Page 78 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Seven

T he discovery of Nina Faraday’s dance team bag during a search party organized for Lucy Vale almost broke the internet.

It was so extraordinary, so unprecedented, that rumors immediately began circulating that the entire search effort had been orchestrated by an anonymous tipper who knew where Nina’s bag had been dumped.

We even wondered if Lucy Vale was said tipper.

We thought she might have reported that a girl who matched her description was walking north along the creek—not because we had any hard evidence but because it fit with the picture of Lucy we were reassembling.

Even then, after everything that had happened, Lucy Vale was still malleable—more so now that she was gone, occupying a blank space we could populate with our imaginations.

Maybe, we thought, Lucy Vale had planned the whole thing. Maybe even with Rachel Vale’s help.

@gustagusta: it’s brilliant. Think about it.

@gustagusta: burn the mascot and get the police looking for you

@gustagusta: then disappear

@gustagusta: then point the cops to Nina Faraday’s duffel bag instead

@pawsandclaws: if the Vales knew where Nina’s stuff was dumped, why wouldn’t they just say so?

@gustagusta: maybe they didn’t think the cops would listen

@bassicrhythm: that seems highly unlikely

@gustagusta: really? Does it?

@safireswiftly: idk. I mean, is Lucy really That devious?

@safireswiftly: she couldn’t even keep up with the dance choreography

@safireswiftly: even when it was just twerking

@spinn_doctor: Lucy’s just a patsy

@spinn_doctor: my money’s on the mom

Within days, national media channels had picked up the story.

News vans from all over logjammed traffic in downtown Granger and circled outside the high school for interviewees like prowling scavengers.

We saw our school fractalized across dozens of news stories and then thousands of subsequent video commentaries.

TikTok was virulent. Nina Faraday’s name began to trend.

Lucy Vale’s too. Blood in the Water rocketed to number forty-five on the Apple Podcast charts.

The Sharks’ Facebook page was apparently inundated with so much hate speech that Administration disabled comments and then removed it altogether.

Alex Spinnaker reported a near constant flow of traffic in and out of Green Gables Ridge, the gated community where both the Steeler-Coxes and Ryan Hawthorne lived.

Reese’s messages were erratic in those days, her TikToks almost unwatchable.

We felt sorry for her. We sent her heart emojis.

So much had changed since January.

In early May, as the search for Lucy Vale stuttered, petering into sporadic and largely worthless online tips, we peeled away from Rachel Vale’s grief, from her continued agitation to get answers, explanations, some closure that we knew would never come.

Ominous graffiti appeared on the side of the Aquatics Center: Where are the girls?

Days later, the message had spread like some kind of fast-growing mold to colonize downtown buildings and even the Byron Park gazebo. Where are the girls?

We weren’t even sure whether to blame the graffiti on outsiders.

As news about Coach Steeler’s relationship with Rachel Vale and possibly Nina Faraday exploded across the internet, our attitudes toward the swim team cracked, exposing a rot of hidden resentment.

We sent pictures of our windshields, denuded of their Sharks decals after hours of work.

We soaped and scrubbed our bumpers to clean them of their Sharks stickers, leaving a film of shredded plastic behind as evidence.

It wasn’t unusual in those days to see garbage cans full of Sharks merchandise dragged out to the curb for pickup.

It even became a trend to demonstrate support for the Vales and the other women who seeped forward to report creepy interactions with Coach Steeler—at Woodward High School and later at the University of Arizona, where he’d taken a position after Nina’s disappearance.

Of course, many people shifted the opposite direction, shaking out Sharks banners, staking team colors in their yards—even displaying posters of Coach Steeler in their windows to gaze benevolently down on us like some long-dead cult leader.

We rifted across generational lines. The athletes banded together and largely threw in with the Sharks.

Riley French attempted to strike some middle ground by suggesting that Coach Steeler’s questionable behavior over the years had been the product of his environment and the backward morals of the world twenty years earlier.

She was roundly ridiculed on the general thread for being an apologist. Charlotte Anderson reportedly had a screaming fight with her grandfather, who referred to both Nina Faraday and Rachel Vale as home-wreckers.

She didn’t see how she could bring herself to cash his graduation check.

We told her to go ahead and spend his money.

We shuddered and lurched toward the end of the school year. We reported to school bleary-eyed, paranoid, shell-shocked, like soldiers to another day at the front.

We eked through our homework. We drove with our windows down. We scraped bird shit off our windshields.

A slow seep of rumor darkened around Noah Landry and the reason for his record times.

Noah Landry uses steroids. All the club swimmers cheat.

Coach Vernon knows. Swimmers marauded through the halls looking ferocious and beleaguered like starved pack animals.

We heard that the Aquatics booster fund was in danger of drying up; if the money vanished, so would our swim program.

Skyler Matthews dyed her hair.

Sofia Young came to school drunk and puked in third-period English.

Charlotte Anderson began picking out her eyebrows.

Reese dropped the Steeler from her last name, insisting that we call her Reese Cox.

Even Spinnaker began distancing himself from the swimmers after years of clamoring for their approval like some deranged lapdog.

He wouldn’t go so far as to say that he believed all the stories about Coach Steeler.

He reminded us that Rachel Vale had been twenty-two years old and an adult when she claimed he’d pressured her to have sex.

He pointed out that being a dirtbag and a cheater weren’t the same as being a predator.

@badprincess: what about Nina Faraday?

@badprincess: she was seventeen

@spinn_doctor: we don’t know that he ever touched Nina Faraday

@spinn_doctor: all we have is Rachel Vale’s word for it

@swifty99: Nina was definitely pregnant

@bassicrhythm: there was a used pregnancy test in her duffel bag. She had it wrapped up in plastic

@badprincess: a used pregnancy test, gym shoes, and an SAT test prep book

@swifty99: ew

@swifty99: why

@badprincess: I guess she was studying for the SATs?

@swifty99: no I mean why the pregnancy test?

@skyediva: maybe proof? Or she didn’t want to throw it out at home

@spinn_doctor: just because Nina was pregnant doesn’t mean Steeler’s the one who knocked her up

@lululemonaide: Rachel Vale is a well-respected journalist

@lululemonaide: I doubt she’d lie

@spinn_doctor: jfc

@spinn_doctor: you people really never learn, do you?

@spinn_doctor: have I taught you Nothing ?

Still, as finals approached, Alex Spinnaker wound down the homework ring.

For years we’d pushed assignments to the athletes in exchange for spending money and the occasional smile or acknowledgment in the hall.

Unsurprisingly Spinnaker blamed liberal culture for souring the atmosphere and making it too dangerous to conduct successful business.

@spinn_doctor: admin is going to come down hard

@spinn_doctor: just wait for it

@lululemonaide: so it’s official? Administration knows?

@highasakyle: that the swimmers don’t do their own homework??

@highasakyle: of course they know

@highasakyle: when’s the last time you’ve actually seen Hammill in class?

@spinn_doctor: fair. But now they actually have to do something about it

@kash_money: better than admitting that our best swimmers are hopped up on human growth hormones and veterinary medicine

@spinn_doctor: everyone uses performance enhancers nowadays

@spinn_doctor: it’s the only way to stay competitive

@kash_money: “and the sun never sets on the empire ...”

We tried to keep up with the outpouring of new information, a cataclysmic volume of new headlines, TikTok videos, hashtags, and podcast episodes.

Our server was a deluge of informational threads—about supposed sightings of Lucy Vale, about advances in the Faraday case, about the penis now defacing the statue of Coach Steeler in Byron Park, about the growing clamor to have the statue removed.

Nate Stern told us the cops were still combing the state park with cadaver dogs.

We didn’t know which girl they were looking for anymore.

Woody Topornycky—town drunk, petty criminal, UFO enthusiast, and occasional drug dealer—was suddenly a local superstar.

Nick told us that his uncle had spent an hour walking the sheriff around the Woodward parking lot, detailing the spot where he’d last seen Nina Faraday.

He was, according to Nick, the key to the entire investigation.

@nononycky: he’s our most important witness

@bassicrhythm: no offense, but he was tripping balls that day

@nononycky: doesn’t matter. He knows what he saw

@safireswiftly: right. An alien landing craft

@nononycky: He saw lights. Machinery. Activity on the construction site

@nononycky: and a man taking Nina’s car

@brentmann: I thought the cops cleared all the construction workers

@brentmann: they were off-site by 5 pm

@nononycky: exactly. So why did Coach Steeler tell the swimmers that he was delayed because of construction issues?

@badprincess: is that what he said?

@nononycky: according to Daniel Frisker.

@stopandfriske: do we trust Daniel Frisker?

@nononycky: do we trust Coach Steeler?

@lululemonaide: what about the texts that Nina sent after she left campus?

@bassicrhythm: the cops aren’t sure she sent them at all

@bassicrhythm: could’ve been someone else, using her phone

@lululemonaide: omg. So something happened to Nina On Campus ?

@pawsandclaws: I knew it

@pawsandclaws: swear to goddess, the aura in Aquatics is so dark

Rumors thickened, tightening around our necks, keeping us in a choke hold, bound to each other and our phones.

We heard that the IHSAA had questioned Coach Vernon about rumors that his club swimmers were using performance enhancers to improve their times.

We heard that the sheriff’s department was hunting down the Sharks who’d been at Coach Steeler’s house the day Nina Faraday vanished and reinterviewing them one by one.

We heard that work on the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion might at last be suspended.

But day by day, construction continued, sending up a fine silt of red dust that coated the parking lot and clotted our lungs, made breathing difficult.

Mornings smelled like machine oil. Our heads ached with the sound of jackhammers. We’d all but given up on sleeping.

We began to wonder if maybe our parents were right about Discord.

Maybe we did spend too much of our time online.

We got our yearbooks. In one of the full-page photos, Lucy Vale was practicing with the dance team. We spent hours staring at that picture, as if we could draw out of the pixelation some clue about Lucy Vale’s final act and what she’d been thinking.

In the picture she has one hand on her hip, the other thrown into the air, fist clenched, as if in triumph.

In the picture her head is tilted back, her eyes narrow, barely glancing at the camera. Her hair is loose. She’s laughing.