Page 21 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Five

We

S hark Week that year was violent with school spirit, and anti-Administration passion.

By then we’d figured out that it wasn’t Jeremiah Greene but Aiden Teller, one of our cocaptains, who’d been arrested. Even worse, we heard that Ryan Hawthorne had injured his shoulder in the fight.

@mememeup: welp, there goes the season

@bassicrhythm: should we be having a vigil or something?

@kash_money: for the season?

@bassicrhythm: for Hawthorne’s shoulder

@gustagusta: which means, for the season

@badprincess: how are you guys making jokes about this?

@badprincess: I’m sobbing rn

@geminirising: me too

@mememeup: co-sign on that

It didn’t matter, in our minds, who’d thrown the first punch. Clearly the whole thing was an ambush, and Jalliscoe was to blame.

@spinn_doctor: I’m telling you, this was coordinated

@spinn_doctor: Jalliscoe masterminded the whole thing

@highasakyle: Wouldn’t that require a mind?

@highasakyle: What is “too smart for the inbred bootsuckers who live in Jalliscoe?”

@spinn_doctor: apparently not, @highasakyle, since it worked

@spinn_doctor: This is straight out of The Art of War

@spinn_doctor: If you guys were actually literate, this wouldn’t surprise you

@ktcakes888: not the time, Spinnaker

The next day, half the Sharks came to school looking like rotten vegetables kicked around a field.

The whole team was alternating between stoicism and grief, like prisoners facing a morning execution.

Meanwhile, not a peep from Administration.

Mrs. Steeler-Cox was allegedly locked up with Principal Hammill all morning, and none of us even had the heart to make a joke about what they might have been doing all that time.

Slowly we cobbled together a timeline. The swim team had gone for pizza with Coaches Radner and Vernon.

This in itself was newsworthy, and suggested a new era of cooperation between the Granger Club Team and our high school Sharks, something that could only bode well for the state title—and make our competitors hysterical.

Afterward, some of the guys had gone bowling. Cocaptains Alec Nye and Aiden Teller were in one car. Ryan Hawthorne had Jeremiah Greene and some of the juniors in his jeep.

JJ Hammill was driving his dad’s 4Runner, even though it was after 9:00 p.m. and he technically didn’t have his driver’s license yet, only his permit.

Hammill left the bowling alley early and was first out of the parking lot.

According to Nate Stern, who heard it from Conrad Lyons, whose cousin Liam had just made the swim team, Hammill was turning onto the road when the Wolverines arrived.

The two cars nearly collided. An argument broke out, then escalated.

At some point, one of the Wolverines exited their car with a baseball bat and aimed it for Hammill’s headlights.

Hammill gunned it, and another Jalliscoe goon hurled a bottle at his fender.

Nye, Teller, Hawthorne, Greene, and a handful of other Sharks were just filing out of the bowling alley when they saw the bottle fly by Hammill’s car, missing it by inches. All hell broke loose; eventually three deputy cars dispatched to the scene.

By dinnertime we’d heard that one of Jalliscoe’s swimmers was in the hospital, claiming the need for stitches and alleging he’d been hit with a bottle.

Meanwhile, the Wolverines and their loyalist stans were already grumbling about a lawsuit.

The worst part was that, for once, we couldn’t dismiss Spinnaker’s ranting as paranoia.

More and more, it was looking like the Sharks were under attack by coordinated forces.

We were so desperate for news about Aiden Teller, we even turned to our parents.

Eventually we confirmed through Evie Grant’s aunt, who knew Aiden’s grandmother from the historical society, that Aiden had in fact been sprung from jail.

But his socials were ominously quiet. None of the Sharks were posting, and that made us more nervous than anything.

In the silence, we sensed a hefty dose of Administrative influence.

We didn’t trust it. We knew we could defend the Sharks’ behavior only to a point—especially if it turned out that some of the swimmers had been drinking like a few people were saying online.

Then, midmorning, Jackson Skye spotted Vice Principal Edwards ushering two Willard County deputies into the office, and we started hearing the poisonous whisper of disciplinary action .

The words soured the atmosphere and filled us with dread.

First Meet was in less than a month, and Aiden Teller was one of our best swimmers.

We didn’t know what was worse: that Jalliscoe now had Administration in a headlock or that we had to admit that Spinnaker was right. We should have read The Art of War , or at least skimmed it, or skimmed the SparkNotes online. Because that’s what this was. Not a competition. An attack.

Jalliscoe was trying to take what was ours by right.

The Sharks weren’t a symbol. They were a line in the sand.

We vowed to protect them, no matter what.

Over the weekend, an epidemic of school colors turned the campus violent shades of yellow and black.

An infestation of shark decals gnawed the walls of the cafeteria, followed us to our lockers, and leered at us from the bathroom mirrors.

A local news crew suddenly materialized in our parking lot; college recruiters drifted into Vice Principal Edwards’s office.

Reese Steeler-Cox and the Student Council Mafia were sutured to their cheer uniforms.

Woodward pride was so extreme, it bordered on punishing. We were a seething, concentrated force of winning and grimly determined to have the greatest week ever.

At the same time, we noticed symptoms of a surprising change: somehow, when we weren’t paying attention, Lucy Vale had started nudging toward popular .

Layla Lewis first reported that Savannah Savage had invited Lucy to sit next to her in math class.

We felt a sudden premonition of dread, as if some key fact about the new girl had eluded us.

As soon as we were alert to the possibility that Lucy Vale had attracted the attention of the school’s Echelon, we saw proof of it everywhere.

We tracked Lucy’s rising clout by the people who said hi to her—or went out of their way to give her dirty looks—in the hallway.

Eli Franklin, the best player on the admittedly mediocre basketball team, started circling around her locker.

The rest of the team hooted her name whenever they saw her in the cafeteria.

Most telling was the way Reese Steeler-Cox and the Student Council Mafia started side-eyeing her. Gone were the veneer of friendliness and the fake smiles spackled on in the new girl’s direction.

The final proof of Lucy Vale’s new popularity hit like a stomach virus: suddenly, violently, and in the bathroom.

At issue: whether Lucy Vale was wearing the wrong shark.

We didn’t know that the Student Council Mafia had cornered Lucy Vale about the hammerhead shark on her sweatshirt until Aubrey Barnes saw her crying between third and fourth periods.

Akash lost his shit.

@kash_money: WTF what do you mean crying??

@kash_money: what happened??

@kash_money: where is she??

No one knew; Lucy Vale wasn’t answering her texts.

We were outraged, appalled, and stymied by helplessness.

We drowned in our respective seats across campus, fending off the assault of irrelevant education coming at us from our teachers.

We thumbed messages under our desks. Ethan Courtland managed to send a desperate SOS before Mr. Harte confiscated his phone for the remainder of the day.

We observed our customary moment of silence when we lost him on the chat.

Within the hour, details of the confrontation began to materialize.

We constructed a picture from discrete facts, dropped at random like errant pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we had to fit together without a reference.

There was the fact that Lucy Vale was absent from fourth period, and Aubrey Barnes reported that Lucy had been wearing nothing but a tank top by the time she was seen red-faced and puffy-eyed outside the cafeteria.

There was the backed-up toilet in the girls’ locker room and the janitor called to clean up the water seeping into the hall.

There was Scarlett Hughes’s cousin’s text asking if Lucy Vale was okay.

There was the shrill, hysterical voice of Mrs. Steeler-Cox piercing our eardrums through the loudspeaker, reminding all students that we at Woodward had a code of conduct that we would pledge to obey or risk losing our school privileges—e.g. , the right to attend.

Our best intel came from Ceecee, a Woodward graduate and our Administration mole.

Ceecee was related to the Steeler-Coxes through marriage to Lieutenant Steeler, which made her pretty much unfireable.

She was also a raging alcoholic who dosed her sodas with vodka stashed in old Pepto-Bismol bottles and was so lazy that she rolled her chair from the filing cabinets to the copy machine and the front desk like an oversize Ping-Pong ball.

But she was a willing accessory to most of our usual misdemeanors, largely because she was so lazy—the forged late notes, which she pretended to believe had actually been signed by our parents; the claims of nonexistent symptoms that kept a rumored pop quiz off our schedules and landed us in the nurse’s office for a forty-five-minute nap.

Plus, she had access to all the school’s disciplinary files and a front-row seat outside Vice Principal Edwards’s office.

She was the one who leaked the news of Aiden Teller’s four-week team suspension, for example—days before it was made public in the local news—and had long hinted that the Steeler-Coxes had plenty of skeletons in their closet.

Although we were never sure if that was just the vodka talking.