The Fever

15

Sean Lurie. Sean Lurie.

The sound of Eli’s tires thumping the name.

Maybe it was the strange crystal dewiness in the air.

But probably it was because the streets were empty, carless, noiseless.

All the sound sucked out of the world.

He had that feeling he’d get, flying down the wing with the puck, and you know you can’t look back, but someone’s behind you, someone’s catching up. You can tell by the sound of his skates shredding that ice.

And the quick double-tap of a stick, and someone’s open and you have to decide: Do I turn my head or do I just send the puck over?

Except, in some way, he was both players. Part of him was charging ahead and the other part saying, Don’t miss it, don’t miss it.

From a half mile away, he could see the glow from the Pizza House sign.

The hardest-working 510 square feet in Dryden! read the cartoon bubble over the mustachioed man on the storefront sign, his chef’s hat tall and tilting.

The whole window seemed to radiate orange.

Skidding to a halt out front, he looked inside.

A gum-chewing boy, face ablaze with acne, stared back at him from the carryout counter.

“Is Sean here?” Eli asked, walking inside, the bell ringing.

Driving home the quick way, skipping the lake, the sky like wine on wood, Tom turned the radio loud, Eli’s clamorous hip-hop. Anything to make noise.

Listen, I’m not the bad guy here. That’s what the man had said. Georgia’s lover.

He’d said it, shoulders hunched into a hapless shrug, to Tom in the parking lot of the Community School District 17 building.

Tom in the car on the way to the hospital, Georgia next to him, her knees tucked against her chest, sobbing. It couldn’t be his, he’s nothing at all. As if that should make him feel better.

This man. The man with whom his wife spent all those hours at Seven Swallows Inn. The man with whom she’d been so careless that maybe she’d even gotten herself pregnant by him, despite her promises at the time (It’s not his. I swear to God).

Tom couldn’t even remember driving to Georgia’s building, couldn’t remember how long he’d waited before he saw the man.

The man who actually raised his briefcase in the air as if to say, Who, me?

In the face of that, who would not have done what Tom did, thrusting his arms out and shoving him, the briefcase falling, spinning like a top on the ice-gruffed concrete.

He could still picture Georgia tapping on the second-floor window, pounding maybe, mouthing, Stop, stop.

A shove back, another shove, the man slipping, his elbow cracking. The blood seeping through the arm of his coat, spider-webbing the ice.

Tom could hardly believe it when the police came.

Could hardly believe that the raging man with the scarlet face in the car’s side mirror was him.

It wasn’t him.

The uniformed officer who thought he’d remembered him was wrong.

That wasn’t me.

Except it was.

Then, less than seven minutes from home, Tom saw it.

In front of him, the bar’s sign winked: TUDGE’S PUB.

He turned the wheel, hard.

The air inside felt cool, artificial, the vague scent of Freon, wood soap, and popcorn. The sulfuric tug from the gold-foil can of Bar Keepers Friend just behind the tap handles.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bar, a true bar with creaking floors and varnished wood yellow with smoke, with glowing bottles of forgotten liquors (Haig & Haig Five Star, Ronrico rum, green Chartreuse) arrayed pipe-organ style, a long clouded mirror behind them.

Where friends meet, the cursive letters announced, half-mooned over the crested center where the cash register sat. Above it, a pair of hockey sticks crossed.

He’d forgotten all of it. The comforting feel of a nearly empty bar, the bartender’s expectant eyes, the red vinyl stools like cherries, the soft black in the middle, where the bar itself met the back tables, the jukebox and its sizzling promise.

That great soft black, like lifting the bedcovers, inviting you in.

“Whiskey, on the rocks,” he said, sliding onto a stool, even letting his fingers curl under the wood ridge, shellacked with oil, grime, pleasure.

It seemed only appropriate to order a real drink, even though he could scarcely remember what he liked and hoped it was this.

Why, he asked himself, taking his first biting sip, did I ever stop going to bars?

And just when he thought the relief couldn’t be greater or more vivid, the jukebox hummed to life. A song he couldn’t identify but that had surely been tattooed on his heart, something from twenty years ago, his college dorm room, a car at night with a girl, a sleeping porch.

“Ohh,” he said, not realizing until he heard himself that he’d said it out loud.

Swiveling on his bar stool, he turned and saw a woman standing in front of the electric juke. And she was looking straight at him.

“Tom Nash,” she said.

“Lara Bishop.” He smiled.

All the lights from all the news trucks, it felt like a Hollywood premiere.

The hospital’s front steps were swarmed over with people, cameramen, women like the TV woman from the night before, panty hose and business-suited, waiting.

Dozens of bright-colored suits, the slick Action News and Eyewitness News seals on the cameras, all under the mounted lights, everything rotating, snapping, and flicking.

From a distance, it looked like be one moving thing, like when you peer into a microscope. Like when her dad used to show her gliding bacteria, swaying filaments like ribbons. It made her stomach squirm but it was also oddly beautiful.

Exiting the bus with all the night-shift nurses and orderlies, Deenie had no plan, but something about the way no one spoke, their hands wrapped tightly around their travel mugs, told her no regular rules applied right now.

It gave her a sense she could do anything. No one was looking at her.

The hospital staff, heads down, moved quickly to the back entrance where two security guards stood, hands on belts like soldiers.

It felt as if a presidential helicopter might appear in the sky and land on the front steps.

Nothing had ever happened here, until it did.

“It hasn’t started yet.”

Deenie didn’t see the woman until she was right next to her.

She was wearing a yellow raincoat and matching hat that shone under the parking lot lights. In her arms she held a large Tupperware container.

“Oh,” Deenie said. “I’m not here for that.”

“Do you know what this is?” the woman said, holding out the container, something orange settled at its bottom.

“No,” Deenie said, trying to figure out if she knew the woman, her face dark under the hat brim.

“A fungus,” the woman said, lifting it so Deenie could see. “It comes during warm, damp springs after hard winters.”

Deenie squinted at it. It looked like the Tang her grandparents used to keep in the kitchen cupboard.

“I think maybe it’s just rust,” Deenie said.

“All rusts are parasites,” the woman said, nodding. “They need a living host.”

Deenie tugged at the wool of her jacket on her neck. “Where did you get it?”

“From the shore of the lake.”

There was something scraping up Deenie’s throat, a word, a sound.

“The lake water’s in everything. So this,” the woman said, gazing into the bottom of the container, “could be in all of us.”

She looked back at Deenie, one long strand of rain sliding from the brim of her hat.

“But it’s definitely in those girls,” she said. “The girls at the school.”

The woman lifted the container up in the air so the parking lot light hit it, making it glow.

Suspended in the liquid were a few grass blades, hovering. Sticking to them, the smallest of spores, or something.

“It affects the brain,” the woman was saying.

It did look, to Deenie, like something.

But who could tell, with the mist-scattered light and the pearly sheen of the Tupperware.

“What does it do?” Deenie said. “If it’s in you.”

“Spasms, convulsions,” she said. “Some people feel like they’re burning inside.”

The shimmering spores reminded her of the MagiQuarium she’d had as a kid, the dark wonders inside, the hatching and unhatching. The spinning and seizing of dying things, a briny trail at the bottom of the tank. The sea monkeys that, Eli told her with horror, mate for days at a time. Stuck together, twisting as if trying to strangle each other.

Eyes fixed on them, Deenie felt her mouth go dry. Inside. Inside a girl.

“How…how does it affect the brain?”

“That’s the next stage. Visual disturbances. Hallucinations. Seizures.”

“Oh,” Deenie said.

The woman turned the bright orb in her hands, catching the light so it looked almost on fire.

Then she said, “It makes you lose your mind.”

“Your sister’s not working tonight,” Sean Lurie said from the back ovens, behind the warming station.

“I know,” Eli said. “I’m not here to see her. I’m here for you.”

“For me?” He grinned, pushing his hair off his brow. “Well, I’m working now, dude.”

“Take a break,” Eli said, glancing around at the deserted store, the barren warming shelf under the cone lamps.

Sean looked at him for what seemed like a long time.

It was almost as if he knew why Eli was there.

“Out back,” Sean said, very quietly. “Meet me out in the back.”

The alley had a dank cat smell, but the parking-lot light gave everything a sparkly look that Eli found hypnotic, like the rink after it’d been sheared to glass.

And the longer he stood there, the more he thought maybe the smell was coming from him, the salty tang of his hockey gear, which seemed to leach into his skin.

He waited three minutes until he realized Sean wasn’t coming out.

“Dude,” the ruddy kid at the counter said, “he’s gone.”

Running outside, Eli caught sight of Sean across the street, the blare of his red interscholastic jacket in front of a rusted Firebird.

Spotting Eli, Sean fumbled with his keys, which fell onto the street, then down the storm drain.

“You never were very fast,” Eli said, slowing down to a stride. “You just knew how to hook and not get caught.”

“I don’t see what’s funny about it,” Lara Bishop said, wiping a slick of cream from the corner of her mouth.

“No, it’s not funny,” Tom said. “I just haven’t seen a grown-up drink a white Russian since 1978. I think that was what my dad used to seduce the neighbor women.”

“Well,” Lara said, tilting her glass side to side, “I haven’t had anything to drink in so long, I figured it’d be best to have something I’d probably never want two of.”

“I know what you mean,” Tom said.

“But it turns out,” she continued, that whisper of a smile, “I was wrong.”

Tom smiled, waving for the bartender. “Two more, please?”

He tried not to let his eyes fix on his phone, silent and gleaming on the bar top.

“Bad taste in drinks, bad taste in men,” she said, winking.

“Bottoms up,” Tom said, clinking his glass with hers.

They finished just as the second round arrived.

“So” Lara said, “did you stay till the bitter end?”

One of them had to bring it up eventually, though he was sorry for it. And then felt guilty for feeling sorry for it.

“Long past when I should have,” he said, flicking his phone on the bar, like the pointer on a board game. Like spin the bottle.

“I figured I’d duck out,” she said, looking at her own phone, “before Goody Osbourne took the stand.”

Tom smiled, surprised. He wasn’t sure what to say.

“And how’s Deenie doing?”

“Well,” Tom said, then added, “under the circumstances.” Eyes back on his phone, he said, “Georgia would kill me if she knew I was here.”

“Well,” Lara said, tilting her head and leaning back a little. “She’s not here, is she?”

“She is definitely not here,” Tom admitted.

“Besides, look at me.”

Somehow, he found himself taking it literally, his eyes resting on hers, her fingers touching her necklace delicately. In the dim bar light, he couldn’t see the scar, but he could feel it. It was an odd sensation he couldn’t quite name.

“And, anyway,” she said, “it’s good they’re together.”

“Who?”

“The girls. Gabby had me drop her at your place on the way to the meeting. I couldn’t leave her at the house alone.” She looked at him. “Didn’t you know?”

“No,” Tom said, a little embarrassed but also relieved for Deenie. “So.”

And her smile, under the light of the peeling Tiffany, was so warm, so inviting.

“So,” she repeated.

“So, tell me. Are you one of the girls?”

The woman was gaping at Deenie from under her trickling rain hat.

Deenie felt her head jerk. “No. No, I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Deenie said, wiping the mist from her eyes.

And it was then that she finally recognized the woman.

She had seen her many times at the public library, sitting in the stacks. Kids used to make fun of her, the way she’d tear off scraps of pink Post-its and mark pages of books no one had looked in for years.

Then one day she saw Jaymie Hurwich talking to the woman and someone told her it was Jaymie’s mom, which couldn’t be true, because Jaymie’s mom lived in Florida, everyone knew. No one had ever seen her.

She was just piecing this all together when it began.

Tire thuds, a swirl of headlights from opposite directions, the long coil of reporters tightening around the neck of the hospital’s stone steps.

With alarming swiftness, the woman fled Deenie’s side, dashing across the parking lot, the Tupperware cradled in front of her, pressed against her slicker.

But Deenie didn’t move.

Moving seemed unsafe, with her head muddled and her throat plugged with humid air and with whatever it was in that container, which felt, suddenly and powerfully, like the thing inside her.

A thing twitching, haired, squirming, fatal.

Before she could let those thoughts take hold, she heard a crackle of static in the distance, saw the pair of security guards bolting toward the front of the hospital, radios to their mouths.

Her eyes returned to the employee entrance. Unmanned.

It felt like it can in a dream sometimes, where you know the door is there just for you. Maybe it wasn’t even there until you needed it.

Once inside, the doors shushing behind her, Deenie found herself in some white corner of the hospital she didn’t know.

Briskly, she walked through a series of random rooms, one with laundry bins, another with fleets of flower vases on long racks, a tangle of brittle petals in each.

Soon enough she found the Critical Care sign, its long red arrow stretched along the wall.

She walked with purpose, head down, and it was easy because there were jumbles of people everywhere, everything rolling, the clicking casters of IV stands, gurneys, trolleys.

Once, she caught sight of a girl she recognized, a freshman abandoned in a wheelchair, her head dropping to her chest then jerking up again.

The girl’s hand was in her mouth, like she was trying to swallow her fist. Lise always could do it, her bones soft like a baby’s.

Another corner and everything started to look familiar. The cartoon Band-Aid figure on the bulletin board, the big red lips on the Shhh…Silent Hospitals Help Healing sign. And posters with dire warnings.

All the posters she must have passed on Tuesday without noticing. Now they felt pointed, urgent, damning.

Turning the last corner, she heard the radio first.

Another security guard, his back to Deenie, stood at the nurses’ station talking to a woman with hair hoisted back into a large clip, hand clenched at her side, her face kneaded red.

It was Mrs. Daniels, forty feet away, and no place to hide.

Head turning slightly, her eyes rested directly on Deenie.

For a split second, Deenie thought the guard would turn his head to follow Mrs. Daniels’s gaze.

But then Mrs. Daniels’s mouth opened, and she was saying something to him.

The guard started nodding.

And Mrs. Daniels kept talking, sliding her phone into the pocket of her coat.

It was like she knew Deenie was there.

Knew and was letting it happen.

“You can’t!”

It was Lise’s grandmother, standing in front of a room, an empty plastic water bottle clutched to her chest.

The collar of her shirt was gray, her neat white hair now flat like a wet otter’s. Deenie wondered if she had even left the hospital since Tuesday. Her eyes, her skin had the look of someone who had not seen the sun in a long time.

“You can’t!” she said again.

Deenie didn’t say anything, only nodded, walking past her, into the blue swallow of the room.

The swaying way she’d been sitting, the bloom on her face, it had been Tom’s idea to make sure she got home safely, driving behind her through the black fen of Binnorie Woods.

Walking her to her front door, he’d hit his head on a porch eave, and now he was on her living-room sofa, ice pack to his forehead, water tickling his face.

“But Gabby’s dad liked to drink it with peppermint,” Lara said, grabbing for a sofa cushion. “Rumple Minze. Which isn’t a white Russian anymore. Do you know what it is? A cocaine lady.”

“Never a subtle fellow, that ex of yours.”

Leaning back, she looked at him, the whisper of a smile amplifying.

“You know, he always liked you.”

“Charlie?”

As surprised as he was to find himself sitting so close to Lara Bishop on her sofa in her cozy matchbox of a house, he was even more surprised when, scar blazing up her neck, she began reminiscing about the man who’d put it there.

“Yeah.” Then she smiled a little, as if remembering something. Shook her head. “But he always thought you were a secret tomcat.”

“What?”

“Well, he said it wouldn’t surprise him. He saw you once with somebody. Or something.”

“No,” Tom said, setting the ice pack down. “He didn’t.”

She looked at him.

“But that was the thing about him,” she said, after a pause. “That was always the thing.”

He had no idea what she meant, but he was glad she’d changed the subject.

She tucked her legs under herself, one shoe falling to the floor, her face newly grave.

“You think I’m a terrible mother, right?” she said.

“God, no,” he blurted. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s not that I’m not terrified,” she said. “Just not about those things.”

“I know,” he said, though again he wasn’t sure he did.

“At the hospital, Gabby said they kept asking her about drugs,” Lara said, “and she said, ‘Mom, like I would ever do that stuff.’ I was so relieved I almost burst into tears.” She paused. “I mean, I loved drugs at her age.”

She looked at him expectantly, but his thoughts had slingshotted. “Who asked her about drugs? The doctors? Lara, did the police talk to her?”

Lara nodded. “There was someone who was from the police there. What did they call her? Public health and safety liaison? But the girls just kept coming in. The looks on their faces.”

His thoughts blurred back to earlier in the day, to watching the girls in line at the nurse’s office. The eerie feeling of something unstoppable, feeding on itself.

“She hated being back in that hospital. All this is making her crazy. I heard her up all night, pacing the house.”

“I’m sure it’s brought back a lot of bad stuff.”

“It’s funny,” she said, “when you think there’s a whole other kid you’d have had if you hadn’t done all the things you did to them.”

“But you didn’t do anything to her,” Tom said, leaning forward. “It wasn’t you.”

She smiled, a smile filled with things he couldn’t hold on to.

“You’ve protected her, you…” he started, but the words felt too heavy in his mouth and she didn’t seem to be listening exactly, reaching down to the floor to seize the bottle of whatever they were drinking.

He couldn’t help but notice the way her shirt pulled, the delicate skin there, a bristle of black lace.

“You know what else is funny?” she said, pouring a little into her glass. “Last week I was worried about what she was up to with boys. Doesn’t that seem silly now?”

“No. That is something that never feels silly.”

She covered her face, embarrassed. “Can I tell you? I found something on her phone.”

He felt himself leaning forward.

“I can’t believe I’m telling you.”

“What?” he said. “Sext—sexts?” The word fumbled from his mouth and she laughed, poking him with her bare foot.

It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was because it didn’t feel remotely possible. Gabby with her serious face and her cool-girl acumen, her silver-sprayed cello case and her meant-for-college-guys gravitas.

“Sort of,” she said, looking at him from behind the hand still cover her blushing face. “A picture. Of her in her underwear.”

Tom felt himself go red now. “Well, girls, they…”

“I never saw such lingerie. The most alarming purple thong. You couldn’t see her face, so I told myself, That’s not her. But if it wasn’t her, why was it on her phone?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said, and he couldn’t quite separate out all the complicated feelings, the uncomfortable idea of Gabby in a thong, even the word thong in the context of a friend of his daughter’s.

And then here, Lara Bishop, the top button of her blouse having slid open and the way her body kept squirming girlishly and the way her face and neck bloomed with drunkenness. The way it made that scar look even darker, more striking, a red plume, and he wanted more than anything to touch it.

His head thick and mazy with whiskey and liquors unknown, he couldn’t stop himself reaching toward her. She nearly jumped but didn’t stop him, her eyes wide and puzzled and not stopping him.

He put his fingers to it, the scar. Touched the soft fold, which felt warm, like a pulse point, like he was somehow touching her heart, or his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to pull his hand back but then feeling her hand grip his wrist, holding it in place.

There was a long, puzzling moment when neither spoke.

“Everyone’s sorry,” she said, smiling faintly. “The whole world’s sorry.”

And he could feel the goose bumps on her skin and wondered when was the last time he’d felt that.

Charlie Bishop had been right about something. Tom had had chances, many chances. There were women, other teachers, even a friend of Georgia’s who sometimes called after she’d been drinking, told him how lonely she was and that she knew he was too. But he’d never done anything about it.

Hell, he’d had a hundred chances, but he’d never done what Georgia had done. Even though he bet he’d had twice the opportunity.

A few kisses, sure. One with the guidance counselor behind the sugar maple at the faculty picnic, high on foamy keg beer. Five years later, he could still taste the caramel malt on her tongue.

But he’d always stopped himself, and Georgia hadn’t. She just did what she wanted and now she treated him, all of them, like they were the blight. That house, its residents, they were the thing. The affliction. The scourge.

“Your eyes,” Lara Bishop was saying to him, her skin like a living thing, “are so sad.”

It was like a doll, a rubber doll, or a vinyl one puffed with air.

Deenie couldn’t see most of Lise’s face, directed toward the window.

Only the round slope of the cheek.

A bulbous head, the sloping brow of a baby or a cartoon character.

Deep down, she must have thought Lise would look like Lise again, or at least like the girl from the other day who everyone said was Lise. The Lise with the dent in the center of her forehead.

But this wasn’t either girl, or any girl.

She moved closer, because she could. Because this wasn’t Lise. Clearly Lise had been moved to another room, or had left the hospital entirely. And been replaced with this.

Or maybe was in the bathroom, in her monkey pajamas, and would pop out any second and say, Here I am, Deenie. Here I am.

Like her outgoing voice-mail message:

“It’s Lise!…Leave me a message or I’ll die!”

As it was, without seeing her face, without Lise’s strawberry-cream skin and marble-blue eyes and the flash of her teeth laughing—well, it looked less like Lise than anyone, or anything, in the world.

Except.

Except, getting closer, there was the scent of something. Beneath the tubes and wires and the pulp of her ruined face, she caught a scent as distinctive as a thumbprint. A smell of Lise that Deenie couldn’t name or define but that was Lise as sure as that butter curl of an ear.

“Lise,” Deenie heard herself crying out.

And slowly, slowly, she made her way around the bed.

If I can see her face, she thought, I will know. I will know something.

The head so round and enormous purpled through like the largest birthmark ever, spreading from the center of her face up to her scalp.

The scalp half shorn, tiny baby hairs like soft chick feathers blowing, the gusting air from all the machines.

And, finally, reaching the far side of the bed, too dark to see anything at first, but then something glowing there.

Lise’s eyes, open.

Open and wandering, like those plastic wiggly eyes on puppets.

Her mouth a wet rag. A tube snaking in and a violet lattice around it and the puff of her lower cheeks, and it was like something was inside the cavity. Or many things, packed tightly there, like a toy stuffed with sawdust.

It reminded Deenie of the girl Skye had told them about.

The one with the mouth filled with cinders, eggshell pieces, the tiny bones of animals. The things no one would want but that were inside of her.

That girl must have swallowed them, all of them, Deenie realized, her head light with the revelation. She’d swallowed all of them. And now they were hers.

Deenie heard a noise, a loud noise, a loud oooh, which had come from her own mouth, from somewhere inside her.

Because there was Lise, one wet eye suddenly on Deenie, its lid pitching higher, as if stuck there.

And Deenie’s own mouth opening, as if a cinder would fall from it, moss clumps, leaf smut, grass blades powdered with spores.

“I didn’t mean to, Lise,” she said. “Don’t be angry. I didn’t mean it.”

“And you think it was me?” Sean said, his face grimy from bending over the storm drain, holding up his phone for the light. “With Lise Daniels?”

“I don’t know,” Eli said, sitting on the curb. “We look a little alike, I guess. And you asked me about her once.”

“Why do you care?” Sean said, sitting beside Eli, kicking his car tire ruefully.

“If people think it was me with her…” But Eli didn’t know how to finish the sentence. The truth was, he wasn’t sure why he cared, but the knot in his chest felt tighter and tighter. The sense he was circling something, drilling in.

Sean sighed, leaning back, his elbows on the sidewalk.

“We didn’t…we were just messing around. We didn’t fuck.”

Eli nodded. He couldn’t say he’d never thought of Lise like that. But he’d always pushed it away. There were other girls. Girls his sister didn’t share clothes with, tell secrets to, keep secrets for.

“I’d see her around. I tried asking her out, but her mom’s not cool. She wouldn’t let her out of her sight. Dropped her off at school, picked her up. So I asked her if I could come before school and we could hang out. She was afraid someone would see us. We found this place behind these big bushes.”

“People saw you anyway,” Eli said.

“We didn’t fuck,” Sean said again. “We just messed around. She’d never done anything. She kept laughing and covering her face.”

He paused, a far-off look in his eyes.

“It was funny,” he said. “She wasn’t like I thought. She was so…young.” He said the last word softly, confusion on his face.

Eli didn’t say anything. Picking up a shorn branch end, he poked into the grate beneath him, spotting the glint of Sean’s car keys.

“Anyway, it was only a few times. Last week, I guess, and then on Tuesday. Was that the day she got sick?”

“Yeah.”

“She seemed fine,” Sean said, shaking his head. “There was nothing wrong with her.”

Eli nodded.

“Except,” Sean said, scratching the back of his neck. “This weird thing happened

“This way,” Lara whispered.

His elbow caught a hard corner as they stumbled to her bedroom.

The crisp smell of night air and pine needles, and the—quilt? comforter?—on the bed was the softest thing he’d ever felt.

There was the crashing sound, a water pitcher, and a muffled laugh and her hands on his belt buckle.

The sinking sense of future regret hurtled away the instant he saw her tug off her shirt with such vigor a button popped, skittering across the floor.

His hand seemed to hit the warm flesh of her stomach the minute the sound came, the bray of guitar so loud he thought a band had kicked up in the living room.

“My kids,” he blurted.

“What?” she whispered, hand on the tongue of his belt.

“My phone,” he said. “It’s for me.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Deenie said, looking down at her hands, not looking at Lise, that open eye. “But you didn’t like him, exactly. He wasn’t your boyfriend.”

She kept starting to say Sean Lurie’s name, but it only came out as a lispy hiss.

“And it was after work and we were in his car. I don’t know why I did it, Lise. But I just had to.”

Which was true. In his car, all the breathing and hands and power of it. Like her body had known something her head never would. Nothing would have stopped her.

Not even knowing Sean was the boy who’d taken off Lise’s tights the week before.

And guess who it is, Deenie? That’s what Lise had said at the lake, wriggling closer, her fingers over her mouth. Guess who the guy is. It’s Sean. Sean Lurie.

Waving the milfoil under her chin, throwing her head back, telling her the thing Sean had done to her and how it made her feel.

Hearing it made something inside Deenie twitch, her whole body wanting to squirm. Her face red and hot, like watching a movie with her dad and suddenly there’s a scene you don’t want to watch with your dad.

That night, though, trying to sleep, all she could think about was how it might feel to have Sean Lurie put his hands there, his mouth.

Watching him at the pizza ovens Monday night, all she could think of was what Lise had told her.

When he offered to drive her home, it felt like it was meant to be.

She never thought of Lise once.

So she didn’t meet Lise at her locker the next morning.

In fact, the next time Deenie saw her, Lise was jumping from her desk chair, falling to the floor.

And now here Lise was, or the thing that had been Lise, lying under the cage of wires.

“I’m sorry,” Deenie said. “For everything. It’s all my fault.”

Which couldn’t be true, but felt utterly true.

And that’s when she saw it. The way Lise’s eye gaped, an oily egg rolling.

“Lise?” Deenie said, nearly yelped.

And a sound coming, like a high whistle.

She’s saying something, Deenie thought, inside.

Like that comic book Eli loved as a kid, The Count of Monte Cristo, the corpse with living eyes.

His face is like marble, Eli would read aloud, scaring her, but from it burned a rage that could not be contained.

Lithe and cherry-lipped, the real Lise was locked inside this dented and bloated thing, this blow-up toy, but what she was saying inside was You, you, you.

And now here she was, her right eye large and gaping and staring at her.

As if she were saying, Deenie, how could you? He wasn’t my boyfriend, but he was mine. I told you and then you had to have him too. And now look what happened. What you’ve done.

Eli couldn’t figure out what it all meant, but he knew it meant something.

“All the sudden she got really nervous,” Sean explained. “She said she lost her backpack. No, wait. She said she thought someone took it.”

Listening, thinking, Eli felt the branch hit something inside the street grate, heard a jingle.

“She kept saying, Someone’s watching, I know it. Finally, she just jumped up. She didn’t have time to put her tights back on. She jumped up like she saw a ghost.”

Eli felt for the key ring, caught with the branch.

“You…” Sean said, watching Eli delicately lift the key ring up through the iron spokes, “you don’t think it has anything to do with what…happened to her? To all of them?”

“I don’t know,” Eli said, the keys hanging from the twig. “Did you take them all out by the bushes?”

“No,” Sean said, looking suddenly very tired, shaking his head. “I didn’t.”

With a clean move, like the faintest of wrist shots, Eli flicked the branch over the grate, Sean’s keys falling soundlessly into the bottomless sewer.

Sean started to say something but stopped.

“Sorry,” Eli said, then rose to his feet and began walking away.

“Hey,” Sean called out. “By the way, how’s your sister? She’s okay, right?”

“Yeah, she’s fine.”

“I’ve been texting her, but she won’t text me back.”

Eli stopped and looked at him. “Why are you texting my sister?”

Sean stood, shaking his head, not looking at Eli. “I heard she wasn’t working this weekend. Just wondering.”

Eli looked at him. Slowly nodded.

“You have to leave,” Lise’s grandmother rasped from the doorway. “They’re coming. People are coming.”

“I am,” Deenie said, walking out. “I’m sorry. But she…she was looking at me.”

“I know you love our Lise,” she said, not even seeming to hear Deenie. “But things have gotten bad today.”

“Bad?”

“That other girl upset her!” she whispered, holding Deenie’s arm. “I could just tell. A grandmother knows.”

“What other girl?”

“The one who came earlier.”

“Gabby?” Deenie asked. “She didn’t tell me she—”

“No, some girl with hair white as a witch,” she said. “She was in there and we didn’t even know how she got in.”

Deenie felt her flesh quill.

“And when she came out, she was crying, like an animal. Her whole body. Have you ever seen a snake sidewinding? That’s what it looked like.”

Deenie didn’t say anything, just nodded. She didn’t know what it was about, but she knew it was very wrong.

Lise’s grandmother leaned closer, so close Deenie could smell her medicinal moisturizer.

“Who was she?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“Her name is Skye,” Deenie said. “And you shouldn’t let her back in.”

No one was home and the house had that spooky feel it always had when the weather changed suddenly. The squeaking and wheezing of floorboards, the walls inhaling and exhaling like a sleeping giant.

Eli read Deenie’s note on the kitchen table, the wild lope of her handwriting.

Turning on the TV loud, he collapsed on the sofa.

He was trying to think through everything, but before he knew it, he was asleep.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, but everything felt different when he woke up, with a jolt. A noise in the house, in the basement.

It must have been a dream, but it wasn’t like any dream he’d had, at least not since he was a kid when he’d run a high fever and go to all kinds of places in his head—the South Pole, Madripoor, Mutant Town, as vivid as comics, as life, but more so—and wake up feeling as though he finally understood everything.

In the dream, whatever it was, he was still on the couch, but Skye Osbourne was with him, her arms hidden in her long sweater, which was like tendrils, and the light came and he could see through it to her breasts, her nipples like gold coins.

One hand, tiny and clawed, suddenly appeared through the bottom of her sleeve and she was holding his phone, as though it had never been lost.

Climbing on top of him, she wrapped her legs tight, waving his phone in front of his face, the picture there. The faceless girl with the purple nails and purple panties.

“You should delete it,” she said, craning her neck down, her breasts swinging. He’d never known her breasts were so large. “What if she dies? Then she’s on your phone forever.”

“Who? Who’s the girl? Is it—”

“Maybe it’s your fault,” she said. “The camera stole her soul.”

Her hair falling onto his face as she arched her neck, as she looked at the photo flashing there in her own hand.

“Look,” she said. “You can see her heart.”