Page 3 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Two

We

A kash Sandhu was the first to talk to the new girl but not the first to hear about her. That honor belonged to Emma Howard.

Emma Howard’s mom was a real estate agent. It was already late July when Mrs. Howard got the inquiry: a woman named Rachel Vale from Michigan wanted to rent a house. Her daughter, Lucy, would be enrolling at Woodward as a sophomore in just a few weeks’ time.

The Vales were clean, quiet, and nonsmokers.

Also, they “might” have a cat.

Whatever that meant.

The news blew up on our Discord server. We were in the hardcore grips of midsummer boredom: we were too young to drive, too hot to work, and too afraid to steal weed from our brothers’ rooms. July was crawling on its hands and knees through a heat wave, and so far the most exciting happening was an algae bloom in Byron Lake that temporarily greened the water.

At first we assumed that Lucy Vale would be an athlete, a transfer student who’d slipped under the Indiana High School Athletic Administration’s radar.

The only reason to move to Granger was to attend Woodward High School, and the only reason to attend Woodward High School was for its athletics programs. Our girls’ track team was thriving, and our dance team was no joke.

The previous year, Bailey Lawrence and the other Strut Girls had flipped and shimmied and catapulted their way into state championships, and almost ten thousand YouTube views.

And then, of course, there was our swim team.

But the athlete theory got shot down pretty quickly by Riley French; her uncle told her that the school was no longer taking athletics transfers, to comply with IHSAA requirements that might otherwise penalize our teams. Since Riley French’s uncle, Judd French, was the assistant director of our athletics department, we figured her intel was legit.

We were so desperate for excitement that we packed this shrapnel of mystery—a new girl, our year, and moving midway through the summer—with as much meaning as possible.

We bombarded each other with a rapid barrage, a cross fire of questions we couldn’t answer, and theories we couldn’t confirm one way or the other.

@ktcakes888: Does anyone know why the new girl is moving?

@geminirising: Does anyone think it’s weird they waited this long to find a house??

@badprincess: I was thinking about that. It feels like it must be a last-minute thing

@skyediva: who moves last minute?

@mememeup: maybe her mom got a job

@badprincess: or a divorce?? Do we know if it’s just the two of them?

@lululemonaide: Has anyone found her profile?

We had not.

We frivoled away hours searching every Lucy and Lucie Vale, Veil, Vayle, and Vayel on every social media site we could think of for a soon-to-be sophomore from Michigan who looked like she might have a cat.

We ruled out most account holders by age alone.

But after that, things got murky. We found a handful of Instagram handles that might have been hers, but one was inactive, another had only a few photos, all of them generic, and the rest were set to private.

Alex Spinnaker turned up a Lucy Vale in Vancouver who’d been convicted of a string of low-level identity scams and tried to convince us that we were about to be served by a fugitive con artist and an accomplice posing as her mother.

We were skeptical, to say the least.

@brentmann: served how? Like what’s the con?

@mememeup: you mean besides america’s higher education system?

@spinn_doctor: Read the article I pinned

@highasakyle: maybe they’re planning to rip off the booster funds

@mememeup: this woman is 29, dude

@spinn_doctor: how do you know? She’s a con artist.

@ktcakes888: there’s a Lucy Vale in Ohio ...

@badprincess: ew pass

@spinn_doctor: Emma’s mom said MI

@mememeup: if she’s a con artist, she could be from Morocco

@spinn_doctor: Nope. She’s Canadian. Read the article.

@badprincess: I’m so confused

@highasakyle: Wait—the article about cryptocurrency??

@spinn_doctor: read that one too

We agreed on one thing: we’d rather have a Canadian con artist than a Lucy Vale from Ohio. We fucking hated Ohio. We weren’t big on Michigan either. But Ohio?

That was the North Korea to our South Korea, the Crips to our Bloods.

Kyle Hannigan suggested someone friend the four most promising Lucy Vale profiles on Instagram. The real Lucy, he figured, would see we went to Woodward and accept.

Obviously that was a no go. We would have sooner volunteered to get a surprise tattoo than friend Lucy Vale before we knew what we were signing ourselves up for.

What if she was a sociopath? What if she was from Ohio ?

Or just as bad—in the wrong fandoms? We hoped she wasn’t an anime head; we’d had enough secondhand anime exposure as it was—a full six channels devoted to it already, even though most of us weren’t even fans.

Hannah Smith—the one who played soccer, not the one in band—eventually tracked down a picture of a Lucy Vale from a volunteer event at an Ann Arbor, Michigan, animal center.

But there were a dozen girls our age in the photograph, and Lucy wasn’t tagged; her name was just in the caption.

We took bets on which girl looked most like a Lucy; we were torn between a super tall, skinny blond with glasses and bad acne, and a heavier girl with a unicorn on her T-shirt.

Then @ktcakes888 pointed out that there were twenty-two volunteers named in the caption and only sixteen people in the photograph—which meant Lucy Vale might be excluded.

We were all relieved; the girl with the glasses looked like she had an eating disorder, and the one with the unicorn shirt looked kind of like a Karen.

Actually, none of the girls looked much like a Lucy, we decided, which meant we could go back to imagining her.

And it turned out we liked the question mark even more than the answer.

She was whatever we imagined; she was all things at once.

She was short and she was tall, into girls or boys or both, a comic book geek, a theater nerd, a sweeper on the JV soccer team.

She was funny, poetic, cynical, and really into Ayn Rand.

She was looking for a best friend, or to fall in love, for someone to change her life, and be changed.

Before we knew anything about her—not even what she looked like—Lucy Vale was looking for us.