Page 66 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Eight

We

I n the aftermath of Ryan Hawthorne’s party, we suffocated.

Every day was dulled by the dread of something terrible arriving.

Information came in gasps. Whispers about the new sheriff covertly investigating.

Rumors that Ryan Hawthorne had been placed on suicide watch.

Reports that Noah Landry had been called to the sheriff’s department twice.

Our parents spoke in whispers about the poor boys’ families . The Landrys went to church. The Hawthornes hired a lawyer. JJ Hammill and Bailey Lawrence came to school holding hands.

Bailey Lawrence and Savannah Savage blocked all of Lucy Vale’s socials.

For days the gates of 88 Lily Lane stayed closed.

Again Akash reported seeing phantom footprints in the light dusting of snow outside the house and lights on in the upstairs windows.

But no one answered when Mrs. Sandhu finally insisted on walking over to check on their neighbors.

The second time she attempted, even the gates were locked.

Someone had taken a marker to Lucy’s mailbox. Mrs. Sandhu wasn’t sure that the Vales had noticed; junk mail was overflowing in the snow. So she directed Akash to go out there with bleach and a toothbrush.

He almost lost a finger to frostbite, he told us, just trying to scrub off the first whore .

Lucy did, eventually, try and come back to school. That was in the early days of January, before the Investigative Committee announced its involvement—when the rumors about Lucy Vale’s report were still nebulous and the details unclear.

Sofia Young was the first person to see her. Sofia was late to school that day, as she often was junior year. She’d started smoking weed behind the athletics complex before school with some of the senior stoners. Her new crowd.

We were surprised to see her back on Discord.

She’d dropped off the server again right after Casino Night, soon after she first started hooking up with Harry Oakes, who sold pills to half the upperclassmen.

But suddenly she was back, with no apology and no explanation for why she’d logged off. Nothing.

Still, we forgave her right away when she told us that she’d just run into Lucy Vale at her locker.

@goodnightsky: so awkward

@goodnightsky: what was I supposed to say?

@badprincess: oh my god. Did she try and Talk to you??

@goodnightsky: no tfg

@goodnightsky: she didn’t even look at me

@lululemonaide: how does she look??

@goodnightsky: she cut her hair

@goodnightsky: other than that, normal

@ktcakes888: what is she thinking??

@gustagusta: you gotta give it to her

@gustagusta: she’s got some balls

@badprincess: that’s sexist

@gustagusta: save it for the Investigative Committee

All week Lucy Vale moved through the halls on a tailwind of whispers.

The athletes fired verbal bullets at her through clenched teeth.

Whore. Liar. It was as if the rumors calcified around her, took solid form, persuading us by her presence: Lucy Vale had accused Noah Landry, our star swimmer, one of the nicest guys in school, of doing terrible, unthinkable things.

She’d made accusations against JJ Hammill, her best friend’s boyfriend. She’d roped Ryan Hawthorne into it.

She was trying to get them in trouble. She was trying to get them expelled.

Lucy Vale had an agenda.

Day by day, graffiti thickened on her locker.

We were too afraid to talk to her, to ask her what she was doing, to ask why, to beg her to tell us it had all been a mistake.

Talking to Lucy Vale, acknowledging her in any way, was social suicide.

The Strut Girls stared her down in the halls.

At lunch they piled their belongings on the cafeteria chair that had once been hers, a clear signal that there was no space left at the table.

We heard that Noah Landry had been warned to avoid her at all costs.

We heard that he’d asked Coach Radner to bring his lunch down to Aquatics, where he and the other Sharks took refuge during their free periods.

They needn’t have bothered. We never saw Lucy between periods.

We heard that she’d started hiding out in the nurse’s office or the library to eat her lunch.

We couldn’t have talked to Lucy even if we’d wanted to. But we didn’t.

We’d welcomed her to Woodward. We’d nominated her to the homecoming court. We’d made her a Minnow, one of the most desirable girls at Woodward. We’d believed that Lucy Vale had deserved it all. We hadn’t even been jealous when she’d started dating the most popular guy in school.

And all along, Lucy Vale was pretending to be something and someone she was not.

To us, that was the same as lying.

By then, we had agreed: we couldn’t trust a word Lucy said.