But after that, the leads dried up.
The rain came at last just before Memorial Day. Indiana sucked it up in sheets and spit back violent explosions of green. For days heavy winds took down the missing posters that Rachel Vale had distributed patiently over weeks, covering miles of open farmland with a shock of red flyers. Heavy rain bled most of them into a pulp.
Over the long weekend, Mr. Mole, the adoptive cat who lived in the Student Leadership Department Tutoring Center, died. Reese Cox told us her mother had discovered him stiff-legged and staring blankly outside the computer center where the Investigative Committee had convened earlier in the semester. He was at least eighteen years old; still, we batted around theories of foul play. It was a sign of the times that our minds went immediately to poison.
@sunshineandhugs:Reese thinks Mr. Mole was poisoned
@sunshineandhugs:it’s gotta be retaliation
@mememeup:why? What did he do?
@sunshineandhugs:not retaliation againstMr. Mole
@sunshineandhugs:it was a message to Reese’s mom
@sunshineandhugs:because she refuses to back down about this dumb Steeler Pavilion
@gustagusta:“where Sharks are born, and girls go missing”
@sunshineandhugs:she loved that fucking cat
@highasakyle:really?
@highasakyle:huh
@highasakyle:is that a thing?
As it turned out, it was.
Mr. Mole’s death sent the whole school into a brief and inexplicable period of mourning. Grieving Student Council members tied black ribbons to their ponytails and painted whiskers on their cheeks. The school chapter of PETA agitated about what Administration had done with the body; there was some rumor that he’d simply been tossed out in one of the dumpsters. Another rumor suggested that Old McVeigh had buried Mr. Mole down by the construction pit, not far from where he’d first been discovered wandering the drainage pipes shortly before Nina Faraday disappeared.
Jackson Skye reminded us of the rumor that we’d heard growing up that Lydia Faraday’s body had been buried beneath Aquatics—a final torment for her troubled soul and punishment for the claims she’d made about Tommy Swift. Punishment because Lydia Faraday had tried to hold the swim team accountable.
For the first time, we wondered whether there was some truth to the story after all.
Maybe, we thought, we simply had the wrong Faraday.
Nine
We 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 waslast 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??
