I can see the impending articles now; all the blame being pointed at Rutledge and Greek life and the way we students were able to run wild, drinking ourselves into a stupor with barely any oversight. Surely, it would go national: endless headshots of Levi flashing across the television, poised and professional and not at all the party animal I had always known him to be. He would be painted an athlete, a scholar, despite the fact that he ran track for one year in high school before dropping out, his smoking habit decimating his lungs. Despite the fact that he was a solid C student who was probably only admitted because his dad was a donor. Nevertheless. The entire country would still mourn his promise, his potential, all of it washed away with the water of an outgoing tide. Kappa Nu would be seen as a mere casualty; an innocent bystander caught in the cross fire.
But were they innocent? Were they, really?
I can’t bring myself to feel bad about the consequences that have already come for the rest of the brothers: the suspensions and the fines. The collective black spots that will follow them around campus, the rest of their lives, forever marring them as the reason one of their own had died. Because they brought this upon themselves, too, the way they looked at us like part of their property. The way they treated us like things they owned; mere decorations that came with the house itself.
The way they used us, dangled us like carrots. Hung us up like a neon sign flashing in the night: GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS.
They deserve it all.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, remembering. The brightness of the stars that night and the way they shone like diamonds in the sky. The totality of the darkness around us, a deep, dank, velvety black. The way Levi stood up and immediately stumbled, pitching forward in his bare feet before lurching off into the distance.
The way Lucy had stood up, too, glancing in my direction before following him into the cattails, quick and quiet. Disappearing into the night.
“Yeah,” I repeat, my confidence growing. “It’s gonna work.”
CHAPTER 14
BEFORE
“Levi Butler was my best friend’s next-door neighbor,” I say at last, picking at a loose cuticle until it bleeds. The three of them are sitting beside me, chins in their hands. “And he’s the reason she’s dead.”
The bluntness of the statement catches me by surprise, the way it spewed out of my mouth like a sneeze. Powerful and without permission. I look up at them, registering their shocked expressions. Their bunched-up foreheads and wide, white eyes.
“Like, he killed her?” Nicole asks.
I open my mouth, then immediately close it, the answer too difficult to form into words.
“It’s complicated,” I say at last. “It was ruled an accident, officially, but there was more to it than that.”
“What happened?” she asks, and eventually, I sigh, my body back in that lukewarm water. The tangle of seaweed caught in my toes and the flitter of minnows grazing my thigh. Later that night, during dinner, Eliza’s parents told us that the Butlers were from somewhere in state. That their son, Levi, was a year younger than us and rightfully bitter at having been yanked out of high school the summer going into his junior year.
“He doesn’t know anyone in the Outer Banks,” Eliza’s mom had said, stabbing at a chunk of salmon with her fork. I still remember the sound of the metal scraping against the inside of her teeth, harsh and grating, spraying goose bumps across my arms. “So you girls be nice.”
“Why did they move?” I had asked, my sun-stung eyes darting in the direction of the Butlers’ house. Even though there were two thick walls and a full yard between us, I could still feel him there, as if he were sitting at that very table, nestled between Eliza and me. Already cutting me out.
“Said they needed a lifestyle change.” Mr. Jefferson shrugged. “Didn’t elaborate more than that.”
Eliza was unusually distant that night, lost somewhere deep in the fissures of her own wild mind. I watched as she sat there quietly, gnawing on a fingernail as Mr. Jefferson stood up and cleared the plates before lowering the needle down on an old record player; grabbing Mrs. Jefferson’s hand and swinging her around the kitchen the way he always did after dinner. I remember closing my eyes, listening to the music leaking out through their wide-open windows; the acoustics and laughter drifting across the water like some kind of birdsong that felt exotic and rare.
I remember thinking she’d get over it, that it was just another one of her brooding moods, but in the weeks that followed, it only got worse.
“What happened,” I echo back, Nicole’s question haunting me like a whisper in the night. I can’t even count the number of times I listened to those words tumbling out of the mouths of my parents that summer as they watched the news in the dark, shaking their heads and a film of tears sitting stagnant in their eyes. How many times I imagined the Jeffersons screaming them into the phone, at each other. Overheard my curious classmates as they tried to pry information out of anyone they could find. Running on repeat in my mind like a broken record, night after night, as I tried to understand it, come to terms with it all—and not just the singular moment, the accident itself, but everything that came before it.
“I don’t really know what happened,” I say at last. “That’s the hardest part.”
The three of them shift on my bed, uncomfortable, perhaps knowing on some subconscious level not to interrupt.
“I think she was just curious at first,” I say, remembering how I would catch her eyes skipping over to the house next door: to Levi, sweaty and shirtless, pushing around a manual lawn mower or doing push-ups on the patio while we sunned ourselves out back. She seemed only vaguely interested in the beginning, a window-shopper’s curious detachment. Strolling around the backyard the way she always did in nothing but her bathing suit, eyes on her phone as she walked the dock like a runway, pretending he didn’t exist. And he kept his distance, mostly. Sneaking the occasional glance when he thought we weren’t looking. Eliza sneaking it back. But then she caved after those first few weeks and searched for him on Instagram, scrolling through an endless array of Levis before throwing her phone onto her bed in defeat. His anonymity just made him more interesting to her, her mind filling in the blanks with details that were far more exciting than what likely existed. It didn’t help that we went to an all-girls school, either. That we spent every day of our lives enveloped in a heavy cloud of body mist and estrogen, dreaming about boys instead of seeing what they were actually like in real life.
If our parents sent us there with the intention of keeping us focused, of eliminating the distraction, it had the opposite effect. Instead, we were clueless and curious, a lethal combination, drawn to their bright colors like moths to a flame.
“She was always trying to branch out, meet new people,” I continue. “Then all of a sudden, this new guy shows up from somewhere different and starts taking an interest.”
“So, they dated,” Sloane says, and I shake my head.
“It was never serious.”
I look at Lucy and register the indifference in her expression; while Sloane and Nicole are totally rapt, shaken at the idea of a murderer next door, Lucy is looking at me in an almost clinical sense, cold and detached. Like she doesn’t quite believe what I’m saying. Like she’s trying to form a hypothesis of her own.
“The thing you need to understand about Eliza is that everyone loved her,” I say at last, looking down at the picture again. “But just because you loved her, it didn’t mean she loved you back.”
“What was so lovable about her?” Lucy asks. I can’t help but startle at the way she says it, venom dripping, almost like she’s jealous.
“Everything,” I say, and that’s the truth. Despite our differences, our occasional spats, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about her. “She was kind and funny and fearless … almost to a fault, you know? Nobody was a stranger.”
Lucy simply nods and I realize, despite how alike they sometimes seem, the two of them probably wouldn’t be friends. There would be too much envy between them, too much competition. That’s the whole reason girls like them choose friends like us: too-nice Nicole and studious Sloane and malleable Margot.
The kind of friends who are more than happy to take the back seat. The kind of friends who won’t get in the way.