Page 83 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Later, when Lucy went upstairs to nap, Rachel finished unloading the groceries. She felt unaccountably light, almost exuberant. Without realizing it, she’d been carrying around a weight about Noah and Lucy’s relationship, about how it was reshaping Lucy’s goals, attention, even her selection of a summer job. Lucy had initially pondered volunteer work, possibly for the Indiana chapter of Planned Parenthood. But working at the ice-cream store near Byron Lake had been convenient for seeing Noah—and Rachel sensed, although Lucy had never said so, that Noah and his family might be pro-life. Unconsciously she had feared that Lucy might continue to wrap her interests and schedule around Noah’s, especially when it came time to apply to college. Lucy still hadn’t totally found herself academically. On any given week, she might profess a thousand interests or none at all.
In some ways, Noah had been the ultimate distraction—a way of defining herself without actually finding herself.
But now it was over, and Lucy herself had made the choice. Rachel had little fear that she would change her mind. Lucy often hesitated, waffled, and even agonized before making a decision. But once she did, she stuck to it. She was a committer.
The thought flashed: Lucy wasn’t like poor Nina Faraday. Lucy would never linger in a toxic relationship like the one Nina had with Tommy Swift.
Just as quickly, she chased the comparison away, ashamed by it. It was ridiculous to hold Lucy up to Nina and to judge Nina unfavorably for it. Whatever had happened to Nina Faraday, it was something that had happenedto her. It wasn’t Nina’s fault or her responsibility. It wasn’t the result of a character flaw—at least nothercharacter flaw, like so many people in Rockland County had implied or assumed. Besides, she was troubled by the idea that Lucy and Nina had followed parallel paths, even briefly. This, too, was yet another source of worry that she had been trying to ignore for many months.
It was over now, Rachel told herself in a singsong. She would have to deal with the photographs, of course. Lucy might wish to forget the whole episode. But if someone at Woodward had distributed them, they would have to be identified and punished.
But not yet. First Rachel would make Lucy something yummy. Something she could eat in bed with a broken heart. Maybe mac and cheese—Rachel was getting pretty good—or an egg and cheese sandwich. Tomorrow they would again do a double Thanksgiving, first at Rachel’s aunt and uncle’s, then at the Sandhus’. But at least they wouldn’t have to make a stop at the Landrys’, where all the conversation, like the decor, was belabored with references to Noah’s swim career.
She turned on the tap and began to fill a stockpot, encouraged by the cheerful drum of water against copper. She thought of her daughter lying upstairs, surrounded by a fleecy pile of tissues, probably torturing herself with old photos and social media posts. She thought of the slow and fitful way that broken hearts repaired, straightened out, and pointed you in new directions.
She thought they had much to be thankful for that year.
Five
We
To be clear, we don’t know what happened at that party. Even at the time, we didn’t know. How could we? We saw through the narrow windows of our perspectives, shaving the night into fragments.
And whatever happened or didn’t happen to Lucy Vale happened behind a locked door, inside a room we couldn’t access.
Rumors about a New Year’s Eve party at Ryan Hawthorne’s house seemed to materialize alongside our desire for one, like we’d all collectively given birth to the idea. Nate Stern heard that Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne were going away for the weekend. Nick Topornycky heard something about a keg. Sofia Young heard that Ryan Hawthorne, who would be out of the pool for at least a month, had painkillers. Slowly the party grew in our awareness like a vein of mold, colonizing our attention until we were obsessed; we had to go.
It was the tail end of Christmas break. Indiana was locked in a cold front that sucked the air from our lungs and shocked the world into stillness. Our cars sputtered and wheezed in the mornings. Our eyeballs gummed to our lids. For days we’d been locked in our bedrooms, trapped in a prison of YouTube, TikTok, and porn.
We needed out.
Ryan Hawthorne lived in Green Gables Ridge, one of the fancy neighborhoods that backed up to the golf course, not far from the Steeler-Coxes and Alex Spinnaker. Driving up to the party, we half expected to be seized and interrogated. Most of us felt like interlopers in a different world.
But we convened without incident in packed cars with the heat blasting so hard it fried our eyeballs and the sting of cheap alcohol burning our throats. Cars backstopped the driveway and flowed all the way down the street. The lawn was rutted with tire marks. Every window scalded with light. We could hear the music reverberating in our lungs as soon as we climbed out of our cars.
Instantly we’d arrived.
The living room was hot, and eddying with classmates mysteriously transformed by the environment into strangers we didn’t know and didn’t know how to talk to. We shed our coats and scarves into a bedroom, intothebedroom where Lucy Vale would later go to sleep off her drunken night.
We didn’t remember seeing Lucy arrive, only that we knew she was there, and drunk.
Very, very drunk.
For us it was like a scrim came down at that party, revealing Lucy’s true self. Lucy was wearing heavy makeup and laughing too loudly. She kept asking around for cigarettes. It was as if she’d somehow collapsed into the rumors that had spread since we’d all seen her old photographs, as if Lucy Vale in real life had finally submitted to the Lucy Vale of our imaginations.
As if finally, at last, weknewher.
We felt vaguely sorry for her and slightly vindicated. Lucy Vale had been notched incrementally down the power chain, which meant, in some ways, the rest of us had climbed it.
A few of us saw Lucy Vale taking shots in the kitchen. Olivia Howard asked Bailey Lawrence if Lucy was okay when, a little while later, Lucy appeared to be nodding off on Bailey’s shoulder. JJ Hammillcame into the kitchen looking for an extra trash can in case Lucy needed to throw up. Akash saw JJ and Ryan helping Lucy into the first-floor bedroom, the one that served as a home office for Hawthorne’s mom. The door stayed closed afterward. We remembered hearing that Lucy Vale had passed out.
We remembered that Holly Markeson, a senior, was puking in the downstairs bathroom and that the upstairs toilet was clogged. There was an empty pack of cigarettes puddled in a nest of soiled toilet paper and piss across the toilet seat. The boys were peeing outside behind a trim wall of boxwood near the patio.
We remembered Jeremiah Greene shouting that the music was too loud, that the cops would come if we weren’t careful. The threat of cops was an undertow that kept pulling us into periodic panic. The cops were coming. Someone had called the cops. The cops would bust us for drinking. We had to run. No one could be outside. We had to get the beer off the patio. The neighbors had complained.
Rumors bloomed and dissipated. Still, more people arrived. At times we couldn’t move. We were rat-packed between walls of people, clotting the stairs and the hallway, weaving in and out of the bedrooms. Breaking things. Stealing things. Getting tossed out and beaten up.
It was chaotic and liberating. We were there. We were part of it. We stood in line for the keg, submerged in a trash can full of ice on the back porch. We tried to get drunk, quickly. We needed to forget our discomfort. We needed to forget that we didn’t quite belong.
