The Fever

9

Thursday

Just after six in the morning, Eli stepped into the dark garage, slung his gear bag over the front handlebars of his bike.

As the garage door shuddered open, he saw something move outside, in the driveway.

For a drowsy moment, he thought it might be a deer, like he sometimes saw on the road at night if he rode far out of town, into the thick of Binnorie Woods.

But then he heard a voice, high and quavery, and knew it was a girl.

He ducked under the half-raised garage door and peered out.

All he could see was a powder-blue coat with a furred hood, a frill of blond hair nearly white under the porch light.

“Who’s there?” Eli asked, squinting into the misted driveway.

With a tug, she pulled the hood from her head.

Except it wasn’t a girl. It was Lise Daniels’s mom, the neighbors’ floodlight hot across her.

“Eli?” she called out, hand visored over her eyes. “Is that Eli?”

“It’s me,” he said.

He’d seen her at the house dozens of times to pick up Lise, had seen her at school events, hands always tugging Lise’s ponytail tighter, always calling after her, telling her to call, to hurry, to be on time, to watch out, to be careful. But Eli wasn’t sure she’d ever said a word to him in his life. He knew he’d never said a word to her.

“Eli,” she said, loudly now. “Tell your father I’m sorry I haven’t called him back.”

The halo of her hair, the pink crimp of her mouth. It was weird with moms, how you could see the faces of their daughters trapped in their own faces. Mrs. Daniels’s body was larger, her shoulders round and her cheeks too, but somewhere in there, the neat prettiness of Lise lay half buried.

“Okay. Mrs. Daniels, are you okay?” he asked, and she moved closer to him, coming out from under the flat glare of the floodlight. “Did something happen at the hospital?”

For a moment, the vision of Lise fluttered before him, twirling in her turquoise tights, skirt billowing as she bounded up the school steps.

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she said. “I’ve been advised not to speak to anyone associated with the school, and your father is a school employee.”

He wondered how long she’d been standing out here. He thought of her looking up at the second-floor windows, waiting for a light to go on. Once, back when he played JV, he spotted a girl doing that after one of his games. A freshman on her bike, one sneaker flipping the pedal around, gazing up at his bedroom window. Until then, he hadn’t thought girls did those things. When he’d waved, she jumped back on her seat and rode away.

“Oh, Eli,” Mrs. Daniels said, shaking her head hard, her hood shaking too. “You’re going to hear things. But I’m telling you.”

“Maybe you should come inside,” Eli tried, the wheels of his bike retreating from her as if on their own. “I can wake Dad up. I bet he’d want to talk.”

But she shook her head harder, shook that pale nimbus of hair. “There’s no time for that. But I need you to pass along an important message. I’ve always thought of Deenie as a daughter.”

She was moving close to him, as if to ensure they were quiet, though her voice wasn’t quiet but blaring.

“What does this have to do with Deenie?”

“Oh, Eli,” she said, nearly gasping. “It has to do with all of them. All of them. Don’t you see? It’s just begun.”

Before he could say anything, before she could get any closer to him, he heard the door into the garage pop open behind him.

“Eli, who are you—”

“Dad,” Eli said, relieved, waving him over. “Lise’s mom is here.”

“My Lise,” she said, not even acknowledging Eli’s dad, her eyes, crepey and sweat-slicked, fixed on Eli. “It’s already over for her. Now all we can do is hope. But it’s not too late for the others.”

Arm darting out, her red hand clasped him. “What if we can stop it?”

“Sheila,” his dad said, walking toward her. “Did something happen?” He reached out to touch her shoulder gently, but the move startled her. She tripped, stumbling into Eli.

He tried to steady her, feeling her cold cheek pressed into his shoulder, a musky smell coming from her.

“Sheila,” his dad was saying, more firmly now.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, whirling around. “I need to tell you about Deenie.”

“What about Deenie?” Eli thought he heard a hitch in his father’s voice.

“They want us to believe they’re helping our girls. They’re killing our girls. It’s a kind of murder. A careless murder.”

“Sheila, why don’t you come inside?” his dad said in that calm-down voice that used to drive his mom crazy. “Let’s sit down and—”

“I can’t do that, Tom,” she said, her voice turning into a moan. “Our girls. I remember when I took Lise and Deenie shopping for their first bras. I remember showing them how to adjust the training straps. Those little pink ribbons.”

“Sheila, I—”

“Who would ever have thought in a few years we’d be poisoning them?”

His dad was saying something, but Eli wasn’t listening, couldn’t stop looking at her, her mouth like a slash.

As if sensing his stare, she turned to Eli again.

“The things we do to our girls because of you.”

Eli felt his hands wet on his bike handles.

“Me?”

Something was turning in her face, like a Halloween mask from the inside.

“The dangers our girls suffer at your hands,” she said. “We know and we’ll do anything to protect them. To inoculate them. Anything.”

“Sheila, have you slept at all?” His dad put his arm on Eli’s shoulder, gave him a look. “Let’s get you some coffee and—”

She shook her head, eyes pink and large and trained on Eli.

“No one made you shoot yourself full of poison,” she said, voice rising high.

She pointed her finger at Eli, below his waist.

“All of you,” she said, eyes now on Eli’s dad. “Spreading your semen anywhere you want. That’s the poison.”

“Sheila, Sheila…”

“Don’t say I didn’t do what I could.” She turned and started walking away. “I hope it’s not too late.”

It had been a night of blurry, jumbled sleep. Deenie woke with a vague memory of dreaming she was at the Pizza House, standing in front of the creaking dough machine, Sean Lurie coming out slowly from behind the ovens, looking at her, head cocked, grin crooked.

What? she’d said. What is it?

It’s you, he said, standing in front of the blazing oven.

And she’d stepped back from the machine suddenly, the airy dough passing between her hands, soft like a bird breast.

It fell to the bleached floor, flour atomizing up.

Hands slick with oil, and Sean’s eyes on them. On her hands.

And she looking down at them, seeing them glazed not with oil but with green sludge, the green glowing, the lights flickering off.

Deenie stood at the kitchen island, phone in hand.

After everything Gabby had been through, she was still worried about Deenie having to navigate the day without her. Because these were things they maneuvered together—school, divorces, faraway parents who wanted things. Boys.

The side door slammed and her dad came into the kitchen, shoving the morning paper into his book bag.

Something in the heave of morning air made her remember.

“Dad,” she said, “did you hear something earlier? A noise.”

Vaguely, she remembered looking out her window, expecting a barn owl screeching.

He turned toward the coffeepot.

“Mrs. Daniels came by this morning,” he said. “She couldn’t stay long, but Lise is doing okay. No change, but nothing’s happened.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“There wasn’t time,” he said, lifting his cup to his face. “She couldn’t stay. She had to go back.”

“But can we go over there now?”

“No,” he said, quickly.

Deenie looked at him, the way he held his coffee cup over his mouth when he spoke.

“I mean,” he added, “we’ll see.”

Outside, it was bitter cold, the sky onion white.

Eli came with them on the drive to school, which never happened.

Riding together, it felt like long ago, fighting in the backseat until Dad would have to stop the car and make one of them sit up front.

She felt a wave of nostalgia, even for the times he kicked her and tore holes in her tights with his skates.

“Eli Nash, skipping practice. I bet you broke Coach Haller’s heart,” Deenie said, looking at her brother in the backseat, legs astride, the taped knob white with baby powder, like Wayne Gretzky’s. But he wouldn’t look at her.

“I bet they didn’t even have practice without you,” she tried again. “I bet they all took their helmets off in your honor. I bet they hung black streamers over the rink and cried.”

“I overslept,” he said, facing the window. He didn’t look annoyed. He didn’t even seem to be listening to her.

She waited a moment, for something, then turned back around. The sky looked so lonely.

The car turned, and there was the lake.

“Deenie,” her dad said, so suddenly his voice startled her, “Lise and Gabby haven’t been in the lake lately, have they?”

He regretted it the moment he said it, and a hundred times more when he saw her body stiffen.

Wrung out from scant sleep, he wasn’t sure his mind was quite his own. All of Sheila’s ravings, he hadn’t quite pieced them together, but he could guess. It had something to do with vaccinations, a predatory attorney, the teeming Internet. She needed an explanation, badly, and he couldn’t blame her.

Driving, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling of something, some idea.

Then his eyes had landed on the lake, its impossible phosphorescence, even in the bitter cold, still half frozen over, the algae beneath like a sneaking promise. Remembering Georgia, her mouth ringed black that night years ago. She said she’d dreamed she put her own fingers down her throat, all the way down, and felt something like the soft lake floor there, mossy and wet and tainted.

She was never the same after that, he’d decided. Though he also knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been the same before that. No one was ever the same, except him.

So, his head still muddled, he’d found himself asking Deenie that ridiculous question about the lake, no better than Sheila’s speculations.

He could see her whole body seize up.

“We’re not allowed in the lake,” she replied, which wasn’t really an answer. “Why are you asking me that?”

“No reason,” he said. “I guess I’m just getting ready for today’s rumors.”

“Sometimes kids go in anyway,” Eli said from the backseat. “I’ve seen it.”

Deenie turned around to face him. “Like you, you mean. You and me.”

“What?”

“We used to go in it, before. We used to swim in it, remember?”

“That’s right,” Tom said. “We used to take you.”

When they were little, long before the boy drowned. Tom had a memory of pushing the corner of a towel in Eli’s ear, hoping it wouldn’t be another ear infection, that milky white drip down his neck. Why did he ever let them in that lake, even then?

He could hear Eli twisting his stick left and right. “But something happened to it. It doesn’t even seem like the same lake. And it smells like the bottom of the funkiest pair of skates in the locker room.”

“You mean yours?” Deenie said, like they were ten and twelve again, except there was a roughness in their voices Tom didn’t like.

And Deenie’s chin was shaking.

Tom could see it shaking.

He found himself watching it with exaggerated closeness, until she noticed him and stared back, her face locking into stillness.

“Dad!” she said. “You missed it. You missed the turn. It was back there.”

You’re a careless person, Georgia once said to him. He didn’t even remember why. He didn’t remember anything. She was always coming out of the water to say things, her mouth black.

@hospital did they ask u abt lake

It had been a week ago. Deenie and Gabby and Lise and Skye all in Lise’s mother’s Dodge with the screeching heater and the perennial smell of hand lotion. Lise said the steering wheel always felt damp with it.

As they drove along the lake, Skye told them she’d seen two guys in the water the week before, the first flicker of spring and their speakers blaring music from open car doors. One had a tattoo that began on his chest and disappeared beneath his jeans.

“Maybe they’re there now,” Lise had said, leaning forward eagerly, laughing. Boy crazy.

They all knew they wouldn’t be, really, and they weren’t. It was just the lake in front of them, its surface skimmed bright green.

And soon enough they were all in the water, just barely, ankle-deep, then a little more, all their tights squirreled away on the bank.

Wading deeper, Lise pulled her skirt high, and her legs were so long and skinny, with the keyhole between her thighs like a model.

You couldn’t help but look.

She had a moon shape on her inner thigh that Deenie had never seen before. Later, Lise would say it happened when she lost weight, a stretch mark that wouldn’t go away.

And then Gabby and Skye left, their calves slick with the water, thick as pea soup.

With Gabby gone, everything was less interesting, but it was easier. It was like before. Those days of just Deenie and Lise, and Deenie let herself settle into in the sugar-soft of Lise’s voice, and how easy she was and the water so delicious and Lise with stories to tell.

Now, remembering it, standing at the bathroom mirror, Deenie looked at herself.

Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? she wondered. Do I look different?

Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn’t even see.

She walked to her locker and opened it, stood there.

If she had to sit through first period, she thought she might explode.

“K.C.,” she called out, spotting a familiar glint of braces in her locker-door mirror. “You have your car?”

Kim Court moved closer, smiling, nodding. Shaking her keys.

Gabby lived ten twisty miles from the school, an A-frame like an arrowhead snug in the Binnorie Woods. There was no regular bus route and the house was always hard to find. Deenie’s dad had picked her up there countless times but sometimes he still got lost, calling Gabby’s mom, who would laugh softly and give him the same directions again. No, that’s a right at the yellow mailbox.

Gabby said living out here made her mom feel safer, tucked away like a nest at the top of a tree. But whenever Deenie was in the house, with its creaking wood and big windows, she couldn’t imagine feeling more exposed.

“I always wanted to see it,” Kim whispered, leaning over the steering wheel, gazing at the rolled-edge roof, its edges weeping with purple ivy. “It’s like a gingerbread house.”

They stood on the porch, hopping in their sneakers to keep warm. Kim in her rainbow-glittered ones, like the ones Gabby wore all last year.

It seemed to take a long time. Gabby’s cat, Larue, watched them from the window with suspicious eyes.

Finally, Deenie saw a curtain twitch, and the door swung open.

“Hey.” It was Skye, wrapped up in one of her fisherman’s sweaters with the elbow torn through. “What’s going on?”

“Hi,” Deenie said, walking inside. She didn’t want to show her disappointment that Skye was there again.

At some point, Deenie was going to have to get used to it. This new alliance.

After all, you could never be everything to one person.

Across the living room, Gabby was perched in the roll-arm chair. Larue hopped from the windowsill and stretched across her lap.

Kim’s eyes were floating everywhere—at the helix of books stacked in one corner, Closing the Circle—NOW! on top, and up into the wooden eaves, dark enough for bats.

Gabby and her mom had lived here for two years, but it still looked temporary, the furniture for a different kind of house, modern and sleek, beneath the heavy wooden ceiling fan, the faded stained glass.

“Where’s your mom?” Deenie asked.

“Sleeping,” Gabby said, her fingers picking at her scalp. “Look how gross this is. I can’t get the glue out.”

“Glue?” Kim asked, using it as an excuse to hover over Gabby.

“From the EEG,” Gabby said as Kim leaned over Gabby, peeking through her long locks.

“It smells,” Kim said.

“It’s toxic,” Skye noted, gazing out the window behind the sofa. “So it smells.”

Kim shrank back from Gabby’s head, her fingers wiggling like she’d nearly touched a spider.

“I’ve been texting you,” Deenie said. “Gabby.”

Gabby turned and looked at her.

“My mom made me turn off my phone,” she said. “And computer. Because of the pictures and stuff.”

“Right,” Deenie said. She hoped Gabby hadn’t seen that video of her onstage. She’d heard it was on YouTube: “Cello Girl Possessed!”

“And Mrs. Daniels was calling me.”

“Mrs. Daniels?” Deenie wondered if she’d showed up here too. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Gabby said. “She wants us to come see her lawyer and some special doctor.”

“So she thinks it’s the same thing? What happened to Lise and what happened to you?”

“I guess.” Gabby shrugged. “My mom says we shouldn’t get involved.”

“Sheila Daniels has a bad mojo happening,” Skye said. “You can feel it coming off her. Maybe she doesn’t want the truth. She just wants an answer.”

“What do you know about it?” Deenie asked. “Do you even know Mrs. Daniels?”

“Not really,” Skye said, walking to the sofa. “But maybe she’s just not someone to be around right now. She’s carrying a lot of pain.”

“Tell them about the girl,” Gabby said to Skye. “Skye was telling me this freaky story.”

Deenie and Kim looked at Skye.

“Oh, just something I read online,” she said. “This eleven-year-old girl a long time ago who got super, super sick. Her eyes sunk back in her head and she’d roll around on the floor. And her body started to do crazy things, like bending back on itself. So her parents called the doctor. And when he came, the girl opened her mouth and started pulling trash out of it.”

“Trash, gross,” Kim said.

“Not like our trash,” Skye said. “Straw, gravel, chicken feathers, eggshells, pine needles, bones of little animals.”

Kim’s fingers touched her lips, eyes wide. “She was eating animals?”

“No,” Skye said, shaking her head. “And she wasn’t just throwing up things from her stomach. Because everything was always dry. The doctor could blow the feathers in his hand.”

Kim gasped.

“Well, the Internet never lies,” Deenie said, but then Skye loaded up the page on her phone. She showed them a picture, a girl with big haunted eyes, her mouth open. You couldn’t really see anything, but her mouth looked gigantic, like a hole in the center of her face.

Gabby took the phone from Skye, stared at it, Larue spiraled on her lap, tail twirling.

“When the doctor put tongs down her throat,” Skye added, “the girl spat out a cinder as big as a chestnut and so hot it burnt his hand.”

Taking the phone back from Gabby, Skye showed them a picture of a stern-faced doctor, his hand out, a scythe-like scar in the center of his palm.

“What’s a cinder?” Kim asked, teeth tugging at her lip. “Like a rock?”

“This is all very helpful,” Deenie said. Gabby couldn’t really want Skye here. She was only making it worse. Worse than even the pictures on the Internet. “Thanks, Skye.”

“So then what happened?” Gabby asked, Larue’s tail tickling her neck.

Skye shrugged. “I didn’t read it all. Maybe they burned a bunch of people in the town square. That’s what they usually do.”

“No,” Gabby said, “I mean to the girl. What happened to her?”

“Oh,” Skye said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”

Deenie sat down on the roll-arm next to Gabby.

“Mrs. Daniels came to our house this morning,” Deenie said.

Gabby looked up at her. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Deenie said, realizing it herself.

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Skye was kneeling on the sofa, looking out the window. Larue leaped from Gabby’s lap and winnowed between Skye’s calves and scuffed boot heels.

“Gabby, are you going back to the doctor today?” Kim asked.

“We’re waiting and seeing,” Gabby said, her fingers flying back to her scalp. “For some results or something. I can’t think of what more they could do. Or ask. ‘Have you visited a foreign country recently? Have you been camping? Could you be pregnant?’”

There was a banging sound from somewhere in the house.

“That’s Mom,” Gabby said, jumping to her feet. “She’s probably not going to like you guys cutting.”

Skye didn’t move, so Deenie didn’t either. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Gabby and she had to before it was late.

“Gabby,” she asked abruptly, “did they ask you anything about the lake?”

“The lake?” Kim looked at Deenie, her face animating. “What about it?”

Deenie watched the back of Skye’s head, which didn’t move.

“We were there last week,” Skye said, looking at Deenie. “Isn’t that what you mean, Deenie?”

And then something happened.

Gabby’s jaw jolted suddenly to the left, then jolted again and again.

Grabbing the chair arm, she pressed her face against the back cushion to try to stop it.

Kim was watching, her fingers to her mouth as Gabby’s jaw slammed into the cushion over and over.

They were all watching.

“Don’t tell my mom,” Gabby said, her jaw popping like a firecracker. “Deenie, don’t.”

Sitting in the parking lot, Tom spread the newspaper across the steering wheel and read the article. He hadn’t wanted to read it in front of Deenie and he didn’t want to be seen reading it in school.

There was a large photo of Lise and Gabby, cropped. In the original version—slapped, milk-spattered, to Tom’s refrigerator door the previous fall—Deenie stood beside Gabby. In the newspaper, only Deenie’s hand remained, resting on Gabby’s shoulder like a ghost’s. The three girls, tanned and triumphant during trip to WaterWonders last fall. Lise bursting from a star-spangled halter top that, no matter how she shifted or twisted, always seemed to land one of its biggest star in the center of a breast, a bull’s-eye.

He’d taken the girls himself, with Eli as company, both pretending not to hear the high frenzy of the backseat, the girls talking the whole eighty-minute drive in a language impenetrable and self-delighted. On the ride back, their bodies chlorine-streaked to numbness, a torpor set in and he and Eli could watch the twilit horizon stretched across the windshield, and not say a word.

Midway down was another photo inset. A creamy lavender brochure he recognized.

HPV and Your Daughter: Vaccinate Today, Protect Her Forever

Oh no, he thought. Here it is. What Sheila was raving about this morning. Alongside the photo came the subhead:

There was a quote from Mindy Parker’s father, Drew Parker, Esq., who was now speaking on Sheila Daniels’s behalf.

Tom looked at the brochure inset again. Protect her forever. It had accompanied the letter all the parents in the school system had received the prior summer.

So she’d done it, the whole series. Three boosters over six months. They sent text-message reminders. The final one had been just a few weeks ago.

He’d been glad for it, though he tried not to think about it for long. He knew his daughter would eventually have sex. That any day now she might find a boyfriend and then it was inevitable. That wasn’t the part that bothered him. It was the peril out there. Infections, cancer, a havoc upon his sweet daughter’s small, graceful little body. One she held so closely, so tightly. Even hugging her, he felt her smallness and delicacy.

She liked the high dive and played soccer and, in gym class or touch football with Eli and himself, was always bold and fearless. Skinned knees, bruised elbow, I can play too. But sometimes he wondered if that was by necessity, a girl living with two males, a girl who might rather be up in her room with Gabby, with Lise, or with her books, that endless pile of novels with limp-bodied girls on the cover. Girls in bathtubs, in dark woods. Girls underwater.

And when he touched her, he couldn’t help but think: What happens when someone touches her someday and doesn’t understand these things about her? That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

And now, with Lise and Gabby, he was more glad than ever that he’d done what he could to take care of her. Whatever theories Sheila Daniels held in her fevered head, the shots were not to blame.

Vaccines, like all great scientific discoveries, are counterintuitive. You must take the very thing you are protecting yourself against. So your body remembers it, knows how to fight it.

You have to do whatever you can to shield their bodies. And sometimes that means you have to expose them to the very thing you want to protect them from. Which is the most unfair thing in the world.

“Oh my God, Deenie, did you see her?” Kim said, tearing open a bag of gummy worms from a warm spot under her car’s heat vent. “Did you see what happened to her face? That sound?”

Nerves, Gabby had insisted, laughing lurchingly. Stress.

And now, heading back to school, Deenie wished she hadn’t gone in the first place. She was going to make it just in time for third period and she hadn’t even gotten to talk to Gabby alone. And she wished she hadn’t brought up the lake.

“And why doesn’t she want her mom to know?” Kim asked, teeth tearing noisily at the green worm dangling from her braces.

“I don’t know,” Deenie said. “Turn left.”

“Here,” Kim said, handing Deenie her phone. “Find some music. I can’t think and drive.”

Deenie scrolled down the playlist mindlessly with her thumb.

“You know,” Kim said, mind-reading, “that lake water is in everything. It’s not just in the lake. If you know what I mean.”

“Is that some kind of riddle?”

“Do you ever drink from the water fountains in the school?” Kim said. “It’s the same stuff. And remember that day in gym, when we played soccer in the field and we all got that orange stuff on our shoes?”

Deenie looked at her thumbprint seared onto Kim’s phone, set it down on the gear panel.

“No,” Deenie said, “I wasn’t there.”

Deenie’s own phone began humming on her thighs. It was another text from the number she didn’t recognize.

Who r u

The thought came: Could it be Sean Lurie?

And then she pushed it away. Nearly shaking her head as if to shake the idea loose. She didn’t have time to think about any of that.

“So,” Kim said, looking at her from the corner of her eye. “You guys went in the lake?”

“We were just there,” Deenie said. “We weren’t doing anything.”

“But did you get near the water?”

“No,” Deenie lied.

“Huh. Well, you’re okay, right?” she said, looking at Deenie, maybe squinting a little.

“Don’t I look okay?” Deenie replied.

Kim looked at her for a moment longer, then turned her eyes back to the road, tugging at a gummy worm, letting it snap against her lip.

Deenie’s phone burred again, a text from Gabby, who must’ve gotten her phone back.

But Deenie had. Though Gabby didn’t know it.

It’d been after she and Skye left, disappearing up the bank.

Leaning back, Lise kicked her legs, her breasts bobbling from her cotton bra.

Swim with me, Deenie, she said. Let’s do it, huh?

And she’d found she wanted to. Cool as Gabby and Skye were, with ex-boyfriends and birth control and complicated hair, maybe Lise and Deenie were cool too. Maybe they were lawbreakers. Rebels.

So they swam, even putting their heads under.

Afterward, lying on the bank, Lise had told her the story, whispering it in her ear. About the thing she had done with the boy, that he had done to her, in the bushes by the school. And she had to tell Deenie about it. And how it had felt.

Deenie hadn’t been able to put it out of her head for days after. She guessed she hadn’t put it out of her head yet.

All during class, every time he walked by the window, Tom saw it, from the corner of his eye. Amid all the hay-brown thatch of late winter, a flash of neon pink, just outside, by the tall hedges.

Soon, he found himself teaching from that corner, trying to get a better look.

It looked familiar and he couldn’t figure out why.

After the bell, in nothing but shirtsleeves, his face flushed from the cold, he crept along outside his own classroom windows like some kind of peeper.

Right by the dense, snow-furred hedges, there was a crumpled pile and first he thought it was a winter scarf swirling around itself, but when he reached out, he felt the thick knit of a pair of girl’s tights, Fair Isles like Georgia used to wear on winter mornings, long ago. Vivid pink with fat white snowflakes.

He thought about tugging the wool loose from the brambles, taking the tights to Lost and Found, but he didn’t.

Just looking at them, how small they were, he didn’t know what to do.

it’s ok

she will.

He hoped she would. He could still remember Deenie’s tight, red-faced anger at their mom, all through the divorce. The way it seemed sometimes her forehead would split open. It had settled into something quieter, less vivid. Something worse, like grooves sunk deep, unfixable. It had been so much harder for Deenie. All because their mom couldn’t control herself, she said. Which is disgusting.

Thrusting his phone to the bottom of his backpack, he opened the door to the loading dock.

And there, once again, was Skye Osbourne, prowling up the ramp from the parking lot.

He was beginning to wonder if she lived out here. But he guessed she could wonder the same thing about him.

She smiled through a crest of smoke. It smelled like honey.

“Sometimes a girl’s gotta get some fresh air,” she said. “Or she might go crazy.”

He dropped his backpack to the ground, climbed up on the railing.

There was a heaviness to the sky, the whisper of something wet in the air.

“Hey,” she said, tugging a fraying scarf from her neck. “Feel how warm it’s getting.”

She dropped her bag and climbed up beside him.

“I heard Lise’s mom came to see you.”

“Who told you that?”

“Deenie.”

“Really?” he said. He had the impression Deenie wasn’t really friends with Skye. Friends of friends. Sometimes Eli felt like that’s all he had. Friends of friends.

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know. She was acting pretty crazy.”

“Huh,” Skye said. “Did she say stuff?”

All those layers of sweater and scarf, and beneath those, her legs, boots climbing to her midthigh. When she turned, her skirt whirled slowly, and, for a split second, he could see the inside of one of those thighs. Stark white through the skein of fishnets.

He watched it. She watched him.

“Sort of,” he said. All that came into his head was Mrs. Daniels saying Spreading your semen anywhere you want. “I don’t remember.”

She looked at him and he thought he saw a funny kind of smile there. He tried to imagine having sex with Skye, to picture her body underneath all those folds and seams. To picture her eyes rolling back, her skin flushed, her body giving way. He couldn’t.

It made him feel relieved.

He didn’t think he’d ever be interested in Skye, but he was glad girls like her existed. Ones who didn’t need him to feel good, pretty, forgiven, safe.

There were marks on Lise’s locker, like from a big claw.

“They didn’t have her combination,” Jaymie Hurwich told Deenie breathlessly. Class salutatorian and Most Self-Motivated Student, Jaymie said everything breathlessly. “The janitor opened it with a bolt cutter.”

Deenie put her finger on the metal-scrape scar.

“They looked, but then they didn’t touch anything,” Jaymie said, hand on the large padlock hanging from it now. “You missed geo, Deenie. How come?”

Deenie didn’t say anything. She knew exactly what was inside Lise’s locker: packs of highlighters, wild-berry hand sanitizer, the dented thermos containing sludgy remnants of yesterday morning’s health smoothie. What could they learn from that?

Then Jaymie told her the other news: a silver-haired woman in a pantsuit had been spotted in the nurse’s office. No one knew whether Nurse Tammy had quit or been suspended or fired, but she was gone. And the silver-haired woman was maybe not even a nurse at all but someone important. The lanyard on her neck read Dryden County Health.

“Do you think they’ll cancel midterms?” Jaymie asked.

Deenie didn’t answer. She was reading the newspaper article that had been making the rounds, the paper greased to near silk by now.

The picture of Gabby and Lise, best friends forever.

Which was all she could see at first until Jaymie spread her hand like a spider over the photo of the lavender brochure.

“It could happen to any of us,” Jaymie said gravely. “We all have it in us.”

The first shots were six months ago.

HPV vaccines are more effective if administered before sexual debut.

That’s what the department of health poster in the nurse’s office said. Gabby had read it aloud, making wide eyes at Deenie until she’d laughed.

Debut. Take a bow after. Hold your applause till the end, please.

Freshman girls were now required to have it before enrolling.

Brooke Campos said most of the fifth-grade girls had already had it. All of them had. “Sluts,” Brooke had said, annoyed at being beaten by her eleven-year-old sister. “The little sluts.”

And here they were, high-school juniors with condoms hurled at their feet wherever they turned, it seemed. And they hadn’t gotten the shots.

“The human papillomavirus can infect you anywhere,” Ms. Dyer, the health teacher, announced before the first round of shots in September, “and can cause everything from benign warts on the hands and feet to cancer of the cervix, anus, mouth, and throat.”

A papilloma, she explained, grows outward like a projecting finger and looks like cauliflower.

Deenie didn’t see how a finger could look like a cauliflower but, watching Ms. Dyer holding up her pinkie, she knew she didn’t want either of them inside her.

And then Ms. Dyer said that HPV had been around forever, even in those fairy tales you read as a kid, when the witches and trolls have bumps on their faces and hands.

“Can’t warts just be warts?” Brooke Campos asked, grimacing. “Let’s not get crazy.” Brooke was always the person in English class who complained that Ms. Enright was “reading too much into things.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Ms. Dyer said. No one would ever assume anything Ms. Dyer said was a joke. Twenty-eight years old with a master’s in female adolescent something, she paused before she answered any question, pushing her oversize blue-framed glasses higher on her nose thoughtfully. Deenie’s dad said, with women like her, a sense of humor comes a few years later.

“See how wide this area is?” she said, holding a diagram of a cervix across her pelvis, making the girls in the front row flinch. “At your age, this is the area most vulnerable to invasion. It’s utterly exposed. In a few years, it will retract. You’ll be safer.”

Lise whispered that it made her feel like her insides were on the outside and anyone could touch them.

“Until then,” Ms. Dyer said, pointing to the sink handle on the lab unit, “you are as open as the mouth on that faucet.”

Skye looked up for a moment from mild contemplation of her own fingers, bundled with rings—arrows, snakes, a silver seahorse.

“Ms. Dyer, I read something,” she said. “Most people with HPV have issues with feeling grounded, with self-judgment, with their sexual energies.”

“Where’d you read that, Skye?” Ms. Dyer asked, her fingers wrapped around the sink handle. Teachers never knew what to do with Skye, Ms. Dyer least of all. Whenever Skye spoke, Ms. Dyer tended to shift the weight on her feet back and forth until it made Deenie dizzy.

“Online somewhere,” Skye replied. “It has to do with repression. Warts mean you’re holding something back that needs to be released.”

“Like what? Pus?” Deenie asked. Everything was always so easy for Skye, with her older boyfriends, the way her aunt bought her cool old-time lingerie from vintage shops, the strip of birth control pills she once unfurled for them like candy.

“No,” Skye said. “Sexual hang-ups. Hiding your erotic powers. Fear. Secrets. You have to release all that.”

“But how?” Lise peeped from behind Skye. “What are you supposed to do?”

Everyone started giggling except Lise, her face puzzled and reddening.

“Don’t worry, Lise,” Skye said, not even turning around to look at her. “You’ll know just what to do.”

The first round of shots, Deenie was surprised how little it hurt, and disappointed.

All the rumors were that it hurt more than any other vaccine, ever.

She remembered Jaymie Hurwich. It had taken her ten minutes because the nurse couldn’t calm her down.

Finally, she told me to watch the ladybug on the window, Jaymie said after. And I said, What window? By then she’d stuck it in.

Back then, the prospect of her or Gabby or Lise having sex seemed remote. None of them had boyfriends and there had been the dramatic cautionary tale of a girl Deenie worked with at the Pizza House. The one who’d confided that she thought she was pregnant by the assistant manager at the ear-piercing booth at the mall. It turned out she wasn’t pregnant but did have gonorrhea, which was disgusting to all of them in ten different ways, “starting with the name,” Lise had said, shivering a little.

But the third booster round came after Gabby and Tyler Nagy. They’d had sex twice, though Gabby wasn’t even sure it worked the first time, though she’d spent four summers at horse camp, so it was hard to know.

After the second time, Tyler broke up with her while she was still putting her jeans back on. “I should never have done it,” Gabby said. “And now it’s gone.”

Around then, she’d started to spend lots of time with Skye, who sent Tyler a text message calling him an abuser of girls. She told them there were secret codes embedded in the text and it was a hex. She shook the phone when she sent it, to increase the mayhem. And when Deenie thought about it now, it was then that Gabby and Skye’s friendship was sealed.

Later, the brief reign of Gabby and Tyler—had it really only lasted a month?—became a sign to Deenie that there were entire dark corridors too awful to ponder. It wouldn’t be that way for her, she decided. And she never would have dated anyone like Tyler, or any hockey player.

But it wasn’t just Gabby. There was Lise, her body bursting with power and beauty, mere seconds away from a wealth of thrilling boyfriend possibilities, which would surely lead to romantic sex and never anything to feel bad about, ever.

Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None.

Every Monday, another girl’s debut.

A sharp burst of screams erupted from inside the gym.

“Put your fingers in her mouth,” someone was shouting, and A.J. and Scotty Tredwell were rushing down the hall, pulling Eli with them through the locker-room exit, following the noise.

The doors pitched wide, but all Eli could see was a band of girls’ legs in all those colored tights like Gabby’s, like the bright pegs in a game board, grouped so closely he couldn’t see past them to whatever they were staring at on the floor.

Mrs. Darger, whistle jammed in her mouth, was shoving them aside like a pro lineman, and when the last face-clenched girl stumbled sideways, Eli spotted a pair of rainbow-colored sneakers twitching on the floor, heard the rapid sound of someone’s head hitting hard wood, rat-a-tat-tat.

It was the red-haired girl, Kim someone, who used to trail after Gabby when she came to watch that jackass Nagy play. Laugh-filled braces, she’d flashed her shirt upward at him, but only as high as her white belly, freckle-sprayed. Once Gabby stopped coming to the games, Kim did too.

Suddenly there was a strong smell, a geyser of vomit from the girl’s mouth, carrot-colored to match her hair.

“It’s me,” her voice came. “Oh no, it’s me.”

Eli had long gotten used to the screams of girls, their faces ruddy and ecstatic behind the throbbing Plexiglas.

You could you never really distinguish them from the noise of everything else in the rink, the seashell roar under his helmet, the double-tap of a stick, the whistle shrieks, the sounds of his own breathing, ragged and focused.

But this wasn’t the same anyway, the sound that came from the girl’s—Kim Court’s—mouth as she saw the paramedics arrive.

It wasn’t a scream, really.

More like a howl, a moaning howl that reminded him of something he couldn’t name. An animal dying, something.

When they sat her up, there was a spray of blood down the back of her shirt from where her head had hit the floor.

“You’re okay,” Mrs. Darger had said, her face a funny shade of green. “You just spooked yourself.”

Like you might say if she had gotten hit in the head with a volleyball.

“What happened,” someone whispered, and Eli could smell the vomit on the floor. One of the paramedics stepped on it, smearing it as he wheeled Kim Court away.

“She was standing and then she wasn’t.”

“That is so gross.”

“She was standing next to me,” someone whispered, “and she was saying, ‘Why are you so gray?’”

There was a long message from Gabby, broken across seven, eight texts.

Standing outside the east breezeway, Deenie read them, one eye on her cell phone signal, her thumb pressing anxiously on the screen, refresh-refresh-refresh, for the next one.

I was scared he’d do this.

It was about Gabby’s dad. Only he could make her like this.

She said he’d just showed up at the house, had learned what happened from Mrs. Daniels. Couldn’t believe he had to hear it from a stranger on his voice mail. And wasn’t that typical, Gabby said, because Mrs. Daniels was no stranger. Had in fact called the police on Mr. Bishop once, years ago, when he’d come to pick up his daughter and driven right onto the front lawn, tearing out a porch light and insisting Gabby get in the car, now.

He went to hosp. looking for me, Gabby wrote. He just wants to show off. He doesn’t care. He was yelling and mom wouldn’t come from behind the dining rm table.

Then:

He started crying, big shock. Mom said what are you gonna do? Cry your whole life?

But Gabby’s final text wasn’t about her dad. It was short and the words seemed to flash at Deenie, her screen catching the sun’s glare.

Also: I’m thinking about the lake. What if u r right. What if it was in the lake. What if it is in us.

Deenie looked at the words, which seemed to float before her eyes.

But I’m okay, she wanted to say, to type. But she just looked at the screen instead.

That was when she heard the funny pant, someone rushing up to her, the hall echoing with new noise.

Keith Barbour was charging down the hall with another senior boy, both their necks ringed by monster headphones.

“Did you hear?” he barked, shoving Deenie in the arm. “Kim Court’s getting wheeled out on a gurney.”

“Kim?” Deenie asked, her phone smacking the floor. “What happened?”

“You’re all going down.” The other boy laughed, beats thrumming through the open mouths of his headphones. “One by one.”

The whole school had a rabid energy, like nothing would settle again.

And then, a few minutes before sixth period began, Eli showed up at Tom’s classroom door.

Tom hadn’t even had a chance to talk to him about what had happened that morning.

The dangers our girls suffer at your hands, Sheila Daniels had said to poor Eli. Eli, the sweetest boy in the world. We know and we’ll do anything to protect them. Anything.

A woman who laid that charge at the feet of his son, a boy who couldn’t even enjoy the girls, their avid eyes always on him, seemed outrageously cruel.

“Dad,” Eli said, face pale, one hand tight on the door frame. “I need to talk to you.”

Tom stepped outside the classroom and Eli told him what he’d just seen, the redheaded sophomore on the gym floor.

“The one with all the braces,” Eli said.

“That must be Kim Court,” Tom said. “It sounds like Kim Court.”

Kim had been in his class last semester. She was one of the ones always trailing behind Gabby and who seemed years younger than her, mouth thick with orthodontia, skittering in her tennis shoes, spinning in the hallways like a red top.

“She didn’t look good,” Eli said. His eyes were glazed and wouldn’t quite meet Tom’s.

“This is just crazy,” Tom said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

Eli didn’t say anything.

The bell rang.

“Okay,” Eli said, swinging his backpack up behind him.

Something in his face when he turned away made Tom pause. An expression he’d almost forgotten. Back when Eli was ten or eleven, that time when he stopped sleeping. Georgia would hear him moaning, go to his room, and find Eli sitting in the dark, his arms wrapped around his shins. He’d say his bones felt like they were popping. The doctor said it was growing pains, which Tom hadn’t realized was a literal thing.

“Kids can become very emotional when they don’t sleep,” the doctor had told them. “It’s natural.”

The only thing that seemed to help was when Georgia rubbed his legs, which she would do for a half hour or more, coming back to their bed her hands slippery with vitamin oil.

Driving him to school in the morning in those days, Tom would watch him in the rearview mirror, eyes ringed gray. It was hard to see. This, his easy child, none of the sweeping emotions of his daughter, her warmth and sorrow both heavy things. He wasn’t used to it on Eli.

“Dad,” Eli had asked one morning, “what if you woke up one day and you were gone?”

“If you woke up and I was gone? That wouldn’t ever happen, Eli.”

“No, what if I woke up and I was gone.”

Tom had looked at him in the backseat, his limbs growing so long, his face changing so fast you could almost watch it happen, and felt a fierce loss and didn’t know why.