Page 73 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Two

I t was late March when the alarm pierced our third-period classrooms, pitched lower and more urgent to signify the lockdown.

The sound crawled up our spinal cords and touched off immediate thoughts of death.

The automated message that spat through the loudspeakers instructed us to observe lockdown procedures and report to safe zones immediately.

We assumed it was a gun.

We assumed it was a him.

None of us were thinking of Lucy Vale. We listened for gunshots and startled at the report of distant locks clicking into place.

We heard the panicked drumbeat of sneakers in the hallway as other students rushed for safety from the cafeteria and the SLD Tutoring Center.

We touched our crosses and confessed our sins. We gripped hands and phones.

We were herded into closets, huddled like cattle for the slaughter, breathing the must of stale breath. We sent texts to our parents. We cursed the spotty service in our various hiding places—the art closet, the boiler room.

We really had to pee.

Minutes eked by. The hum of our nerves began to idle with boredom.

For the first time in weeks, our Discord server began sparking with conversation. Does anyone know anything? Can anyone hear anything? So typical of admin to go silent during a lockdown. Cowards .

Our hearts leapt when we saw @ktcakes888, @skyediva, and @kash_money asking for permission to rejoin the server.

The alert electrified us into sudden herd activity, like the touch of a cattle prod.

We crouched over our phones in locked classrooms. We ignored the imminence of death.

We stood strong in the face of a nameless terror who might be prowling the grounds with an AK-47, looking to take revenge for some nameless infraction or indifference.

We fired off messages to Spinnaker. Akash wants in. Let Akash into the server.

As usual Spinnaker was truculent, even during lockdown.

@spinn_doctor: Akash has to be verified, just like everybody else

@mememeup: screw your security, Spinnaker. This server is dying

@badprincess: we’re dying

@badprincess: we literally could be shot any second

@nononycky: heyyyy @badprincess is back

@badprincess: I never left

@badprincess: just haven’t been on

@mememeup: Let Akash in the server

@spinn_doctor: I’m not just going to roll out the red carpet now that he’s decided to grace us with his presence

@mememeup: good thing all you have to do is click admit

Spinnaker caved. We welcomed Akash with a confetti of emojis.

@nononycky: welcome to the lockdown party

@kash_money: are you guys okay? Do you know what’s going on?

@mememeup: I don’t hear any shooting

@badprincess: me neither

@lululemonaide: I wish they’d tell us what’s happening ...

@goodnightsky: did you guys miss me?

@goodnightsky: is everyone alive?

@mememeup: unfortunately

@mememeup: this closet is rank

We were miserable and elated. It was horrible and historic.

It was, we found out, a fire in the recycling bin and death to our beloved mascot. An abomination, but a relief nonetheless.

Once Administration released us from our classrooms and an encirclement of police cars and fire trucks logjammed our parking lot, we milled around while sheriff’s deputies cleared the buildings and members of the fire department clustered around the evidence: a blackened, still-smoking ruin, which we joked should be buried with a proper funeral for Sean the Shark.

We were electric with excitement, disaster narrowly averted.

We thought of Jalliscoe. Of podcasters. Of vengeful online agents persuaded by reports that the Sharks’ star swimmers had been doping for years.

Over the next two days, our Discord swelled again to forty-seven members. Spinnaker was forced by a vote of the returning majority to yield sole power as mod. Kaitlyn Courtland came back, reconfigured the server, and restored sanity to the threads.

Once again we were alive, powerful, and tethered to our phones, where the world was compressed to a typeface, flowing steadily to us through a stream of message alerts.

We had theories. We had arguments. Scarlett Hughes had pink eye, which she was convinced she’d picked up from the gym’s moldering equipment room, her refuge during the lockdown.

We quickly zeroed in on the idea that the fire had been an act of protest against the construction of the new Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion.

We’d heard that the recycling bin had been removed from the construction site before it was taken to Administration—to us a clear signal of meaningful intent.

The mascot, which had been adopted by the school during Coach Steeler’s reign, was an obvious and pointed target.

Then there was the timing, only days after Blood in the Water had dropped its last episode of season 2.

For the season finale, the hosts had interviewed Daniel Frisker, who’d actually swum with Tommy Swift under Coach Steeler for a few years.

According to Daniel Frisker, competitive high school swimming was rife with various forms of doping, at least at its most elite levels.

Tommy Swift, Daniel claimed, was on a regimen of illegal supplements that he thought would improve his swim times.

Coach Steeler encouraged it. He had total control of all his star swimmers’ lives, Daniel said.

What they ate, where they went, and who they went out with.

The boys got used to asking Coach Steeler’s permission before making any decisions of their own.

Daniel Frisker was sure Coach Steeler would have lost his shit if he’d found out Nina and Tommy were still talking.

True, the night Nina vanished Tommy was with the team at Coach Steeler’s house having pizza. True, Tommy hadn’t left the house until after nine o’clock, by which point Nina had already sent her last text: Don’t look for me.

No, Tommy hadn’t mentioned receiving a text from Nina. And so far as Daniel knew, he’d never tried calling her cell phone, even after he’d heard from her concerned mother that Nina wasn’t at home. Tommy later claimed it was because he’d found out that Nina was sleeping with somebody else.

But at the time, Daniel had thought it odd.

Daniel Frisker hadn’t come forward sooner, he claimed, for the same reason Nina Faraday’s friends had walked back their statements: Nina was afraid of Tommy’s temper and worried about the supplements Coach Steeler was encouraging his star swimmers to take.

The reason? There was no point. The Steelers had too much power, too much pull with the police.

Besides, for years Daniel had suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome, a bond of shared trauma that yoked him to the pact he’d made with the rest of the team.

They’d agreed to alibi each other—and had sworn to never mention that Coach Steeler was late to his own party, that he was missing for about an hour and a half on the evening Nina Faraday was last seen alive.