“So, was he obsessed with her or something?” Nicole asks, scooting forward, fully absorbed like she’s soaking in a movie and not my real life, some slow-motion car chase seconds before the crash. “Like an ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can’ type of thing?”
I nod, remembering. It had started small between them: a mutual fascination, an innocent crush. A bud of a thing still curled up and cautious, but slowly, inevitably, it began to bloom. By the middle of that summer, I would come over and catch the two of them talking on the dock, one of Levi’s cigarettes dangling between her fingers. Eliza never used to smoke during the day like that, only at the occasional party when she was too drunk, but with Levi, her bad habits became more abundant. They mutated and metastasized; took on a life of their own. So I would approach them gently, respectfully, sitting cross-legged next to Eliza and trying to keep my distance, smiling weakly as their conversation hushed into a smothered silence—but at the same time, my very presence signaling that I wasn’t the intruder in that situation.
I wasn’t the outsider. He was.
Because that was the thing with Eliza, the thing Levi never realized: she was like that with everyone. She was just passing the time with him, a shiny new plaything to keep her occupied during those long, lazy days of summer. She liked the feeling of his eyes on her skin; the thought of him just next door, lying in bed, his mind on her. She was just starting to realize the power her own body could have on other people, just learning how to wield it like a weapon: moving her legs and chewing her lip and twirling her hair. A single batted eye bringing a boy to his knees.
“A couple months before she died, she told me she felt like she was being watched,” I say at last.
I’ll never forget it when she finally told me. We were halfway into our senior year and whatever this thing was between them had stretched on from the summer and into the school year, a curling tentacle holding her tight. I thought it would naturally fizzle out once classes started up again, but the distance only seemed to make it stronger. Nobody else looked at her the way he did. At school, she went back to being just another carbon copy of everybody else—long hair, starched skirt, knee socks, and scuffed-up clogs that made us all sweaty and shapeless—but back home with Levi, prancing around in her tank tops and short shorts, she was different, special. Perfect.
I remember studying on her bed that night, stomachs flopped down on the mattress and Eliza’s long legs scissoring in the air. We were still in our uniforms, shirts untucked and skirts riding high, and she kept glancing over her shoulder, toward the window, tucking her hair behind her ear like she was playing some kind of role in a movie. Like she knew she was on display.
“What are you doing?” I asked at last, tired of acting too stupid to notice. “Why are you being so weird?”
She just smiled at me, condescendingly coy, like I was on the outside of some inside joke.
“Is someone out there?” I asked, twisting around so I could look, too. I realized then how exposed we were: the brightness of her bedroom juxtaposed with the darkness outside; how the two of us, framed by the window, would be perfectly visible to someone outside, yet they would be perfectly invisible to us.
“I think he watches me,” she said at last, her chin tucked into her chest and her voice an inch above a whisper. “I think he’s out there right now.”
“What?” I gasped, standing up quickly. I started to walk over to the window but before I could reach it and peer outside, she grabbed my arm and yanked me back down.
“Don’t look,” she hissed. “Are you crazy?”
“Are you? Eliza, that’s so creepy. Do you not see how that’s creepy?”
“It’s not creepy,” she said. “It’s cute.”
“I’m sorry, but what exactly about being stalked is cute?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said, rolling her eyes. Shifting her weight from one arm to the other, letting the neck of her button-up yawn open wide.
“What is with you lately?” I asked her then, not bothering to hide the disdain in my voice. The judgment, the scorn, the frustration that I had been keeping bottled up at that point for far too long. “Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like this,” I said, throwing my arms up, gesturing to it all. “He’s just a boy, Eliza. Since when do you change yourself like this for a boy?”
“I’m not changing myself—” she started, but I interrupted her before she could finish.
“Yes, you are. You’ve been different. Distant.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered, and I let out a scoff.
“Try me.”
She looked up at me then, front teeth digging into her lower lip. I raised my eyebrows, egging her on, and watched as her eyes darted back to the window.
“There’s nothing wrong with letting him look.”
I stared at her then, disbelief washing over me, the thin line between danger and desire evaporating completely and melding the two together into something else entirely. It was so classically Eliza: driving without a seat belt, diving into the marsh when the tide was too low. Sometimes I thought she genuinely enjoyed the prospect of getting hurt, the threat of impending danger dangling over her heightening the sensation of being alive.
“Pretty soon he’s gonna want to do more than just look,” I said at last, my arms crossed tight. “What are you going to do then?”
Eliza just shrugged, ignoring me, lifting her pen to her lips and chewing on the cap in the same mindless way she used to saunter down the dock, adjusting the triangle of her bikini top before flipping onto her stomach and untying the straps. She was doing it on purpose, I realized, all of it cunning and calculated and entirely for him: cracking the window but never opening it completely. Flashing a glimpse of her bare back before clicking out the light and closing the curtains, letting him wonder what was happening in the dark.
I shot another look out the window, squinting my eyes against the inky beyond, and in that moment, I swear I could see him: a silhouette in the distance, standing on the dock.
The outline of Levi watching us both.
CHAPTER 15
I wake up to the sound of rolling thunder, a shuddering through the house I feel deep in my bones.
We’re three weeks into summer and the noise reminds me of that very first day, the bloated clouds encroaching on campus turning the sky a marbled gray. The way I had glanced out the window as the four of us sat on my bed, the spray of rain suddenly fogging up the glass. I remember thinking Levi had summoned it, somehow, his presence alone turning a perfect morning into something dreary and dark—but the truth, I knew, is that summer storms are normal around here, those reliable rumbles showing up as soon as the sun peaks in the sky. Those flashes of lightning; the torrential rain.
Quick, violent things that disrupt everything before disappearing again once they’ve found their release.
We ended up skipping the party at Kappa Nu, opting instead for a girls’ night in. And I was grateful for it, relishing the opportunity to both avoid Levi and settle into my strange new life. Nicole and Sloane latched on to my stories about him immediately, swigging straight from a bottle of bourbon they brought into my bedroom when I described the way we once found a cigarette butt smoldering in the grass outside Eliza’s window, proof of him moving even closer in the night.