The Fever (25 page)

“Deenie,” he said, “get in.”

She stood for a second, looking at her father, his face red and fevered, hands gripping the wheel.

She felt so sorry for him.

Eli kept trying to tell them he was okay, but they wouldn't listen.

Knees up in the backseat, Deenie had her head buried in her arms, and he thought she might be crying.

Dad drove faster than Eli had ever seen anyone drive, faster even than A.J. drag-racing by the old wire factory outside of town.

“Did you drink something?” his dad kept asking. “Did someone give you something? How about in your thermos?”

“What? No. I don't have a thermos,” he said. “I'm okay, Dad.”

“You're not,” Deenie said from the back. “You think you are, but you're not.”

The hospital was there, lit so brightly it hurt his eyes, the parking lot like the school's before a big game.

Their headlights skated across a pair of girls, maybe ten or eleven, in flannel pajamas, their mother with an arm around each of them, rushing them inside. They both wore big slippers—lobsters and bunny rabbits—oozing with gray rain, so heavy they could barely lift their feet.

Time shuttered to a stop as Eli watched them, their faces blue in the light, looking at the windshield, at him. He squinted and saw they were older than they'd first looked. The one with the bunny slippers he recognized as the sophomore girl everyone called Shawty, the one who'd snuck into his bedroom months ago, the one who'd cried when it was over, worried she'd done it all wrong. After, she'd stayed in the bathroom a long time. When she came out, her face was bright with pain.

Girls changed after, he thought. Before, she'd been texting him all the time, pulling her shirt up at games, saying all the things she wanted to do to him, flashing that thong at him.

And then after. But it changed for him after too. Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters.

And now here she was, hair scraped back from her baby face, and she had stopped, and she was looking at him.

Recognizing him, remembering things. A hard wince sweeping across that soft face.

And he wasn't sure what her real name was.

Then came the girl's mother's burly arm covering her face, hoisting her along, and the girl was gone, lost behind the hospital's sliding doors.

“Deenie,” Eli said, turning around to face his sister, “did Gabby find you? Did you talk to her?”

And she just shook her head, eyes wide and startled, mouth fixed.

“Because I have to show you something. You need to see something.”

Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the note, damp in his hands.

A blurry half hour after he'd left, Tom was back in the hospital waiting room, this time with Eli and Deenie.

Eli, glassy-eyed, an arm around his sister, her face colorless, mouth slightly open.

He hadn't been able to get anything coherent from Deenie.

Like when she was little and would lose her breath and all he could do was say it would be okay, everything would be okay.

I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

Now, his heart still jamming against his chest, he tried to settle himself. He needed to be ready for anything.

There was something about seeing Eli, his hand on his sister's arm, saying things in her ear, that was beginning to work on him.

To calm him.

To make his breaths come slow, to let him stand back and see them both.

When her dad went up to the reception window, Deenie turned to Eli. He had something in his hand and kept trying to show it to her.

It was a piece of paper, like a wet leaf, and she recognized Gabby's tight scrawl.

She read in what felt like slow motion, each word shuddering a moment before locking into focus.

The
first time I met you, back when Deenie and me were just freshmen, you wore a shirt with a dinosaur on it.

The things Skye said, they were true.

She thinks I need her but she's the one who needs me. I make her feel more interesting.

She read it and thought of everything that had ever happened with her and Gabby, and all the things she'd held tight to her own chest. About her part of the story, about Sean Lurie. And how neither Gabby nor Skye would ever find out.

Why should she tell them?

Your sister's a really good person
, Gabby had written.
But she doesn't know me at all.

Maybe we don't really know anybody,
Deenie thought.
And maybe nobody knows us.

The nurse was crazily beautiful, like a nurse in a porno movie, and Eli thought he must still be high, all these hours later.

Her breasts seemed to brush up against him every time she moved, checking his eyes, his pulse. Asking him a series of questions and then asking again.

Fifteen minutes before, he'd peed into a cup, handed it to her.

“Nothing here,” she said now, looking at the results. It seemed impossibly fast.

“I haven't done any drugs,” he said. “I don't use drugs.”

He wondered if his dad, standing just a few feet away, was also noticing how beautiful the nurse was. But his dad didn't seem to notice anything, his eyes set on Eli, his gaze intent.

Another nurse, her scrubs dark with sweat, rolled a cart past them, the wheels screeching.

“I just don't know how we get out of this,” she was saying to the beautiful nurse. “I've never seen anything like this.”

There was a frenzy around him, a constant whir that didn't seem to touch him. Or his nurse, her voice tut-tutting, the fine gold cross around her neck, hanging between the tops of her breasts.

And then, as she bent the arm of a light above him, he saw she wasn't really crazily beautiful and was a lot older than he thought, but there was a tenderness and efficiency to her that made him feel like everything would be okay.

“We'll still take some blood but—” Just then a crash came, followed by the yelp of a girl's voice, the skidding of sneakers on the floor.

“Some help here!” a voice rose, deep and urgent.

“I'll be back,” the nurse said to Eli's dad, putting her hands on his shoulders to direct him to a narrow waiting area crushed with parents. “Sit tight.”

His dad just stood there, watching the unshaven men with pajama tops under their open coats, women wearing slipper boots, one father weeping into his lap.

“Eli,” his dad was saying, “I have to make a call, okay?”

No one was looking.

Eli was the only male and that made it easier. No one was looking, so he started walking, exploring.

Hearing a dozen conversations, voices pinched and frightened.

“…and her throw-up looked like coffee grounds. I heard that means…”

“…explains why she's been this way for so long. All those ADD meds. Maybe this is why…”

“…all these clots when I was doing the laundry. And I asked her and she started crying…”

“…and heavy-metal poisoning, or mold? She kept saying everything smelled like meat. And then she'd throw up again.”

“…like I was floating, and a darkness was closing in on me.”

He had been sitting on a small chair, all the exam tables taken, when he spotted, under one of those rolling privacy screens, a pair of soggy bunny slippers.

And then the slippers started to move.

He saw her, the sophomore girl, walking toward the swinging doors.

And he couldn't sit there anymore.

And no one stopped him.

A man in scrubs, his forehead wet, clipboard in hand, called out to him as he passed a nursing station.

“That's my sister,” Eli lied, rushing past the man, who started to say something and then stopped.

“I think he's fine. I don't know. They think he's fine.”

“Oh, Tom,” Georgia said, “what's happened?”

And he didn't know how to begin to answer that question.

He'd planned on telling her everything he knew, but it felt like so many enigmatic scraps, and all of it depended on her being here, on her knowing the teen-girl complexities of Deenie's friendships, of the extraordinary
something
that had overtaken all these girls and everyone in their lives. How did you explain any of that?

He could tell her about finding Eli's phone, and they could try to figure it all out, but he didn't know how to tell her without explaining why he'd been with Lara Bishop at midnight.

“I was always afraid something could happen to Eli on the ice,” Georgia said. “That's the thing that kept me up nights.”

“Georgia,” he said suddenly, “why aren't you here?”

“Because,” she said, “I'd only make it worse.”

Then she told him she'd tried three times. Gotten in her car, driven nearly all the way to Dryden, three hours, before turning around and driving back. Now she was in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven twelve miles from her apartment.

“Drinking a can of beer,” she said. “Genny Cream. Which I haven't done since I was twenty.”

And he laughed, and she laughed.

And everything felt mysterious and lonely and half forgotten.

He could hear her laugh in the center of his brain and he thought,
That's not her laugh. I don't recognize that laugh at all.

Eli lost sight of the sophomore girl quickly.

But down a long hallway in Critical Care, he found what he was looking for.

It was the quietest spot in the entire hospital, a building smaller than their school, which it seemed to be trying to contain right now, its walls swelling and straining.

The doors are always open in hospitals, which seemed funny to him, but he was glad.

Because there she was.

Lise Daniels.

It felt like she'd been alone in the waiting room a long time, her thoughts scattering everywhere, jumping to her feet whenever either set of doors opened.

But then Deenie's phone rang, and time seemed to stop entirely.

Gabby,
the screen read.

She walked swiftly outside, into the back parking lot to a place hidden by a pair of drooping trees, and answered.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey, girl.”

And a pause that felt electric before Gabby spoke again.

“So I'm waiting for my mom. I told them I wanted my mom here before I tell them.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the police station,” she said, voice hoarse and faint. “I walked for an hour and when I got there, I knew I would do it.”

“But Gabby, listen to me—”

“Don't hate me, Deenie, okay? Whatever you hear.”

“Gabby, I know what happened. I talked to Skye. It was Skye.”

“No,” Gabby said, with finality. The voice of someone who had decided many things, and now that she'd decided, she was done.
I won't see my dad, I won't talk to him. I'm done with him forever
. “It was me, Deenie. It was me. And I'm not going to tell them about her. You have to promise me you won't either.”

“I won't promise! Listen to me, Gabby,” she said again, trying to forget the things Skye had said, about Gabby not caring about Deenie, about how Deenie was in the way. “You wouldn't have done it without Skye. It's all her fault.”

Then Gabby said the thing Deenie hoped she wouldn't say, never guessed she would.

“When I put the leaves in the thermos, I didn't know what would happen. I didn't care.”

And Deenie could hear it, that click-click-click on the other end, Gabby's jaw like one of those old wind-up toys, a spinning monkey slapping cymbals. Deenie could practically see her shaking.

Then, as if Gabby had wedged her hand under her jaw to hold it in place, the words came fast and Deenie tried to hold on to them.

“Deenie, if Eli didn't love me, why would he have been so nice to me and played Ping-Pong with me and that time he gave me a ride on his handlebars? Why would he have treated me like I was special? Not like those hockey groupies, not like girls like Britt Olsen or those girls from Star-of-the-Sea or that slutty sophomore Michelle. But then I heard about Lise and the bushes by school.”

There was a long, raspy gulp, like Gabby couldn't get air in. And when she started again, Deenie could feel everything falling apart for her. Gabby had many things to say, none of which could help her explain any of it.

“And the more Skye kept talking,” she said, “the more it seemed right. It was supposed to be
me
, Deenie. He was supposed to love
me
. But we did the love spell wrong. And Skye told me what she saw. It was like a loop in my head. And he was pulling down her tights, that's what Skye said. Thinking of his hands on that…that-that-that
skin
of hers when it was supposed to be me.”

The way she said it,
that skin of hers
, her voice shaking with anger and disgust, Deenie had the sudden feeling she'd had with Skye. For a fleeting second, she thought it was all a trick, some black art, and it was Skye on the other end of the phone, casting a spell.

“After, Skye said we shouldn't feel bad. She said it's what was supposed to happen. It's how the universe works. Lise's bad energy came back on her. Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise's thigh, it was a warning.”

Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything.

But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch's mark, the blot on Lise's body that reminded you of what she had been—a plump, awkward girl—before the lithesome beauty took her place. It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.