The Fever

16

When’s the next bus?” Deenie asked a pair of hospital employees smoking out back. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Where you going, honey?” one asked, a lady with pouched eyes and a lab coat under her puffer.

“Over by the school.”

“I’m leaving. I’ll take you,” she said, throwing her cigarette to the ground.

On the way, the woman talked without stopping.

She told Deenie how the pharmacy had never had a day like this, the dispenser beeping ceaselessly, the premixed IVs gone by four o’clock, a tech fainting and splitting her scalp, four girls an hour admitted at first, double that by the time she left.

“I saw you and I thought, Not another one. All day, each of you acting crazier than the last.”

“I was visiting a friend.”

Mind racing, somersaulting, Deenie was trying to piece it all together: Why was Skye visiting Lise? What did it all mean?

The woman glanced over at her in a way that made Deenie’s eye twitch.

“A girl came in to visit her sister, and ten minutes later she was spinning around on the floor. We can’t get this tiger by the tail. Your eye always do that?”

“I’m okay,” Deenie said. “What happened at the press conference?”

The woman kept looking at her, “They canceled it,” she said. “Everything’s changed.”

“What do you mean? What happened?” Deenie felt her eye throbbing, wanted to put her finger to it, make it stop.

“Because of the police investigation.”

“What?”

“They found something in the girl’s locker. The first girl.”

Deenie thought of the people digging through Lise’s locker, their gloved hands on Lise’s gym uniform, her thermos, her binder.

“What did they find?”

“Look, I can’t talk about it,” the woman said, eyes returning to the road. “They made us sign all these papers.”

The feeling came over Deenie like a rush of water to the mouth, rimy and overflowing.

Please tell me, she tried to say, but her mouth wouldn’t do what it was supposed to, and the woman looked at her as if deciding something.

“I don’t really know, honey,” she said. “But I heard they think someone gave her something that made her sick. Very sick.”

Deenie sat for a moment, thinking.

“Like a Roofie?” she asked, remembering from health class.

“No. We check for that right away.”

“So…so that’s what happened to everyone? To the other girls too?”

“No. Their tox screens came back negative.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Deenie said, twitching, the vein at her temple like a wriggling worm, her hand jerking up, trying to hide it. “It can’t be just Lise.”

At that moment, the road rose and the school loomed on the horizon.

“You can stop right here,” Deenie said, pointing hurriedly to the nearest corner.

“I can’t leave you,” the woman said, squinting out the window, the empty parking lot. “It’s not safe.”

Deenie looked at her. Then it was like she’d touched a frayed plug. She felt something like sparks, her head jerking against the car window.

She looked at her hands, which tingled.

“Honey, you…” the woman started, her eyes leaping to Deenie.

“My dad teaches here. He’s inside waiting for me,” Deenie said, gritting her teeth to make the shaking stop, which only made it worse. She reached for the door handle. “Stop the car. Let me out now, please.”

The woman slowed the car to a stop, looking down the empty street.

“I don’t see anyone…” she began, but before she could say more, Deenie felt her shoulders vault forward, jaw percussing.

Swinging open the door, she jumped out of the car. And then she ran.

It was a little click-click sound and seemed to be coming from below.

Standing at the top of the basement stairs, Eli wondered if it was the dryer, or if it was a raccoon, like once before. For months after, Deenie wouldn’t go down there without singing loudly or raking one of Eli’s old hockey sticks across the rail.

“Deenie?” Eli called out. “Dad?”

“No,” a voice came, throaty, cautious.

Three steps down, he stopped.

She was sitting on the Ping-Pong table, purple rain boots dangling off the edge.

At first he could barely see her face, long hair catching the light and her face tucked behind it.

But then she turned, and he saw her eyes widen, heard the smallest gasp.

“Gabby,” he said, walking down the remaining steps.

“I’m sorry for coming in,” she said quickly. “Did I scare you?”

“No,” he said. “No problem.”

“It was raining,” she added. Under the lightbulb, her hair glistened from within its deep pockets. All the girls loved Gabby’s hair, but Eli always thought it looked so heavy, so complicated, like one of those leathery cocoons you stare into at the science center.

“I had a key from before,” she said.

“Good thing,” he said. “I was wondering what happened.”

“What do you mean?” she said, clasping her phone between her palms.

“To you and Deenie. Where is she?”

Gabby just looked at him.

“Deenie left a note that she was with you,” Eli said, walking over to the Ping-Pong table.

She said something, but with her voice so soft and the furnace kicking up, he couldn’t hear, so he moved closer.

“No. I was just trying to find her,” she said, almost leaning back from him, as if he were standing too close. “I came here to find her. I really need to see her.”

There was the smell on her of something, something in her hair that reminded him of his dad’s classroom.

He must have made some small gesture because she said, “They put glue in, for the EEG.”

“No, I—” he began.

“I can’t get it out,” she said, touching it. “Witch hazel, aspirin crushed in water, nail polish remover. I tried everything. Maybe I’ll just cut it all off.”

“Don’t cut it off,” he said, smiling.

She didn’t say anything, looking down at her phone. He was suddenly a little queasy, thinking of Gabby in the house while he was having that dream. Skye and her golden nipples and grinding hips.

“I guess they’re all still at the meeting at the school,” he said, eager to make conversation, to get the noise out of his head. “Things were crazy over there. I saw them digging around outside.”

Her eyes lifted. “Saw who?”

Eli shrugged. “I don’t know.” He thought about it. The dark coats and the blue plastic gloves. The one with rain cover stretching over his hat brim. “The cops, I think.” And then, fitting pieces together in his head, he added, “By the breezeway. By those big bushes. I guess it had to do with Lise being back there.”

“What do you mean?” Her eyes back down on her phone.

He didn’t want to tell her, but he was trying to see what the pieces meant.

“Lise,” he said, his brain churning, attempting to make sense of it. “She was back there. With a guy. Screwing around, I don’t know. What I don’t get is why the police…”

He stopped.

The look on her face, the way it seemed to collapse upon itself, to wither inside that cocoon of hair. He was the biggest jerk in the world. No one wanted to hear stuff like that about her friend.

“Wait, stop,” she said, shaking her head so forcefully it startled him. “I don’t understand. Why are you telling me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. What if she was having another seizure, or whatever that thing was? “I shouldn’t have said anything. I only found out because there was a mistake. People thought it was me back there with Lise. People were saying it was me.”

Her head shot up.

“What?”

“But it wasn’t me. I’d never—well, it wasn’t me.”

“It was you,” she said, looking at him, eyes black and obscure.

“You heard that too, huh?” He hoped Deenie hadn’t. “No way, ever. This guy just looks like me, sort of. This guy, Sean, from the Pizza House.”

“It was you,” she repeated, louder now.

“No,” he said, looking at her. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it has nothing to do with all this. I’m sure—”

And something seemed to snap hard in her face, like a rubber band stretched too far.

“Oh, Eli, no. Look what happened, and now,” she said, her voice going loose, like someone slipping under anesthesia, like when he watched his teammate get his arm re-broken after a game. “Lise. Lise is going to die.”

“Hey,” he said, gently. “No, she’s not.”

Her hands gripped the table beneath her.

“She is. She is.”

He put his hand on her arm, hot to the touch.

She breathed in fast, shuddering.

“I better go,” she said, pressing her whole body against him for the most fleeting moment, so close he could feel the swell of her breasts, the heat of her breath on his neck.

Before he could say anything, she slid off the table, her jacket dragging behind her as she raced up the stairs.

“Hey,” he called out. “How…”

But she was gone.

Stuck with the landline, it took him several minutes and a few tries to figure out his dad’s cell number.

He could hear Gabby on the front porch, talking into her phone.

After six long rings, his dad answered, “Deenie?” His voice breathless and sharp.

“Dad,” Eli said. “Deenie’s not here. I don’t know where she is.”

“She and Gabby must have gone out.” It sounded like his dad was even panting a little.

“No, Gabby’s here, Dad. She’s been waiting for her. She doesn’t know where Deenie is either.”

There was a pause. Eli thought he heard music in the background.

“Dad,” he asked, “where are you?”

“Okay, I’m going to find her. I’m going to look for her. I’ll call you.”

Trying to buckle his half-undone belt with one hand, Tom called Deenie. There was no answer.

On the edge of the bed, Lara was talking to Gabby on her own phone. A lock of hair drooping forward, she spoke in low mothering tones.

“I’m not mad at you, Gabby, but…okay, it’s okay…”

Walking into the hallway, he decided to call Eli back.

Just as his call went through, almost in the same instant, he heard the electronic bleat of a ringtone from another room.

Then came the recognition. That ringtone—the shriek of a goal horn. It was Eli’s phone. In the Bishop house.

Following the sound, he stopped at the doorway to what had to be Gabby’s room.

He could feel Lara behind him now. “What the…?”

“That’s Eli’s phone. Why would…”

Lara’s eyes darted around the room. In seconds, she was kneeling over Gabby’s laundry hamper, hands rustling through the clothes.

When she rose with Eli’s battered white phone in her hand, Tom hung up.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

For several minutes, they stood over the hamper, pushing buttons on the phone, popping the dying battery in and out. It didn’t matter. The screen was blank. No call history other than Tom’s own call moments before, no contacts, no texts. The phone was immaculate.

There wasn’t any time to think, just a few minutes Deenie walking swiftly, a block over to Revello Way.

For a panicked moment, Deenie wasn’t sure she’d recognize it. She’d only been to Skye’s house a few times, and never inside.

But then she spotted the glint of the gold-rimmed sundial on the front lawn.

It was a ranch house, a rambling one that hooked over a sharp incline on one side. There was the whispery sound of chimes in every window—capiz, bamboo, glinting crystal—and the creaking of its eaves, heavy with old leaves.

It felt too late to knock on the door, but it didn’t matter because she saw a light on in the garage.

Making her way up the drive, she caught a flash of white.

T-shirt, bare legs, and the distinct white flare of Skye’s hair.

Her back to Deenie, she was completely still, shoulders bent.

Like a picture Deenie once saw of a white cobra, its hood spread.

Girls like Skye, she would never understand. Girls who got away with ditching school and never doing any homework, who could have twenty-six-year-old boyfriends and be able to explain what fisting was and why anyone would enjoy it and had aunts who gave them copies of the Kama Sutra and no one stopped them and they made everything seem easy and adult and anyone who found it all confusing and maybe scary was just a kid, just a little kid.

Girls who, despite never having been your real friend at all, felt it was okay to visit your oldest friend’s bedside and lurk there in that Skye way, like a living ghost, a cobra-hooded witch.

“Skye,” Deenie called out softly, wet sneakers grinding up the gravel drive. “Skye.”

But Skye didn’t move or even flinch, shoulders white and bony under her thin T. Her head down.

Approaching, Deenie finally saw what Skye was standing in front of, a wet-wood hutch on stilts, its front traps open.

“Skye,” she hissed, “it’s Deenie.”

But still her head wouldn’t turn, her shoulders hunched, her white figure ghostlike, and a tiny noise of something chewing, gnawing.

“Skye?”

Through the window, he could see Gabby on the front porch.

At first, he thought she was still on the phone, but then he saw she was writing something in one of her notebooks, writing faster than he’d ever seen anyone write.

He walked through the house, his head starting to feel things again, and badly. Everything seemed to be coming undone, like the ceiling corners, swollen with rain. The house, his mom used to say, is weeping.

Passing headlights flashed across the front windows and he looked out to the front porch to see Gabby was gone.

The drive back through Binnorie Woods seemed to take forever, twisting down one veiny road after another, while Tom tried to will himself sober. To reckon with the snarl in his head, which included a sneaking sense of relief.

He’d promised to bring Gabby back, had insisted Lara shouldn’t drive. And now, the road doing odd, shimmery things, he was pretty sure he shouldn’t be driving either.

“I know what it is,” Lara had said as he was halfway out the door, still buttoning his shirt with one hand, the other hand crushed over his car keys.

“What?”

“Everything happening,” she said, standing in the hard light of the entryway. Saying it quietly, barely a whisper.

He froze, waited.

“It’s what we put in the ground,” she said. “And in the walls. The lake, the air. And the vaccines we give them. The food, the water, the things we say, the things we do. All of it, straight into their sturdy little bodies. Because even if it isn’t any of these things, it could be. Because all we do from the minute they’re born is put them at risk.”

He felt his keys cut into his fingers.

“We put them at risk just by having them,” he blurted, not even knowing what he meant. Touched by her words, frightened by them. “And the hazards never stop.”

She paused, looking at him. A chill on his neck, he felt as though she could see everything.

“Well,” she said softly, her hand in her hair. “We’re all at risk.”

And she’d slipped back into the house, closing the door.

Now, in his car, he rolled down the windows all the way, tried to breathe. He couldn’t really breathe.

He could still smell her on his shirt and hands and mouth, feel her mysterious energy. Warm and unsettling.

In the strangest way, it reminded him of Georgia.

This is why I don’t drink, he thought, because a hundred things he’d shut in shoeboxes and hoisted up to closet tops cast themselves down again.

Like how he’d wanted to grind that guy’s face into the icy parking lot.

How he’d called Georgia ugly names, said things in front of Deenie and Eli.

Once he’d even pointed out the guy to Eli at the grocery store. Said, There he is, that’s what your mother did it all for. That loser in the orange tie.

And that other time. Opening all Georgia’s dresser drawers, Deenie in the doorway, balling up his wife’s lingerie, her panties, throwing them at Georgia. Wanting to stuff them in her mouth. Stopping himself. He stopped himself.

But that was a short period of time, a long time ago.

How do you get over it? he’d asked Lara Bishop before he left. Over what happened to you?

But she just smiled like it was a stupid question, or at least the wrong one.

The streak of her white T-shirt, the hunch of her back, head dipped low, the stillness of her.

“Skye,” Deenie said, louder now, the smell of sawdust, ammonia, fur everywhere. “Skye, turn around.”

And Skye’s head turned slowly, as if she’d barely heard, earbuds dropping to her collarbones.

Her face cool and expressionless and so pale it was near translucent.

“Deenie,” she said, her skinny arms inside the open door of the hutch, stroking something. A cherry-eyed rabbit with long ears.

“This is Crow Jane,” she said. “Meet Crow Jane.”

Deenie stopped short as Skye lifted the animal, its plush fur looked as soft as the purple foot charm Deenie used to hang on her backpack when she was little.

“His mother tried to eat him,” Skye said, fingering a pellet into the rabbit’s mouth. “It happens sometimes. When they get scared or confused. Or by accident. Or if they think something’s wrong with the baby.”

“Why are you out here this late?” Deenie asked, even though she was the one out at midnight, in Skye’s backyard.

There was a smell that reminded her of the time the lawn mower sparked and burned up one side of the front lawn.

“What…” Deenie began, and it seemed to happen at that same second, the sharp twinge in Deenie’s neck, her head bobbing, and Skye saying, “Are you okay, Deenie?”

Something in Skye’s calm made her feel crazy, her neck and jaw throbbing.

“Why were you in Lise’s hospital room?” Deenie asked, almost a bark. “What would you be doing there?”

Staring at her, Skye lifted the rabbit to her chest, rubbing its body.

“You’ve been there too, right?” she asked, her fingers nestled in the fur, stroking it with her thin fingers. “I guess the same as you.”

“You were never friends with her,” Deenie said, voice shaking now. “Not like me.”

Something was shifting in Skye’s eyes. “No one can be as close to anyone as you, is that it?”

“What does that mean?”

Skye didn’t answer, taking Crow Jane by the cowl and setting her, a little roughly, back into the soggy hutch.

A wind gusted up and the smell, sooty and sweet, came strong, seemed to be coming from beyond the hutch.

“Were you burning something?” Deenie asked, the smell thick in her mouth.

Walking past the hutch, Deenie felt the ground soft with ash.

Skye shrugged. “My aunt does it. We have lots of weeds.”

The school’s bell tower chimed midnight, an ancient clang, heavy with rust and lime.

Both their heads turned.

That was when Deenie saw.

Through the dark of Skye’s zigzagging backyard, the knotted brush, there it was. Its familiar gloomy limestone, veined with soot.

“You can see the school from here,” Deenie said.

Something was coming together in her head, sharp fragments, thin as ice, assembling, sliding into place.

“Not really,” Skye said. “Until they cut back those trees after the ice storm.”

Deenie walked across the yard, straight toward the greening black of trees in the rear.

“Is this the way you get to school? You walk this back way?”

She thought she could hear Skye’s breath catch. Heard the hook of the latch on the hutch and then Skye moving behind her, toward her.

“Sometimes.”

Deenie walked to the far corner. From there, a few muddy steps and it was a clean path along the long row of hedges that ran up to the breezeway on the east side of the school.

We went behind those tall bushes, she could hear Lise saying now, her legs covered with milfoil. He took my tights off first.

“Did you see Lise back there, Skye?”

“Lise?” Skye’s eyes narrowed to slits, and Deenie knew she was close to something.

“You saw, didn’t you? What Lise did.”

Skye looked at Deenie.

“Sure,” she said, her voice changed. “I saw. I guess Gabby finally told you. I know Lise wouldn’t.”

“Gabby?”

“I saw it all,” Skye continued. “You should’ve seen the things your brother was doing to her.”

Deenie felt something crack and twist at her temple.

“What? What did you say?”

“Your brother going down on your Lise. Lise’s leg twitching like a dog’s.”

Deenie felt her neck stiffen to wood, her hand leaping to it. She couldn’t stop it, or Skye. Why Skye would say—

“She seemed to love it,” Skye said, jaw out, her lips white. “She didn’t care who saw. Your brother didn’t either.”

“You shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t my brother,” Deenie said. “Stop saying that. It wasn’t him.”

Skye’s hand was at her mouth.

“Skye,” Deenie said, voice creaky and high, “did you do something to Lise?”

“She did it to herself.”

The note was folded and stuck in the space between the storm door and the wooden one.

It was hard to read, the letters smeared and only the muzzy glare of the porch light. But once he started, he couldn’t stop to go inside.

“Your daughter couldn’t be here, sir,” the nurse told him. “Visiting hours ended at nine.”

“I know,” Tom said, “but I think she might be.”

Where else would she be? he thought. Not at home, not at Gabby’s—there was no other place.

“Sir, we have a lot going on in here right now.”

“I know, I do. I promise, I’m not being a jerk. I think she might have gone to see Lise Daniels. Can you at least let me—”

“Sir, have you been drinking?”

“Listen, can you page Sheila Daniels for me? She’ll vouch for me,” he said, though he had no idea if she would. “I promise.”

The nurse looked at him blankly.

Nurses are like cops, he thought. You can’t hide anything.

But then he remembered he had nothing, really, to hide.

Together, they sat on pastel chairs in the Critical Care waiting room.

The slump of Sheila’s body, so different from the Sheila of the other morning, or most of the times he saw her, always running on nerves and worry. Now there was a zombie sedation about her that made her easier to talk to, but much sadder.

Her hands, chapped, were folded in her lap, the nails lined red.

“Deenie was here,” Sheila said, the smell on her like a live presence. “I saw her. I think I did. The pills they gave me…”

“When?”

“An hour ago, maybe. I don’t know. My mom saw her too.”

“Do you know where she—”

“You know, I’ve only been home once. For an hour. The coffee table was still tipped over. I keep thinking about that coffee table.” She looked at him, eyes yellowed. “That’s what did it, in the end.”

Something ghastly turned inside him. “In the end? Sheila, is Lise…”

But she shook her head, over and over. “Nothing’s changed. Except everything. I don’t understand. Tom, who would hurt my girl?”

“Sheila, I don’t…what’s happened?”

“I told them Lisey doesn’t use drugs,” she said. “Is Deenie a drug user now?”

“Deenie? No.”

“That’s what I told them.”

“The police?” he asked, though he knew. “And they were asking about Deenie?”

“All day I’ve been talking to them,” she said.

“Detectives? A woman with a ponytail—”

“They found it in Lise’s thermos,” she said, taking a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket, reading from it. “Datura stramonium.”

Tom looked at the paper, a printout from the web. With a picture of a white flower like a pinwheel, smooth with toothed leaves.

D. stramonium—Jimsonweed; thorn apple; Jamestown weed (Family: Nightshade). A foul-smelling herb that forms bushes up to five feet tall. Its stems fork into leafy branches, each leaf with a single, erect flower.

For centuries, Datura has been used as an herbal medicine. It is also a potent hallucinogen and deliriant that can generate powerful visions. Legend has it that Cleopatra used the extract as a love potion in her seduction of Caesar.

Low recreational doses are usually absorbed through smoking the plant’s leaves. It can, however, prove fatally toxic in only slightly higher amounts, and reckless use can result in hospitalization and even death. Amnesia of the poisoning event is common.

Late signs/fatal reactions: convulsions, cardiovascular weakening, coma.

Tom tried to concentrate on the words, but the noise in his head wouldn’t let him.

“Jimsonweed. Someone gave her this?” he said. “Someone gave this to all these girls?”

“They gave it to Lise,” Sheila said, swallowing loudly, the paper shaking in her hand. “They couldn’t find it in the other girls.”

“Do they know why? And what about…” There were too many questions and she wasn’t listening anyway.

She looked down at the printout, turning it over, showing him the drawing of the plant’s chemical composition.

Looking up, she smiled vaguely, her voice rising and pushing the words out: “Blind as a bat, mad as a hatter…”

“Red as a beet,” continued Tom, an old memory, cramming for a long-ago exam, rising up in him, “hot as a hare, dry as a bone, and the—”

“—heart runs alone,” she finished. “The doctor told me that’s how they memorize it in med school. The symptoms. Toxic something. I forgot to write that part down.”

“Poisoned,” he said. “She was poisoned.”

“The heart runs alone,” she repeated, turning from the paper to Tom. “Isn’t that horrible?” Then, looking up at him. “Or beautiful?”

“Skye,” Deenie whispered loudly, moving closer. “What did you do?”

“Why would I tell you?” she said, arm lifting to the dark boughs of the tree above her. “What did you ever care about me? The only one who ever cared is Gabby.”

“Gabby cares about Lise,” Deenie said. “What did you do, Skye?”

And that’s when Skye’s mouth started its clicking sound again.

“I can’t believe you never knew,” she said. “About Gabby.”

“What does Gabby…” But already something was happening, a feeling.

“About Gabby,” Skye said. “About how fucking much she loves your brother.”

“What…” Deenie started, but she couldn’t make the words come. Because there it was, some private song she knew from far back in a cobwebby corner of her head. A song so faint she’d barely heard it, but now, the sound turned up, she couldn’t muffle it anymore.

Gabby, who always walked so fast by his bedroom door. Gabby standing beside her at the washing machine, her hand on Eli’s T-shirt. Her fingers. Deenie wanted to look away. A dozen times like that. The way her body battened tight when he came in the room. The way her face…

This song, she’d heard it so low and quiet so long, she never really heard it all.

“She could never tell you,” Skye said. “She knew you wouldn’t understand, or help her. But she had me.”

Deenie felt something drag up her spine. Turning, she said, each word slow and raking up her throat, “Had you for…what? What did you do, Skye?”

And, stepping farther back under the black canopy of the tree, Skye seemed to draw herself into herself, a tiny white flower.

There, hidden, her voice low and forceful and insistent, almost a chant, she told Deenie a story, the way only Skye would tell it.

Of how she and Gabby became friends, true friends, because they both knew how to keep secrets. How one night last year, Skye caught her hiding in the tall trees by the school, watching Eli Nash skating by himself on the practice rink. She was so embarrassed, and Skye said she shouldn’t be and invited Gabby to her house to do the love tarot.

They sat for hours and Gabby told Skye she’d loved Eli since the day she met him, and he was all she thought about. And that she loved Deenie but that she’d mostly become friends with her because of Eli, whom she loved so much she wanted to die.

It never stopped, the feeling, and watching him with all those girls, once or twice hearing them in Deenie’s house, was almost too much for Gabby to bear. Sometimes she even thought that if it weren’t for Deenie…

But Skye had told her it didn’t matter. That was how guys were, trapped for years in the mindless mojo of lust. And together they cast love spells from the Internet, mixing honey, oils, and leaves with things—hair, pens, stick wax, a roll of grip tape—stolen from Eli’s backpack, his house.

Once, they used a dove heart Skye’s cat carried in from the backyard.

Once, they used menstrual blood.

And then one day it happened, or they thought it did.

I saw him in the hallway, Gabby said, and you should have seen it, the way he looked at me. I know it worked. I know it.

To bind it, Skye cautioned, they would have to send him a picture. If it stays on his phone for twelve days, the spell will work. And Gabby said she’d do it. She was not afraid.

But the spell didn’t work in time. Or it worked the wrong way. It worked for Lise.

Because one morning, a week ago, Skye was walking to school, late, head full of bad dreams like always, and she saw it all. Saw the secret. Behind the bushes. Lise and Eli Nash.

She told Gabby what she’d seen. And Gabby could think of nothing else: I want to die, she told Skye. I’m dying now.

The next day, they’d all gone to the lake.

Gabby was so angry, couldn’t even look at Lise, Lise showing off her body in the water. And that spot on the inside of her thigh, like a moon, a kiss, a witch’s mark. The whole time, Gabby kept whispering to Skye, She stole him from me.

And so Skye promised to reverse it. And she knew just how.

Sulfur, honey, and dried jimson flowers from the bushes out back, the kind that bloomed at night. They’re called love-will. She’d found it in a book. A spell to scare a faithless lover into repentance.

She made the mixture and gave it to Gabby and Gabby put it in Lise’s thermos. It was important that Gabby do it herself. It was the only way the spell would work.

And they couldn’t be responsible for what happened. In fact, didn’t Lise’s reaction show that it was Lise who was a faithless lover? Was holding some bad energy inside that needed to be released?

Deenie listened and listened and finally broke in.

“But you gave Lise… sulfur?”

“Jimson. It runs wild back here. If you dry the leaves and smoke them, you can have visions,” Skye said, stepping back even farther under the heavy branches, only her mouth and chin visible now. “But it only makes visible a darkness that’s already there. Maybe eating it like that…”

She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie’s brain. “Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.”

Deenie felt herself sinking, her hand reaching out for the tree beside her, knuckles pressing into its hard bark.

“They’ll find it,” Deenie said, huskily. “They’re finding everything.”

“I burned it all,” she said, head tilting toward the dredged ashes mixing with the sawdust by the rabbit hutch. That smell Deenie had caught, now nearly gone. “The plants were so beautiful. It’s all done.”

Pressing her hand to her chest, Deenie tried to get a breath that wouldn’t come.

“I’m going to tell,” she whispered.

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

A wind came and Skye’s head dipped down from the tree’s shadow and Deenie saw her face, hair blown back. Her face bare and clean as she’d never seen it. She looked small and dangerous.

“Skye,” she said, softly, “Lise is going to die.”

There was a pause. Deenie couldn’t look at her, her face so naked, her eyes like hard green marbles.

“I’m not sorry, Deenie,” Skye was saying. “And you shouldn’t be. We don’t owe anybody anything.”

Deenie couldn’t imagine anything less true. The hardest part was how much we owed everyone.

“You poisoned her,” Deenie said, feeling her neck throb from its seizing bursts, her whole body aching from it. “You poisoned everybody.”

“No,” Skye said. “She was the only one.”

Deenie looked at her, trying to puzzle it all out, including the long, fevered lurches of her own body, heart. How was it possible?

“And it’s not poison,” Skye said, stepping forward, so close to Deenie she could smell the sawdust, the ashes. “Your brother had some, he smoked some today and he didn’t get sick.”

Deenie lifted her head, eyes on Skye, the white smear of her face. It seemed to happen instantaneously, her body moving fast across the lawn.

“Sheila Daniels, please return to ICU.”

The crackle from the ancient PA system.

“Maybe she’s awake,” Tom said, rising, helping Sheila to her feet.

Her body bobbled between his forearms, her hair slipping from its clip, he grabbed for one shoulder to try to keep her upright.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, “you…”

But she had pulled away from him and charged through the double doors with surprising suddenness and strength.

All Sheila Daniels’s constant, exhausting vigilance over the years looked different now. It made you wonder if, in some obscure way, she had known what was coming and spent all her days raising the ramparts, doing whatever she could to forestall it, or at least prepare for it.

Except what, or who, had she been protecting Lise from? He couldn’t imagine why anyone in the world would want to hurt that sweet girl.

And now he was bounding through the front doors, not stopping to think where he could find Deenie, just knowing he would.

His phone started ringing just as he reached his car.

“Hello?” he answered, not even looking.

“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe and I…”

And it was Deenie’s voice, one he hadn’t heard in a thousand years, and she was saying things, frantically, breathlessly, but with the sound of everything in the world roaring in his ear, he could only hear “Daddy.”

It was five miles or more, even if she found the right shortcuts, iron spreading through her chest as she ran.

There was no guessing about it, but a picture kept coming: Eli’s head hitting the ice, like she’d once seen happen at a practice, his helmet shorn off, two teeth knocked out. Deenie had been there, felt her heart stop.

And her mom running onto the ice, arms around him in seconds. Scrambling to find both teeth. Deenie watched as she foisted them back in Eli’s open mouth. And he was fine. Because Eli was always fine, wasn’t he?

Running faster, breathing harder, her face slicked from the damp, her sneakers nearly twisting off her feet, she pressed her phone against her ear.

Her dad was telling her to slow down, to breathe.

“Where’s Eli,” she said and it wasn’t her voice now but her voice in an old home video, long-ago Christmas mornings, a canoe trip, the time she first rode a bike and fell elbow first onto the sidewalk. “Daddy, he’s poisoned.”

A two-liter nestled between his legs, Eli held Gabby’s letter in his hand.

He was drinking fast, trying to wake up, to shake off the final dregs of the smoke, to understand what he’d read and what it meant.

There were revelations tumbling through his head—so many moments that looked different now, how he’d read them all wrong—but he pushed them aside for the moment because of the sickly urgency he felt. Now I have to fix things, she’d written, a sentence that had a sense of purpose. And finality.

He picked up the kitchen phone again, realized he didn’t have her number.

Pulling his laptop out of his bag, he e-mailed Gabby, the first time he ever had.

Then he sat for a second, waiting, hoping.

All those times with Gabby, her stern and mysterious face. To matter so much to someone you hardly thought about. Someone who maybe didn’t even wonder about you, or check in much to see if you were okay because that person wasn’t thinking about you, not really, and maybe had moved far away, three hours or something, just far enough to be able to put you out of her mind whenever she wanted.

The phone rang.

“Eli, it’s Dad.”

“Hey,” Eli said. “Gabby left. And this thing happened. I don’t know—”

“Are you okay, Eli?” his dad said, his voice even more breathless than before. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, Dad, but Gab—”

“We’ll be right there, okay? Don’t—just sit still, okay? Just don’t do anything.”

“What?” Eli said, but all he heard was the smack of tires on a wet road, then a click.

She saw the car, the only car in the world, the streets desolate and haunted, like a town during a plague.

“Deenie,” her dad was shouting from the rolled-down window.

And the car nearly jumped the curb, spraying her with gathered water.

“You were supposed to go to Eli,” she shouted, holding her trapper hat on her head, heavy with rain.

“Deenie,” he said, “get in.”

She stood for a second, looking at her father, his face red and fevered, hands gripping the wheel.

She felt so sorry for him.

Eli kept trying to tell them he was okay, but they wouldn’t listen.

Knees up in the backseat, Deenie had her head buried in her arms, and he thought she might be crying.

Dad drove faster than Eli had ever seen anyone drive, faster even than A.J. drag-racing by the old wire factory outside of town.

“Did you drink something?” his dad kept asking. “Did someone give you something? How about in your thermos?”

“What? No. I don’t have a thermos,” he said. “I’m okay, Dad.”

“You’re not,” Deenie said from the back. “You think you are, but you’re not.”

The hospital was there, lit so brightly it hurt his eyes, the parking lot like the school’s before a big game.

Their headlights skated across a pair of girls, maybe ten or eleven, in flannel pajamas, their mother with an arm around each of them, rushing them inside. They both wore big slippers—lobsters and bunny rabbits—oozing with gray rain, so heavy they could barely lift their feet.

Time shuttered to a stop as Eli watched them, their faces blue in the light, looking at the windshield, at him. He squinted and saw they were older than they’d first looked. The one with the bunny slippers he recognized as the sophomore girl everyone called Shawty, the one who’d snuck into his bedroom months ago, the one who’d cried when it was over, worried she’d done it all wrong. After, she’d stayed in the bathroom a long time. When she came out, her face was bright with pain.

Girls changed after, he thought. Before, she’d been texting him all the time, pulling her shirt up at games, saying all the things she wanted to do to him, flashing that thong at him.

And then after. But it changed for him after too. Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters.

And now here she was, hair scraped back from her baby face, and she had stopped, and she was looking at him.

Recognizing him, remembering things. A hard wince sweeping across that soft face.

And he wasn’t sure what her real name was.

Then came the girl’s mother’s burly arm covering her face, hoisting her along, and the girl was gone, lost behind the hospital’s sliding doors.

“Deenie,” Eli said, turning around to face his sister, “did Gabby find you? Did you talk to her?”

And she just shook her head, eyes wide and startled, mouth fixed.

“Because I have to show you something. You need to see something.”

Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the note, damp in his hands.

A blurry half hour after he’d left, Tom was back in the hospital waiting room, this time with Eli and Deenie.

Eli, glassy-eyed, an arm around his sister, her face colorless, mouth slightly open.

He hadn’t been able to get anything coherent from Deenie.

Like when she was little and would lose her breath and all he could do was say it would be okay, everything would be okay.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

Now, his heart still jamming against his chest, he tried to settle himself. He needed to be ready for anything.

There was something about seeing Eli, his hand on his sister’s arm, saying things in her ear, that was beginning to work on him.

To calm him.

To make his breaths come slow, to let him stand back and see them both.

When her dad went up to the reception window, Deenie turned to Eli. He had something in his hand and kept trying to show it to her.

It was a piece of paper, like a wet leaf, and she recognized Gabby’s tight scrawl.

She read in what felt like slow motion, each word shuddering a moment before locking into focus.

The first time I met you, back when Deenie and me were just freshmen, you wore a shirt with a dinosaur on it.

The things Skye said, they were true.

She thinks I need her but she’s the one who needs me. I make her feel more interesting.

She read it and thought of everything that had ever happened with her and Gabby, and all the things she’d held tight to her own chest. About her part of the story, about Sean Lurie. And how neither Gabby nor Skye would ever find out.

Why should she tell them?

Your sister’s a really good person, Gabby had written. But she doesn’t know me at all.

Maybe we don’t really know anybody, Deenie thought. And maybe nobody knows us.

The nurse was crazily beautiful, like a nurse in a porno movie, and Eli thought he must still be high, all these hours later.

Her breasts seemed to brush up against him every time she moved, checking his eyes, his pulse. Asking him a series of questions and then asking again.

Fifteen minutes before, he’d peed into a cup, handed it to her.

“Nothing here,” she said now, looking at the results. It seemed impossibly fast.

“I haven’t done any drugs,” he said. “I don’t use drugs.”

He wondered if his dad, standing just a few feet away, was also noticing how beautiful the nurse was. But his dad didn’t seem to notice anything, his eyes set on Eli, his gaze intent.

Another nurse, her scrubs dark with sweat, rolled a cart past them, the wheels screeching.

“I just don’t know how we get out of this,” she was saying to the beautiful nurse. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

There was a frenzy around him, a constant whir that didn’t seem to touch him. Or his nurse, her voice tut-tutting, the fine gold cross around her neck, hanging between the tops of her breasts.

And then, as she bent the arm of a light above him, he saw she wasn’t really crazily beautiful and was a lot older than he thought, but there was a tenderness and efficiency to her that made him feel like everything would be okay.

“We’ll still take some blood but—” Just then a crash came, followed by the yelp of a girl’s voice, the skidding of sneakers on the floor.

“Some help here!” a voice rose, deep and urgent.

“I’ll be back,” the nurse said to Eli’s dad, putting her hands on his shoulders to direct him to a narrow waiting area crushed with parents. “Sit tight.”

His dad just stood there, watching the unshaven men with pajama tops under their open coats, women wearing slipper boots, one father weeping into his lap.

“Eli,” his dad was saying, “I have to make a call, okay?”

No one was looking.

Eli was the only male and that made it easier. No one was looking, so he started walking, exploring.

Hearing a dozen conversations, voices pinched and frightened.

“…and her throw-up looked like coffee grounds. I heard that means…”

“…explains why she’s been this way for so long. All those ADD meds. Maybe this is why…”

“…all these clots when I was doing the laundry. And I asked her and she started crying…”

“…and heavy-metal poisoning, or mold? She kept saying everything smelled like meat. And then she’d throw up again.”

“…like I was floating, and a darkness was closing in on me.”

He had been sitting on a small chair, all the exam tables taken, when he spotted, under one of those rolling privacy screens, a pair of soggy bunny slippers.

And then the slippers started to move.

He saw her, the sophomore girl, walking toward the swinging doors.

And he couldn’t sit there anymore.

And no one stopped him.

A man in scrubs, his forehead wet, clipboard in hand, called out to him as he passed a nursing station.

“That’s my sister,” Eli lied, rushing past the man, who started to say something and then stopped.

“I think he’s fine. I don’t know. They think he’s fine.”

“Oh, Tom,” Georgia said, “what’s happened?”

And he didn’t know how to begin to answer that question.

He’d planned on telling her everything he knew, but it felt like so many enigmatic scraps, and all of it depended on her being here, on her knowing the teen-girl complexities of Deenie’s friendships, of the extraordinary something that had overtaken all these girls and everyone in their lives. How did you explain any of that?

He could tell her about finding Eli’s phone, and they could try to figure it all out, but he didn’t know how to tell her without explaining why he’d been with Lara Bishop at midnight.

“I was always afraid something could happen to Eli on the ice,” Georgia said. “That’s the thing that kept me up nights.”

“Georgia,” he said suddenly, “why aren’t you here?”

“Because,” she said, “I’d only make it worse.”

Then she told him she’d tried three times. Gotten in her car, driven nearly all the way to Dryden, three hours, before turning around and driving back. Now she was in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven twelve miles from her apartment.

“Drinking a can of beer,” she said. “Genny Cream. Which I haven’t done since I was twenty.”

And he laughed, and she laughed.

And everything felt mysterious and lonely and half forgotten.

He could hear her laugh in the center of his brain and he thought, That’s not her laugh. I don’t recognize that laugh at all.

Eli lost sight of the sophomore girl quickly.

But down a long hallway in Critical Care, he found what he was looking for.

It was the quietest spot in the entire hospital, a building smaller than their school, which it seemed to be trying to contain right now, its walls swelling and straining.

The doors are always open in hospitals, which seemed funny to him, but he was glad.

Because there she was.

Lise Daniels.

It felt like she’d been alone in the waiting room a long time, her thoughts scattering everywhere, jumping to her feet whenever either set of doors opened.

But then Deenie’s phone rang, and time seemed to stop entirely.

Gabby, the screen read.

She walked swiftly outside, into the back parking lot to a place hidden by a pair of drooping trees, and answered.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey, girl.”

And a pause that felt electric before Gabby spoke again.

“So I’m waiting for my mom. I told them I wanted my mom here before I tell them.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the police station,” she said, voice hoarse and faint. “I walked for an hour and when I got there, I knew I would do it.”

“But Gabby, listen to me—”

“Don’t hate me, Deenie, okay? Whatever you hear.”

“Gabby, I know what happened. I talked to Skye. It was Skye.”

“No,” Gabby said, with finality. The voice of someone who had decided many things, and now that she’d decided, she was done. I won’t see my dad, I won’t talk to him. I’m done with him forever. “It was me, Deenie. It was me. And I’m not going to tell them about her. You have to promise me you won’t either.”

“I won’t promise! Listen to me, Gabby,” she said again, trying to forget the things Skye had said, about Gabby not caring about Deenie, about how Deenie was in the way. “You wouldn’t have done it without Skye. It’s all her fault.”

Then Gabby said the thing Deenie hoped she wouldn’t say, never guessed she would.

“When I put the leaves in the thermos, I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t care.”

And Deenie could hear it, that click-click-click on the other end, Gabby’s jaw like one of those old wind-up toys, a spinning monkey slapping cymbals. Deenie could practically see her shaking.

Then, as if Gabby had wedged her hand under her jaw to hold it in place, the words came fast and Deenie tried to hold on to them.

“Deenie, if Eli didn’t love me, why would he have been so nice to me and played Ping-Pong with me and that time he gave me a ride on his handlebars? Why would he have treated me like I was special? Not like those hockey groupies, not like girls like Britt Olsen or those girls from Star-of-the-Sea or that slutty sophomore Michelle. But then I heard about Lise and the bushes by school.”

There was a long, raspy gulp, like Gabby couldn’t get air in. And when she started again, Deenie could feel everything falling apart for her. Gabby had many things to say, none of which could help her explain any of it.

“And the more Skye kept talking,” she said, “the more it seemed right. It was supposed to be me, Deenie. He was supposed to love me. But we did the love spell wrong. And Skye told me what she saw. It was like a loop in my head. And he was pulling down her tights, that’s what Skye said. Thinking of his hands on that…that-that-that skin of hers when it was supposed to be me.”

The way she said it, that skin of hers, her voice shaking with anger and disgust, Deenie had the sudden feeling she’d had with Skye. For a fleeting second, she thought it was all a trick, some black art, and it was Skye on the other end of the phone, casting a spell.

“After, Skye said we shouldn’t feel bad. She said it’s what was supposed to happen. It’s how the universe works. Lise’s bad energy came back on her. Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise’s thigh, it was a warning.”

Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything.

But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch’s mark, the blot on Lise’s body that reminded you of what she had been—a plump, awkward girl—before the lithesome beauty took her place. It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.

“But Deenie, I did feel bad. It was like it was meant to happen. The bad thing you’re waiting for, the thing you might do someday. And then you’ve done the thing, and there’s no going back.”

Once, after Deenie said something unbelievably awful to her mom, using a word she’d never even said aloud, shouting it so loud her throat hurt, her mom looked at her and said, Deenie, someday it’s going to happen to you. You’re going to do something you never thought you would. And then you’ll see, and then you’ll know.

I hope, she’d added, it’s not for a long time.

“But at the school concert,” Deenie said suddenly, remembering Gabby, her cello bow pitching, face scarlet. “Was that all fake?”

“No! I can’t make my jaw stop,” Gabby said, her voice cracking and a long, low sob. “I can’t make my head right. It’s like it’s everything about me now. It’s inside me and everywhere. It was always in me. I couldn’t stop myself.”

There was a long pause. Then Gabby whispered, “Deenie, I couldn’t stop myself. I had to do it. Can you understand?”

Deenie felt her mouth go dry, her head throbbing. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

The clicks started again, and an awful rattle, and Deenie felt the phone hot on her face, beep-beep-beep, her cheek pressed against the keyboard.

Then, suddenly, Gabby’s voice came again, low and strange.

“And now he’ll never love me,” Gabby said. “Now it’ll never be me.”

Deenie slowly lowered the phone from her ear.

“Deenie, did Eli read my letter? Did he say anything about me?”

At first Eli couldn’t see her past the wires tentacled over her, the room blue and lonely.

There was just a swoop of a girl’s cheek, and a flossy pile of hair, everything blue in the blue light.

And there was something resting in the middle of Lise’s head. Something dark. Like in a fairy tale, a black cat perched, a swirl of smoke.

But then he remembered something Deenie had said, about a fall.

She made it sound gruesome, but it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe it was because Lise’s eyes were so pretty, shining and looking directly at him.

Following him as he walked toward the bed.

Gentle and soft, like Lise. And the light from the open door falling on her, giving her a funny kind of radiance.

Her mouth slightly opening, lips pale but full.

Eyes seeming to smile, at him.

“Do you see?” came the softest of whispers.

And it was Mrs. Daniels behind him, and she was smiling, like watching Lise play “Für Elise” on her flute.

“Do you see?” Mrs. Daniels whispered, her hand gentle on Eli’s back. “She came back.”

Alone in the waiting room, Deenie sat, her phone gripped in her hand.

Everything that day at the lake, just a week ago, started to look different.

The way Gabby looked at Lise, her long legs, like milk glass, thighs so narrow you could see between, like a keyhole.

How Gabby and Skye had stood next to each other, their ankles flecked green from the lake’s creamy surface, and Gabby whispered something in Skye’s ear, and Deenie had that feeling that she’d had so often in recent months: They are sharing something without me, they are talking about me, Gabby doesn’t love me anymore.

And then Gabby wanted to leave suddenly, even though Lise was driving.

I can take you, Lise promised, but they were already walking away, their legs greened, never looking back.

And Skye said the lake had bad energy, arms folded, eyes on Lise.

Was that when Skye got the idea? Or had she and Gabby already decided by then?

It felt now like they had. Like it had already been too late.

Deenie wondered how it had felt for Lise, sharing her secret about Sean. Waiting for Skye and Gabby to leave to tell her. Wanting it be theirs. A thing together. She couldn’t know what might happen. How different it might have been had she told all of them.

Deenie thought about what Skye had said, that the whole time, Gabby was so angry she couldn’t even look at Lise. Couldn’t bear Lise showing off her body in the water. And whispering to Skye, She stole him from me.

That day, Lise had been more beautiful than she’d ever been before, her lashes iridescent and her face with an almost unearthly glow. Her body, Deenie guessed, felt her own in a way it only can when you’ve made it yourself.

Lise did give off a strong energy that day, but not like Skye meant.

And Deenie, she’d said, Don’t tell Gabby. Gabby’s weird about this stuff.

Deenie, you’re my best friend.

Deenie, I didn’t do anything wrong, right?

Deenie, am I bad?

Deenie, I hope you get to feel it. I hope it feels like that for you.

It was something powerful and everyone wanted it.