The Fever

2

Deenie couldn’t get the look on Lise’s face out of her head.

Her eyes had shot open seconds after she fell.

“Why am I here?” she whispered, blinking ferociously, back arched on the floor, her legs turned in funny ways, her skirt flown up to her waist, and Mrs. Chalmers shouting in the hallway for help.

It had taken two boys and Mr. Banasiak from across the hall to get her to her feet.

Deenie watched them steer her down the hall, her head resting on Billy Gaughan’s linebacker shoulder, her long hair thick with floor dust.

“Deenie, no,” Mrs. Chalmers said, taking her firmly by the shoulders. “You stay here.”

But Deenie didn’t want to stay. Didn’t want to join the thrusting clutches of girls whispering behind their lockers, the boys watching Lise turn the corner, her skirt hitched high in the back, her legs bare despite the cold weather, the neon flare of her underpants.

After, ducking into the girls’ room, Deenie saw she was still bleeding a little from the night before. When she walked it felt weird, like parts of her insides had shifted. She could never have ridden to school with her dad. What if he saw? She felt like everyone could see. That they knew what she’d done.

As it was happening, it hurt a lot, and then a sharp look of surprise on Sean Lurie’s face when he realized. When she couldn’t hide what she was, and wasn’t, what she had clearly never done before—thinking of it made her cover her face now, her hand cold and one pinkie shaking.

You should have told me, he’d said.

Told you what.

Swinging open the lavatory door, she began walking quickly down the teeming hall.

“Deenie, I heard something.” It was Gabby, sneaking up behind her in her sparkled low-riders. They never made any noise. “About you.”

Gabby’s face seemed filled with fresh knowledge, but there was no way she could know. Sean Lurie went to Star-of-the-Sea. People couldn’t know.

“Did you hear what just happened to Lise?” Deenie countered, pivoting to look at her. “I was there. I saw it.”

Gabby’s eyebrows lifted and she held her books to her chest.

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” she repeated. “Tell me everything.”

At first they wouldn’t let her into the nurse’s office.

“Deenie, her mother isn’t even here yet,” snipped Mrs. Harris, the head of something called facilities operations.

“My dad asked me to check on her,” Deenie lied, Gabby nodding next to her.

The ruse worked, though not for Gabby, who, lacking my-father-is-a-teacher privileges, was dispatched immediately to second period.

“Find out everything,” Gabby whispered as Mrs. Harris waved her out.

The nurse’s office door was ajar and Deenie could hear Lise calling her name. Everyone could hear, teachers stopping at their mailboxes.

“Deenie,” Lise cried out. “What did I do? Did I do something? Who saw?”

Peering in the open door, Deenie saw Lise keeling over on the exam table, her lips ribboned with drying froth, one shoe hanging from her foot. She wasn’t wearing any tights, her legs goose-quilled and whiter than the paper sheet.

“She… she bit me.” Nurse Tammy was holding her own forearm, which looked wet. She hadn’t been working there long and, rumor was, a senior athlete with a sore knee had scored two Tylenol with codeines from her on her very first day.

“Deenie!” Head whipping around, Lise gripped the table edge beneath her thighs, and Nurse Tammy rushed forward, trying to help her.

“Deenie,” she said. “What happened to me? Is everyone talking about it? Did they see what I did?”

Outside the nurse’s office, Mrs. Harris was arguing with someone about something, the assistant principal’s stern jock voice joining in.

“No one saw,” Deenie said. “No way. Are you okay?”

But Lise couldn’t seem to focus, her hands doing some kind of strange wobbling thing in front of her, like she was conducting an invisible concert.

“I…I…” she stuttered, her eyes panicked. “Are they laughing at me?”

Deenie wanted to say something reassuring. Lise’s mother, vaguely hysterical under the best of circumstances, would be here any second, and she wanted to help while she could.

“No. Everyone saw your Hello Kitty undies, though,” Deenie tried, smiling. “Watch the boys come now.”

As Deenie walked out, a coolness began to sink into her. The feeling that something was wrong with Lise, but the wrongness was large and without reference. She’d seen Lise with a hangover, with mono. She’d seen girlfriends throw up behind the loading dock after football games and faint in gym class, their bodies loaded with diet pills and cigarettes. She’d seen Gabby black out in the girls’ room after she gave blood. But those times never felt like this.

Lying on the floor, her mouth open, tongue lolling, Lise hadn’t seemed like a girl at all.

It must have been a trick of the light, she told herself.

But looking down at Lise, lips stretched wide, Deenie thought, for one second, that she saw something hanging inside Lise’s mouth, something black, like a bat flapping.

“Mr. Nash,” piped Brooke Campos, “can I go to the nurse’s office? I’m feeling upset.”

“What are you upset about, Brooke,” Tom replied. There was fidgeting in a dozen seats. Something had happened, and he could see everyone was looking for an advantage in it.

“It’s about Lise. I saw it go down and it’s a lot to take in.”

Two jocks in the back stifled braying laughs. They seemed to go to class solely in the hopes of hearing accidental (or were they?) double entendres from girls like Brooke, eternally tanned and bursting from T-shirts so tight they inched up her stomach all day.

“What about Lise?” Tom asked, setting his chalk down. He’d known Lise Daniels since she was ten years old and first started coming to the house, hovering around Deenie, following her from room to room. Sometimes he swore he could hear her panting like a puppy. That was back when she was a chubby little elfin girl, before that robin’s-breast belly of hers disappeared, and, seemingly overnight, she became overwhelmingly pretty, with big fawn eyes, her mouth forever open.

He never really had a sense of her, knew only that she played the flute, had perpetually skinned knees from soccer, and appeared ever out of place alongside his own brilliant, complicated little girl and her even more complicated friend Gabby.

Four years ago, Gabby’s father, blasted on cocaine, had taken a claw hammer to his wife’s Acura. When Gabby’s mother tried to stop him, his hammer caught her on the downswing, tearing a hole clean through her face and down her throat.

Gabby’s mother recovered, though now all the kids at the community college where she taught called her Scarface behind her back.

Her father had served a seven-month sentence and was now selling real estate in the next county and making occasional, unwelcome reappearances.

In the school’s hallways, Tom could see it: Gabby carried the glamour of experience, like a dark queen with a bloody train trailing behind her.

It was hard to fathom girls like that walking the same corridors as girls like Brooke Campos, thumbs callused from incessant texting, or even girls like downy-cheeked Lise.

“Mr. Nash,” Brooke said, rolling the tip of her pen around in her mouth like it hurt to think about, “it’s so traumatic.”

He tried again. “So what is it that happened to Lise?”

“She had a grand male in Algebra Two,” Brooke announced, eyes popping.

The jocks broke into a fresh round of laughter.

“A grand mal?” he asked, squinting. “A seizure?”

Up front, antic grade-grubber Jaymie Hurwich squirmed painfully in her seat, hand raised.

“It’s true, Mr. Nash,” she told him. “I didn’t see it, but I heard her mouth was frothing like a dog’s. I had a dog that happened to once.” She paused. “Mr. Nash, he died.”

A hard knock in his chest in spite of himself, he looked at Brooke, at all of them.

He was trying to think of something to say.

“So…” Brooke said, rising tentatively in her seat, “can I see the nurse now?”

After second period, he found Deenie buried in her locker nearly to her waist, hunting for something.

“Honey, what happened with Lise?” he asked, hand on her back.

She turned slowly, one arm still rooted inside.

“I don’t know, Dad.”

For a second, she wouldn’t look up at him, her eyes darting at the passing kids.

“But you saw it?”

“Dad,” she said, giving him that look that had made his chest ache since she was four years old. “I don’t want to talk now.”

Now meaning here: Not at school, Da-ad.

Meaning he had to just let her go, watch her dark ponytail swinging down the hall, head dipped furtively, that red hoodie hunching up her neck, helping her hide.