@stopandfriske:the one who got called into Committee this morning
@badprincess:that doesn’t help
@hannahbanana:we both got called
@hannahbanana:we both showed up, anyway
@geminirising:what did they ask you??
@hannahbanana:they wanted to know about the pictures
@hannahbanana:they wanted to know where they came from
@badprincess:please tell me you lied
@stopandfriske:That’s it?? They didn’t ask about the party?
@hannahbanana:they did. They asked me if I knew that Lucy Vale was drinking
@badprincess:lol
Even time seemed to deform, pulling us backward into the past, into the slow horror of sheriff’s deputies materializing in the Woodward hallways, squinting when we passed as if they suspected us of something. We lived in terror that the press would get wind of the story: another girl and her mother with another claim about the swim team.
Another championship season lost.
We all suffered. We felt our suffering keenly; we googled articles about collective trauma and confirmed that we all shared symptoms of PTSD. Administration was traumatizing us. Our parents’ questions, their insensitivities, their insistence that we do our homework and stop obsessing over school gossip, was a form of gaslighting. We felt minimized and marginalized, both victims of and incidental to the drama. Evie Grant confessed that she’d doubled up on her antianxiety medication and was now running low. Allan Meeks kept having dreams that he’d been called to the SLD Tutoring Center to report to the Investigative Committee but couldn’t find his way there. Will Friske started smoking weed daily before school just to get through the day. But the idea that he might encounter the sheriff on campus made himpanicky, which meant he needed more weed and couldn’t focus on any of his classes.
His parents were threatening him with therapy, or rehab.
Aubrey Barnes said she would pray for him at church. Friske told her to go to hell, then apologized. Evie Grant asked Will Friske if he could get her more antianxiety medication.
Our anger deepened, gathering force, buoyed by Noah’s insistence that everything that happened at the party was Lucy’s idea. Of course we couldn’t know what had happened behind the locked door of that first-floor bedroom. And we believed in accountability. We were champions of transparency. We demanded it—from our brands, from our churches, from our teachers, about their politics and their grading system. We were feminists. Well, most of us were. Brent Mann was a sexist. Alex Spinnaker was a conspiracy theorist and a proud Libertarian.
But this was different. It was personal. It was aboutus. The swim team was ours. Noah Landry was ours. We knew him. We’d fished tadpoles with him from the murky shallows of Byron Lake in elementary school. We’d jostled next to him at the Fourth of July parade for a better view of the floats. We’d sung in youth choir with him, yawned next to him in church.
We’d known Lucy Vale for barely a year and a half.
And as it turned out, we hadn’t known her at all.
Still, the summons kept coming.Ethan Courtland. Alex Spinnaker. Evie Grant. Akash Sandhu.
Please report to the front office.
Please report.
Report, report, report.
One by one, we waited to be called.
Eleven
We
We didn’t know which of us was idiotic enough to mention our server to the Investigative Committee, only that soon afterward the Student Leadership Department began an email campaign about Discord’s perverting effects on young minds.
When Mrs. Steeler-Cox’s first letter to our parents was posted on the student portal, our stomachs curdled. We had the disconcerting sense of hovering above our laptop screens. It was like one of those dreams where we were naked at a pep rally, or like coming home to find one of our parents rooting in our drawers where we stashed weed and Adderall or kept condoms in the hopes that they might someday be necessary. We felt exposed. Violated. Helpless.
Right away we went on a hunt for the traitor.
