Read The Fever for Free Online Page B

but she wouldn’t look at him.
    â€œI don’t like it there,” she said. “I really don’t.”
    â€œI know,” he said, watching her scroll through text messages. One after another, they arrived, her phone sputtering in her hand.
    She hadn’t met his eyes once.
    â€œDeenie,” he said, “I think I should just take you home.”
    â€œI think…” she started, then set her phone on her lap. “I want to go back to school, Dad.”
    There was an energy on her that worried him, like right before she left for her mom’s place each month. Sometimes it felt like she spent hours putting things in and taking things out of her backpack. Blue sweater in, blue sweater out, Invisible Man in, then out, biting her lip and staring upward. What is it I need, what is missing.
    â€œA lot’s happening,” he tried again. “We can go home. Watch a movie. I’ll heat up those frozen turnovers. Those fat apple ones you love. Your favorite Saturday-night special.”
    â€œWhen I was twelve,” she said, like that was a million years ago. It had been their weekly ritual. She liked to watch teen movies from the ’80s and make fun of their hair but by the end she would tear up when the tomboy with the wrong clothes danced with the prom king under pink balloons and scattered lights. It turned out he had missed the perfect girl, right in front of him all along.
    â€œI just want to be at school,” she said, softly. He guessed there might be something soothing about the noise and routine of school. Except she didn’t know yet that the school didn’t feel routine right now.
    â€œOkay,” he said, after a pause. “If you’re sure.”
    His mind was full of ideas, ways to comfort her, all of them wrong.
    â€œBut Deenie,” he said.
    â€œYeah, Dad.”
    â€œIt’s going to be okay,” he said. The eternal parent lie, a hustle.
    She seemed to hear him but not really hear him.
    â€œI don’t think it was even her,” she said, a tremble to her voice.
    â€œWas who? Did you see her, Deenie? At the hospital?”
    She nodded, her fingerless gloves reaching up to her face.
    â€œJust for a second. But I don’t think that was Lise,” she repeated, shaking her head.
    â€œBaby,” he said, slowing the car down. He wondered what she’d seen. How bad Lise looked. “It was her.”
    â€œI mean, none of it was Lise,” she said, eyes on the traffic as they approached the school. “In class this morning too. Watching her. She looked so weird. So angry.”
    Her voice speeding up, like her mother’s did when she got excited. Trying to help him see something.
    â€œLike she was mad at me,” she went on. “Even though I knew she wasn’t. But it was like she was. She looked so mad.”
    â€œWhy would she be mad at you, Deenie?” he said, stopping the car too long at the blinking red, someone honking. “She wasn’t. You had nothing to do with this.”
    She looked at him, her eyes dark and stricken, like she’d been hit.
    *  *  *
    It just wasn’t a day for going to class.
    It was nearly sixth period and, so far, Eli had made it only to French II—he never missed it, spent all forty-two minutes with his eyes anchored to the soft swell of Ms. Loll’s chest. The way she pushed her hair up off her neck when she got frustrated, her dark nails on that swirling tattoo.
    He never missed French.
    But the idea of going to history, of sitting in class with everyone gripped in the talk of Lise Daniels and her rabid-dog routine and his sister seeing it—it all knotted inside him.
    He didn’t like to imagine what Deenie must have been feeling to ditch school, which wasn’t something she ever did. She was the kind of girl who burst into tears when her fourth-grade teacher called her Life Sciences folder “unkempt.”
    So he found