Page 53 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Three

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O ver the summer, we lost sight of Lucy and Noah a bit. We fractured into subsets and individual members. Loosed from Woodward’s gravitational pull and the unifying force of shared homework assignments and social scandals, we drifted aimlessly through days of punishing heat.

Southern Indiana was suffering its worst drought in decades after a dry winter and a spring of puffed-up clouds and clear skies.

Byron Lake was striped with brown as it gasped down to the sediment.

The news tracked the Ohio River levels as they ebbed and denuded banks rifted into giant cakes of mud and then dust. The fields browned and crops withered.

Our AC was always breaking, always dripping water down our windowsills, always on the fritz.

Our parents yelled at us to turn off lights, to use a fan, to conserve the water when we were brushing our teeth.

Our only path to wholeness was through the internet, through our phone screens, through our fingers.

We used our phones practically naked in dark rooms, sweating next to the must of insufficient air circulated from our gasping fans.

We constantly worried about what we were missing.

We were sure that we were missing something vital—a boyfriend or girlfriend; a path and a purpose; the chance to be seen and to matter.

The girls on the server made a competition out of culling pictures of the Sharks with their shirts off.

The boys claimed reverse sexism. The girls claimed retribution, payback for Luke Hawthorne’s rumored Discord server, which none of us had actually been invited to join, where members ranked girls by hotness and exchanged their pictures.

It was news whenever we saw Lucy and Noah together—the town parade on the Fourth of July, for example, when Lucy and the Strut Girls shimmied on a float skinned with paper roses.

They were just behind the open truck bed towing Noah Landry and the other star swimmers, sweating through their face paint next to a beaming Marnie Steeler, Jay Steeler’s widow.

Olivia Howard rang up Lucy Vale out at the PetSmart when she came in for cat food and reported Noah lingering several feet behind her, idly picking through the cat toys before settling on a squeaky mouse.

Mid-July, Akash reported that Lucy, Bailey, Savannah, and Mia were sunning in the backyard of the Faraday House.

He snapped covert pictures of the four in their bikinis, barely visible behind the fan of green trees.

The Vales were in trouble for their water usage that summer.

An arc of sprinklers misted their lawn almost continuously.

Riots of new roses climbed the trellises again, and the azaleas burst open blossoms the color of purpling wounds.

Akash told us that the Strut Girls had seen him and had hailed him over. They wanted to talk to him, he told us, about notes the Vales were receiving in their mailbox.

@ktcakes888: what kind of notes?

@kash_money: threats

@kash_money: someone wants them to move

@lululemonaide: move houses? Or move towns?

@kash_money: towns, I guess. Lucy didn’t really give me details

@lululemonaide: ten bucks says the Steeler-Cox delegation

@lululemonaide: Mad because Rachel went public about naming the new pavilion after a known pervert

@nononycky: * alleged * pervert, please. Innocent until proven guilty lol

@badprincess: I bet it’s Reese

@badprincess: salty because Lucy got Noah Landry

@meeksmaster: it could be anyone

@meeksmaster: I know like twelve people who think the Vales should have stayed up north

@badprincess: you know twelve people?

Conversation meandered, sputtered, and stalled over the summer. We lost track of time and each other. We lost service driving into the woods to find fishing holes, most of them down to puddles.

Peyton Neely lost her grandmother to a stroke. Sofia Young’s father lost his job at the university after a student came forward with claims of sexual harassment.

We all lost our minds when Sofia Young took a break from Discord.

Nick Topornycky lost his virginity.

Some of us grew beards. Evie Grant grew C cups. We were growing up, and growing apart, and getting our driver’s licenses.

It was a summer of change. A summer of growth.

It was the summer we fought back and started a podcast.