The Fever

10

Eli sat, playing it and replaying it in his mind. The girl’s head slapping the floor, the glare from all those braces, like a mouth full of tinfoil.

Horse. Now he remembered. That’s what they called her.

Language lab should have started five minutes ago, but Ms. Chase, who gave out the peeling headphones, was nowhere to be found. Under the faded poster of the Eiffel Tower, A.J. and Stim, both in their jerseys, were sitting on top of their desks, speculating loudly that school would be canceled.

“They gotta do it now,” A.J. said. “Quarantine. Lock your daughters up!”

“I’m telling you, it’s some kind of mutant STD,” Stim said, flapping the edge of the long gauze pad on his forearm, an acrid smell wafting from it. “I won’t be hitting any of that. I’m sticking with Star-of-the-Sea girls.”

“Oh, man, those girls all have STDs. They don’t believe in condoms.”

Eli looked longingly out the classroom door. Maybe he could just leave.

“Why don’t you ask Nash?” Stim said, spinning the dials on the ancient analog tape deck. “He’s the one who got a booty call from Mo McLoughlin after the Brother Rice game.”

Maureen. The one who’d chugged hard cider on the way over and thrown up in his wastebasket after. So tiny, school gymnast, her fingernails looked like one of Deenie’s old dolls’, tiny as baby’s teeth.

“I doubt Horse gets enough play to get a mutant STD,” A.J. said, baring his teeth like a donkey, “or even a regular one.”

“Speaking of, Nash,” Stim said, still plucking at the gauze, “I saw your sister take off with her this morning.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before everything. Your sister and K-Court were in a car, driving toward the woods.”

A.J. smiled. “She’s getting to be quite the little rebel, that sister of yours.”

Eli placed his palm over his textbook, a different picture of the Eiffel Tower on it. French in Action! L’Avenir Est à Vous, it was called.

“It’s evolution,” Stim said. “With Lise Daniels and Gabby Bishop on the DL, somebody’s gotta step up.”

“Not even,” A.J. said, shaking his head and laughing. “She’s his sister, man.”

Stim shoved a pencil under his gauze, scratching thoughtfully. “Did you see Lise in her bikini last summer? The top, it was just like triangles over her tits, and when she walked past…and sometimes the fabric, it’d kinda buckle. Man, I loved that suit.”

“I think you should shut the fuck up,” Eli said, throwing his bag down with a thud that made everyone on the lab look up. “I think it’s time you do that.”

Stim looked at him carefully.

Eyes darting between the two of them, A.J. seemed to be waiting for something, grinning a little.

Stim shrugged. “Lise isn’t your sister, Nash,” he said. “They’re not all your sisters.”

The teachers’ lounge was the liveliest Tom had ever seen it, at least since Mr. Tomalla had been fired for taking photographs of female students’ feet with his cell phone beneath his desk. He had posted them online and had twenty thousand hits, far more than Nat Dubow’s YouTube science videos.

Everyone was waiting for Principal Crowder.

Laptops open, several teachers were hovering and gasping over photos of Lise and Gabby that had been posted online. A frightening snapshot of Lise’s white thigh, her fingers locked around it. And one of Gabby, mid-seizure and curiously glamorous: jaw struck high, the auditorium’s stage lights rendering her a pop singer, a movie star.

Tom didn’t want to look, and didn’t want to join in the tsk-tsking or the bemoaning of our social media–ridden culture.

Checking his e-mail at the communal workstation, he saw three messages from Georgia:

Why won’t Deenie call me back? Is it true about Gabby?

What’s happening?

Have D. call me ASAP, okay?

He told himself he would call her as soon as he could.

“A few other girls—I mean, has anyone else seen anything odd?” asked June Fisk, one of the scarved social-science teachers—there were three of them, and they liked to sit in the lounge and drink from their glass water bottles and talk about the decline of grammar, the rise of bullying, the dangers of fracking.

“Jaymie Hurwich,” said Brad Crews, rapping his fingers on his business-math textbook. “She kept blinking through all of sixth period.”

“What, she shouldn’t be blinking?” Tom asked.

“That’s not what I mean,” Brad said, looking slightly dazed—though he always did, the father of six-month-old twin girls who seemed to have ravaged him. “It was constant. And really hard. She’s an intense girl to begin with.”

Everyone knew vaguely about Jaymie’s family situation, a long-estranged mother with emotional problems of some unspecified nature, which meant everyone was easy on her even when she was hard on them, crying over A minuses, over class critiques.

“They’re scared,” said Erika Dyer, the health teacher, snapping her laptop shut loudly. Tom couldn’t look at her now without thinking of her presentation to parents last year: HPV and Your Daughter.

“Maybe because it feels like everyone’s watching them,” she added, poking her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “Their own teachers, maybe.”

“I couldn’t concentrate,” Brad said, wiping his face, staring down at his shoes. “It was…unsettling.”

“Of course it was,” piped up Liz somebody, who wasn’t even a teacher but an ed student from the community college. “You feel like any one of them might fly from their chairs at any moment.” Tom couldn’t help but notice how hard Liz was blinking.

“The sympathy in this room is affecting,” Erika said. “Truly.”

“I have nothing but sympathy for Lise Daniels,” June Fisk insisted. “And as if Gabby Bishop didn’t have enough trouble. But how are we supposed to teach like this? Pretend like nothing is going on?”

Carl Brophy groaned loudly. “Teenage girls fidgeting, high-school students trying to get out of class. Clearly, it’s a supervirus. Call the CDC. Alert the World Health Organization.”

At that moment, Ben Crowder swung open the door, which felt like a relief, though the look on his face, gray and tight, reminded Tom of the final years of Ben’s predecessor, who’d retired at age seventy, skin like wet paper.

“First, an update on Kimberly Court,” he said. “Her doctor said it looks to him like a panic attack. And the parents, in this case, seem to understand that. They had trouble at her old school with a few boys who teased her. Some bullying. They say she’s always been a high-strung girl.”

It seemed a funny thing for parents to say about their child under these circumstances. Even if they might think it.

“So they released her?” Erika asked.

“She’s probably heading home as we speak,” he said, nodding firmly.

“But you don’t know?” June Fisk said.

“I’ve been on the phone with the superintendent,” Crowder continued, ignoring her, “and spent the past hour talking to the health department. What’s important is this: Do not speculate, especially with students or parents. If parents come to you with questions, please direct them to me or the superintendent. And, in particular, if you have any contact with Sheila Daniels, please alert us immediately.”

There was much exchanging of looks, but Tom kept his eyes on Crowder, trying to read him. He wondered if Sheila Daniels planned to sue the school district along with the health department.

Fleetingly, he wondered if it was possible that she did know something none of the rest of them did. It wasn’t a thought he wanted to hold on to.

“But this vaccine stuff she’s talking about is everywhere now,” Brad said. “I’m the parent coordinator and I have thirty-two e-mails about it in my inbox. What am I supposed to say to parents?”

Crowder took a deep breath, lifting his arms as if encouraging everyone to breathe with him.

“Our primary goal as educators,” he said, his shirtsleeves furrowed with sweat, “needs to be containment of panic.”

Erika Dyer, fingers still pushing those glasses up that dainty nose, hurried along next to him as they walked into the east corridor.

“Lise Daniels’s mother called me,” she whispered, not looking at him.

Tom felt like he had somehow been elected universal reassurer.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “She’s all over the place right now, and—”

“She told me I’d poisoned her daughter just as surely as the vaccine itself.”

“She’s just swinging wildly at anything. She came to my—”

“It’s my job, you know?” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “To protect those girls. Girls like Lise. She came to my office just last week. I was trying to help her understand her body. The feelings she had. Things happening to her. And now…”

“These girls trust you. Sheila should be thanking you. And when she settles down, she’ll realize you don’t have any say in public-health policy for the school system.”

Erika looked at him, fingers cradled around her ear in a way that reminded him of Deenie.

“She said as sure as if I’d held the poison syringe in my fingers, I had harmed her daughter.”

“She’s hysterical,” he began, then paused a moment. “Hold on. Lise came to see you last week?”

She looked at him. “Yes.”

Tom waited a second.

“Of course, whatever she said, that’s private,” she added.

“Of course,” Tom said, a little embarrassed. What did it matter now?

But it felt like it might.

Erika looked at him, her right eyelid trembling behind her clever glasses.

“You can’t let it get to you,” he said. “None of it’s your fault.”

Deenie wanted to turn her phone off, to stop the texts nearly rattling her phone off the kitchen island.

But it might be Gabby.

Let’s meet up, she’d texted Gabby an hour ago, to talk abt Kim & lake.

So she was left with bad thoughts.

One, two, three girls. The way it was moving, like the way pink eye or strep would tear through the school, a blazing red mouth swallowing them one by one, it didn’t feel like a vaccine. It felt like a virus, a plague.

She clicked to the latest news article and read it while she ate dinner, toaster waffles that were still cold inside.

Of the two hundred and seven girls in the school, the article pointed out, more than half had been vaccinated.

In her head, she kept running numbers. More than a hundred girls had had the vaccine. But what were the odds that she would be friends with all three of the Girls. The Girls. The Afflicted Girls.

“Police and public-health officials,” the article said, “are working together to determine commonalities among the girls: hobbies, medications, health histories, personal histories.”

“Me,” Deenie found herself saying out loud, washing her dinner plate, gluey with syrup, her fingers grating through it.

Lise to Gabby to Kim, and what did they all have in common?

They’re friends with each other, sort of.

But how long before someone said, All of them are friends with Deenie.

Deenie is the thing they have in common.

It’s Deenie.

“At that age, it’s all about yourself,” she’d overheard her mom say once. “You think the whole world spins around you.”

Deenie had missed the context. All she knew was how it felt to hear that coming from her mom, the woman who’d overturned the family like a box of garage-sale toys to suit herself.

Maybe that’s what this thinking was, her maternal inheritance. Something happened, anything, and it was all about me, me, me.

Her phone shot to life, buzzing across the counter.

The number flashing: Kim C.

Deenie grabbed for it.

“K.C., are you okay?”

“I can’t talk long,” came the choked whisper. “I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”

“Why not? What happened?”

“I’m still at the hospital. They won’t let me go.”

“Why? They let Gabby go after. Are you…”

“I don’t have time, Deenie. I just—look, I’m gonna have to tell them.”

Deenie set down her fork, sticky in her hands. “Tell them what?”

“About the lake.”

“Kim, you weren’t at the lake. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It might be why,” she said. “It might by why it happened to me.”

“Why what happened to you? Why you threw up in the gym? Someone throws up in gym every week.”

Deenie knew it was mean to say. But what happened to Kim just didn’t sound scary, like with Gabby or with Lise. At least not the way Keith Barbour had described it, twirling in a circle and gagging. And, privately, the thought had come to her: it’s just Kim Court, anyway. Kim Court, who copied Gabby’s tights, Gabby’s shoes, lapped up everything Gabby ever said.

Kim didn’t say anything, clearing her throat in a raw way that hurt Deenie to hear.

“You weren’t even in the lake, Kim,” Deenie added, dropping her plate in the sink, her right hand in the hot dishwater, swirling.

“But I was with Gabby. In her house. I touched her hair. You saw me.”

“What?” Deenie asked, even as she remembered Kim’s stubby white fingers digging in Gabby’s scalp, that dark swarm of Gabby hair threaded with glue from the plugs on her head. Frankenstein’s creature.

“And—” She paused and Deenie could hear her breath coming faster. “And you.”

“You didn’t touch my hair,” Deenie said, her hand stinging from the sink’s hot water.

“We were together. You were in my car…”

Find some music. I can’t think and drive.

“…and then it happened to me.”

Deenie pictured her fingers rubbing along the playlist on Kim’s phone.

“It’s not fair…” Kim gasped. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No one did,” Deenie said, coolly.

“And how come…” Kim let the question trail off for a second. “I mean, how come everyone but you, Deenie?”

Deenie looked down at her hands, red and raw in the dishwater.

“What did the doctors say?” she asked.

“They don’t know,” Kim said, her voice dropping so low Deenie could barely hear it. “But I’m telling you: there was something inside me, and it was in my throat.”

“Vomit, Kim,” Deenie said roughly, her eyes stinging from the water.

“No, but that’s why I threw up. Because I couldn’t get it out. I couldn’t stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“The way it felt, the things I knew.”

“Things you…What do you mean?”

“And it’s not the vaccine, Deenie. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Don’t listen to them about the vaccine!”

“Kim, what—”

Through the phone, Deenie could hear the crackling PA of the hospital, paging someone. She felt a click in her own throat but stopped herself from clearing it.

“I have to go,” Kim said. “I can’t explain it to you. It has to happen to you for you to understand.”

Lying on his bed, three warm beers heavy inside him, Eli wished he’d just gone home after practice.

Instead, he’d followed A.J. to Brooke Campos’s house. They were all freaked out about Kim Court and everything, though no one would admit it.

Brooke took them to the basement, where there was a broken fridge. Laid flat like a glossy white coffin, it was packed with skunked Yuengling abandoned after her dad’s poker game. They sat on it and drank and talked about everything.

Brooke said she used to go to camp with a girl who’d had the shots and her heart had expanded to the size of a grapefruit and she died. She said she always felt sorry for how she’d treated that girl and for pushing her off the diving board that time and now it was too late.

Then Brooke started crying, her head thrown back, just like Gabby in all those pictures. Leaning first against A.J., then Eli, with a kind of breathless warmth, she cried, her fingers clinging to their shirtfronts. Eli left before things got too crazy. Even A.J. seemed upset, talking about his brother, who died of septic shock when A.J. was five.

You never knew how things would make you feel. The kinds of people who might feel things.

That’s what he was thinking, lying on his bed, eyes on the spider cracks in the ceiling.

Reaching over, he grabbed his backpack, trying to shake his phone free. He hadn’t looked at it in hours, afraid it’d be his mom again, texting about Deenie. He felt sorry for her, a little. And for himself.

Maybe he’d had four beers.

And the phone wouldn’t shake loose.

Finally, lifting his torso woozily against his pillows, he turned the backpack inside out, scattering loose-leaf, handouts, practice schedules all over the bed and floor.

“Deenie,” he said. “Can I come in?”

Through the door, he could hear her moving, thought he heard a sharp inhale, like she was deciding whether to answer.

“Okay,” she said. “You can.”

“You haven’t seen my phone, have you?” he said, pushing the door open, surveying the room, the tangle of loose charger cords sprouting from the wall, jeans coiled at the foot of the bed, one long dust-streaked sock. And always the books, their covers creased, spines spread across the floor. He thought girls were supposed to be clean.

She was standing in the middle of the room, which surprised him. Her fingers were pinched red, latticed tight in the strings of her hoodie.

She stared the knotted string ends in her hand for a second.

Then she looked up at him.

“Don’t tell Dad,” she said, voice so small.

“Tell Dad what?”

It was after seven o’clock, and Tom was sitting in the driveway looking at his house, holding his phone.

He’d just listened to another voice mail from Georgia: Tom, maybe Deenie should stay with me. Maybe she’ll be safer away from Dryden.

And now, still not moving, not even taking the keys out of the ignition, he looked once more at the three texts from Deenie, asking if he’d heard anything about anything.

I’ll tell you when I get home

When r u coming home

The meeting with Crowder had gone late, everyone with had a great deal to say, and then talking to Erika and finally helping the French teacher—Kit was her name, he had to remember that—jump her scooter, stalled from the sudden damp in the air, the temperature rising twenty degrees or more since the day before in that weird way of Dryden.

“Isn’t it something?” she’d said throatily, looking around, her cheekbones misted and her lipstick slightly smudged. “Like a fairy tale.”

He’d said he knew just what she meant.

And she’d mentioned Eli’s magnifique attendance, and Tom pretended he knew, even though he’d been sure Eli took Spanish.

Finally, they had talked about the imaged of Gabby posted everywhere, that curtain of hair, the dramatic arc of her neck, the inflamed cheeks.

“Like a ballerina,” Kit said. “All the girls will want to steal that pose for their yearbook photos.”

And now it was after seven, and he was still sitting in the car.

Did they tell u what is happening, Deenie’s text read. Do they know yet.

Taking a breath, he picked up his phone one last time.

“Medical billing, Diane speaking.”

“Diane,” he said, “it’s Tom. I wasn’t sure you’d still be there.”

“Tom,” she said. “Well, I’m twelve-to-eight today.”

“I’m sorry to keep calling,” he said, sensing a tightness in her voice. “I was just wondering if you had any news.”

There was a pause, then a sigh.

“Hey, I get it,” she said. “If I had a daughter at that school, I’d want to know everything too. And a lot’s been happening.”

“A girl named Kim Court, she was there today, at the hospital, right?”

“Yes, she’s here.”

“Still? I thought they were sending her home. That it was just a panic attack.”

“We have to keep her until she seems stable. After a seizure—”

“So it was a seizure?”

“No,” she said, then lowered her voice. “I didn’t mean that. But they have to rule out some things.”

“Like what?”

“When teenagers come, and they’re having hallucinations—”

“Hallucinations? I didn’t know she was—”

“—we have to rule out drugs. Ecstasy, MDMA. There’s a lot of ecstasy at that school.”

“There is?”

“Or it could be the onset of schizophrenia.”

“Jesus.”

“Can I call you back?” she said suddenly.

“Sure.”

A moment later, the phone rang.

“I’m calling from my cell,” she whispered, a nervous titter in her voice, “from the ladies’ room.”

As if by magic, the smooth professional tone—professional biller, professional dater-slash-divorcée—was gone. She sounded suddenly younger, girlish.

“They wouldn’t even let us leave for dinner because of the reporters out front,” she was saying. “We’re not supposed to be talking about any of this. They made us sign something.”

“I’m putting you in a bad position,” Tom said.

“I have a friend in ER,” she said, words rushing, jumbling together. “She said the Court girl kept putting her hand in her mouth. She got her whole fist in there. And when they put the restraints on, she started screaming that something was touching her from the inside.”

“Touching her?”

“Well, people can say all kinds of things in that state. But they didn’t find any drugs. I don’t think.”

Tom took a breath.

“How’s Lise Daniels?”

A pause.

“I can’t talk to you anymore about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I just—” He heard the sound of another woman’s voice, everything echoing, the rush of water. “I have to go.”

“Right,” he said. “I understand. It’s just…when you have a daughter.”

Her voice cracked a little. “Oh, Tom, I know. I wish…”

“No, I don’t want to get you in any kind of trouble.”

“It’s just…Can I say something?” Whispering.

“Sure,” he said, feeling a churning inside. There was a long pause, then the thud of a door.

“Tom. It feels crazy in here right now.”

Tom could hear her breath catch.

“The mother, she walks the halls all night. That’s what Patty, one of the nurses, told me. The mother walked by the nurses’ station so many times last night, Patty thought she’d go crazy herself. She keeps telling them her daughter has been destroyed. That’s the word she used. Destroyed. Like you do with an animal. After.”

It didn’t seem so bad to him. Nowhere near as bad as Deenie seemed to think.

Sitting down on the edge of her bed, Eli watched his sister bobbing from foot to foot, just like she did during countless past confidences, shared reports of dirty deeds, stolen candy, a pilfered beer, running a bike over Mom’s violets. Except that was a long time ago. It hadn’t happened in a long time.

When she’d first started talking, he’d been afraid. He’d had this squinting sense, lately, of something. That she was different, changed.

A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he’d seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.

I didn’t spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps.

He’d stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands.

She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.

He couldn’t stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat.

Next to her, by the ovens, was that guy Sean, the one who used to play forward for Star-of-the-Sea. Once, Sean had asked him about Lise, wondered if he knew her. Her tits look like sno-cones, he’d said. Beautiful sno-cones.

And now Deenie stood before him, her body tight, the zipper on her hoodie pinching that tiny bird neck of hers, saying, “Don’t tell Dad. Okay?”

But what she told him had nothing to do with what he’d noticed at the Pizza House, whatever that was. Or the other thing—the thing he’d almost forgotten. Someone at school saying he saw his sister getting into a car with some guy.

Instead, it was just some crazy story about the lake.

“But Eli, we put our feet in. Last week. What if it did something?”

He shook his head. “If it did something, you’d be sick too. And Skye Osbourne, she was with you, right? She’d be sick too.”

“Maybe it affected us in different ways.”

She looked at him. The look he’d seen since they were small, like camping, her pale face in the tent flap when he’d tell her there were bears out there, hidden in the green daze of Binnorie Woods.

“Deenie,” he said, “it’s not the lake.”

“How do you know?”

He looked at her. It was one of those tricks his dad always pulled off. He used to watch him do it with Mom over and over. I promise you, I promise you, a smile, a coaxing shoulder rub, spinning her around like dancing, everything will be okay. Mom used to call it the Croc dance, to go with the Croc smile.

“The doctors would know, Deenie,” he said, the thought coming to him just as he needed it. “They’ve been doing tests, right? For toxins and stuff. They’d pick that up.”

“Oh,” Deenie said. “Right.”

He could see her shoulders relax a little. He was surprised how easy it was. Just like when they were little. Taking her hand and dragging her out of the tent, promising her there were no bears out there after all. They were safe.

“So you feel better?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then,” he said, leaning back, feeling his body loosen, the beer bloom returning.

Except there was something wedged under him, Deenie’s Pizza House shirt, stiff with old flour or whatever it was they made pizzas with.

“Jesus, Deenie, don’t you ever wash your uniform?” he teased, fingering the shirt, feigning throwing it at her.

She didn’t say anything, her hands once more gripping the ends of her drawstring. Tugging it back and forth. It was like it had lasted only a second, that brief spasm of relief.

Girls never stopped being mysterious, he thought, tossing the shirt to the floor.

Sinking back onto her pillow, he lay there for a moment, staring at her ceiling, wondering about his missing phone, or something.