The Fever

3

Eli Nash was supposed to be in class. Practice had ended a long time ago, but he was still circling the rink behind the school. No sound except the faint hum of its refrigeration coils.

Looking up, he could see Gabby Bishop in the library. Back facing him, she was pressed against the windowpane like one of those butterflies under glass.

Deenie and Gabby and Lise. The Trio Grande. Always huddled together, whispering, a kind of closeness that interested him. He wondered what it might be like. He never wanted to huddle with his friends, though he guessed in a way he did it all the time, playing hockey.

Sometimes it was annoying. The way the three of them would be like this little knot in the house. He could hear them through the wall at night, laughing.

Lately, Lise and Gabby didn’t seem to come over as much, or maybe he’d just stopped noticing. But it always felt weird when girls were laughing together and you didn’t know why. Sometimes it was like they knew all these things he didn’t.

Other times he wondered if they knew anything at all.

They didn’t know about guys, as far as he could tell. At least not the things he wished his sister knew. He would catch her looking at Ryan Denning or that guy who won Battle of the Bands. That dreamy expression she wore, her face showing everything she was feeling. Imagining big love and romance, he guessed. But she didn’t realize what they saw, looking back at her: a girl, lips slightly parted, her head tilted hungrily. What they saw was I’m ready. Let’s go.

“Nash,” a voice rang out.

Eli looked up and saw A.J., the team captain, baseball cap low to cover his cigarette.

“Bro,” he said, “you missed it. I got an eyeful of Lise Daniels’s pretty white ass this morning.” He tilted his head toward the school. “Come on. Who knows what’s next?”

Eli felt the cold in his lungs, the ache of it. It felt good out here, and just looking at A.J. made him tired. All the effort, hat brim angled, jacket open. Smirk.

“Nah,” he said. “Not yet.”

A.J. grinned. “I feel you,” he said.

Eli nodded, pushing off on his skates, gliding backward.

“Say hi to your sister for me,” A.J. shouted.

Turning his head, Eli felt his skate catch a fallen branch.

The library was quiet, a glass-walled hothouse overlooking a narrow creek dense with mud.

Deenie found Gabby behind the gray bank of computers at the far wall. She was sitting on the floor, her sneakers pressed against the tall reference volumes on the lowest shelf, knees bent.

As always, she wasn’t alone, was bookended by two girls.

To her right crouched thick-braced Kim Court, in her usual pose, whispering in Gabby’s ear.

And to her left sat Skye Osbourne, her blond hair spanning the moldy world atlases behind her. Lately, Skye was always around, that web of hair, her long mantis sleeves.

All three looked up when they saw Deenie.

“What did you hear?” Gabby asked, fingers tapping on her lip.

“Nothing,” Deenie said, sliding down to the floor next to Kim.

She wished it were just her and Gabby. No one else to hear them and they could talk about Lise alone.

This was their favorite place to meet. It always felt hidden, forgotten. The gold-lettered World Book encyclopedias from the 1980s. The smell of old glue and crumbling paper, the industrial carpet burning her palms.

It reminded her of what you did when you were a little girl, making little burrows and hideaways. Like boys did with forts. Eli and his friend, stacking sofa cushions, pretending to be sharpshooters. With girls, you didn’t call them forts, though it was the same.

This was the place Deenie and Gabby first really spoke, freshman year, both of them hiding back here, heads ducked over identical books (something about angels, back when that was all they read). They’d snuck looks at each other, smiled.

“Did you see her before school?” Deenie asked Gabby.

“No, I was late,” Gabby said. “Skye couldn’t find her purse.”

“Is she pregnant?” whispered Kim, her tongue thrust between her wired teeth.

“What?” Deenie said. “No. Of course not.”

“Pregnant people faint all the time,” Kim said, tugging her tights up her legs, inching as close to Gabby as she could without landing in her lap.

“She’s not pregnant,” Deenie said. Then, turning to Gabby: “Her mom came and took her home.”

Gabby nodded, looking down at her hands, clasped over her notebook. Deenie knew she wished they were alone too. Ever since that first week of school freshman year, it had been hard to find Gabby alone—at least at school, where girls hung from her like tassels.

“How can we go to class when this is going on?” Kim said. “We should go to her house.”

“Have you ever even been to her house?” Deenie said. Kim and Lise occupied starkly opposite poles in a group of friends. A year younger, filled with hard sophomore ambition, Kim was eager to spread herself wide, offering car rides, expensive eye shadow swiped from her mother, free gift cards from her job at the mall. She was the kind of girl you end up being friends with just because. The opposite of Lise, whom Deenie had known since third grade, whom she traded clothes, even underwear, with. Three days ago even helping her unwedge a crooked tampon, Lise laughing the whole time, wiggling her pelvis to assist.

That was how she knew Lise wasn’t pregnant. That, and other reasons, like that Lise was still a virgin, mostly.

“The point is,” Deenie said, “they’re not going to just let us leave school.”

“Maybe it was an allergic reaction,” Skye said, tufting her hair against her cheek thoughtfully. “Don’t you get those?”

Everyone looked at Kim, who was in fact allergic to everything, a special page in the school safety manual devoted to her. Nuts, eggs, wheat, yeast, shellfish, even some kinds of paper.

“I don’t think that was it,” Kim said, unwilling to share her special status. Then, swiveling closer to Gabby, eyes widening, “Oh God, maybe it’s something to do with that one guy.”

Deenie paused. “What guy?”

“You know,” Kim said, dropping her chin, lowering her voice. “Don’t you know?” Her lips were shining, like when she had her sister’s car, waving the keys at everyone like they changed everything. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“There’s no guy,” Deenie said. “So stop making stuff up.”

Boy crazy, that’s what Ms. Enright, the English teacher, called Lise. But who could blame her? No guy had ever looked at Lise until suddenly they all did. Last summer, she wore a white bathing suit hooked with bamboo rings to the big Fourth of July barbecue and someone’s older brother, who was in college, started calling her La Lise and even e-mailed her a song he wrote about her and her Lise-a-licious bikini.

Lise’s mother would never have let her go out with him, but it set something off among the other boys and a fever in Lise, who suddenly decided that all boys were a-mazing, every one.

After that, Lise had vowed she’d never get that baby fat back, and every morning she’d chew on parsley or drank swampy green shakes out of her Dryden Wind & Strings thermos. It was the only way, because her mom made her finish a full glass of buttermilk at night, which, no matter what her mom said, she was sure was full of fat. Maybe she wants me to be fat, Lise said, because she always makes monkey bread too and she knows I can’t stop eating it.

“You must’ve heard,” Kim said, looking to Gabby, then Skye, who didn’t even seem to be listening, her fingers running along the lacy hem of her many-tiered skirt, vintage and complicated.

Gabby shook her head. “Lise didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said, looking at Deenie.

“Okay,” Kim said, smiling enigmatically. “But I didn’t say he was her boyfriend.”

“What would a guy have to do with her fainting anyway?” Deenie asked. “She’s not pregnant.”

“It could be a lot of things that aren’t pregnant,” Skye said, gaze still resting on her hair, webbed between her ringed fingers.

“Like what?” Kim asked, squirming onto her knees with fresh vigor.

“I knew this girl who got this thing from this guy once, an older guy, a club promoter,” Skye said. “He had a big house on the lake and he gave her all this great red-string Thai stick. He leaves for the Philippines, she wakes up with trich. That’s a sexual parasite. It crawls inside you.” She reached down for her bag, tangled with fringe. “So.”

No one said anything for a moment. Skye was somehow to be trusted in these matters. It was all part of her mystique. That white-blond hair, like a dream of a California girl, and thrift-store peacoats, the slave bracelets and green vinyl cowboy boots. Sunny, the artist aunt she lived with but whom Deenie had never seen and who taught classes at a glass studio three towns over and let Skye’s ex-boyfriend sleep over, even though he was supposedly twenty-six years old, though no one had ever actually seen him either. The rumor was he’d been one of her aunt’s students, or even her boyfriend. After they broke up, Skye wore his coat, a long leather Shaft duster, to school every day until a hard winter rain shredded it.

“Well, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with guys,” Kim said, facing them again, twisting her lips. “Maybe she’s just sick.”

Deenie picked up her phone and began typing.

[Eye roll], she texted Gabby, whose phone burbled immediately.

Gabby looked at her phone, grinned. Kim looked at both of them questioningly.

Nobody said anything, Kim’s eyes darting back and forth between them.

“Well,” Kim said, rising, tugging again at her tights, the ones just like Gabby’s favorite pair, silver striped, “I got stuff to do.”

“See ya,” Deenie said, and they all watched until she was gone.

Nestling next to Gabby, Deenie let her head knock against hers.

Skye stood up, grabbing her purse, and Deenie’s chest lifted in anticipation. At last, she’d have Gabby alone.

But then Gabby rose too, looping her arm in Skye’s to gain footing.

“Bye, Deenie,” Skye said, already turning away.

“See you, Deenie,” Gabby said, smiling apologetically. “Next semester I hope we get the same lunch period.”

“Yeah,” said Deenie, watching them walk away, their hair—Gabby’s dark to Skye’s bone-white—swinging in sync, their matching metallic tights. Those two leaving together again. Which happened a lot lately, like last week at the lake, and other times. Leaving together and leaving Deenie alone.

“Nash, get your ass to class.”

Coach Haller’s face was always red, like a tomato with a crew cut. Eli’s dad said he looked like every coach he’d ever known.

“Yes, sir,” Eli said, rising from the locker-room bench. He had that crazy cold-hot feeling from the practice drills in the makeshift rink outside, the hot shower after, the school always blasting with forced heat that seemed to groan through the building.

He’d been staring a long time at the picture on his phone, the girl in the purple underwear. Something about it.

And then there was the other thing. Something he’d overheard that morning, about his sister. Someone seeing her get into a car last night, with some guy. And then there was A.J., that smirk of his.

All of that and looking at the purple panties on his phone, the girl’s skin shining like girls’ skin always seemed to. He began to feel a little queasy.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have a sister, though he loved Deenie and still remembered the feeling he had when he caught that kid Ethan pushing her off the swing set in the school yard in fifth grade. And how time seemed to speed up until he was shoving the kid into the fence and tearing his jacket. The admiring look his sister gave him after, the way his parents pretended to be mad at him but he could tell they weren’t.

These days, it was pretty different. There’d be those moments he was forced to think about her not just as Deenie but as the girl whose slender tank tops hung over the shower curtain. Like bright streamers, like the flair the cheerleaders threw at games.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t have a sister.

“Tell me again what Lise said,” Gabby said when they caught each other between classes. “When you saw her.”

“She wanted to know what happened to her,” Deenie said. “She was really scared.”

She couldn’t remember any more than that, it had happened so fast. And now Kim’s grimy insinuations, and Skye and her deadpan cool, were laid over her own bad feelings. She couldn’t think. She just kept picturing Lise’s face, the way her bare legs jerked when she went down.

“We should go check on her,” Gabby said, scratching her palm. “See how she’s doing.”

“Leave school?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get busted,” Deenie said. “You will.” Gabby had had two detentions in the last month, one for smoking clove cigarettes with Skye in the kiln room and one for wandering off school property, sneaking to Skye’s house, just a few blocks away.

“You, then. You won’t get in trouble,” Gabby said. “Your dad would understand.”

“I’m not sure,” Deenie said, but she knew she would go. Gabby was right. Someone had to see.

The bus ride was quick, and no one saw her.

Lise lived with her mom in a duplex on Easter Way. Despite all these years of being friends with her, Deenie had spent little time there.

“My mom doesn’t like me to make lots of noise,” Lise always said. Though they had never been noisy girls. At her own house, they spent most of their time watching movies and lying on Deenie’s bed, listening to music and talking about how someday they’d travel through Africa or hand-feed stingrays in Bora Bora or ride Arabian horses in some desert, somewhere.

But Lise’s mom usually preferred Lise to be at home with her, especially lately, when her daughter seemed to look more and more like she herself looked in her old modeling scrapbooks, posing in the Spiegel catalog and at trade shows, gold-shellacked hair and large breasts.

“Yes, she’s a lovely woman,” Deenie’s dad had said when Lise once suggested he date her mother. “Very lovely.”

He said it very politely, like the time Deenie showed him the two-piece bathing suit her mom had bought her last summer. After, Deenie hid it in the back of the drawer and never wore it.

“Mr. Nash, I think she’d be so happy if she found a boyfriend,” Lise had added, watching Mr. Nash as he focused intently on their English muffins, the toaster buzzing red beneath him.

“Lise,” Deenie said later, “you can barely stand her. Why should my dad have to?”

As soon as the words came out, she regretted them.

But Lise had just sighed, winsomely, her pretty face crumpling a little.

“I just wish she had something to do. Other than watch my Facebook page.”

Walking the three blocks from the bus stop, Deenie felt sure this was the right thing to do.

By the time she reached the front door, though, it felt like a big mistake. Except she’d promised Gabby, and, anyway, it looked like no one was home.

A long minute passed after she’d rung the bell.

She felt a grim thickness in the front of her head, a feeling of knowing something very important without knowing what it really meant. It reminded her of the day her mom decided to move out. The stillness in the morning, the house keys sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.

Her dad had spent hours shoveling the driveway, the front walk. She hadn’t thought he’d ever come back inside.

Suddenly, the front door swung open. It was an older woman, her short white hair closely cropped, coat half open, purse slipping from her arm.

Deenie was pretty sure it was Lise’s grandmother, but friends’ grandmothers all kind of looked alike.

“Oh!” the woman said, startled. “Honey, what are you doing here?”

“I came to see how Lise was,” Deenie said. “I was there when she—”

“She’s not here,” the woman blurted, her hands shaking wildly, car keys tight in red fingers. “They took her to the hospital. I’m going there now.”

Behind her, the coffee table was overturned and a rug askew. There was a sharp smell of vomit.

“What happened?” Deenie said, her voice high. “Where’s Lise?”

The car keys seemed to spring from the woman’s hands, clattered onto the cement porch. They both bent down to grab them. Deenie could hear the woman’s hard, hurried breaths. She grabbed the keys from Deenie’s hands and inhaled deeply.

“Sweetie,” she said, hands on Deenie’s shoulders like she was seven, “go back to school, okay?”

Before Deenie could say what she wanted to—Can I come too? I need to come too—the woman was running down the steps and to her car, its door hanging open.

Deenie looked back into the living room. A slick of vomit, a torn latex glove. Imagined Lise lying there, head knocking against the floor.

Lise on the classroom floor, eyes black.

Deenie now feeling her own knees shaking, like she hadn’t eaten anything. The sense, again, of a bigness to the day that was more than she could ever want.

Lise.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for.