Page 100 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

@spinn_doctor:Akash has to be verified, just like everybody else

@mememeup:screw your security, Spinnaker. This server is dying

@badprincess:we’re dying

@badprincess:we literally could be shot any second

@nononycky:heyyyy @badprincess is back

@badprincess:I never left

@badprincess:just haven’t been on

@mememeup:Let Akash in the server

@spinn_doctor:I’m not just going to roll out the red carpet now that he’s decided to grace us with his presence

@mememeup:good thing all you have to do is click admit

Spinnaker caved. We welcomed Akash with a confetti of emojis.

@nononycky:welcome to the lockdown party

@kash_money:are you guys okay? Do you know what’s going on?

@mememeup:I don’t hear any shooting

@badprincess:me neither

@lululemonaide:I wish they’d tell us what’s happening ...

@goodnightsky:did you guys miss me?

@goodnightsky:is everyone alive?

@mememeup:unfortunately

@mememeup:this closet is rank

We were miserable and elated. It was horrible and historic.

It was, we found out, a fire in the recycling bin and death to our beloved mascot. An abomination, but a relief nonetheless.

Once Administration released us from our classrooms and an encirclement of police cars and fire trucks logjammed our parking lot, we milled around while sheriff’s deputies cleared the buildings and members of the fire department clustered around the evidence: a blackened, still-smoking ruin, which we joked should be buried with a proper funeral for Sean the Shark. We were electric with excitement, disaster narrowly averted.

We thought of Jalliscoe. Of podcasters. Of vengeful online agents persuaded by reports that the Sharks’ star swimmers had been doping for years.

Over the next two days, our Discord swelled again to forty-seven members. Spinnaker was forced by a vote of the returning majority to yield sole power as mod. Kaitlyn Courtland came back, reconfigured the server, and restored sanity to the threads.

Once again we were alive, powerful, and tethered to our phones, where the world was compressed to a typeface, flowing steadily to us through a stream of message alerts.

We had theories. We had arguments. Scarlett Hughes had pink eye, which she was convinced she’d picked up from the gym’s moldering equipment room, her refuge during the lockdown.

We quickly zeroed in on the idea that the fire had been an act of protest against the construction of the new Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion. We’d heard that the recycling bin had been removed from the construction site before it was taken to Administration—to us a clear signal of meaningful intent. The mascot, which had been adopted by the school during Coach Steeler’s reign, was an obvious and pointed target.

Then there was the timing, only days afterBlood in the Waterhad dropped its last episode of season 2. For the season finale, the hosts had interviewed Daniel Frisker, who’d actually swum with Tommy Swift under Coach Steeler for a few years. According to Daniel Frisker, competitive high school swimming was rife with various forms of doping, at least at its most elite levels. Tommy Swift, Daniel claimed, was on a regimen of illegal supplements that he thought would improve his swim times. Coach Steeler encouraged it. He had total control of all his star swimmers’ lives, Daniel said. What they ate, where they went, and who they went out with. The boys got used to asking Coach Steeler’s permission before making any decisions of their own.

Daniel Frisker was sure Coach Steeler would have lost his shit if he’d found out Nina and Tommy were still talking.