Page 112 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

@lululemonaide:what about the texts that Nina sent after she left campus?

@bassicrhythm:the cops aren’t sure she sent them at all

@bassicrhythm:could’ve been someone else, using her phone

@lululemonaide:omg. So something happened to NinaOn Campus?

@pawsandclaws:I knew it

@pawsandclaws:swear to goddess, the aura in Aquatics is so dark

Rumors thickened, tightening around our necks, keeping us in a choke hold, bound to each other and our phones. We heard that the IHSAA had questioned Coach Vernon about rumors that his club swimmers were using performance enhancers to improve their times. We heard that the sheriff’s department was hunting down the Sharks who’d been at Coach Steeler’s house the day Nina Faraday vanished and reinterviewing them one by one. We heard that work on the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion might at last be suspended. But day by day, construction continued, sending up a fine silt of red dust that coated the parking lot and clotted our lungs, made breathing difficult. Mornings smelled like machine oil. Our heads ached with the sound of jackhammers. We’d all but given up on sleeping.

We began to wonder if maybe our parents were right about Discord.

Maybe we did spend too much of our time online.

We got our yearbooks. In one of the full-page photos, Lucy Vale was practicing with the dance team. We spent hours staring at that picture, as if we could draw out of the pixelation some clue about Lucy Vale’s final act and what she’d been thinking.

In the picture she has one hand on her hip, the other thrown into the air, fist clenched, as if in triumph.

In the picture her head is tilted back, her eyes narrow, barely glancing at the camera. Her hair is loose. She’s laughing.

Eight

The police did eventually locate Lucy’s car, a used Honda Civic that Rachel Vale had bought her right around the time Lucy and Noah broke up. It was in an impound lot in Warren County, Ohio, two hundred miles from Granger. It had been abandoned in a nature preserve parking lot not far from the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge, which carried I-71 high above the Little Miami River gorge, one of the Ohio River’s tributaries.

The news came from Evie Grant, who’d found out about it on TikTok even before we’d tracked down the official sheriff’s bulletin.

According to Evie, Jeremiah Morrow Bridge was one of Ohio’s most popular suicide spots.

@ktcakes888:you think she jumped??

@badprincess:I’m just telling you what I read online

@lululemonaide:was there a note in her car or anything?

@geminirising:what about her wallet? Rachel Vale says she left home with her wallet

@pawsandclaws:why would you bring your wallet to commit suicide?

@nononycky:tolls? Snacks?

@pawsandclaws:this isn’t funny

@badprincess:why would you leave your cell phone behind to run away?

@geminirising:maybe she just wanted to ... disappear for a while

@lululemonaide:if she’d decided to kill herself, she would have left a note

@lululemonaide:she would have told somebody

@lululemonaide:right?

We didn’t know. It was possible that Lucy had ditched her car and jumped. But she’d emptied her checking account at an ATM in Cincinnati the day before her car was abandoned. And a long-haul trucker had reported seeing a girl who matched Lucy’s description at a rest stop outside Columbus two days later.

We held on to hope that Lucy Vale would soon be found, would soon return, would soon show up online, make contact, make things right again. We prayed that the story wasn’t over.