The Fever

5

Walking through the cafeteria, Eli Nash was thinking about Lise, whom he’d known since she was bucktoothed and round as a tennis ball. She’d grown into the teeth, but not all the way, and the overbite made her look older, like her new body did, like everything did. She’d been one of those baby-fatted girls who laughed too loudly, covering their mouths, squealing. Then, at some point, overnight, she’d done something, or God had, because she was so pretty it sometimes hurt to look at her.

It felt like, whatever happened now, Lise was maybe gone. That maybe it’d be like his friend Rufus, who’d hit his head on the practice rink last year and who seemed okay but never laughed at anyone’s jokes and sometimes couldn’t smell his food.

“Eli,” his dad had said, finding him before calculus. Wearing a funny smile like the one he’d have after Eli had had a rough game, a cut over his eye, a stick across the face. “Can you do something for me?”

He said of course he would.

Right away, he spotted Gabby in the cafeteria’s far corner, where she always sat, usually with his sister, their heads together as if planning a heist.

Gabby was the one all the girls puppy-dogged after at school, the kind other girls thought was “gorgeous” and guys didn’t get at all. Or they got something, which made them nervous. Made him nervous.

All the stuff that had gone down with her family, it seemed to give her this thick glaze, like the old tables in the library that shone golden-like, with dark whorls, but when you got close and touched them, they felt like plastic, like nothing. All they did was push splinters into your hand.

Eli didn’t much like sitting in the library either.

She was spinning a can of soda between her palms, that girl Skye lurking behind her, the one with all the bracelets and heavy skirts, the one who got suspended once for coming to health class with a copy of the Kama Sutra, which she said was her aunt Sunny’s, as if it were something everyone had at home, like the dictionary.

“Gabby,” he said, tapping her shoulder.

Gabby’s head whipped around and she looked at him, eyes wide.

“Oh!” she said. “Eli. You scared me.”

Skye was looking at him, her eyes narrow, and Eli removed his fingers quickly from Gabby’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a second?” He looked at Skye. “Alone?”

“Okay,” Gabby said, slowly. “Sure.”

They walked over to one of the far tables. Gabby was almost as tall as he was and had a big heap of hair on top of her head, like Skye and so many of the other girls seemed to be copying. Sometimes they’d put their hair in heavy braids they’d wrap across their heads and he didn’t get it but figured it was a fashion thing beyond his grasp.

“Deenie’s at the hospital,” he said as they sat down, “with Lise. Something happened to Lise. I figured you might not know.”

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

Three tables behind, Eli could see still Skye, her ringed fingers clawed around her phone, head bowed, typing something.

“I mean, I didn’t know Deenie was at the hospital,” Gabby said. “Or that Lise was.”

He didn’t think he’d ever sat so close to Gabby, her skin pale and that serious expression she always wore. He had the sense of so many things going on behind that face.

“Yeah,” Eli said. “They had to call an ambulance, I guess. She’s there now.”

Gabby’s phone buzzed slightly on the table. They both looked at it.

“So, what happened? Is it…” Gabby started. “Is it mono again?”

Eli paused, licking his lips.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Once she got behind the double doors, Deenie had no idea how to find Lise. There was a feeling to the place like in the basement at school, where they held classes for a while when enrollment ran too high. A furnacey smell and uncertain buzzing and whirring sounds. Turning the corners, the floor sloping, you felt like you were going down into something no one knew about, had forgotten about.

At the end of the first long hallway she could see an old man sitting in a wheelchair, his white hair tufted high like a cartoon bird. He was wearing a very nice robe, quilted, like in an old movie. She wondered who’d bought it for him and where that person was now.

The man’s head kept drifting from side to side, his mouth open in a kind of perpetual, silent panic. How did this happen? Why am I here?

“Hi,” she said as she approached, surprising herself.

He looked up with a start, his swampy green eyes trying to focus on her.

“Not another one?” he said, his voice small and wavery. “Are you another one?”

One hand lifted forward from his silken lap.

She smiled uneasily, not knowing what else to do.

“Okay, well,” she said, and kept walking.

Maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re old, she thought. Always more young people, a parade of them going by. Here’s another one.

“I hope it will be okay,” he said, his voice rising as she passed. “I hope.”

Far down the hall now, her head feeling hot, she turned to look back at him.

“I… I…” he was saying, his voice like a creak.

She started to smile at him but saw his face—from this distance a white smudge—and stopped.

It took five minutes, and no one questioned her or even seemed to notice.

Rushing as if with purpose, she spotted Mrs. Daniels’s turquoise coat in an open doorway, hovering just inside the threshold, Lise’s grandmother beside her.

Walking in, she saw the hospital bed webbed with wires, a sickly sac hanging in one corner like a trapped mite. It reminded her of Skye once telling them that you should put cobwebs on wounds, that it stopped blood.

“Deenie,” Mrs. Daniels cried out. “Look at our Lisey.”

The puff of both women’s winter coats, the sputtering monitor, a nurse suddenly coming behind her, and Mrs. Daniels sobbing to breathlessness—Deenie pushed past it all to try to get closer to Lise. Like people did in the movies, she would push past everything. She would not be stopped.

But when she got to the foot of Lise’s bed, she halted.

All she could see was a violet blur and something that looked like a dent down the middle of Lise’s delicate forehead.

“What happened,” Deenie said, a statement more than a question. “What’s wrong with her.”

“She hit her head on the coffee table,” the grandmother said. As if that were the problem. As if the purple gape on Lise’s brow were the problem here. Were why they were all here.

Though it kind of felt that way to Deenie too because there it was. A broken mirror where the pieces didn’t line up. Splitting Lise’s face in two. Changing it.

“That’s not Lise,” Deenie said, the words falling from her mouth.

Everyone looked at her, Mrs. Daniels’s chin shaking.

But it felt true.

The nurse took Deenie’s arm roughly.

“They always look different,” the nurse said. “She’s very weak. You need to leave.”

Mrs. Daniels made a moaning sound, tugging on her mother’s coat front.

“But are you sure it’s her?” Deenie asked as the nurse walked her to the door. “Mrs. Daniels, are you sure that’s Lise?”