Page 50 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Six

We

T he five-minute break before the raffle was basically triage.

We were gasping like drowned frogs, sweating like pigs, and our hair was unsalvageable.

A lot of us were horrified to realize our deodorant was not working.

There were meltdowns in the girls’ locker room and a sudden frenzied bull market for gum, Altoids, and sweat-absorbent paper towels.

We staggered back onto the dance floor like wounded soldiers—bruised, dazed, or fortified with alcohol, hoping for courage.

The raffle setup was cheesy, and we pretended to hate it like we pretended to hate the glowing bracelets slowly dulling on our wrists.

Behind the table setup for the ticket draw, Mrs. Coates—who we were pretty sure had volunteered to man the locker room entrances just so she could go in whenever she needed to sneak a drink—kept nodding off in her chair.

Coach Radner and Judd French took turns announcing the Balladeers, reading off clues about each of the volunteering swimmers so we could guess who was next to the stage.

The DJ fed us some Jeopardy! knockoff sound effects to build suspense, and then—bang!

—one of the swimmers would burst into view from the locker room, arms up and grinning, and every time we fucking lost it, like each was a free cruise we’d picked from behind Door Number Three.

We were disappointed that Noah Landry wasn’t among them. He was sitting alone on the risers, hunched over his phone, carving a protective wall with his posture. Well, not alone exactly; the Student Council Mafia had seized on him like pigeons on a breadcrumb.

Ryan Hawthorne drew Reese Steeler-Cox’s name.

We made jokes about how many tickets she must have purchased— if she and her mom hadn’t devised some other way to rig the system.

But Aiden Teller drew the name of a freshman named Maddie Lapinski who hadn’t even been named one of the school’s most desirable Minnows.

She had blond hair so long it almost touched her waist and a pretty face that was the color of a fatal sunburn as she took the stage.

We could swear she was even crying a little, like someone who’d just been given news of a lifesaving organ transplant.

@badprincess: Girl needs to breathe

@skyediva: Anyone know CPR??

@spinn_doctor: I do

@mememeup: no you don’t

Jeremiah Greene drew Angie Peele’s name—an enormously controversial pick since she was rumored to be hooking up with Ryan Hawthorne all fall.

Then freshman Ethan Gregory drew Skyler Matthews’s name, and we erupted.

It felt like placing a team in the World Cup, watching her maneuver to the stage grinning like a maniac.

We suggested that the mods rename her handle to @cradlerobber, as a joke.

The raffle went on. Charlotte Anderson and Brianna Rourke, two of Reese’s Student Council Mafia watchdogs, both got picked and joined Reese onstage in a bedlam of squealing.

But Cole Hughes drew Shawna Locke’s name, announcing it into the microphone with a slight cough, where it landed on the crowd like a hammer; Shawna Locke was a desperate hanger-on and a walking field of acne.

All in all, we were inclined to think the raffle was legit.

Then it was JJ Hammill’s turn. “Give it up for JJ Hammill!” Coach Radner rolled JJ’s name into a full sentence as the DJ cued JJ’s entrance music, and a thudding bass line kicked out our eardrums.

We turned to the locker room doors expectantly.

Nothing.

The rhythmic thump of the music dulled into long seconds. We waited.

But the locker room door didn’t open.

“Let’s hear it for JJ!” Radner repeated, a little louder, which only made the microphone kick back a screech of reverb. Still, JJ didn’t come. The applause petered off as we stood there in confusion.

Radner gestured for the DJ to cut off the music. For a brief, unnerving second, the room was silent.

“Hello? JJ?” Radner scanned the crowd as if JJ might be hiding among us. “Anyone know where JJ is? Anyone?”

We all turned instinctively to Noah. Only then did Noah look up and realize that we were all staring at him, waiting for his answer.

“No idea,” he said.

Now Radner tipped the microphone away from his mouth a few inches. But it was still enough to land his voice at Noah’s feet. “Well, can you try finding him?”

“Me?” Noah frowned. “Why me?”

“Unless you want to step in as a replacement,” Radner said. “I’m sure the ladies wouldn’t mind.” He turned back to the crowd. “Would you, ladies?”

High-decibel enthusiasm kept Noah from responding for almost thirty seconds. “I don’t dance,” he said.

This was news to us.

Coach Radner was sweating under the lights. “Has anyone seen JJ?” he repeated.

Reese Steeler-Cox said loudly, “Has anyone seen Bailey ?” That drew a laugh.

“Or Kennedy?” someone called out.

The word threesome surfed the crowd on a break of snickering.

Someone shouted that the chaperones should check the parking lot.

Mara Gaines, a senior on the cheerleading squad, announced that she’d seen lights in the construction trailer permanently moored between Aquatics and the rest of the athletics center.

We saw a skirmish of discomfort work through the chaperones.

Principal Hammill disappeared into the hall.

Sofia Young, who had been sneaking to the parking lot to take swigs from a vodka bottle concealed behind the planters, announced that Kennedy had gone home with her parents. She’d left at the same time as Akash.

It was the first we’d heard that Akash had ditched out early.

@mememeup: does anyone know what happened?

@spinn_doctor: don’t @ me.

@mememeup: we weren’t

@bassicrhythm: wtf. His parents were supposed to be my ride ...

@pawsandclaws: did something happen, @goodnightsky? Details??

But Sofia didn’t know, or was too drunk to remember.

Vice Principal Edwards stepped in to draw for JJ Hammill. When he announced Bailey Lawrence’s name, we lost it. It was fate. It was toxic. It was true love. What were the odds?

“I guess Bailey owes me a dance,” Edwards said, and we all laughed with him.

The locker room door burst open suddenly, and JJ slid out, arms open, giving off I’m-sorry-to-be-so-awesome-you-had-to-wait-for-me Coachella mainstage vibes.

Bailey materialized at the same time—from where, we couldn’t say—and we fell aside in waves like she was Moses walking toward the Promised Land.

JJ bowed, and Bailey took his hand and did a spin that ended in mouth-to-mouth. Vice Principal Edwards leaped forward to separate them—a second and a half of gorgeous video that lived on for months as one of our favorite memes. Whatever he said had no prayer against the volume of the crowd.

There was no doubt about it: they were both nuts. Someday they’d probably kill each other. Their relationship was that psycho.

That’s why it was fate.

And we had to admit, we were even a little jealous.

Doesn’t everyone want to be loved like that?

Alec Nye was the last Balladeer to draw. By then the whole thing had the feel of anticlimax.

Then Alec Nye plucked a raffle ticket and read the winner into the microphone.

“Lucy Vale,” he said and flipped the ticket around in his fingers to face the audience. And even though her name was way too small to see from even a few feet away, he stood there holding it up to the crowd—as if he knew somehow that proof would be important.

Lucy didn’t want to join Alec onstage.

“I didn’t enter the raffle,” she kept saying as a bunch of us were trying to steer her toward the stage. “Someone must have put my name in.”

“Uh huh.” Savannah Savage gave Lucy a nudge toward the stage. Even she didn’t believe it. How could she? Someone must have put my name in was a punchline, a meme, like asking for a friend .

The Student Council had already whisked away the drawing table. Now we were all waiting for Lucy. Coach Radner took the microphone again and gestured for the raffle ticket Alec Nye was holding.

“Lucy Vale,” he said, “come on up.” A few people echoed him, shouting for Lucy.

“I didn’t enter,” Lucy said, raising her voice a little louder.

The crowd opened up and then gobbled Lucy up, a physical pressure of bodies that kept her moving toward the stage.

“Someone must have put my name in.” Weirdly, the fact that she kept saying it seemed like proof it wasn’t true—like someone loudly claiming an alibi for a murder that hadn’t yet been discovered.

Or the first person to sniff a fart and declare a culprit.

Lucy reached the stage just as the other Balladeers took to the dance floor with their dates.

Briefly we saw her argue first with Alec Nye and then with Coach Radner, who made it clear with a hand gesture that the issue was below his pay grade.

By then the DJ was softening the mood with the first chords of the night’s final slow song.

We saw Lucy shaking her head and Alec Nye’s smile growing tighter and tighter, like it was stretched over a balloon.

At first we figured she was just embarrassed; she’d been claiming for weeks that she had no interest in Alec Nye.

Or maybe she’d been hoping to dance with another swimmer—possibly Noah Landry.

But the more Lucy argued, the more we wondered whether she really hadn’t put her name in for the raffle.

Maybe someone else had bought her a ticket.

Either way, she wasn’t caving. Alec Nye’s face was dark with anger as he followed her off the stage. Lucy tried to skirt the dance floor, hemming close to the bleachers where some of us were standing around, trying to make it look like we didn’t care we had no one to dance with.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not so fast.” Nye caught up and stepped in front of Lucy. “You owe me a dance.”

“I don’t dance,” Lucy said. She started to turn away again. This time when he caught her arm, he held it there.

“Come on, Lucy. Don’t embarrass me.” He was so much bigger than her, he had to bend over to get close. He looked like the wolf trying to convince Little Red Riding Hood to stay. “You’re the one who put your name in the raffle.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Alec Nye’s smile looked sharp. “It’s mandatory, Vale. No objections.”

“I don’t want to dance.” She wrenched away from him.

It was maybe the first time in Alec Nye’s life a girl had turned him down. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we just didn’t hear about it. Maybe he wore them down. Maybe it was mandatory .

So this time when she turned again, Nye slid up behind her and put an arm around her chest so he could talk right into her ear.

So she was pinned to his body. So that if we didn’t know what he was saying—which we didn’t until the following year—it would have looked like they were really close, like they knew each other, like this was normal. That is what it looked like.

Lucy said, “Let go of me.”

Nye said, “Only if we can dance.”

“Fine,” Lucy said. “Fine.”

“I mean it, Vale,” Alec said. “I’m trusting you.”

“I’ll fucking dance with you,” she said. “Just let me go.”

He did. But he grabbed her hand immediately. “Come on,” he said. “Relax. You might even enjoy yourself.”

We couldn’t tell what she was thinking while he led her toward the dance floor. She didn’t look angry, or sad, or happy, or upset. She looked totally blank. Like the silhouette a painting leaves after it’s been removed from a wall.

Nye went to pull her close.

And Lucy started doing the chicken dance.

She started really doing the chicken dance. She strutted and flapped. She knocked her knees together. She even squawked—right in his face.

For a second we were all too stunned to do anything but stare. Nye looked like he’d just gotten hit in the face with the back of a toilet seat. He looked mortified .

Lucy dropped her purse; it was interfering with the motion of her right wing. And she just kept on doing the chicken dance.

“Freak,” Nye said finally. “You’re a fucking nutjob .”

She did look crazy, for sure. She looked totally, absolutely, gloriously out of her mind.

And we will always swear, to this day, that when Noah Landry came through the crowd toward her, he was moving inside a single beam of perfect white light, carving through the colors and the crowd and the laughter like someone surfing a perfect wave.

“Looks like you could use a wingman,” he said. And Noah Landry—our Noah Landry, future Olympian, the boy who didn’t dance, didn’t break regimen, didn’t even Balladeer for the charity raffle—put his hands on his hips, started strutting, and let out a single triumphant squawk.

It was legend. It was magic. It was a real-life happy ending. That’s what we thought anyway.

Until almost exactly a year later when, sometime before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the Hawthornes’ guest bedroom, something happened to Lucy Vale.