I tilt my head, realizing now that maybe Lucy had been watching me all year the same way I had been watching her—secretly, from a distance, eyes darting in the other direction after hovering in the same spot for a beat too long. I just never noticed. I open my mouth, ready to respond, when the door creaks behind me and I whip around, registering Sloane in the entryway.
“What the hell was that?” she asks, brown eyes boring into mine as she steps deeper into my room. “Who was that guy, an ex or something?”
“What guy?” Lucy asks, an eagerness in her tone. I see Nicole appear behind Sloane now, too, the dependent pet who can’t stand to be left alone for too long. The stares from all three of them attacking me at every angle.
They want answers, all of them, a thirsty need for information that won’t be quenched until I spill.
“It’s a long story,” I say instead, already knowing that won’t cut it.
“We’ve got time,” Lucy says, throwing herself onto my bed. Sloane and Nicole follow her lead, taking their own places on the mattress, and I stand in the center of the room for a second, eyeing them there. Numbly watching as Nicole flashes a smile and pats an empty spot on the comforter like she’s trying to seduce me.
I chew on the side of my cheek, thinking. Trying to decide how much to reveal. These girls are still strangers to me, still enigmas I can’t quite crack—but isn’t this how friendships are born? From shared traumas and bedroom bonding? Eliza and I used to do this, too, curled up on her dock in the dark, whispering secrets that drew us closer in the night. It was always the topics that felt taboo that ended up pulling us in the tightest: Eliza, age ten, revealing that she had bought her first bra but was too embarrassed to wear it. Too afraid of the straps poking through the fabric of her T-shirt; of the boys zeroing in and snapping them against her skin. Me, age twelve, showing her my ravaged ankles from trying to shave with my mom’s old razor I had dug out of the trash; the nicks and the cuts and the dried, crusty blood. Her fingers grazing over all those prickly patches I couldn’t quite reach. The two of us talking about boys and tampons and growth spurts and braces, all those tumultuous things that present themselves during the fragile years—years so fragile they were always in danger of shattering completely if not for that one friend who helped you hold it all together.
How many times had we come home from school with our uniforms on, shirts untucked and bras flung off, retreating into her bedroom to talk about our problems, each one seemingly larger than the last? Every conversation tying us tighter until, at last, we were two threads knotted into one: indivisible, inseparable. Eternally intertwined.
I grab the picture from the mantel now and hold it in my hands. I know I can’t keep Eliza from them forever. I know I’ll have to explain it all eventually: her, us. What happened back then and how I came to be here, alone. Levi Butler and why his appearance next door was enough to make me break down completely, buckling like rotten lumber beneath the overwhelming weight of him. A stilt house just waiting to collapse. The truth is, Levi was the very first splinter between us. Like salt-stained wood, it started small: a hairline fracture, skinny as a paper cut, but still, I could feel it. Even then, I could feel it. Beneath that dock, I had been hiding—but Eliza, she had been watching. Watching Levi, her lips dipped beneath the water and a dark curiosity washing over her like an ominous cloud blotting out the light. I watched her while she watched him and somehow, I knew that splinter would just continue to grow, expanding slowly from a crack to a crevice to something else entirely.
I knew it was only a matter of time until he would split us apart: forcefully, violently. I just didn’t know how violent it would be.
“Margot,” Lucy says, and I pull my gaze upward at the three of them sitting frog-legged on my bed. They’re looking at me so strangely and that’s when I register the wetness on my cheeks, two twin tears that have managed to snake their way down my face.
I lift my hand and wipe them away, smiling weakly.
“You can tell us,” she continues, Sloane and Nicole on either side of her, nodding like bobbleheads. “We’re your friends.”
CHAPTER 13
AFTER
“It’s gonna work.”
I look up from my bed, Lucy’s phone still clutched in my hand. Sloane is in the doorway; behind her, Nicole hovers, like neither of them quite want to come in.
“Margot,” she prods when I don’t answer. “It’s gonna work.”
I sigh, letting the phone fall asleep and sliding it back in my bedside table before gesturing for them both to come closer. They push the door all the way open, scampering across the floor in their bare feet, and I fling the covers back, inviting them in.
“They won’t find her,” she adds, scooting in beside me. “It’s Lucy.”
“I know,” I say, knowing Sloane is right. Lucy, who is known to take off on her own without warning. Whose only predictability is being impossible to predict. Lucy, whose own mother is still blissfully unaware that she’s even gone. I wonder if she’s even thought about her recently, Lucy’s mom—if there’s been some kind of primal tickle in the back of her subconscious, alerting her that something is wrong—or if this kind of sustained silence is so normal for them that maternal instinct has long since left.
I wonder if she even cares.
If I was the one to disappear, my parents would already have “MISSING” posters stapled to every light pole across the state. I know I complain about them, I know they have flaws, but I can’t deny that they are the ideal family for a missing girl. They have money and resources and endless time; the kinds of faces that would look nice at a press conference, their televised grief still achingly attractive. There would be manned tip lines and a million-dollar reward set up within the first twenty-four hours.
Probably a hashtag, already trending.
I can’t help but remember now how we all sat here together, in these very same spots, on that very first day: Lucy, Sloane, Nicole, and me, squeezed together on this tiny little twin. Maybe it was the cheap beer still sitting stale in my stomach or the knowledge that Levi Butler was just next door or the fact that Lucy had been looking at me, blue eyes wide and attention rapt, in a way I had never seen her look at anyone before—but whatever the reason, something changed in that moment.
My guard dropped and I started talking. I started telling them everything.
“You’re getting scared,” Sloane says now, her hand on my leg. “You shouldn’t be. This was her idea to begin with.”
“I know,” I say again.
“She’s the one who got us into this.”
“I know.”
“The Butlers are filing a lawsuit against Kappa Nu,” Nicole adds. “Wrongful death.”
I nod, my eyes drilling into my bedspread. I had heard that, too, the breaking news alert chirping across my phone. Even though Levi’s death was initially deemed an accident, it happened at a fraternity function. Alcohol was involved … a lot of it. None of us were of age, yet all of us had been wasted, guzzling cheap booze before passing out around a giant open flame as the temperature plummeted around us, frozen fingers and plumes of breath visible in the night. He had marks and bruises on his skin, possible evidence of being hazed. His blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.
It’s a miracle, his parents would argue, that there weren’t more fatalities.