Page 70 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“Noah had a question,” she responded.
“Couldn’t it wait?” she asked. “He knows you’re not supposed to be on your phone in school.”
“It was important,” Lucy said. It was always important when Noah texted because Noah himself was important—not just to Lucy but to everyone at Woodward.My boyfriend is basically our national hero,Lucy told her mother once.
When Rachel asked her what that made Lucy, Lucy shrugged and said,Lucky.
Whenever Rachel worried that Noah and Lucy spent too much time together, she reminded herself that Lucy seemed healthy. Her grades hadn’t slipped. Noah was a good student and cared about his schoolwork. (He actually does his own homework,Lucy had said, as if that were something to be especially proud of.)
The ground thawed early; it had been a mild winter with barely any snow. In early March, the Friskes had helped Rachel bag the fallen leaves and winter detritus from her two acres, carting away more than fifty bags to the dump. In the mornings after Lucy went off to school, Rachel wrote, made notes, made phone calls, and sent emails. In the afternoons, she gardened—yanking dandelions from between the paving stones, uprooting a sea of ferns that hemmed close to the front porch, clearing the rose beds and then reseeding.
It was a season of planting and sowing. Of ideas that barely sparked to life, then flowered into questions, hypotheses, leads to pursue. Slowly the veil of the new book fell over her, including ideas for the structure. She would write not about Nina first but about her mother. About the lawsuit and the claims she’d made about a cover-up. About her mysterious death. Then about Nina and Tommy Swift, about their volatile romance—the volumes of text messages, the obsession, the fiery arguments, the breakups. She’d begun to track down Nina’s old friends—former cheerleaders, many of them still in town with young children of their own—and encountered the same haze of contradictions in their memories.
Yes, Tommy and Nina had broken up and gotten back together more times than they could count. Neither Coach Steeler nor Nina’s mom wanted them to date.
True, Tommy Swift had a temper. But he would never have hurt Nina.
And Nina had changed in the weeks before her disappearance. That last time, it was Nina who’d ended things with Tommy. That last time, something was different. Something was truly broken. She was missing cheer practices. She withdrew. She seemed nervous about something.
Her grades slipped. Coach Steeler was worried. He was trying to help her. It was surprising perhaps that Coach Steeler had stepped in, given that he’d disapproved of Nina and Tommy’s relationship. But it dovetailed with what Rachel knew about him: he was a man who liked tofix, to take control, to be at the center of things. Even now, several years after his death, Coach Steeler was, in a way, at the center of Rockland County life.
But not in her book. No, in her book Nina was the mystery at the center. Rachel would weave the narrative around the impenetrability of her final days, crystallize her through the stories people told about her. And slowly, through the fractal accumulation of viewpoints, of recollections and theories, she might assemble some splintered vision, some final insight, some truth.
And she would leave her own memories, her own experience, out of it. It didn’t matter that she’d briefly encountered Nina in the dark all those years ago, watched her flying birdlike and barefoot across the lawn to greet Coach Steeler.
It didn’t matter that Rachel had accepted a ride home from Jay Steeler that night, bored and flattered, heartsick over her ex-boyfriend. Young. Just barely twenty-two. Half-excited and half-sickened when the married father of two slid a rough hand up her bare legs and found her underwear with his fingers.
It was a brief affair. They’d met again only twice. Both times Rachel was nervous and drank too much at dinner. Both times they had sex in a motel room near I-69. Rachel could hear the 18-wheelers rattling the windows as Steeler grunted on top of her. She didn’t come and didn’t remember enjoying it. What she remembered was a desperate feeling of embarrassment, of having done something wrong, of having displeased him in some way.
She remembered calling his phone again and again on and off that winter, hoping to recapture some sense of power, some proof that he’d really meant it when he’d told her how beautiful she was.
She’d been stupid and naive without knowing it. She’d been desperate to be special.
But none of that belonged in the book. It would remain Rachel’s secret—the small, tangled episode that had lived inside her for so long, it had grown roots and become its own source of strength.
All spring, Rachel knelt in the dirt, planted seeds, and sorted through the layers of the book taking shape in her head.
Lucy was rarely home. Too busy.
There was no rain at all.
Three
We
Over the summer, we lost sight of Lucy and Noah a bit. We fractured into subsets and individual members. Loosed from Woodward’s gravitational pull and the unifying force of shared homework assignments and social scandals, we drifted aimlessly through days of punishing heat.
Southern Indiana was suffering its worst drought in decades after a dry winter and a spring of puffed-up clouds and clear skies. Byron Lake was striped with brown as it gasped down to the sediment. The news tracked the Ohio River levels as they ebbed and denuded banks rifted into giant cakes of mud and then dust. The fields browned and crops withered. Our AC was always breaking, always dripping water down our windowsills, always on the fritz. Our parents yelled at us to turn off lights, to use a fan, to conserve the water when we were brushing our teeth.
Our only path to wholeness was through the internet, through our phone screens, through our fingers.
We used our phones practically naked in dark rooms, sweating next to the must of insufficient air circulated from our gasping fans. We constantly worried about what we were missing. We were sure thatwe were missing something vital—a boyfriend or girlfriend; a path and a purpose; the chance to be seen and to matter.
The girls on the server made a competition out of culling pictures of the Sharks with their shirts off. The boys claimed reverse sexism. The girls claimed retribution, payback for Luke Hawthorne’s rumored Discord server, which none of us had actually been invited to join, where members ranked girls by hotness and exchanged their pictures.
It was news whenever we saw Lucy and Noah together—the town parade on the Fourth of July, for example, when Lucy and the Strut Girls shimmied on a float skinned with paper roses. They were just behind the open truck bed towing Noah Landry and the other star swimmers, sweating through their face paint next to a beaming Marnie Steeler, Jay Steeler’s widow. Olivia Howard rang up Lucy Vale out at the PetSmart when she came in for cat food and reported Noah lingering several feet behind her, idly picking through the cat toys before settling on a squeaky mouse.
Mid-July, Akash reported that Lucy, Bailey, Savannah, and Mia were sunning in the backyard of the Faraday House. He snapped covert pictures of the four in their bikinis, barely visible behind the fan of green trees. The Vales were in trouble for their water usage that summer. An arc of sprinklers misted their lawn almost continuously. Riots of new roses climbed the trellises again, and the azaleas burst open blossoms the color of purpling wounds.
