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.
Nine
Rachel
Rachel had dreaded going to the police. Early on in her career, she’d covered a sexual abuse scandal at a tony private school in a small town, and she knew all too well the way these stories played out—the way that small systems under threat united in defense, the victim-shaming, the victim-blaming. Lucy had been drunk. At times she’d blacked out. Her memory of the evening was spotty. She’d been assaulted by an ex-boyfriend who subsequently drove her home, seemingly with Lucy’s consent.
Even Lucy seemed confused, uncertain about what had happened. On the morning after the party, Rachel had watched the clock crawl past eleven o’clock and then past noon. Finally she’d taken pity on her daughter for what she’d assumed was a hangover. She’d mounted the stairs to the attic with orange juice and a Tylenol and found Lucy curled in the fetal position, staring at the wall, shivering despite the space heater.
“Lucy?” Rachel took a seat on her daughter’s bed. “Lucy? Are you feeling okay?”
For a second Lucy just lay there, trembling as if her body were trying to physically shake loose her words. Finally she said in a voice thatbarely scraped above a whisper, “I think—I think something happened last night.”
Instantly Rachel felt pricks in her spine like a touch of electricity. “What do you mean, something happened?”
“I mean with Noah.” Lucy’s voice was barely audible. Rachel had to lean closer just to hear her. “I think ...”
“You think what? What happened with Noah?”
Lucy reluctantly turned to look at her. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I think ... I think he raped me.”
Raped.An unfathomable word, like a scalpel that cleaved the breath from Rachel’s body.
Rachel knew the police would never believe Lucy’s story. Even Lucy’sfriendsdidn’t believe her story. In the days that followed the party, Rachel had taken Lucy’s phone away as Lucy’s notifications turned cruel, thickening like dark snow across her accounts. Bailey, Savannah, and Mia weren’t speaking to her. One day, as if by silent agreement, they all unfollowed her at once.
Lucy seized hold of the idea that the police would hear her truth, that the police would make things right. That theyhadto. She was terrified that JJ Hammill had filmed the entire event, that this, too, would end up online, forever memorializing her horrific night. Lucy swore that JJ Hammill had been holding up a phone at one point, that she’d heard him tell Noah that he needed a better angle.
Rachel didn’t know what to believe. If there was a video, at least it might corroborate Lucy’s story. It might help them hold Noah Landry, the county’s golden boy, to account.
But she doubted it. She doubted anyone would look in the first place.
Still, what could she do? How could she explain to her daughter, still sixteen and inflamed with ideals about right and wrong, that not all victims were victims in the same way? That people would say that Lucy had compromised her right to be taken seriously, first by drinking too much, by dressing the way she had, then by going into a closedbedroom with Ryan Hawthorne, and finally by accepting a ride home from Noah? She couldn’t. Lucy, already paranoid, barely functional, had latched on to the idea that she would prove that she was telling the truth. That Noah might be punished and Lucy redeemed. Rachel didn’t dare shatter that slender hope.
So she promised Lucy that they would hold all the boys responsible. Doubly so if they’d been the ones to circulate Lucy’s old pictures.
But deep down, Rachel didn’t actually believe it could happen.
Still, she took Lucy to the county sheriff’s department to make her report. She hoped, at least, that they could speak to Sheriff Horne, still the only woman, other than a dispatcher, in the office. Instead they were directed to the sergeant who’d shoved past Rachel over the summer to announce that a body had been discovered along the river. Will Erickson was his name. In the intervening months, he seemed to have grown in both height and arrogance—but Rachel wondered whether this was simply a trick of perspective, the way he seemed to expand to fill the interview room while Lucy shrank further and further into her clothing.
Rachel sat beside her daughter, gripping her hands tightly in her lap, letting all the usual questions fall on her Lucy like blows from a fist.
How much did you have to drink that night?
