Page 80 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Nine

W e rushed into the summer gaspingly with an enormous sense of relief. We fragmented back into individual lives, into babysitting gigs and jobs scooping ice cream at the Byron Park concession stand, into video games and gamer communities, into fandoms and new Discord servers.

We saw each other infrequently and mostly by accident.

There was the Fourth of July parade, missing its usual Shark floats, grim and securitized, ringed by so many sheriff’s deputies that it felt like the opening salvo of a world war.

There were afternoons at Byron Lake and swimmers who worked as lifeguards scowling at us from their chairs, shrilling every infraction with the blast of a whistle, as if in retaliation.

There was talk of parties that never materialized, the suggestion that we should all visit Lucy’s mom, welling up and dispersing again like bubbles in a stream.

Slowly Lucy Vale became less and less real to us.

It seemed impossible to imagine that she’d once sat next to us in biology, one leg folded underneath her other, doodling on the sole of her sneaker.

The more internet famous she became—the more her picture, and Nina’s, were circulated by strangers—the less she seemed to belong to us.

We bled her slowly out of our system via transference that instead enshrined her story forever online.

It was late July before the sheriff’s department got permission to dig for Nina Faraday’s body under the Aquatics Center, where she was last seen alive. Sofia Young, who’d been forced into summer school after flunking two classes, brought us the news of police activity on campus.

@goodnightsky: um, does anyone know why there’s a militia outside of Aquatics?

@goodnightsky: it’s crazy—the whole building is roped off

@goodnightsky: and like twenty state troopers on the construction site

@goodnightsky: hello?

@goodnightsky: ??

@goodnightsky: is anyone alive??

@goodnightsky: jfc

It took us hours to see the messages. By then our server was a carcass, gutted of all but a handful of active members, bled of its purpose and our pleasure in it.

Every so often a comment or meme sparked a few fitful minutes of chatter.

But for the most part our Discord was dark, the conversation intermittent at most. Threads that had amassed thousands of comments grew listless, dark for days at a time.

The swell of new subscribers logged on less and less, placing an agonizing pressure on the rest of us to keep the server going.

But what was our Discord with no news of Lucy Vale and no real hope of bringing her back?

Every thread raveled us back in time to the edge of the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge and a free fall into darkness.

We prayed for more news of Lucy—another sighting, a potential breakthrough, something to prove definitively that she had not left the world in a swan dive.

We powered on for Lucy and for our Discord server. We did it so that we would have something to talk about. Something to discuss. More threads to follow. More mystery to unravel.

We were not bad people.

Still. We were only kids.

We didn’t know how to let go of our stories when the truth was merely sad.

Almost exactly two years since we’d first heard that a new girl was moving to town, two dozen of us gathered in the football bleachers to watch Nina Faraday’s body exhumed from the ground.

It was a hot day and muggy with flies. A bald sun scoured the parking lot, making distant mirages of the asphalt.

Some of us came with flasks of alcohol siphoned off from our parents; some of us came with sandwiches and snacks.

Olivia Howard showed up with flowers. It felt like that kind of occasion.

We couldn’t see much of the activity from our vantage point, just a cordon of police cars and deputies milling around the entrance to Aquatics, trying to shoo away the arriving press.

The construction site, where work on the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion had been stalled by growing national outrage, was invisible from where we were sitting.

Instead we had a sweeping view of the parking lot and traffic slowing to a long-tail crawl at the school entrance as word of the operation spread through the afternoon.

We saw Old McVeigh prowling like a caged animal between the press vans.

Skyler Matthews pointed out Principal Hammill and Coach Radner, hemmed behind a bright rope of police tape, angling for a view.

In the far distance, drifts of green massed among the hills marked the easternmost portion of the state park.

From campus it was at least an hour to the spot where Nina’s duffel bag had been discovered.

Still, it would have been easy enough to stash her stuff in an empty locker, then get rid of it in the days after her disappearance—maybe during a long hike or even a fishing trip.

An hour seeped by, then two. The sun heated the metal bleachers to an agony. We ran through all our snacks. We grew bored and impatient.

“How do they know where to dig?” Evie Grant wanted to know. The Aquatics Center was a thirty-thousand-foot complex, and nearly half of it had been under construction the night Nina Faraday went missing.

No one knew the answer. Nate Stern suggested that the sheriff was working with old blueprints.

Will Friske suggested that they might have been tipped off like they had been to the duffel bag’s location.

We wondered what Coach Steeler’s swimmers had known, or at least suspected.

It was no wonder, we said, that Tommy Swift had gone off the rails.

We got sunburned. We grew bored, impatient for something to happen.

Nick Topornycky tried to sneak into Aquatics for a closer look but got busted by Nate Stern’s cousin, who threatened to write him a ticket—for what, we didn’t know.

Nick Topornycky and Nate Stern got into a fight about who was the bigger asshole, Nick or Nate’s cousin.

We scratched our mosquito bites until they bled.

One by one, we lost interest and drifted home, back to our air conditioning. Olivia abandoned her bouquet of flowers to brown on the top row of bleachers. We agreed that it had been a gigantic waste of an afternoon.

We doubted the cops would find shit, no matter how long they kept digging.

But we were wrong.

Two days later, Reese Cox wrote us with the news: Ceecee was blackout drunk, and her mom was crying into a kitchen towel.

That morning, the sheriff’s department had found bones.

More than eighteen years after she had vanished, Nina Faraday had come home at last.