The Fever

11

Sitting at the kitchen table, Tom was trying hard to think of exactly nothing except the beer in front of him when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

His shoulder jerked, but it was just Deenie, her fingernails short and painted silver, like all the girls’.

“Dad,” she said, “Gabby called. Can I borrow the car?”

She almost never asked. With only a learner’s permit, she wasn’t supposed to drive without an adult.

But it was the first thing she’d said to him since he came home and told her what Principal Crowder had said, or insisted. That everyone was working very hard to figure this thing out and that it was important not to get caught up in all the rumors. She’d given him a look that suggested what he knew to be true: he didn’t really have any information at all.

So now, when she asked him for the car, something in him stirred, and, without even saying a word, he found himself sliding the keys across the table and dropping them into her palm, which shut over them instantly.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, grasping them so tight it hurt to look.

“But Deenie,” he said, although she was already halfway to the door, “call your mom tonight, okay?”

She said she would.

It felt so warm outside, one of those weird nights when the temperature rises, making everything look strange and glowy.

Gabby’s mom had taken pity on her and said she could go out for a while.

And, unaccountably, Deenie’s dad had loaned her the car.

“The air,” Gabby said, taking a few tight, sharp breaths. “Even the air hurts.”

“It does?” To Deenie, it felt delicious. When she breathed, the warm seemed to swirl in her mouth. “At least your mom let you out.”

Once they’d gotten a few miles from her house, Gabby, her face pale and puffy, said she didn’t want to be in the car.

So they decided to walk through town, hands shoved in pockets and the sky a ghostly shade of violet.

For a few minutes, Deenie forgot everything.

No one was out, and there was a ghost-town feel, like no one knew winter was over, at least for the night, and the streets had a kind of fuzzy beauty, the air briny from four months of rock salt, the pavement spongy under Deenie’s feet.

Across the street was the orange flare of the Pizza House. She wondered if Sean Lurie was at the ovens, grip in either hand, smiling.

“I can’t believe Kim called you from the hospital,” Gabby said. “I can’t believe she’s still there.”

“Yeah,” Deenie replied, shuttled out of her daydream. “They told my dad—they told all the teachers—that she’s fine. It’s stress.”

“Do you believe it?” Gabby asked, leading them toward the misty blur of the elementary school, its bricks streaked with salt.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I didn’t see it. Eli said she just threw up.”

“But, I mean, what Kim said to you. About it being something in the lake. Do you think it’s true?”

“Kim was never in the lake,” Deenie said, her new refrain.

They arrived at the square across from the school, its olden-times town pump splintered and gray. Back in fourth grade, their teacher said it was the spot where they whipped people centuries ago. For months afterward, every time they stood there, waiting for the bus, Deenie and Lise talked about it, pretended.

Lise, color high, howling upward, chubby arms wrapped around that old pump, Forty lashes, forty lashes, no, kind sir!

“She wasn’t in the lake,” Gabby said, her face hidden behind her hair, her sunken hat. “But maybe that’s why she’s not as sick as Lise. Why it isn’t as bad for her.”

“But why would Kim be sick at all?”

“Because,” Gabby said, and then she said the thing they hadn’t said, not aloud to each other, “because maybe it’s inside us now. And she got it. From us.”

Deenie felt something twitch at her temple. For a moment, she felt like she had when she saw Skye at Gabby’s house. Like everything was tilting and she’d only just realized it, but it had been tilting slowly for a while.

“But nothing happened to me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” Gabby said, looking down as their feet dusted along the glistening grass of the square, “some people are just carriers. Maybe that’s what you are.”

Deenie looked at her.

“Like those boys with HPV,” she added, still not meeting Deenie’s eyes. “They never get sick. They just make everyone else sick.”

Deenie couldn’t get anything to come out of her mouth, and they kept walking, and Gabby wouldn’t turn her head, and then they were in the darkened center of the square, under the old elm.

It didn’t even sound like Gabby and she wondered where it all came from. Carriers. In its own way, it didn’t feel different from what Skye had said, all her talk about bad energy.

“So maybe that’s what you are,” Gabby added.

And they kept walking. And as they did, Deenie’s lungs started tightening. Pressing her palm on the cold of the tree trunk, she had to stop.

It turned out the air did hurt, and Gabby was right.

“I’m sorry,” Gabby said, stopping too, her eyes burning under the lamppost. Watching Deenie. “I’m sorry.”

When the phone rang, Tom was afraid it was Georgia again, asking why Deenie hadn’t called. But it was Dave Hurwich, Jaymie’s father, whose barking tone reminded Tom why he’d stopped coaching soccer.

“What kind of school endorses medical experimentation on its students?” Dave asked. “You’re a man of science. I’m on the CDC website right now, Tom. I’m looking at the VAERS. Do you know what we’re dealing with here with this vaccine?”

Tom sighed. There was no use talking epidemiology with Dave Hurwich, who always knew more about law than lawyers, more about cars than mechanics. And there was no use trying to explain the nuances of school-board recommendations versus forced government vaccinations of children.

A single dad, Dave prided himself on his parenting and on his daughter Jaymie’s academic successes, which were due at least half the time to her ability to wear down all her teachers (But I did the extra credit and I wrote twice as much and I never missed a class and I always contribute…) as relentlessly as her dad. Whenever Tom began to lose his patience with either of them, he tried to remember the “family situation,” Jaymie’s out-of-the-picture mother—was it something to do with postpartum? The details were vague and it never felt appropriate to ask.

“It was a stressful day for all of us, Dave. How’s Jaymie doing?”

“Let me tell you how she’s doing,” he said, a smacking sound like his tongue was dry from making phone calls all night. “She hasn’t stopped blinking since she got home. It’s like looking at a Christmas tree.”

So why are you calling me? Tom wanted to ask. Except he got the feeling Mr. Hurwich was calling everyone, anyone.

“I’ve been reading all about that supposed vaccine. You’re the chemistry teacher. You should know. It’s loaded with aluminum and sodium borate. Do you know what that is? That’s what they use to kill roaches. They treated my daughter like a roach. And yours.”

“Dave, I’m sure your doctor—”

“That goddamned doctor doesn’t know anything. He prescribed vitamins. None of them know anything.”

There was a pause, a creaking sound.

“She says it’s like a light flashing in the corner of her eye all the time. She’s my little girl,” Mr. Hurwich said, and all the hardness broke apart in an instant. “She doesn’t even look the same.”

Tom swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, voice cracking. “The way she looks at me. Something. It doesn’t look like my daughter.”

“Let’s just drive, okay?” Gabby said. “Can we drive?”

And they both knew where they were going.

Looping back and forth along the lake, three, four times.

At first, they kept the windows shut tight.

Finally, the fifth time, Gabby opened hers, her hair slapping across the pane.

The raw smell from the water, like a presence. Something furred resting in your throat.

It reminded Deenie of something, some school-retreat middle-of-the-night story Brooke Campos had told Deenie and Lise and Kim Court about how, when she was thirteen, her big sister’s boyfriend had offered her ten dollars to “taste something she’d never tasted.”

Clutching her throat as she told it, Brooke almost cried and couldn’t finish telling it. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks. Kim kept asking everyone, But did she? Did she do it? And nobody knew. They’d never gotten to hear the end.

“I should go home,” Gabby said, looking down at her phone in her lap. “My mom’s called twice.”

“Does she know you’re with me?” Deenie asked. Carriers. Maybe that’s what you are. “She’d let you be with me?”

“Of course,” Gabby said. “What—”

Before she could say more, Gabby’s phone lit up: Skye.

But Gabby didn’t answer, just stared at it.

And then a text followed.

“What is it?” Deenie said, trying to sound even.

“She said there was something on the news. About something happening at the hospital.”

“With Lise? Is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” Gabby said, staring at her phone. “But I better go home.”

“Gabby,” Deenie said, turning the wheel hard, “we have to go there now.”

“No, Deenie,” Gabby said, her voice rushing up over the radio, the wind charging from the window.

But Deenie decided she didn’t care and she was the one driving anyway and the hospital was only a few miles up the road, lit like a torch.

Lise. Lise.

“You don’t have to go inside, Gabby,” Deenie said, voice surprisingly hard. “But I am.”

Deenie was driving very fast, the stoplights shuddering above them and her foot pumping the gas.

“She’s all alone,” Deenie said. “And we don’t know what’s happened.”

Gabby looked at her, chin tight, like wires pulled taut and hooked behind her ears. Like the ventriloquist’s dummy that used to perform at the mall, Deenie thought, then felt bad about it.

“Okay,” Gabby said, as if she had a choice. “I’ll go.”

The white steeple of the hospital’s clock tower gleaming, Deenie was walking Gabby, directing her in a way that felt unfamiliar and powerful.

But it wouldn’t be like before, wouldn’t be so easy.

As soon as they walked in, a lady in a gold-buttoned suit jacket at the welcome desk recognized Gabby.

“Oh no,” she said, rising to her feet. “Not again. Let me page the ER.”

The alarm on her face stopped both girls.

“We’re okay,” Gabby said. “We’re here to see Lise.”

“Oh no,” she repeated, shaking her head, “that’s not possible.”

So they sat in the parking lot, three spots behind Mrs. Daniels’s wind-battered Dodge.

They had the idea that if she came out, she might let them see Lise.

“Maybe she sleeps there,” Gabby said. “Maybe she never comes out.”

“She has to come out,” Deenie said, flipping the radio dial, trying to find news. “Something’s happening in there.”

She wondered if Gabby was thinking about the night her mother was wheeled in on a gurney. The way Deenie heard it, the hammer prongs almost severed an artery and Gabby had had to hold the hammer in place until the paramedics came or her mom would have died.

Deenie didn’t know if it was true, but she always remembered the one detail Gabby had told her, that the sound coming from her mom reminded her of those slide whistles they’d give out at Fun Palace when they were kids.

Bad things happen and then they’re over, but where do they go? Deenie wondered, watching Gabby. Are they ours forever, leeching under our skin?

She didn’t even see the woman approach the car, and when the rapping on the window came, her body leaped to life.

Still thinking about Dave Hurwich’s call, Tom was finishing his beer and considering a second, was half ready to ask his son to join him, when his phone rang again: Lara Bishop.

“Tom, sorry to call so late. Is Gabby there?” she said, voice raspy and anxious.

“Lara,” Tom said, phone slipping slightly from his hand. “No. Deenie’s not home either. Has it been that long?”

He looked at the clock over the stove and was surprised to see it was nearly eleven.

He didn’t really know where the hours had gone, a stack of week-old tests on his lap watching a documentary about people dying on Mount. Everest along with Eli, whose eyes had a boozy luster, his long limbs heavy. There was a feeling of warmth about Eli, his peculiar brand of gloomy nostalgia (“Hey, Dad, remember that time you took us to Indian Cave and we found those frozen bones with hair?”).

“I keep calling Gabby,” Lara said, “and she won’t pick up. Can you call Deenie?”

“Of course.” And he felt a surge of shame in his chest. The girls dropping like dainty flies at school, their limbs like bendy straws, their bodies collapsing, and he gives his daughter car keys and sends her out into the great dark nettles of Dryden with the girl who had violently collapsed in front of the whole school only the day before.

What made him think he could forget for an hour with his daughter out there, somewhere?

“Dad,” Deenie answered, almost before Tom heard the call go through. “I’m coming home. I am.”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“We went to the hospital.” Gulping, hectic. He thought he could hear someone in the background crying. “I think something happened.”

At first Deenie thought she was hallucinating, that gigantic face at the car window, neck crooked down, hair like soft butter. A woman she recognized, something heavy in her hand like a metal flashlight, using it to tap on the glass.

“Deenie,” Gabby was saying, next to her, “Deenie, don’t.”

There was an insignia on the flashlight, the numeral seven, with a lightning bolt like a superhero’s, and she realized it wasn’t a flashlight. It was a microphone.

“Don’t open the window, Deenie!” Gabby said. “Don’t talk to her!”

But Deenie had already pushed the window button, the woman’s lips turning into a smile.

That’s when she realized who the woman was. The lady from TV, the one who had emceed the big school fund-raiser to not quite pay for the new football field that never got built.

“Hey, I’m Katie,” she said, her voice bell-clear. “Are you a friend of Lise Daniels?”

Deenie didn’t say anything.

“Can you come out and talk for a second?” the woman said. Then, craning down, she peered at Gabby, who quickly turned away, her neck twisted.

“You’re the second,” the woman said, pointing with the microphone at Gabby. “You’re Girl Two.”

A few minutes later, they were all standing by the car.

“Gabby,” Deenie had whispered, “it’s the only way we’ll find out.”

A man with a large camera hoisted over his shoulder appeared from nowhere, but the TV woman handed him the microphone and waved him away.

That was when Deenie noticed a truck and two vans with satellites like giant teacup saucers had pulled in behind them.

She looked at the TV woman, her hair crisp but eye makeup blurred in the mist.

“We got a tip from the Danielses’ lawyer,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “He’s friendly that way. He’s going to give us some camera time. He’s got a statement to issue.”

Deenie felt her chest pinch hard. “Something happened to Lise?”

“No. Not yet.” She shook her head, her eyes as white as pearls under the parking-lot lights. “The mother is trying to move her to the medical center all the way down in Mercy-Starr Clark. Looks like she’s going to be suing. Suing everybody.”

“Suing for what?” Deenie said. “Over the vaccine?”

“You bet. We heard the state health department people were here today, someone from the DA’s office, cops, who knows what’s next.”

There was a slamming of doors somewhere and the camera guy, his face concealed behind the great black box slung on his shoulder, was suddenly there again.

“Now?” the TV woman asked him.

He nodded.

“Wait,” Deenie said. “But do you know about Lise, about how she is?”

The camera light went on and the woman’s worn face sprang magically to life.

“Well, you two probably know more than anyone,” she said, her voice newly smooth, buttery as her hair. “How about we just talk a few minutes. Have you ever been on TV?”

“No,” Deenie said. “I—”

“Not you,” the woman said. “Her.”

Deenie turned to Gabby, who was facing the car.

“No,” Deenie said, watching Gabby’s body, wire-tight, her elbows clamped to her sides. It looked like she was trying to hold herself together, to keep herself from blowing apart.

The front doors of the hospital opened loudly and all the lights seemed to go on everywhere.

Listening to Rick Jeanneret’s cracking voice on ESPN Classic, Eli was thinking again about what Deenie had said about going into the lake. In some ways, what she’d told him was like the thing he’d noticed about her at the Pizza House that night, or other nights, other things. Because the Deenie he knew wasn’t the kind to break rules, take chances.

The lake was the last place he’d want to go. The smell, even from the car, felt wrong. It reminded him of the basement of their house.

Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he’d sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985 Playboy he’d found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform.

And through the chute, he could still hear the girls, two floors above. The basement’s drop ceiling porous and seeming to breathe. After a long rain, it smelled just like the lake.

Once, a senior girl from Star-of-the-Sea tried to get him to climb the safety fence, but he said no. Wiggling out of her halter dress, she said, her tongue between her teeth, It’s okay. We can always skinny-dip right in your car. Who needs water?

“You’re the luckiest mother I ever knew,” A.J. said when Eli told him about it. “Screw that pretty face of yours.”

Lying there, Eli fumbled for his phone before remembering it wasn’t there.

“Dad,” Deenie said, answering her phone. “I’m coming home. I am.”

“You better be,” her dad said in a tone he rarely used.

The car thudding along the road, the spatter of light rain, she and Gabby didn’t say anything for a mile or two.

Finally, Gabby spoke. “They’re going to want to bring me back in again, aren’t they? They’re going to want to talk to me again.”

Deenie looked at her, passing headlights flashing across her face, and saw something pulsing there, from her temple to her jaw.

“Uh, I don’t know. ”

It hurt to look at her, the way she was holding her body so tightly, her arms rigid at her sides, a girl made of wood. “Maybe not.”

When they entered Binnorie Woods, Deenie’s heart started to slow down a little. No streetlights and the car dark, it was like being under your covers, your sleeping bag at camp. She’d always liked that feeling, and the smell of cedar coming through the vents.

“Maybe,” Deenie said, “this means Lise is doing better. If they can move her she must be doing better.”

Gabby nodded lightly, her head canting to one side.

“You know what I thought,” she said quietly, “when the reporter came over, you know what I thought she was going to tell us?”

“What?

“That Lise was dead.”

“It’s okay, Lara. She’s driving Gabby home to you right now.”

“Thank God. Tom, have you seen some of these pictures? And videos?”

“I saw a few,” Tom said, thinking of that striking one of Gabby. “Wait, videos?”

“There’s a video of Kim Court. Some kid must’ve taken it while it was happening. It’s all over. It’s on the news now.”

Tom grabbed the remote from Eli.

There, on Channel 7, was a grainy YouTube video of Kim Court, body twitching on the gym floor.

The screen crawl read: Mysterious Outbreak: Parents’ Rush to Vaccinate to Blame?

And then, hands gripping her own neck, a blur of vomit, head thrown so far back you could only see the glint of her braces. The piano-tinkling score from The Exorcist played.

“Lara,” he said. “Turn off the TV.”

They were deep into the woods now and Deenie couldn’t remember the way. Gabby had to keep saying, softly, Right, right, left here. Left.

“Deenie, remember what Kim told us in the library,” Gabby said, resting her head on window. “About Lise having a boyfriend?”

Deenie looked at her, not even remembering for a moment.

“In the library. Kim told us something about Lise and some guy.”

“Why would Kim Court know anything about Lise? Gabby, why are we talking about this now—”

“I think it might be true.”

Gabby faced the window and Deenie could hear a faint rattling: Gabby’s head against the glass.

“No,” Deenie said. “It’s not true.”

Technically, it was not. There was the thing Lise had told her at the lake, the thing she’d done with the boy. But that boy was not Lise’s boyfriend, not at all.

“Deenie, I’ve heard it from other people. I thought she might have told you. Sometimes she tells you things she doesn’t tell me.”

“No,” Deenie said.

“Because lately, Skye and me, we’ve been noticing Lise has been kind of secretive. Like maybe she was hiding something. When I took her to the Pizza House the other night, I tried to talk to her, but—”

“Skye?” Deenie barked, so loud she surprised herself. “Skye doesn’t know a goddamn thing about Lise. Why would you listen to her? Lise wasn’t hiding anything.” Taking a breath, she tried to calm herself. Then added, “No one’s hiding anything, Gabby.”

Gabby nodded, the worst, most thoughtless kind of nod Deenie could imagine.

Then she turned and faced Deenie. “I just remembered what I heard about you,” Gabby said. “The other day.”

Deenie looked over at her, the car swerving slightly. “What?”

“That you were in a car with some guy. You never told me that.”

Deenie faced the road again. “Because it’s not true. It was probably Eli.”

“Stop!” Gabby shouted, her voice suddenly loud, Deenie nearly jumping in her seat, words rushing to her head, flooding her mouth without emerging.

“My house,” Gabby said, one hand dropping on Deenie’s arm, the other pointing to driveway.

Deenie exhaled, turned the wheel.

The house blazing with lights, and Mrs. Bishop was running out, her legs and feet bare, the headlights making her scar look red, alive.

But any anger on her face seemed to break to pieces the minute her daughter exited the car.

Backing out, Deenie watched as Gabby slumped into her mother’s arms wearily, a veteran home from battle. Mrs. Bishop folding her in her arms in such a mom way. In a way that made Deenie blink.

Face drawn, hair half caught in her rubber band, his daughter looked half and twice her age at the same time.

Nearly midnight, on either side of the kitchen island, Deenie told him about the hospital.

“And so the reporter said Mrs. Daniels is trying to move Lise to the medical center.”

“That probably means she’s stable,” he said. “So that’s something.”

Her mouth twisted, dubious, like Georgia somehow, that was the echo, and the way her shirt was riding up and her arm stretching tiredly and with dismissal.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Did you call your mom?” he said, holding out his hand for the car keys. A gesture stolen, he was sure, from his own father, a century ago.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t have time.”

“Deenie,” he said. “You were gone for hours.”

“The reporter wanted us to talk on camera,” she said. “She wouldn’t leave us alone. But we wouldn’t do it.”

He sighed. “How did Gabby seem?”

He watched her try to pull the rubber band from her hair, her eyes down, and he wanted to reach over and help her untangle it, but her body looked so closed off, a tooth clamp.

“I don’t know, Dad.”

He found his hand reaching out to her anyway, and the flinch that came was sudden, terrible.

Trying to push herself, hard, into sleep, Deenie felt her toes cramp painfully, a pang in them she had to rub away, tangled under her own sheets, breathing hard until it stopped again.

Then her phone hissed: SKYE.

She could have sworn she’d turned it off.

Yes

We need to protect each other

We R surrounded by bad energy

Staring at the words blinking hard at her, almost spasming, she had a sick feeling in her stomach and turned her phone off.

What made Skye think she could text her? Because they were the only ones left? Skye’s words always felt cryptic. Shake it off, she told herself. Don’t let her get under your skin.

And she grabbed for the bottle of antihistamine left over from the flu and drank three plastic cups.

Somewhere in the gluey Nyquil haze, the memory came of standing in the lake with Lise the week before, stomping their feet in the emerald thick of the water.

On the shoreline were Skye’s hard-jeaned boys with the disappearing tattoos. They whistled at Lise, fingers hooked in their mouths.

Let’s do it, Lise whispered in her ear, her tongue showing between her teeth. Let’s go in.

When she woke up, in the purple of four a.m., she could still hear Lise’s voice in her ear, high as a little girl’s.

We went behind those tall bushes. He took my tights off first. It was so cold, but his hands…

Who was it? Deenie had asked, kept asking.

Then, finally, Lise whispered the boy’s name, and Deenie was surprised.

Really? Him?

And Lise’s smile filled with teeth, a giggle up her throat.

Like something inside opening, she said as they sprawled on the shoreline, feet tangled in seaweed tickling up their legs, and then opening something else.

Don’t tell anyone, she made Deenie promise. They’ll think I’m a slut.

No, they won’t, Deenie said. Though you could never be sure.

I told him not to do what he was doing. That it was disgusting. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. We put our mouths down there with boys, but…but he was down there and everything happened.

But she said his hands were cool, like a doctor’s. And that made it seem okay. And soon enough she was so hot, a burning down there, and his mouth cool too, and the way, like—and she was so embarrassed to say it, to have even thought of it—like a flute, the flutter tongue. The one it takes so long to learn.

I don’t know, she said, her fingers curled over her mouth like eating a candy. I don’t know. And then she said the thing about how it was like an opening, an opening, and forever opening.

She never even knew before what it meant to see stars.

That was all she could say. Deenie wanted her to say more.

Since it was a boy she knew, she wanted to picture it.

Is it disgusting? Lise asked, but she was smiling as she said it, face red. Was it bad?

Deenie didn’t say anything. Their legs slimy from the water.

Deenie, she said, am I bad?

No, Deenie said. Not you, Lise.

Never you.