Page 26 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Nine

We

T he next day, Lucy Vale came to school in a SpongeBob SquarePants costume, and we all lost our shit.

We snuck photos of Lucy trying to fumble her locker open with enormous white gloves and maneuvering the crowded hallway in a six-foot-tall cube of smiling Styrofoam. We got a video of Lucy sidling through the portico doors sideways. We bowed to her in the hall.

We couldn’t get enough.

We found out that Nick Topornycky did the best SpongeBob impersonation in school. We were shocked by how good it was. How did a committed gamer with a known alien fetish pull off a SpongeBob impression like that?

We asked him if he even liked SpongeBob SquarePants.

@nononycky: who the fuck doesn’t like Spongebob squarepants?

It was a good point.

Word spread quickly to Admin about Lucy’s costume; it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that went unnoticed.

We would have given anything to see Vice Principal Edwards shit a brick when he realized that Lucy was not technically in violation of the school’s new standards for dress, had reported to all of her usual classes, and was taking notes as usual—kind of.

Her costume was so unwieldy that she couldn’t actually fit the Styrofoam bulk behind a desk, and bulbous white mitts made it impossible to type or hold on to a pen.

Still, she played the whole thing straight. She requested that someone help her press record on her iPhone at the start of every period. And she wasn’t milking it for comedy or attention either. When she raised one of her bulbous hands, it was because she had to ask a question, always on topic.

It was absolute legend.

Lucy made it all the way to third period before she was once again called to Vice Principal Edwards’s office.

This time she was sent home to change. By the afternoon, the dress code had been amended by hand—sad work for Keith, the school’s head janitor, who had to go flyer by flyer with a Sharpie—to include a prohibition against costumes.

Administration posted a hysterical new message to the portal.

Mrs. Steeler-Cox oozed into the font selection, a serif-heavy mess that reminded us of her signature on the summons she had her army of recruits distribute with increasingly liberal abandon.

Lucy’s punishment galvanized a miniature revolt. It was Bailey Lawrence, in fact, who led the charge. Lucy Vale’s outfit, Bailey argued, violated none of the new dress code rules. So what was the problem? Why had she been sent home?

To us, it reeked of sabotage. Was Admin trying to divide us, to repress our spirit, to bury us under so many rules and restrictions that we couldn’t even focus on the upcoming swim season?

Somehow the idea got floated that Mrs. Steeler-Cox was having an affair with someone from Jalliscoe and trying to rig the season in their team’s favor.

Admittedly, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

Jalliscoe was solid, but they weren’t as good as, say, Willow Park, which almost always made states alongside us.

And Mrs. Steeler-Cox was clenched so tightly around her uncle’s legacy, it was a miracle she hadn’t shat out a state trophy by now.

On the other hand, we knew that behind the veneer of school solidarity, affirmed with soul-deadening regularity on the official school social media accounts—which we followed only out of fear of reprisal—were political currents squalling over huge sums of money.

Occasionally tension bubbled into view; the Tellers, for example, were considering bringing a lawsuit against the school board, and tension was ratcheting up over the planned construction of the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion in the Aquatics Center and whether his name would still grace the frontispiece.

And for all the attention on the Woodward Sharks and the Granger Club Team, the swim teams and their operations were obscure to all of us, sheeted behind the warping influence of committees, subcommittees, boards, and the legacy booster fund.

Still, on an emotional level, the conspiracy theory was compelling.

Besieged by homework assignments and laws about how we talked and dress and even chewed, trapped in the eddies of a system that turned us to its will, we suspected an unseen current of power was at work beneath the surface of our lives.

As freshmen, we’d tolerated it. What choice did we have? We were fresh meat. We were newly hatched. We were the Minnows, finning frantically around a threshing of dangers, just trying to survive.

But things were different now. We’d had a party. We’d even had alcohol. Topornycky knew where to score Adderall. Nate Stern sold weed out of his locker. Hannigan could get us a discount at Baskin-Robbins.

We were sophomores. We were turning sixteen and getting our learner’s permits. We were practically adults—and just before swim season, we were all coming down hard with a violent case of giving-zero-fucks.

Forget our rivals. Forget the championships.

We entered October at war.