The game stretches on for another thirty minutes: the toss of the ball, the slap of the beer. Foam spraying across the table, my forearm, my shirt. Trevor and Lucas are all too willing to talk about themselves, which means Sloane and I are mostly just drinking, her chiming in with the occasional laugh or disparaging quip. Standing next to her is an immersive study in effortless cool—and judging by the way Lucas looks at her, whatever she’s doing, it works.
We’re getting ready to start a new game when the front door bangs open and another group of guys gush in. They’re all talking over one another, laughing, each one carrying a cardboard case of beer in one hand and a handle of liquor in the other.
“Come over here and meet the girls!” Trevor yells, waving them closer. “If you commit to Kappa Nu, they’ll be your new neighbors.”
The way he says it makes me flinch, like we’re two slabs of meat being dangled in front of a pack of animals. Sloane makes an effort to catch my eye, rolling hers.
“This is the shit we deal with for cheap rent,” she whispers, and I let out a laugh.
I look down at the table and decide to busy myself with racking the cups; I want to act disinterested, bored, the way Sloane does, too, even though I can see the group of them moving closer in my peripheral vision. The nearness of them makes my neck grow hot. I grab a few cups and accidentally tip another one over in the process, the remnants of backwash beer trickling down my hand. The room is spinning gently, I realize, the last hour going by in a daze. I don’t know how much I’ve had to drink—a few beers, at least—and I concentrate again on the table, trying to keep my legs from tilting.
“This is Sloane,” I hear Trevor say, my eyes still glued to the table. I register a few mutters, Sloane dispensing all the right lines, until finally, I feel their collective attention turn toward me. “And this is the new girl from OBX. Where’s Levi?”
The shock of the name makes my head snap up; surely, I’ve imagined it. It can’t be. He can’t be the incoming freshman from my hometown; the one visiting for the weekend that Trevor wanted me to meet. I blink a few times, trying to reorient myself as I look at the boys, their smug expressions and too-short shorts, when my attention lands on a familiar face in the back.
“Levi,” I echo, my voice tight. It’s him, of course it is, and the reality of him, here, standing in this very room crashes over me like an unexpected wave, practically knocking me back. I can feel the past suddenly pulling me under, taking me down, a rip current in water that I’m powerless to fight. Because if there’s a single person who brings back memories of Eliza, a body from before that could have stopped what happened, saved her from it all, it’s Levi.
Levi Butler.
CHAPTER 10
We were in the water the first time we saw him, his slow approach down the dock thieving our attention.
“Who’s that?” I had asked, my legs kicking beneath the calm of the current like a hidden panic, concealed from the surface.
Eliza’s dock was long and lean, over one hundred yards of salt-stained wood spooling into the ocean like a red cedar carpet. It was the summer going into our senior year and we had spent every day out there, flip-flopping down to the floating dock in the mornings, marinating ourselves in tanning oil until our skin started to crisp. That day, we had been out there for hours already, our towels wet and rumpled and smelling of musty coconut, before deciding to dive in to cool off—but suddenly, we could just barely make out the outline of a person walking our way.
“I think it’s my neighbor,” she said, her lips just above the waterline. The house next to Eliza’s had been vacant for years; like lots of homes in the Outer Banks, it spent most of its life as a vacation rental until the owners simply decided to stop renting it. They must have been pretty wealthy to let it sit like that, unoccupied, but when they did finally decide to let go of it, it was barely a week before the “For Sale” sign was replaced with “Sold.” By then, though, Eliza and I had gotten used to the dock being solely ours. We didn’t want to share it with anyone—despite the fact that it straddled the property line and, technically, was just as much theirs as it was ours.
Or, rather, hers. The Jeffersons’. My home away from home.
I always thought of Eliza’s family as flawless, and I guess that’s why I spent so much time there. It was like I hoped proximity alone could get some of whatever they had to rub off on me like a barbed hitchhiker sticking to my clothes, traveling back with me before planting itself in our home. Their love like an invasive species that could take over us all. I felt bad sometimes, resenting my parents like that, wishing they were different, but the reality was that while my parents tried to be perfect, Eliza’s seemed like they actually were. My mother was a stay-at-home socialite, bleached blond and impossibly chatty, the textbook complement to my dad, who spent most evenings stoically silent, fingers clutching a whiskey highball and eyes perusing the room in a way that made you wonder what was wrong. We lived in a house on the same street as Eliza’s, but other than that, they couldn’t be more different. My dad was in finance, the kind of industry you enter into with the explicit purpose of getting rich, whereas Eliza’s used to play guitar in a band, a trust-fund child who spent his youth roaming around before eventually deciding to settle down on the coast. He was passionate and peculiar and completely unfazed by the things they had, almost as if he didn’t even notice them. Didn’t even care. Their waterfront oasis was kept cluttered up and lived-in whereas ours was always perfectly pristine, cold like a museum and just as impersonal.
And they always ate dinner together, just the three of them, except when I was invited and they set the table for four.
I’ll never forget those little moments I got to witness: Mr. Jefferson scooping up Eliza’s mom on the dock, olive skin and dark hair glistening like tar melting in the sun. Those massive hands all over her bare bikini legs before he cannonballed the two of them into the water together, Mrs. Jefferson emerging with a slicked-back ponytail and mascara tears dripping down pale, freckled cheeks. Head thrown back, maniacally laughing.
My mother would have been livid, I remember thinking as we watched them splash each other like smitten teenagers. My dad wasn’t even allowed to kiss my mom when she was wearing lipstick, not that he ever really tried.
I turned to look at Eliza, the memories evaporating and replaced by this unknown person walking into our space. New neighbors could change everything. They could alter the very air itself, making it lighter or heavier with their presence alone. The figure was getting closer now, both of us treading water as his lanky outline grew larger in the distance, and we could tell it was a boy. A teenage boy. A tall, tan boy with moppy brown hair and board shorts and a bare, hairless chest. He wasn’t looking at us—not yet, at least, still a few too many yards away to catch sight of our bodies in the water below—and it gave us mere seconds of interrupted time to scrutinize him before he could scrutinize us.
“Come on,” Eliza said at last, taking a deep breath before slipping beneath the surface like a water moccasin, silent and slick. I watched her silhouette disappear below the floating dock and I plugged my nose and followed her under, reemerging in the gap between the top of the water and the underside of the wood. It was one of our secret spaces, a private little corner of the world that we had discovered as kids and claimed as our own. I could still remember the day we found it, years ago, doing somersaults in the water and our fingers digging into the pluffy bottom. I had been afraid of it at first, getting that claustrophobic feeling like being trapped inside a submerging car, the pocket of air above me growing smaller as we sank. But Eliza had explained that as the tide rose and fell, the dock did, too. The air would never run out.