Page 41 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Six

Rachel

I t was Lucy’s idea to have a Halloween party, an open house for trick-or-treaters, neighbors, and friends with hot cider and prizes awarded for the best costumes. But the night before, she began to have doubts.

“What if nobody comes?” Lucy’s attic room had, over a month, slowly accumulated a detritus of Halloween decorations: snarls of colored lights, stacks of construction paper, even a severed hand randomly dangling next to her blow-dryer from a hook in the closet.

Rachel had to sidestep an enormous trash bag of cotton fluff and several rubber spiders just to make it to Lucy’s bed.

“Of course they’ll come,” she said. “They’re already coming.” It was true. For days people had been gravitating to Lily Lane from all over to take pictures of the house.

“I don’t mean randos,” Lucy said. “I meant my friends.” Her hand fluttered to her eyelashes, and Rachel remembered at the last second to say, “Chicken tenders.”

Poor Lucy. Even before she’d met the seventeen-year-old who had promised her he loved her, that he would keep her pictures private, she’d been struggling in middle school.

In sixth grade, her old friends had suddenly turned on her—an inexplicable cruelty but part of the inevitable striving for social ascendancy that Rachel remembered from her early adolescence.

Lucy hadn’t had good friends, real friends, in so long.

Rachel cleared a space on her daughter’s bed and sat down. With her hair wet from the shower, wearing an oversize T-shirt that had once belonged to Alan, Lucy looked much younger than fifteen. Like the wide-eyed, stick-legged nine-year-old who’d begged to adopt a manatee for Christmas.

“Of course they’ll come,” Rachel said. “It was Bailey’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean Bailey either.” Lucy squirmed away from her mother’s hand. “Forget it.”

Rachel didn’t move. She sat there scrutinizing her daughter’s profile, the way she twisted and fidgeted in her body as if it were a costume that didn’t quite fit.

On the bed, Lucy’s phone kept lighting up with messages.

An endless stream of texts and group chats, memes and photos.

A world inside a world inside her daughter’s head.

Rachel had a sudden realization: this was about a boy. She felt a sudden clutch of dread.

“Is there anyone in particular you’re worried about?” Rachel asked.

Lucy didn’t answer for a second. Then she twisted again, casting off the dark mood and giving her mother the slender arc of a half smile.

“I’m not one of your mysteries, Mom,” she said, lilting the words into a taunt. “Don’t try and solve me.”