Page 16 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Fifteen

We

W hether or not Lucy was pretty, hot, beautiful, or some or none or all of the above was a matter of furious debate.

After the party, we argued about the most basic facts of her appearance.

Her hair might have been mousy brown, or dirty blond, or auburn.

The word caramel was thrown around pretty freely.

We couldn’t agree, it turned out, on even her basic physical characteristics.

Allan Meeks, five foot four and one of the shortest boys in our class, swore Lucy Vale was even shorter than him and threatened to measure her to prove it.

But most of us thought Lucy Vale looked average, and the Hannah Smith who played soccer swore that Lucy Vale was at least five eight.

It was the same with her eye color, which varied between brown and hazel, the color of honey and the look of cheap weed, depending on who was reporting on it.

We tried to deconstruct Lucy’s face, to triangulate the symmetries, to understand them, without success.

When Spinnaker pointed out that her nose was a little too short for her face, and her ears a little too large, we couldn’t disagree factually.

Although we disagreed with what it implied: that Lucy Vale had flaws.

Some of us thought Lucy was a dead ringer for Jade Goodwin, the model who’d gotten her start parodying runway shows on TikTok.

After the party, Brent Manning made a composite image of legendary twentieth-century beauties such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Gisele Bündchen to prove that Lucy’s features corresponded perfectly to a recognizable Western standard of female perfection.

The experiment was flawed. The composite image looked like a creepy CPR mannequin, or a doll that might be possessed, and it launched an enormous argument about racist beauty standards and the twentieth-century American eugenics movement.

Point was, Lucy didn’t look at all satanic. At least we could all agree on that.

Otherwise, there was no consensus. Peyton Neely, for example, insisted that Lucy looked exactly like a white-tailed mongoose.

@badprincess: WTF is a white-tailed mongoose?

Peyton Neely posted a link to the mongoose’s Wikipedia entry to the “New Girl” Discord channel. We were skeptical. Mongooses looked just like ferrets. Peyton Neely thought Lucy looked like a ferret?

@geminirising: No. I think she looks like a mongoose.

@geminirising: Do you not see it?

@mememeup: dude

@mememeup: Put a mongoose and a ferret in a police lineup, and there’s no way anyone could tell the difference

@geminirising: why would you need a ferret or a mongoose in a police lineup?

@geminirising: They’re different species. You could just take DNA samples

She had a point. But we all felt that if Peyton really thought Lucy looked like a ferret, she should have the balls to say so, not get sneaky with euphemistic mammals.

The first hour of the party was as awkward as the average cafeteria lunch.

Sofia Young’s house had been emptied by Mr. Young’s departure, and we wandered the living room idly and filtered onto the deck, studiously ignoring all the missing family portraits and furniture.

We were thrilled, and alarmed, to see everybody from the server in real life—none of us could remember inviting or approving Sean Douglas, for example—and we quickly knotted into groups and subgroups, collecting like lint around the fabric of our usual social sets.

The anime heads and the gamers got into heated debates about manga we’d never heard of.

The band and orchestra geeks dominated the chip bowl.

The chorus and drama crowd swapped TikTok favorites and threatened to rope us into a video.

It was a relief when Nick Topornycky showed up with Sahara Richards and, more importantly, beer.

Slowly we coalesced under its liquid power, and the novelty of awaiting the tenant of the Faraday House.

The mystery had come alive for us again, animated by new blood.

Kyle Hannigan asked Olivia Howard whether Brian, the creep who lived on her family’s commune, had ever spoken about how the sheriff’s office had considered him a suspect in Nina’s disappearance.

Olivia told us that (a) Brian wasn’t a creep, (b) her family lived on a farm collaborative, not a commune, and (c) she’d never asked him because it was none of her business.

Nick pointed out that minding your business didn’t seem very collaborative .

Before Olivia could respond, Sofia Young trumpeted, She’s here.

A sudden crush of movement drove us to the front patio, where we waited, frozen and breathless, to catch our first glimpse of the new girl.

The sky was a pale, leached blue, the clouds the raw pink of entrails.

We suffocated on our own excitement. It seemed to take forever for Akash and the new girl to move out of the trees.

But at last, they did, and our anticipation collapsed around the reality of Lucy Vale.

She had a wrapped present for Olivia under one arm—a pink sweatshirt with a stitched cat on the chest next to the zipper, we later saw—and as she and Akash started across the lawn, she kept freeing one hand from the box to tug at her shorts.

She wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t short. She wasn’t thin, and she wasn’t plus. Her hair was brownish. Not long. Not super short. But shortish.

Afterward we could never quite agree.

That was the thing about Lucy Vale. That’s what frustrated and baffled us about her, and later drove us crazy trying to figure her out, twisted us into knots trying to get our hands around her shape.

That’s what drives us crazy even now, so many years after it happened: the neither-here-nor-thereness of her.

It wasn’t that she was shy exactly. We soon discovered that Lucy had plenty of questions about Woodward, and our extracurriculars, and which teachers we thought were the hardest. She wasn’t afraid of controversial opinions—such as hating ketchup, which was close to insane, or feeling ambivalent about swimming as a sport, which was wrong and would have to change.

She told Will Friske that the best hot dogs came from Chicago but she didn’t believe in deep-dish pizza, which was more like calzone cake.

The real problem with Lucy Vale was that she wasn’t one thing or another .

She told Riley French that she’d played soccer in middle school but wasn’t very good.

She couldn’t even say what kind of music she was into; she told Meeks that it was all over the place and depended on the vibe.

She talked a lot about her cat, Maybe, but denied being a cat person.

But when Brent Manning asked if she was a dog person, she said no, definitely not.

Too slobbery. Plus, she’d been bitten by a neighbor’s terrier when she was a kid.

But she liked some dogs. She liked some cats. Really, Lucy said, it all depends.

On the one hand, Lucy’s answer was totally reasonable.

The Thompsons’ chihuahua was an actual reincarnated serial killer, for example.

And Mr. Mole, the now-obese tabby who lived in the Student Leadership Department Tutoring Center, would sit purring and drooling on our shoes until we gave him scratchies.

Mr. Mole was the friendliest cat we’d ever met.

But the question wasn’t actually about preferences.

It was about personality. It was about being cat or dog people.

Dog people were, for the most part, extroverts.

They were social and fun, and possibly narcissistic.

They might be sporty. They probably had nice hair.

Cat people, on the other hand, were smart, shy, and prone to dreaming.

They might be into theater or fan fiction. They wore scarves and loved thrifting.

The question was: What type of person are you?

And Lucy’s answer— it depends —was a cop-out.

Lucy did like horses—from a distance at least. We couldn’t believe it, but Lucy had never been on a horse before, unless a pony ride at the petting zoo counted, which it didn’t.

She was equally shocked to find out how many of us had horses.

Scarlett Hughes’s family stabled broncos for the rodeo in Pewter Falls; the Howards rehabilitated rescues; Kaitlyn Courtland and her cousin Ethan both competed in junior rodeo and stabled their horses with the Hughes.

And that wasn’t even counting the working farm horses.

Well, Toto, Lucy said, I guess we’re not in Lansing anymore . We couldn’t tell whether she sounded disappointed. We didn’t figure out until after the party that Lucy Vale had moved from a university town, practically a city. That explained why she couldn’t ride a horse.

The Vales were northerners.

We were desperate to know how she and her mom had chosen the Faraday House, and whether Lucy knew its history.

But none of us were brave enough to straight-up ask her, even after the three six-packs were divided among all of us.

It was hard to find a casual way to ask if she’d noticed a body hanging from the apple tree yet, or if there was any disembodied weeping coming from the attic.

We were even afraid to use the words Faraday House , in case it led to awkward questions.

If the Vales really didn’t know about the Faradays, and the storm of theories about what had happened to Nina, we didn’t want to be the ones to tell her.

Instead we edged as close as we could to the topic, hoping that Lucy Vale would take the hint and open up on her own. Jackson Skye pointed out that his dad had a paint and tile business, if the Vales needed help getting the house in shape ...?

When Lucy only said, Thank you, Evie Grant tried to salvage the opportunity, jumping in to say they must have their work cut out for them, seeing as the home had been so long abandoned .

But Lucy Vale simply replied that the inside of the house was a thousand times better than the outside made it seem.

The owners, she said, had made sure to keep it clean and had hired a caretaker to regularly turn on the lights, flush the toilets, and run the heat so that the pipes didn’t freeze in the winter—all of which was news to us.

Still, we refused to give up entirely. Even if Lucy didn’t have much to say about the house, there was no way she could duck the topic of the garden: a ravenous, colonizing jungle that crawled up the front porch and snaked up the colonnade porch and looked as if it were determined to haul the house down into a grave.

Between the apple tree, the ghostly apparition of the tormented Lydia Faraday, and rumors that a phantom Nina Faraday still wandered the old rose garden, the Faradays’ ruined gardens were the most haunted botanicals in the Midwest, possibly the whole country.

We persuaded a stoned Will Friske to mention the flyer he’d slipped into the Vales’ mailbox, the one advertising his cousin’s landscaping business that largely served as a front for growing weed, in the hopes that Lucy might admit to knowing more about the property and why it had fallen into such disarray.

But it was useless. Lucy simply thanked Will Friske for the offer of help and told him that her mother had big plans for the garden.

Then she told us a random story about the time her mom had planted false sunflower instead of Maximilian in her college co-op garden and, over the next two years, watched the Napoleonic conquest of the entire quad by colonies of yellow blossoms.

My mom learned her lesson, for sure, Lucy said.

Plants were social beings, just like people. They lived in carefully calibrated balance with their neighbors.

Introducing a new one could be dangerous.

After the party, we tried to hold on to an impression of Lucy.

What resurfaced again and again was the memory of Lucy Vale and Akash, arriving on foot from the direction of Hickory Lane, blurred at first behind a kaleidoscope of leaves that cut them into moving colors.

She looked nervous.

And for that first second when we saw Lucy Vale—nervous, pretty, and holding a wrapped gift, while the sun bled out into the trees behind her—we hated ourselves for lying.

But we hated her even more for believing us.

Then Olivia freed herself from the crowd and plunged toward Lucy, arms outstretched.

Perfect timing, she had said. We were about to do the cake.

Her voice canted over the music. Like a tailwind, the words swept away the momentary pressure of feeling bad. The cake, we echoed, the birthday cake . Like an incantation to ritual magic we all knew by heart.

We complimented Lucy on her wrapping job. Sofia suggested that she put the present with all the others, leaning a wink into her tone. Kyle Hannigan went to get the cake from the freezer. Evie Grant chased after him with the birthday candles.

We sang “Happy Birthday,” loudly, with drama. We were horribly off-key. But at least we all sang together.

We were athletes and anarchists, band geeks and gamers, virgins and sluts. We were actors and magicians.

We lied, and we protected our own.