Page 81 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“It’s my mom,” Sofia said. She wasn’t slurring anymore at least. “Don’t answer it.”
Up the hill, Noah was piloting Lucy back toward the cafeteria. She was moving carefully, limping with one hand on her lower back. We thought of calling out and asking whether she was okay.
Her voice thinned in the distance. We couldn’t hear what she was saying, only Noah’s response.
“Your funny bone’s in your elbow, silly,” Noah said. His voice sounded the way it usually did. Warm. Gentle. Sure. “That was your tailbone.”
We were freezing. We felt suddenly anxious. We’d been gone for too long. Our parents would notice we were missing. Olivia and Hannah returned with rolls of paper towels for Evie Grant, pilfered from the auditorium bathroom, which had been mercifully unlocked.
“We saw Lucy and Noah in the parking lot,” they announced. We said nothing.
Evie was still tearful. There was no way she could return with vomit all over her. It was all Sofia’s fault for being such a fuckup.
We interceded before things could get ugly. We helped clean Evie and Sofia up. Sofia told us she was feeling much better. She hadn’t taken much, she said. Just a few pills and some vodka.
We told her she would wind up like Mr. Cross if she wasn’t careful. She didn’t seem to remember that she’d mentioned him and implied that Aiden Teller knew something about the drugs and Mr. Cross’s OD—just like the troll ANONYM1698 had been claiming online for months. And we didn’t want to push it.
If Teller was wrapped up in something like that, we didn’t want to know.
We scattered. Olivia and Hannah stayed with Sofia outside Aquatics, feeding her sips of ginger ale. We swore to fend off Ms. Young until Sofia was sober enough to return to the cafeteria. We promised to look around for Sofia’s boyfriend. Evie Grant went to find her parents; she was done. By then most of us were tired. The night had soured. The cafeteria lights looked suddenly flimsy in the darkness, like a movie set, an illusion that would dissipate before morning.
It was close to midnight when we got a notification from Peyton Neely. A single message after hours of inactivity. By then most of us were sleeping. But a few of us saw our phones light up, casting a small neon window into the dark of our bedrooms.
@geminirising:hey. do you guys remember all those storm birds years ago?
We knew at once what she was talking about. Four years earlier, back-to-back tornadoes had driven the Ohio River over its banks. Floodwaters had sheeted the streets, spun away mailboxes, uprooted whole gardens. The same water had fingered through porous gaps in the drywall of Akash’s old house and floated their living room furniture on four-foot eddies. As a result, Akash’s parents had decided to relocate to Lawrence Place where it intersected with Lily Lane at the Faraday House.
But the Sandhus’ old house was just one of the many casualties of that storm season. The winds had blown hundreds of nests from their branches. Dozens and dozens of infant birds, not yet grown enough to fly, had died inside a hundred-mile-an-hour centrifuge of debris, dirt, and loose trash. Some of the birds had tried to fly anyway; their wings were cleaved apart, stripped from the jointing of their spines, flayed in crazy directions.
In the morning, we’d found them. Dozens of them. Dark, all dark, with grit and storm sludge and blood. Who knew what color their feathers had been? All of them broken, their wings cracked in strange directions or almost entirely ripped away. They had lain with small, sorry faces turned into the pavement under a sweep of dirty feathers. They had almost looked as if they were covering their eyes. As if they had died mourning something they were too horrified or embarrassed to face.
@mememeup:yeah, i remember the birds
@mememeup:why?
We waited for an answer, but none came. We figured maybe Peyton had gone to sleep. We tried to sleep too, but our thoughts were full of agitation, the sweep of dark memories.
We hadn’t thought about those birds in years. Not until Peyton Neely reminded us. Not until Lucy Vale, beautiful Lucy Vale—we agreed she was beautiful now—limped up the hill on Casino Night, pinioned beneath the dark wing of Noah’s tuxedo jacket, her face invisible, turned into the shadow of his arm.
Four
Rachel
Afew days before Thanksgiving, Rachel came home from the grocery store to find her daughter, face pulpy from crying, huddled on the couch among a scrum of wadded-up tissues.
She was so alarmed, she nearly dropped the bag with the eggs.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Lucy blew her nose. It was like the toot of a mournful trumpet. “I broke up with Noah,” she said. Her voice was thick with mucus.
“Youdid?” Rachel asked.
Lucy glared at her. “Yes,Idid. Is that so fucking hard to believe?”
“Lucy.” Rachel deposited the bags on the coffee table and took a seat next to her daughter on the couch.
“Sorry,” Lucy grumbled. She blew her nose again, extravagantly. “It was so sad. But I had to. He’s been so weird ever since—”
