The Fever

18

Monday

Sitting in his car in the school parking lot, Tom couldn’t quite bring himself to go inside.

His gaze fixed on the breezeway beyond. All the hedges had been torn away, shorn stumps remaining, a stray evidence bag, a twirl of police tape. The orange streaks of herbicide dye.

He’d spent the day before driving Deenie the three hours to Merrivale, then turning around and driving home. It was the first time he’d seen Georgia’s place, which was cozy and filled with light and fresh air. Deenie insisted on staying only two days, had a history test on Wednesday, had forgotten to bring her books. In fact, maybe she’d stay just overnight.

Eli had come too, had helped with the driving. Deenie kept watching him from the corner of her eye.

At the hospital, they’d tested his blood, even his hair, used enormous machines and tested the electrical activity of his heart. But whatever Eli had smoked with Skye Osbourne, they couldn’t find anything dangerous in his body.

“There’s nothing inside him,” the doctor said. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

Eli told them the smoke had been for something called lucid dreaming.

“Did it work?” Tom asked.

Eli had paused, then said no.

The sharp bark of an engine stirred him to life. Looking out his car window, he saw the French teacher hopping off her Vespa and smiling at him, red-lipped.

“Open that window,” she said. “Or invite me in.”

He clicked the power locks and watched her glide around the car and climb inside.

Rubbing her gloves together, she told him she couldn’t take her eyes off the news.

“Gabby Bishop, Jesus,” she said. “I never even had her in a class, but I knew about her. The way she’d walk down the hall, girls circling her like little magpies. All that hair and drama.”

“Yeah,” he said, just to say something.

Her hands dropping to her lap, she sighed. “It’s all so freaky. All the other ones who got sick—I sent two to the nurse myself. So they must have gotten some of that jimson stuff, right? They must have smoked it too, like at a party?”

“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “I don’t think they took anything.”

She nodded and they sat silently for a moment.

“I remember when I was a sophomore in high school,” she said. “There was this girl, the coolest girl in school. Laia Noone. Even her name was cool. She had a tattoo on her stomach: I’ve seen love die. In tenth grade!” She laughed. “All I wanted was to be like her.”

“And now you’re the coolest girl in school.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. Then she lowered her jacket zipper and, using two fingers, separated the space between a pair of blouse buttons, baring the smallest triangle of flesh. He could see only the middle words—seen love—but was sure the rest was there too.

“And so,” Tom said, “marked for life.”

“That’s what high school does.”

“And everything else,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back, like he knew she would.

“It’s funny the things you think of now,” she said, yanking the zipper back up. “I remember last year once, Jaymie Hurwich crying in my classroom after school. She said there was something wrong with her mom’s brain and it’d started when her mom was sixteen and now she was sixteen and what if something happened to her. She said her dad was always looking at her, like he was watching for signs.”

Tom was surprised, but then everything surprised him now.

A hundred thoughts started floating in and out of his head, but none cohered.

“It’s going to be hard for all of them,” she said. “Everyone’ll be looking at them. Like they’re these damaged girls.”

They sat for a minute.

“But not Deenie,” she said, smiling. “Thank goodness. No one will be looking at her.”

Tom looked at her. Nodded.