair.
We didn’t see him try and kiss her.
Five
Rachel
Joaquin Turner, the swimmer from Jalliscoe who’d been questioned by Rockland County deputies after Nina Faraday disappeared, now lived in Ohio. According to his LinkedIn page, he was a middle school math teacher and curriculum expert.
After a bit of prodding, he agreed to speak to Rachel on the phone.
“We were just friends,” he said almost immediately, as soon as the conversation turned to Nina. Even now, sixteen years later, he sounded exhausted by the topic. “We hung out a few times. That was it. Nina was off-limits.”
It was just after nine o’clock on a Friday. Rachel was alone in the house; Lucy had packed off to the Winters Dance. Rachel could hear the clamor of Joaquin’s kids in the background. “Off-limits how?” she asked. “Because of Tommy Swift?”
“Because of all of them.” Joaquin sighed. “Look, I really didn’t know Nina very well. After a few months, she told me that Steeler didn’t want us talking anymore.”
“Coach Steeler?” Rachel was startled. Immediately she felt uneasy. “How did Coach Steeler find out that you two were friends?”
“Oh, he knew everything about everybody. Nina told me Steeler was the reason Tommy dumped her in the first place. He thought shewas a distraction. You’ve gotta understand, someone like Tommy was around Steeler more than his own parents. Nina too. She hung around practices, even tried to sneak onto the team bus to ride to meets sometimes. All those girls did.”
“So what did Steeler think? That Nina was passing on trade secrets?”
“Don’t know,” Joaquin said. “That was the last I ever talked to her. After that, she ghosted.”
