The Fever Quotes
"You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for."
"Like her brother after hockey, his dark hair wet and face sheened over—she’d tease him about it, but it was a look of aliveness you wanted to be around."
"Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they’d come for his daughter too."
"It must have been a trick of the light, she told herself. But looking down at Lise, lips stretched wide, Deenie thought, for one second, that she saw something hanging inside Lise’s mouth, something black, like a bat flapping."
"She wasn’t sure it was studying, exactly, but it made her feel better, her eyes dry from screen glare, fingers tapping her lower lip."
"It wasn’t long after that he found out about the affair, a year along by then, and that she pregnant. She miscarried three days later and he took her to the hospital, the blood slipping down her leg, her hands tight on him."
"Like many long-term transplants, he had the uncomplicated pride of a self-proclaimed native but with the renewing wonder a native never has."
"That was how she knew Lise wasn’t pregnant. That, and other reasons, like that Lise was still a virgin, mostly."
"Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another."
"She hadn’t met his eyes once. 'I think… 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 he felt like it was the only time he truly breathed."
"It’s funny how you never think about your heart."
"Everyone knew things so fast, phones like constant pulses under the skin."
"There seemed no stopping all the texts jangling from her phone."
"It wasn’t until Mrs. Zwada, silvered hair like a corona, called out to her from the biology lab that she realized that was where she was supposed to be."
"My balance is good," he said, the smell of her cigarette drifting toward him again. Spicy, cloying. He kind of liked it but didn’t want to.
"What’s wrong with her?" Gabby asked. "Is she going to be okay?"
""Hey—U ok? Just saying…" That’s what the text said, but Deenie didn’t recognize the number."
"But it wasn’t the same. Gabby hadn’t fainted, had never even fallen, exactly, never hit her head or bit anyone."
""We’d be lucky if it was rabies," Skye said. "They have a shot for that."
"I guess everyone was talking about it," Gabby said. "The whole school saw."
"Of course not." But what he was thinking was, Weren’t they obligated to notify him? He was still her dad.
"And if he had called," he added, though he wasn’t sure why, "I wouldn’t have told him anything."
"Thank you, Tom." He could hear the relief in her voice.
"We’re not allowed in the lake," she replied, which wasn’t really an answer. "Why are you asking me that?"
"Don’t worry. we didn’t put our face under water. we were never all the way in."
"You have to do whatever you can to shield their bodies. And sometimes that means you have to expose them to the very thing you want to protect them from."
"Sometimes a girl’s gotta get some fresh air," she said. "Or she might go crazy."
"I think you should shut the fuck up," Eli said.
"Our primary goal as educators needs to be containment of panic."
"It’s my job, you know? To protect those girls. Girls like Lise."
"It didn’t feel like a vaccine. It felt like a virus, a plague."
"Maybe it’s from the funky ooze out by the football field after it rains."
"Bad things happen and then they’re over, but where do they go?"
"No one here wants to know the truth. That’s why they won’t let me go."
"What kind of school endorses medical experimentation on its students?"
"Are they ours forever, leeching under our skin?"
"You never knew how things would make you feel. The kinds of people who might feel things."
"What’s the point of here," she added, waving something in her hand, a joint, a white Bic.
"Pins and needles, pins and needles," stallion-legged track star Tricia Lawson was saying, over and over again, rubbing her long limbs.
"It clears away darkness," she said. "And banishes negative energy."
"My life was perfect," Jaymie had said. "Until I got the shots."
"It had to be something else. A thing you didn’t know you were waiting for."
"That’s her," Hawk told the others, not looking at Deenie.
"He told me to never be ashamed," she said. "That it was beautiful."
"Listen!" Kim Court shouted on the video. "Whatever’s happening to us, it’s bigger than any shot. It’s bigger than everything."
"No one cares if you’ve always been pretty," she said, palm stretched flat against the glass. "It’s the same old news. But if all the sudden you’re beautiful, you can do anything. That’s what she must’ve thought, anyway."
"You were never good for anything," Deenie said. "Except ruining everything."
"The headline here is that there’s no evidence—and Mrs. Tomlinson from the hospital can back me up here—suggesting we are dealing with a contagious threat of any kind."
"If I sound weird," Kim said, "it’s only because my tongue is so big and my mouth is so small."
"It only affects girls because they were the ones shot up with poison."
"Girls without fathers in their lives, broken homes. Emotional issues."
"Until yesterday, she was always a happy, normal girl!"
"Do you have a daughter? Did either of you ever have a daughter?"
"All rusts are parasites. They need a living host."
"Spasms, convulsions. Some people feel like they're burning inside."
"We just messed around. She’d never done anything. She kept laughing and covering her face."
"Everything felt different when he woke up, with a jolt."
"How do you get over it?... Over what happened to you?"
"His mother tried to eat him. It happens sometimes."
"No one can be as close to anyone as you, is that it?"
"I could smell the beers on you. I couldn’t breathe."
"I’m just so in love with you. I just can’t stop being in love with you."
"Maybe we don’t really know anybody. And maybe nobody knows us."
"You’re going to do something you never thought you would. And then you’ll see, and then you’ll know."
"Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters."
"It felt now like they had. Like it had already been too late."