Page 1 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Prologue
We
We were athletes and anarchists, band geeks and gamers, virgins and sluts.
But mostly virgins.
We were dyslexic, and desperate for someone to notice us. We came from a constellation of small towns in the lower left corner of southwest Indiana, all tipped into the gravitational pull of the Woodward Central School District. We came from farms out past the Lincoln Walmart and condos near the College of Southern-Indiana at Housataunick. We came from the McMansions of Granger North, with Byron Park and the golf course, and the trailers of Granger South, with a Waffle House, an IHOP, and a pizzeria rumored to include a dime bag of weed when you ordered a veggie slice with extra green.
We were Christians, mostly. The Sandhus were Sikhs; the Kornsteins were Jewish; Olivia Howard claimed she was Wiccan. We were aspiring politicians and future farmers, violin players and JROTC cadets. We owned guns. We protested guns. We followed each other on Instagram. We wanted more followers on TikTok.
We dreamed of trending someday, for something, going viral for a spontaneous act of courage or for rocketingCheetosout of our noses at the doctor’s office. We envied Jack Hamlin’s older brother, Paul,who had 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube—even before the whole stampede debacle.
We could have told him bulls have no sense of humor, especially during breeding season.
We were hicks. We were pathologically shy. We didn’t want to be famous. We wanted toinfluence. To matter, to be special, to stand out. We wanted to be accepted.
We didn’t believe incliques. We’d left cliques behind in middle school. But we stuck with our own kind. We believed in friend groups. Common interests. Extracurriculars. Sports. Clubs. Finding your people. To hell with all the rest of them.
We were different. We were ordinary.
We were the roughly thirty-six members of the private Discord serverWoodwardSchoolBored, and before anything ever happened to Lucy, Lucy Vale happened to us.
Part 1
One
We
None of us know what happened to Lucy Vale. But all of us agree that by the time she set fire to the school mascot in front of Admin, it was too late to do anything about it.
At the time, we weren’t thinking about Lucy; we were thinking about dying, and how we really didn’t feel like doing it on a random Tuesday in March of our junior year. Shunted into closets, barricaded in our classrooms, sweltering inside the boiler room, we all imagined we were getting stormed by some psycho with a semiautomatic. We heard the fire trucks approach with the shrill of their alarms. We strained to hear gunshots. We speculated about the most likely culprit. Wyeth Boone. Allan Meeks. Lee Mailer. It’s always the quiet ones you can’t trust.
We texted our parents.There’s something happening at Woodward. We’re locked inside the art closet. I’m so scared. Are they saying anything on the news?? I think the cops are here. Pray for us. We reunited on Discord and complained about the smell in the art closet. Someone had farted, for sure.
We googled Woodward High School. We had shit service in the boiler room.
We realized we had to shit. We prayed that we wouldn’t crap our pants in a closet crammed with peers.
Then the loudspeaker spat out a burst of static, and Principal Hammill cleared his throat across the entire campus. “Sorry, kids,” he said. We’ll never forget that.Sorry, kids. “Looks like someone lit a fire in a recycling bin. We’re still clearing the grounds. Back to you as soon as possible.”
About sixty seconds later, he was back, this time sounding slightly annoyed. “To clarify, there is no active or inactive shooter. This has nothing to do with a gun. Like I said, it appears someone lit a fire in a recycling bin. Unfortunately we need to wait for the police before we can lift lockdown, so please stay where you are until I give the word.”
It wasn’t until we were funneled into the parking lot for a school-wide head count that we got a glimpse of the recycling bin, now a blackened deformity with a volcanic residue of char around it. A dozen firefighters and cops milled around the world’s most pathetic crime scene. We figured it was an accident, or a hack to avoid class.
We were dying to know who did it.
There was a brief panic when we found out that Connor Williams and Hannah Smith—the one in band, not the one who played soccer—hadn’t made it with the rest of the woodwinds into the parking lot. Mr. Cower, the band teacher, was practically molten with panic. He shoved through the crowd like one of us might secretly be concealing Connor and Hannah in our backpacks. We tossed around the idea that these two were the culprits because it was so absurd; they were both the type who actually got sad on weekends when they didn’t have any homework to do.
The mystery was short lived anyway. A hastily organized search party of theater geeks and brass hounds homed in on the sound booth, which was locked from the inside. A few minutes later, Connor and Hannah emerged, clearly in a conflagration of embarrassment, and it was pretty obvious to all of us what had happened. We started firing messages back and forth while waiting to return to our classes.
@geminirising:Anyone catching serious walk of shame vibes?
@mememeup:You mean walk ofFame
@badprincess:Is @hannahbanana’s sweater on inside out??
It was, actually.
