Page 80 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
A violent cataclysm seemed to shudder her whole body. Just as Evie Grant caught up, Sofia puked. She erupted. It was like something out ofThe Exorcist. Evie screamed as vomit patterned her face, her dress, her bare arms. We shouted, barely dodging the flow.
Evie started crying. Nate let Sofia go, pitching her toward the planters at the entrance to Aquatics. She fell to her knees, still retching. Everyone was talking. It was a mess. Olivia Howard and Hannah Smith left with a promise to find paper towels. Evie Grant wailed that she needed a new dress.
Peyton Neely hushed us sharply. She’d heard something.
Heard what?we wanted to know, and Peyton shushed us again.
“Voices,” Peyton said. “Someone’s coming.”
Evie Grant was still crying softly. Kaitlyn Courtland was crouched next to Sofia Young at the planters, rubbing her back, murmuringindistinctly. The rest of us stood motionless, our fingers numbing against soda cans and bottles of water. The wind slid fingers down our necks. We imagined McVeigh prowling somewhere out of sight between the cars. Watching us. We scanned the parking lot for movement. Up on the hill, the darkness shuddered, rippled, and shook loose a pair of silhouettes.
“Do you think I’m stupid or something?”
Noah and Lucy. They were standing farther up the hill, a few hundred feet from where we were gathered, just outside the circle of light cast down from the overheads braced to the cafeteria.
“Answer me. Do you think I’m stupid?”
We heard the pitch of Lucy’s voice in her response. But whatever she said was lost by the distance, muzzled by the fizz of indifferent rain.
Then Noah again, his voice edged with warning. “I know who you are, Lucy. I know everything about you. Don’t forget.”
We stood there helplessly, signaling to one another in the dark. Neither Lucy nor Noah looked in our direction. Even if they had, it wasn’t clear that they would be able to see us where we were, lost in the folds of darkness that curved down the parking lot and puddled at the bottom of the hill.
From a distance we saw Lucy Vale step into the light, swiping her eyes with her arm. She wasn’t wearing a jacket. Her voice canted suddenly down to us.
“You know what, Noah Landry? Everyone thinks you’re so nice. But you’re not. You’re a fuckingasshole.”
She took one step. She took another.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” Noah said. He reached out. Grabbed her.
That’s when it happened. Sofia’s phone trumpeted a short blast of music from her bag, which she’d abandoned somewhere in the darkness.
Noah yanked.
Lucy slipped.
Or she slipped, and he pulled.
Later we could never tell the exact order of events. Everything happened too fast. Noah cursed. Lucy yelped. We were looking around for Sofia’s bag, trying to silence the ringtone. By the time we looked up, Noah Landry was staring in our direction, and Lucy was on the ground.
“Hello?” he called out. “Is someone down there?”
After a long beat, Kaitlyn Courtland spoke up. “Sofia’s puking. We think she took something.”
Noah Landry said nothing. For a beat he stood there staring, maybe picking out our forms in the darkness.
“Lucy slipped,” he said and bent down to help her to her feet. Then he put his arm around her, and she seemed to disappear into his jacket, engulfed inside his shadow. For a second something stirred again in our subconscious—a memory of something, an impression we couldn’t name.
Yanked or slipped. A small difference but important. Critical even.
We were there. We’d seen it happen. But we didn’t know forsure. The memory had already turned into a jigsaw of different pieces; we remembered it happening one way, then another. Noah had grabbed her, pulled her so hard she’d lost her balance. Lucy had lost her balance, and Noah had grabbed her, pulled her, trying to keep her on her feet.
Impossible to know. Lucy was changing—had changed—in our imaginations. Lucy wasslippery.
Noah was probably just trying to help.
Sofia Young’s phone began to ring again. Peyton finally located Sofia’s bag, abandoned on the asphalt between two parked cars.
