Page 61 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

She took one step. She took another.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” Noah said. He reached out. Grabbed her.

That’s when it happened. Sofia’s phone trumpeted a short blast of music from her bag, which she’d abandoned somewhere in the darkness.

Noah yanked.

Lucy slipped.

Or she slipped, and he pulled.

Later we could never tell the exact order of events. Everything happened too fast. Noah cursed. Lucy yelped. We were looking around for Sofia’s bag, trying to silence the ringtone. By the time we looked up, Noah Landry was staring in our direction, and Lucy was on the ground.

“Hello?” he called out. “Is someone down there?”

After a long beat, Kaitlyn Courtland spoke up. “Sofia’s puking. We think she took something.”

Noah Landry said nothing. For a beat he stood there staring, maybe picking out our forms in the darkness.

“Lucy slipped,” he said and bent down to help her to her feet. Then he put his arm around her, and she seemed to disappear into his jacket, engulfed inside his shadow. For a second something stirred again in our subconscious—a memory of something, an impression we couldn’t name.

Yanked or slipped . A small difference but important. Critical even.

We were there. We’d seen it happen. But we didn’t know for sure .

The memory had already turned into a jigsaw of different pieces; we remembered it happening one way, then another.

Noah had grabbed her, pulled her so hard she’d lost her balance.

Lucy had lost her balance, and Noah had grabbed her, pulled her, trying to keep her on her feet.

Impossible to know. Lucy was changing—had changed—in our imaginations. Lucy was slippery .

Noah was probably just trying to help.

Sofia Young’s phone began to ring again. Peyton finally located Sofia’s bag, abandoned on the asphalt between two parked cars.

“It’s my mom,” Sofia said. She wasn’t slurring anymore at least. “Don’t answer it.”

Up the hill, Noah was piloting Lucy back toward the cafeteria. She was moving carefully, limping with one hand on her lower back. We thought of calling out and asking whether she was okay.

Her voice thinned in the distance. We couldn’t hear what she was saying, only Noah’s response.

“Your funny bone’s in your elbow, silly,” Noah said. His voice sounded the way it usually did. Warm. Gentle. Sure. “That was your tailbone.”

We were freezing. We felt suddenly anxious. We’d been gone for too long. Our parents would notice we were missing. Olivia and Hannah returned with rolls of paper towels for Evie Grant, pilfered from the auditorium bathroom, which had been mercifully unlocked.

“We saw Lucy and Noah in the parking lot,” they announced. We said nothing.

Evie was still tearful. There was no way she could return with vomit all over her. It was all Sofia’s fault for being such a fuckup.

We interceded before things could get ugly. We helped clean Evie and Sofia up. Sofia told us she was feeling much better. She hadn’t taken much, she said. Just a few pills and some vodka.

We told her she would wind up like Mr. Cross if she wasn’t careful. She didn’t seem to remember that she’d mentioned him and implied that Aiden Teller knew something about the drugs and Mr. Cross’s OD—just like the troll ANONYM1698 had been claiming online for months. And we didn’t want to push it.

If Teller was wrapped up in something like that, we didn’t want to know.

We scattered. Olivia and Hannah stayed with Sofia outside Aquatics, feeding her sips of ginger ale.

We swore to fend off Ms. Young until Sofia was sober enough to return to the cafeteria.

We promised to look around for Sofia’s boyfriend.

Evie Grant went to find her parents; she was done.

By then most of us were tired. The night had soured.

The cafeteria lights looked suddenly flimsy in the darkness, like a movie set, an illusion that would dissipate before morning.

It was close to midnight when we got a notification from Peyton Neely. A single message after hours of inactivity. By then most of us were sleeping. But a few of us saw our phones light up, casting a small neon window into the dark of our bedrooms.

@geminirising: hey. do you guys remember all those storm birds years ago?

We knew at once what she was talking about.

Four years earlier, back-to-back tornadoes had driven the Ohio River over its banks.

Floodwaters had sheeted the streets, spun away mailboxes, uprooted whole gardens.

The same water had fingered through porous gaps in the drywall of Akash’s old house and floated their living room furniture on four-foot eddies.

As a result, Akash’s parents had decided to relocate to Lawrence Place where it intersected with Lily Lane at the Faraday House.

But the Sandhus’ old house was just one of the many casualties of that storm season.

The winds had blown hundreds of nests from their branches.

Dozens and dozens of infant birds, not yet grown enough to fly, had died inside a hundred-mile-an-hour centrifuge of debris, dirt, and loose trash.

Some of the birds had tried to fly anyway; their wings were cleaved apart, stripped from the jointing of their spines, flayed in crazy directions.

In the morning, we’d found them. Dozens of them.

Dark, all dark, with grit and storm sludge and blood.

Who knew what color their feathers had been?

All of them broken, their wings cracked in strange directions or almost entirely ripped away.

They had lain with small, sorry faces turned into the pavement under a sweep of dirty feathers.

They had almost looked as if they were covering their eyes.

As if they had died mourning something they were too horrified or embarrassed to face.

@mememeup: yeah, i remember the birds

@mememeup: why?

We waited for an answer, but none came. We figured maybe Peyton had gone to sleep. We tried to sleep too, but our thoughts were full of agitation, the sweep of dark memories.

We hadn’t thought about those birds in years.

Not until Peyton Neely reminded us. Not until Lucy Vale, beautiful Lucy Vale—we agreed she was beautiful now—limped up the hill on Casino Night, pinioned beneath the dark wing of Noah’s tuxedo jacket, her face invisible, turned into the shadow of his arm.