Page 29 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Twelve

We

I t’s hard to explain what we felt about Lucy Vale—the obsession that took hold after the assembly.

We tracked her outfits, posts, and extracurriculars.

We alerted each other whenever she popped up in one of the Strut Girls’ stories, like she was some exotic bird we were tailing across the wilderness of social media.

In a way it felt like watching a movie, one of those fairy tales in which an average girl, someone like us, discovers she is secretly a princess and gets whisked off to another world to claim her crown and marry a prince.

Somehow we were changing. Woodward was changing. And Lucy Vale was central to all of it, an invisible element of volatility, an extra pressure that gave friction and spark to buried tensions.

Of course, not all of us were fans. Alex Spinnaker still distrusted the Vales, mostly because he couldn’t find any dirt about them online.

It was dubious logic but undeniable: Lucy Vale might have burst into existence only when Akash first spotted her behind the Faraday House, like one of those physics experiments when something becomes real only at the moment of being observed.

Spinnaker hunted for information about Lucy’s relatives and turned up a Susie Vale who lived right on the border of Willard County, putatively on the Jalliscoe side.

He investigated every rumor filtered to us about Lucy and her mom—specifically that Lucy was the product of an affair with a married man and that Rachel Vale was that kind of woman, a suggestion that whipped around after she declined an invitation to join the PTA.

He threatened to collect Lucy’s DNA and have it tested for genetic links to our rivals, oscillating wildly between hypotheses that the Vales were living under an assumed identity and that they were Jalliscoe moles.

Scarlett Hughes floated the idea that Lucy Vale and her mother were in witness protection—which would explain, she claimed, why their social media identities were so recently constructed. Lucy’s dated from only a few months before the move.

@moonovermatter: people in witness protection have to build a whole new identity

@gustagusta: people in witness protection don’t have any photos online, dude

@moonovermatter: They do if they changed their appearance. They get all new socials

@gustagusta: As a cover. They’re not sharing reels from the pumpkin patch, believe me

@geminirising: when was LV at the pumpkin patch?

@gustagusta: she went with her mom this weekend

@gustagusta: It was all over her Instagram

@kash_money: wow, stalk much?

@gustagusta: not all of us can just peep her bedroom at night, bro

@kash_money: that’s not funny

@nononycky: . . . cuz it’s true?

We mined facts about the Vales like panners for gold. We picked through the silt of a thousand everyday observations and interactions, selected certain facts, certain stories, and polished them over and over until they became meaningful. Until they shined, at least to us.

Lucy Vale collected socks and sometimes wore mismatched pairs deliberately.

She had her ears pierced—Olivia counted two holes in her right ear, at least—but never wore earrings.

But she liked bracelets a lot and putting tiny stickers on her nails.

She doodled on her Converse during class.

She claimed to be allergic to asparagus. She loved peach yogurt.

@gustagusta: really? peach? Are you sure?

@hannahbanana: positive. She literally eats peach yogurt in third period every day

We were baffled. Our cafeteria carried only a small selection of yogurts: plain, vanilla, and strawberry. Occasionally a blueberry made its way into the batch, for reasons unclear. So where was Lucy Vale getting peach yogurt?

@hannahbanana: IDK. She brings it from home I think

@hannahbanana: She brings a tiny spoon too

@hannahbanana: She’s like really into small spoons

@heyitsaubrey: Small spoons? Or small utensils in general?

Hannah Smith didn’t know the answer. But Olivia Howard confirmed that Lucy Vale used regular-size utensils at lunch, unless she was, you know, eating a pizza or something. But when she needed a fork, she definitely used a regular-size fork, and she never looked unhappy about it or anything.

We agreed this was far from definitive since the cafeteria offered only regulation-size silverware.

Eventually Olivia agreed to ask. It turned out Lucy’s mom was a tea drinker and had a collection of very small spoons she used to stir her tea. Lucy had started using them when she was a little girl. Now she just thought they were cute.

Unless, Lucy said, she was eating cereal. Eating cereal with a small spoon was insane.

We completely agreed; cereal should be eaten with the largest possible spoon that wasn’t officially a ladle.

Some of us began to seek out peach yogurt in the grocery store. Some of us imagined that the smell—a rush of chemical sweet, the faint tang of bacterial sourness—was how Lucy would taste if we ever kissed her.

Which, obviously, we never would.

History is written by the victors. High school, by consensus. But fate is written by the gods, and ours swam for the Sharks.

If the team thought Lucy Vale was desirable, she was too desirable for us.

Free will was an illusion, and consent was not ours to give.