Page 63 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Five

We

T o be clear, we don’t know what happened at that party. Even at the time, we didn’t know. How could we? We saw through the narrow windows of our perspectives, shaving the night into fragments.

And whatever happened or didn’t happen to Lucy Vale happened behind a locked door, inside a room we couldn’t access.

Rumors about a New Year’s Eve party at Ryan Hawthorne’s house seemed to materialize alongside our desire for one, like we’d all collectively given birth to the idea.

Nate Stern heard that Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne were going away for the weekend.

Nick Topornycky heard something about a keg.

Sofia Young heard that Ryan Hawthorne, who would be out of the pool for at least a month, had painkillers.

Slowly the party grew in our awareness like a vein of mold, colonizing our attention until we were obsessed; we had to go.

It was the tail end of Christmas break. Indiana was locked in a cold front that sucked the air from our lungs and shocked the world into stillness.

Our cars sputtered and wheezed in the mornings.

Our eyeballs gummed to our lids. For days we’d been locked in our bedrooms, trapped in a prison of YouTube, TikTok, and porn.

We needed out.

Ryan Hawthorne lived in Green Gables Ridge, one of the fancy neighborhoods that backed up to the golf course, not far from the Steeler-Coxes and Alex Spinnaker. Driving up to the party, we half expected to be seized and interrogated. Most of us felt like interlopers in a different world.

But we convened without incident in packed cars with the heat blasting so hard it fried our eyeballs and the sting of cheap alcohol burning our throats.

Cars backstopped the driveway and flowed all the way down the street.

The lawn was rutted with tire marks. Every window scalded with light.

We could hear the music reverberating in our lungs as soon as we climbed out of our cars.

Instantly we’d arrived.

The living room was hot, and eddying with classmates mysteriously transformed by the environment into strangers we didn’t know and didn’t know how to talk to. We shed our coats and scarves into a bedroom, into the bedroom where Lucy Vale would later go to sleep off her drunken night.

We didn’t remember seeing Lucy arrive, only that we knew she was there, and drunk.

Very, very drunk.

For us it was like a scrim came down at that party, revealing Lucy’s true self.

Lucy was wearing heavy makeup and laughing too loudly.

She kept asking around for cigarettes. It was as if she’d somehow collapsed into the rumors that had spread since we’d all seen her old photographs, as if Lucy Vale in real life had finally submitted to the Lucy Vale of our imaginations.

As if finally, at last, we knew her.

We felt vaguely sorry for her and slightly vindicated. Lucy Vale had been notched incrementally down the power chain, which meant, in some ways, the rest of us had climbed it.

A few of us saw Lucy Vale taking shots in the kitchen.

Olivia Howard asked Bailey Lawrence if Lucy was okay when, a little while later, Lucy appeared to be nodding off on Bailey’s shoulder.

JJ Hammill came into the kitchen looking for an extra trash can in case Lucy needed to throw up.

Akash saw JJ and Ryan helping Lucy into the first-floor bedroom, the one that served as a home office for Hawthorne’s mom.

The door stayed closed afterward. We remembered hearing that Lucy Vale had passed out.

We remembered that Holly Markeson, a senior, was puking in the downstairs bathroom and that the upstairs toilet was clogged.

There was an empty pack of cigarettes puddled in a nest of soiled toilet paper and piss across the toilet seat.

The boys were peeing outside behind a trim wall of boxwood near the patio.

We remembered Jeremiah Greene shouting that the music was too loud, that the cops would come if we weren’t careful.

The threat of cops was an undertow that kept pulling us into periodic panic.

The cops were coming. Someone had called the cops.

The cops would bust us for drinking. We had to run.

No one could be outside. We had to get the beer off the patio. The neighbors had complained.

Rumors bloomed and dissipated. Still, more people arrived. At times we couldn’t move. We were rat-packed between walls of people, clotting the stairs and the hallway, weaving in and out of the bedrooms. Breaking things. Stealing things. Getting tossed out and beaten up.

It was chaotic and liberating. We were there. We were part of it. We stood in line for the keg, submerged in a trash can full of ice on the back porch. We tried to get drunk, quickly. We needed to forget our discomfort. We needed to forget that we didn’t quite belong.

None of us knew that Noah Landry had come. None of us remembered seeing him. All we knew was that the door to the first-floor bedroom stayed closed for hours after Lucy Vale had entered to sleep it off, and none of us could get our coats.

Later Peyton Neely and Sofia Young saw Lucy Vale stumbling through the snow, flanked by some of the swimmers, who were practically carrying her toward a waiting car. What car, they couldn’t say. But Akash was positive that Bailey Lawrence had told him that Lucy Vale was going home with Noah.

Of all of us, Akash was the most concerned about Lucy’s drinking. Even though he and Lucy barely spoke anymore, he still couldn’t quite shake her. He’d noticed she was missing at the party for a while. He’d heard, like the rest of us, that she was lying down in a bedroom.

Around eleven o’clock, he’d worked up the courage to ask Bailey whether Lucy needed a ride home. Bailey had told him that Lucy was fine, and Noah Landry had come to get her.

So Akash left to drive the Courtlands home and thought nothing more about it. What was he supposed to do?

If Lucy wanted to go home with her ex-boyfriend, she wanted to go home with her ex-boyfriend.