The Fever

  “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 repeated. “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 one’s laughing. 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, girls eternally tanned and bursting from T-shirts so tight they inched up their stomachs 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.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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 along the far wall. She was sitting on the floor, knees bent, her sneakers pressed against the tall reference volumes on the lowest shelf.

  As always, she 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 musty 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.

  “Lise?” 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 Lise’s 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 drink 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 baroque.

  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 part of her myst
ique. That white-blond hair and thrift-store peacoat, the slave bracelets and green vinyl cowboy boots. Sunny, the artist aunt she lived with but whom Deenie had never seen and who 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, 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, a tomato with a crew cut. Eli’s dad said he looked like every coach he’d ever known.