Page 65 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Seven

We

S ometime during the holiday break, in the brutal, icy headlock of midwinter, Lucy Vale and her mother went to the police to report that Lucy had been sexually assaulted at a swim team party on New Year’s Eve.

Slowly the whispers curdled into terrible, poisonous accusations. Noah Landry had done things to Lucy Vale when she was passed out. JJ Hammill and Ryan Hawthorne had watched.

There was a video.

Lucy Vale was devastated.

Lucy Vale was lying.

Noah Landry was off the swim team. Noah Landry was going to jail.

Lucy Vale wanted revenge because Noah had dumped her in October.

Noah Landry wanted revenge because of the photos from Lucy’s old school.

It took days for the rumors to compound with any certainty.

For a while we lived with shudders of suspicion, hoping desperately that there had been some mistake—that Lucy Vale would come back to school, sheepish but smiling, ready to admit that she’d punked us.

But after Kyle Hannigan saw Sheriff Connelly and Lieutenant Steeler talking with Principal Hammill and Noah’s parents outside Administration, we knew.

Something had broken. Something had gone terribly wrong.

A national cold front dropped temperatures to below zero. The wind was as sharp as a razor. The sun was almost macabre, grinning in a frigid sky. We felt as if we were sleepwalking through an alternate reality, as if the worst imaginings of the internet had come to life around us.

We couldn’t bear to see what people were saying on the internet. We jumped whenever we got a new alert on Discord. All the news was bad—a darkening, a thickening of signs, all pointing to disaster.

@gustagusta: the sheriff was at Noah Landry’s house last night

@gustagusta: My mom saw the car on her way back from the grocery store

@badprincess: did you guys notice that the Strut Girls aren’t following Lucy on TikTok anymore?

@meeksmaster: the Sharks’ Facebook page is a blood bath

@meeksmaster: you should see some of these comments

@nononycky: the Sharks have a Facebook page? lol

@meeksmaster: it’s not funny

@meeksmaster: these people are unstable

@meeksmaster: they should all be rounded up and shot

@hannahbanana: this is like Jalliscoe’s wet dream

@brentmann: do we know for sure Lucy has no ties to Jalliscoe?

@badprincess: you really think she’s making everything up??

@brentmann: that’s what Bailey thinks. And Bailey’s her best friend

@ktcakes888: * was * her best friend

@spinn_doctor: I told you that Lucy Vale wasn’t as innocent as you guys thought

@nononycky: you told us that the Vales were con artists from Canada

@spinn_doctor: close enough

We didn’t know what Lucy Vale was doing or thinking during that time.

We didn’t know whether or not she intended to come back to school.

Nick Topornycky tried to wheedle information from Ceecee, Lieutenant Steeler’s wife and our front office mole, and reported uncharacteristic pushback and a completely novel commitment to following Administrative protocol.

@nononycky: she practically bit my head off

@gustagusta: nah. that would have involved standing up

Akash reported movement in the Vales’ house and lights burning in the windows.

But other than that, the place might have been abandoned.

There was no movement in or out. The Toyota hybrid and Lucy Vale’s used Honda Civic remained immobile in the garage.

Lucy Vale’s bike stayed on the front porch.

When it snowed, the front walk went uncleared.

Although Akash did report seeing footprints around the house, as if someone had been circling late at night.

The trash bins never even made it down the driveway on collection day.

We debated texting Lucy. But we couldn’t.

We all felt too awkward. By then we carried around the contaminant of guilt; from our server had seeped the old rumors about Loosey Lucy .

Not a nice girl at all. Not trustworthy.

A loose cannon. Prone to picking fights, starting shit, getting into trouble. Troubled.

Of course, we all felt at least partially responsible, although none of us said so, not out loud. Earlier that fall, as rumors about Lucy’s connection to the Faraday case had continued to fester, breeding gaseous suspicion that soured our moods, we’d turned on Lucy Vale.

She had rejected us. She’d leveraged our friendships, our welcomes, to stratospheric heights of popularity.

She’d humiliated Akash at the Winters Dance.

She’d claimed for months that she had no interest in dating, and especially no interest in dating a swimmer.

She’d pretended not to have entered the Balladeers’ Auction, then brilliantly manipulated the draw to her benefit.

She’d refused to contribute to our podcast.

Slowly our resentments had stirred into whispers, creeping insinuations about Lucy and her mom.

Our fixation with Lucy had taken a darker turn, turning petty and vindictive.

We’d snarked about Lucy in private. We’d floated insinuations about her in text threads and DMs. Lucy Vale had still been a Strut Girl, immune from direct attack, protected by the buffering force of Bailey Lawrence’s popularity.

But within our Discord, we’d seethed. We were like a body suddenly inflamed with allergy; the Vales’ presence was an irritant, a foreign object. Dangerous.

We’d criticized what Lucy wore to school.

We’d trolled her performances with the dance team—Lucy nearly always fumbled her moves—and reported on every awkward hallway interaction between Lucy and Noah Landry.

When we heard that the threatening letters had tailed Lucy back to school, found their way into her locker, we’d been unpitying.

Instead we’d ridiculed her for complaining to Administration—a sign of weakness and, in our opinion, hypocrisy.

@highasakyle: funny that Lucy’s crying to admin now about bullying

@highasakyle: she and her mom weren’t so hype on making friends when they spent all summer protesting the Steeler pavilion

@spinn_doctor: what do you expect from democrats?

@spinn_doctor: they’re always changing their position

Whereas over the summer we’d hunted for proof that would discredit our online attackers, now we tried to prove a connection between the Vales and the Faradays, tried to find evidence that the Vales might be profiting from the media around the case.

The more we leaned in to an ugly picture of the Vales and their intentions, the more Lucy’s reputation was colored with stories about why she’d left her old school and muddied with rumors about her family’s connection to the Swifts and the Faradays, the more Noah Landry sharpened in contrast into a figure of almost biblical perfection, we forgot our temporary misgivings about Casino Night, dismissed the memory of Noah’s voice rapping out across the parking lot as he seized Lucy.

The impression of Lucy, huddled pitifully at his feet, evaporated.

Only Akash still insisted that Noah Landry was, in fact, a fraud.

@kash_money: he’s a predator

@kash_money: he only went out with Lucy because he made a bet with Nye just before the Winters

@kash_money: it’s all about the win with him

@geminirising: who told you that? Lucy?

@kash_money: Savannah Savage

@hannahbanana: I still can’t believe she follows you

@geminirising: okay, but Savannah probably heard it from Lucy

@spinn_doctor: say it with me, people

@spinn_doctor: Check Your Sources

@spinn_doctor: sounds like more #liesbyLucy

@brentmann: what do you expect her to say? She just got dumped

@kash_money: first of all, please don’t ever use that hashtag again @spinn_doctor

@kash_money: second of all, Noah didn’t dump Lucy. She dumped him

@spinn_doctor: see above re: #liesbyLucy

@kash_money: what happened to #believeallwomen?

@spinn_doctor: rationality?

We didn’t want to side with Alex Spinnaker sheerly on principle, and definitely not in public. His hashtags were dumb. But we couldn’t argue that he was right about Lucy.

Lucy Vale was not on our side.

But we couldn’t imagine what had compelled Lucy Vale to go to the police.

It felt to us like a dramatic miscalculation—an attempt to regain some degree of power over Noah Landry that had badly backfired.

It was impossible to believe that Noah Landry, our Noah Landry, was responsible for hurting Lucy.

The accusations were outlandish, almost cliché, direct parrots of the rumors our swimmers had been dodging ever since Nina Faraday had vanished.

If something had happened to Lucy Vale on New Year’s Eve, we felt sure it was a mistake. A misunderstanding.

After all, we were all there. We were all jostling around the beer pong setup in the basement, or refilling Solo cups in the kitchen, or packing bowls and smoking cigarettes on the back porch.

If something had happened to Lucy Vale—something bad, something wrong —then surely, surely, we would have known. We would have felt it. We would have heard something. We would have seen a disruption at the party, a sudden thrust of people, a clamor to help out.

We were not bad people.

We would never, ever simply stand by if a girl were getting raped.