Page 51 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
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O nce Lucy Vale and Noah Landry officially started dating our sophomore year, they quickly became Woodward’s it couple, even dethroning Bailey Lawrence and JJ Hammill.
We didn’t know how Bailey felt about being upstaged by her best friend, but no one could deny that Noah and Lucy were perfect.
They were the kind of couple we saw in the rom-coms we denied watching and read about in YA books we pretended to find cheesy.
As southern Indiana slowly thawed from the clutch of winter, as the fields greened and the sun elasticized the daylight, our moods turned from rivalry to romance.
The Sharks swept the state championships, drawing a record turnout of more than a thousand people.
We’d all joined the flotilla of traffic traveling to the event in Morgan County with Shark decals plastered to our bumpers and school flags snapping from our trunks.
So many people showed up that the crowd overflowed into the parking lot.
Some of the late arrivals were stranded outside in the cold, trying to decrypt the action inside from the cadence of cheering and the muffled resonance of the loudspeakers announcing the results.
Noah Landry had beaten two of his own record-shattering times in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle events.
But JJ Hammill, Alec Nye, Ryan Hawthorne, and even Aiden Teller were also at the tops of their games.
Alec Nye accepted an offer to swim for North Carolina.
Aiden Teller was heading to Michigan. It was the last time either boy would compete for the Sharks, and their swim caps were decorated with send-off messages written in Sharpie by girls more popular than we were.
They were gods in the water. We were vindicated, triumphant, and taking home the trophy for our third year in a row.
We said goodbye to the official swim season for another year.
We went out for new teams and swapped extracurriculars.
Cicadas came up in heavy swells, burrowing up from the dirt like an upward-banking tide.
They infested our trees, blurring the bark behind the motion of their bodies.
We crunched over their discarded shells in the parking lot.
Between classes, we made games of swinging at them with our book bags.
Spring was a season of sex and mating rituals.
Akash and Delancey McNamara started hooking up right before Easter. We were happy for him, even if we sensed that he had never quite gotten over Lucy Vale. It was almost compulsive how he kept track of Noah Landry and Lucy’s relationship.
@kash_money: did anyone hear that Noah and Lucy had a fight this weekend?
We hadn’t.
@kash_money: Does anyone think it’s weird that Lucy goes to all of Noah’s club team practices? It’s like she doesn’t even have a life anymore
We didn’t think it was weird. We thought it was romantic.
@kash_money: Rachel Vale ran into my mom at the post office today and they started talking about Lucy. I don’t think Rachel likes Noah Landry
@gustagusta: why would she?
@gustagusta: Rachel Vale doesn’t like the Sharks
It was a difficult truth to accept. But in the early spring, as the tension between Rachel Vale and the Steeler-Coxes exploded into open warfare, we were forced to come to the same conclusion: Rachel Vale had radical views about Coach Steeler, about the Faraday case, and about the swim team in general.
For that reason, when we heard people saying that Rachel Vale might be behind the troll account ANONYM1698—which for months had spammed the Sharks’ social media accounts, the County News website, and the broader internet with conspiracy theories about steroid use and a culture of sexual violence—we assumed that the Steeler-Coxes were yet again to blame for the rumors.
Rachel Vale had recently declared her intentions to protest the construction of a Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion at the Aquatics Center, a controversy that besieged our parents and inboxes with all-caps emails and petitions to support one side or another.
But ultimately rumors were like every other virus: what made them deadly wasn’t where they began but how contagious they were.
The evidence that Rachel Vale and ANONYM1698 were the same person was circumstantial but convincing, at least among those inclined to distrust the Vales anyway.
ANONYM1698 had first popped up online in July of the previous year—about a month before the Vales first moved to Granger.
They didn’t write like a normal online troll.
Even more concerningly, they seemed to have a suspicious amount of inside information about the swim team, both past and present.
Only a journalist, the theory went, could write so dispassionately about hearsay, elegantly giving rumor the gloss of reported fact .
Only a journalist could produce such detailed point-by-point references to accusations more than a decade old.
Only a journalist could argue so persuasively that the system of booster funds, and the continued flow of big money tied to our high school swim team’s ascendance, held Administration hostage to their wins and incentivized the county to overlook their misdeeds.
Only a journalist—or someone waging a detailed and protracted campaign against our reputation, dedicated to spinning every story into damning proof and to displaying every failure in the most unflattering light.
Or both. The two possibilities weren’t mutually exclusive.
It was always possible that Lucy Vale and her mother had taken the Faraday House with a hidden agenda and the intention to bring our swim team down.
Still, we championed Lucy Vale and Noah Landry’s coupledom. We rooted for them.
To us, Rachel Vale’s perceived disapproval of the Sharks made the Noah-and-Lucy endgame even more romantic. We loved a low-key Romeo and Juliet vibe.
We swooned over the way Noah decorated Lucy’s locker on Valentine’s Day.
We made their Instagram posts our #relationshipgoals.
We voted them onto junior homecoming court.
We stood in a fan around them as they took to the floor after winning, shuffling awkwardly in circles under lights that glittered through their plastic crowns, and heckled them until they agreed to reprise the chicken dance.
We thought they would get married someday.
Somehow Noah Landry and Lucy Vale were not like other couples.
For the most part, we tracked school romances by digital deduction.
We knew whether Bailey Lawrence and JJ Hammill were on or off again by whether they were following each other on any given week.
We could identify Savannah Savage’s admirers by the accounts that left her heart-eyed and flame emojis.
We knew who was hanging out and who was breaking up by the photos and videos they were tagged in.
We were fluent in the Morse code of posted memes and chosen camera angles, hashtags and viral sound clips.
We swiped and scrolled to a revolving picture of heartbreaks and hookups, feuds and friendships.
But Noah Landry and Lucy Vale’s relationship was somehow obscure, even as they became the most watched couple at Woodward. They existed in their own space, in a dimension bounded entirely by his regimen and her devotion to him. They were the most private public couple we knew.
They were always together—in the SLD Tutoring Center between classes, in church on Sundays, in the lunch line.
Lucy went to all of Noah’s practices, doubling over her laptop in the bleachers while Noah swam endless laps, working milliseconds off his already deadly times.
When we saw them in town or at the lake, they were always locked in private conversation or physically entwined, arms entangled, fingers interlaced, foreheads touching until they looked like a single being.
When they showed up in JJ Hammill’s or Bailey Lawrence’s social media posts, they were always standing a little ways off from their friends, usually in the background. Touching. Always touching.
Noah walked Lucy to her classes. He walked her to the bus. Lucy stopped taking the bus. Noah Landry’s parents began picking her up in the morning and dropping her home at night after Noah finished practice.
Every time we saw them together, they were holding hands. In the cafeteria, they sat practically on top of each other. We heard that when they were apart, even for half an hour, Noah Landry texted Lucy to check on her.
We didn’t think it was weird.
We thought they were in love.