Page 98 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
@badprincess:probably both?
@bassicrhythm:Lydia Faraday’s, sorry.
@badprincess:this is so confusing
Rumors sifted to us, one after the other, until all the rumors were just stories and all the stories were just comments turned over on our server, through our fingers, into tidbits of data to digest and regurgitate and recycle and forget.
We moved on. As a raw spring wind began to scrub the green from the ground, we felt the fierce grip of the events on our subconscious begin to loosen. With it, almost imperceptibly at first, came the slow unraveling of our obsession with the swim team. The state championships had come and gone. We’d felt nothing but relief when they wereover; none of us had bothered to attend the meet. Without some of our best swimmers, Woodward placed third behind Willow Park and Nyack, giving our enemies something to crow about on TikTok.
We pitied our rivals for their obsessive preoccupation with a single competition. We had other things to worry about: college, and whether we would get in or could afford to go; the looming threat of the SATs, which suddenly edged into every conversation with our parents and every lecture from our teachers; whether or not we would be able to see Taylor Swift in concert. We’d grown up and gained new perspectives. It was as if the swimmers and their wins had slipped down the length of a telescope, grown increasingly distant from us.
Toward Noah Landry, our feelings turned fickle. Fitful. With no punishment on the horizon, we were stirred by currents of unease. His social media, we felt, was insensitive. His headphones were outdated. His easy smile, suspicious. We detected no signs of shame, no crippling grief, no self-flagellation or regret. Spinnaker pointed out that Noah’s behavior was evidence of a clear conscience. Evie Grant floated the wordsociopath.
Noah just kept swimming on the club team, and left all the bad feelings for us to work through.
We studied for our PSATs. We were buried under an avalanche of homework. We started having dreams about college where college was a maze and we couldn’t ever find the dining hall. We put our phones on “Do Not Disturb” for hours at a time. We hunted for new Discord servers dedicated to our favorite gamers, our favorite channels, our favorite books. We were hopeful, for once, about our basketball team. We heard that freshman Theo Davis had sunk thirty points in one game. We followed him on TikTok.
In March we heard that Administration had been tipped off about a cheating ring that fed homework to the athletes for cash. Alex Spinnaker warned us not to say anything. He threatened to infiltrate our hard drives and leak our personal data if we even thought of confessing.
@spinn_doctor:no body, no crime
@spinn_doctor:remember that
@nononycky:whoever killed Nina Faraday did
@mememeup:that’s not funny, man
@lululemonaide:wait—do we really think Nina Faraday is dead???
@nononycky:no, we think she went on a 17-year-long vacation
We relaxed our imaginative hold on Lucy. We let her slip away, lost inside the Faraday House, drowned somewhere out of sight. The longer she stayed away from school, the less clear our memories of her were. When we tried to get our imaginations around her, it was like plunging our hands into a stream to catch something we saw streak beneath the surface—a fish, a frog, a newt stirring in the mud. Our fingers went quickly numb. Something vital slipped through the dark places in our memories.
Even Akash stopped reporting on the lights burning in the house or the twitch of a hand at the window, cinching the curtains shut. He logged on only intermittently, usually with a question for Spinnaker and Meeks about a video game that had stymied him or an expletive about homework. He spent most of his time with his new sort-of girlfriend. He’d even moved lunch tables to sit with her.
And then, one day, without a word or a goodbye, his username disappeared.
Without Akash, our server began to fray.
Then Kaitlyn Courtland rocked us when she announced she was giving up the moderator role. We weren’t convinced by her excuse either. According to Kaitlyn, her parents wanted her to spend more time on her homework. This was equivalent to announcing that Kaitlyn Courtlandhadparents. It was our parents’ most common refrain, the rhythmic undercurrent that powered a whole generation of internet use. We were always supposed to be doing our homework, or our chores, or getting outside, or making real friends. True, Mrs. Steeler-Cox’saggressive marketing campaign about the poisonous effects of Discord on young minds and moral development made things trickier. Still, we wouldn’t have pegged Kaitlyn for a quitter.
Ethan Courtland had an alternate explanation for his cousin’s abdication of her responsibilities.
@mememeup:She feels bad about Lucy Vale
@badprincess:what do you mean? Bad how?
@mememeup:she just feels bad about what we did to her
@spinn_doctor:are you crazy?
@spinn_doctor:am I crazy?
@spinn_doctor:does anyone listen to me?
@spinn_doctor:do I exist?
@nononycky:unfortunately
