Page 4 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Three

We

I n the early days of August, we waited for the new girl and her mother to arrive, maybe with a cat, maybe not. A moving van spotted on Richmond Lane gave us a flicker of hope. So did the fact that a For Rent sign had vanished from one of the condos above the Garden Groves mini mall in Lincoln.

But both leads were false, and soon explained by the news that Sofia Young’s parents were getting a divorce.

@bassicrhythm: Sofia Young’s dad just moved out

@bassicrhythm: that’s why the moving van was there. He’s renting a place in Lincoln

@bassicrhythm: It’s pretty fucked up

@frenchkissesry: I don’t understand Sofia’s mom

@frenchkissesry: How do you not know that you’re a lesbian for 40 years?

@ktcakes888: wait What ????

@badprincess: What

@badprincess: is that why her parents are getting separated?

@badprincess: Because Sofia’s mom is a lesbian??

@highasakyle: I don’t get why Mr. Young has a problem with that ...

@highasakyle: ... now he and his wife both like to bang other women

@nononycky: maybe Mrs. Young likes them to be of legal drinking age

@goodnightsky: wtf you guys this is so fucked up

@bassicrhythm: it really is

@highasakyle: My cousin took a class with Mr. Young

@highasakyle: He said the guy grooms a new girl every semester

@goodnightsky: no, I mean what you said

@nononycky: he teaches poetry. Enough said

@goodnightsky: this whole conversation is beyond fucked up

@ktcakes888: poor Sofia. I feel so bad for her

@badprincess: @goodnightsky is right. We shouldn’t be talking about this.

@badprincess: Especially behind Sofia’s back

@goodnightsky: Or in front of my face

That’s how we found out that Sofia Young was on Discord with us.

It was high-key awkward.

The problem with Discord was also the great thing about it: since our server was invite-only, we were lazy about tracking usernames.

On Discord, usernames were like Instagram filters, slight alterations in tone and aesthetic that varied with our moods.

Before we accidentally told Sofia her dad was a serial cheater with a taste for teenagers, for example, most of us just assumed @goodnightsky was Skyler Matthews because her old username was @goodskyelf, and @goodnightsky joined only a couple of weeks after Skyler said she was going to change it.

Ironically, we always figured it was safer to avoid our real names.

We’d all heard horror stories about the time Harper Rowe was catfished by her friend Reese Steeler-Cox pretending to be their other friend Charlotte Anderson.

“Charlotte” baited Harper into talking shit about Reese and got Harper permanently iced out of the in crowd.

Poor Harper started middle school as one of the Echelon girls and ended it as a musical theater geek, all because of a friend’s Discord server and her misplaced trust in a username.

Then there was the rumor that Ryan Hawthorne’s creepy older stepbrother, Luke, had used Ryan’s name to make it onto a private Discord for the Woodward cheerleaders and solicit topless photos of at least three of the girls.

Although, there was controversy about whether it was actually Ryan Hawthorne’s creepy stepbrother pretending to be Ryan Hawthorne who did it, or Ryan Hawthorne pretending to be his creepy stepbrother pretending to be Ryan Hawthorne.

Either way, it made for crazy drama our freshman year and nearly got Ryan Hawthorne suspended from the swim team just before state championships, which would have been tragic.

Besides, our real names came with trip wires of social expectation. We couldn’t use our real names and interact honestly. That’s the other thing about Discord: we were all friends on the server, but we were only friends there.

High school wasn’t a hierarchy; it was a habitat, an ecosystem.

We all had our places and our roles to play.

School was a little like being onstage, acting out different parts in a play, reading different lines, following a script everyone knows but doesn’t remember learning.

In the play, some characters are friends and some aren’t.

Some characters act all their scenes together, and some are never onstage at the same time.

No one knows why, and it doesn’t matter. That’s just how the play is written.

The Discord, to us, was the greenroom: a place where all the actors hung out before going onstage again.

That’s why we were lazy about usernames. Our real names were part of the script. They were characters we played every day.

On Discord, we could finally be our real selves, and no one would ever know.

After the whole mix-up with Sofia Young, conversation about the new girl began to sputter, like a star burning through all its gas.

By then it had been almost a week with no new information.

Emma Howard hadn’t logged on to the server in weeks.

According to Hannah Smith, Emma was coy the first time Hannah asked whether the Vales had found a house yet and seemed annoyed the second time.

After Hannah asked a third time if Emma’s mom had shown the Vales any houses, Emma literally burst into tears, like there was a water balloon behind her face and Hannah’s question had popped it.

She didn’t know, she wished Hannah would stop asking, she wished Hannah would maybe ask about Emma for a change, because it felt like Hannah only talked to her when she wanted something and it really wasn’t fair, she was super stressed, she was assistant stage director for the youth theater’s production of Peter Pan opening in three days, like did Hannah even know what a stage director was , and she hadn’t even seen her mom in like a week because she was so busy planning her dumb wedding to that totalitarian freckledick she was engaged to.

@hannahbanana: Emma doesn’t really get along with her mom’s fiance.

@lululemonaide suggested that we buy tickets to Peter Pan . @mememeup told her that he would rather have an actual freckle for a dick. @lululemonaide logged off in an obvious huff. We felt kind of bad about it. But we were already short on fun things to do. We weren’t trying to go full deficit.

Thank God the Sharks were getting back in the water.

We’d noticed a welcome banner for the new team season hanging outside Aquatics, and Ethan Courtland had spotted Coach Radner sporting a ferocious sunburn and vacation stubble, talking on his cell phone outside the pool entrance while Ethan was practicing three-point turns in the Woodward lot.

We could always count on the boys’ swim team for distraction; being consumingly, pathologically obsessed with the Sharks was as fundamental a requirement at Woodward as wearing pants to class.

That year the Granger Club Team, the all-year training team that pushed most of the best swimmers to compete for the Sharks during the high school swim season, had gotten a new coach: Jack Vernon.

He’d trained under the infamous Coach Steeler and competed with Tommy Swift during the all-star season that was derailed by Nina Faraday’s disappearance.

We knew little about him beyond that he was leaving a position with one of the Granger Club Team’s fiercest rivals.

We agreed that his appointment was a coup for the Steeler family; they’d been pushing to restore Coach Steeler’s legacy and reputation since his death from colon cancer the year before we got to high school.

We wondered what Coach Vernon would mean for our season.

We obsessed over the status of Jeremiah Greene’s elbow injury.

We scoured Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitch for video proof that JJ Hammill, a sophomore, and Ryan Hawthorne, a junior, had really challenged the senior cocaptains to a 200-meter relay at Byron Lake—and possibly even won .

We couldn’t find proof one way or another; there was some confusion about whether the race had actually happened.

August slurped toward September.

We played video games and watched YouTube. We scooped ice cream and rotated hot dogs. We mowed lawns and painted sheds. Our older siblings went back to college. Nick Topornycky’s uncle was back in jail.

We heard Sofia Young had gone to stay with her grandparents for a while.

We heard from Administration: the Aquatics Center might soon be under renovation again. We wondered if the girls’ locker room would finally get a Jacuzzi and steam room like the boys’ had.

We dreamed of roiling water and woke up in a sweat.

We had so many weird dreams in August that we made a channel to talk about weird dreams. In some of them we were swimming, flashing through water that felt like air. In others, we drowned.

@lululemonaide had a dream she was in trouble. She was trying to charge her cell phone so she could call for help, but the charger was always a strawberry by the time she was trying to fit it into the wall.

@hannahbanana had a dream that she was on a boat with Principal Hammill, filming a scene from Jaws .

Principal Hammill, the director, was instructing her to jump from the boat, which was a diving board, into a pool filled with hundreds of extras dressed in shark costumes.

But she realized right as her feet left the board that the whole thing was a setup, a trick by the sharks, who were real, only pretending to be actors.

We didn’t know what any of it meant. We suggested meditation podcasts.

We were anxious and suddenly regretful for all the time we’d spent being bored. We got nostalgic remembering that we’d been excited about the new girl weeks earlier. We felt nostalgic for July and the promise of change.

Emma Howard’s mood, at least, had improved after the three-day run of Peter Pan successfully concluded and earned a generally positive review in the county newspaper. She logged on to Discord, finally, to offer her theory about what had happened to the new girl.

@emheddles: Maybe the Vales changed their minds about moving

@emheddles: my mom said that she wasn’t helping them anymore

That part turned out to be true, although not in the way we, or Emma, had interpreted it.

Later we figured out that when Mrs. Vale called saying she was interested in renting a house, she meant a specific house, one they’d already seen plenty of times, at least online.

All Emma’s mom had done was get the Vales in touch with the owner.

But Emma wasn’t the type to ruminate on semantics, and neither were we. So we assumed that her explanation—that the Vales had changed their minds—was right.

We were almost offended. It felt like we’d been ghosted.

The shared spark of interest we’d been carrying went right down the toilet bowl.

It was like the lights came up on a really good movie, and we all suddenly remembered we were sitting in third-period English.

Embarrassed somehow. A little lonely too.

But we were used to falling a little in love in our imaginations and getting our hearts broken in real life.

Facts were facts: Lucy Vale wasn’t coming.

Until, one day, she did.