Maybe the madness of these last three months has finally caught up to me, the beer and liquor and cheap, shitty weed causing my brain to slow way down, processing things that used to be easy in a kind of sluggish slow motion. I’m definitely sleep-deprived, consistently hungover, but in truth, I think I just miss the way those days bled together like watercolor, twelve entire weeks stitched into a single memory like a mosaic, a quilt. One long fever dream that couldn’t possibly end. But when it did end, I blinked my eyes and found myself loopy and disoriented like waking up wrecked after a cough syrup stupor: bumbling and bleary-eyed, unable to discern the real from the imagined. Fact from fiction. Reality from dream.
I’m curled up on the couch now with a pile of books on the cushion beside me, the smallest of them nestled in my lap. I’m enrolled in a Great Books class this semester and the reading list is exorbitant, a fast slap back to reality: Homer and Dostoevsky and Twain and Tolstoy, all of us warned on the very first day that we’ll need to get through a book a week in order to be prepared for the final, no matter if the selected text is ninety pages or nine hundred. I never could have gotten through them all last year, the way my mind constantly wandered without warning, but now, somehow, I find that I’m able to relax into the words again, the sentences stringing together in my mind without effort as I slip into another body, another world.
More undeniable evidence that this summer has changed me in more ways than one.
I look up just as Lucy bursts out of her bedroom, her open door revealing a peek inside. I can see clothes cast away on an unmade bed, a single dreamcatcher spinning sluggish beneath the air vent. She keeps stick-on stars on the ceiling, the same kind I had when I was a kid, and the quick glimpse reminds me of my very first day here, taking stock of every single space, trying to piece together what the clues might say. Sloane’s and Nicole’s were fairly easy to decipher, the pictures their rooms painted straightforward and clear, but I still can’t get a grasp on Lucy’s, even after so much time spent inside. I still can’t discern what, exactly, it says about her. What it reveals.
I probably never will.
“What are you reading?” she asks now, walking over to the couch. She stands above me, peering over the pages, and I hold the book up, showing her the cover: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “What’s it about?”
“You’ve never heard of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” I ask, with an incredulous stare. Everybody knows Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even though this is the first time I’ve ever actually read the story, the characters themselves are so deeply saturated into society, it’s hard to imagine having never even heard of it: the eternal battle of good versus evil, the ability for one body to possess two entirely different natures. The constant clashing between them and the question of which will rise up, victorious.
Lucy just shrugs, shakes her head, and I look back down at the book again, eyeing the passage I just highlighted.
“It’s about … human nature, I guess.”
“Huh,” she says.
“You’d probably like it.”
I think back to that night at Penny Lanes again, the scene flaring up like an itch begging to be scratched. Lucy’s voice, soft as silk, as she presented us all with that question: “If you knew you could get away with murder, would you do it?” I can still see her devilish grin, the way she was examining us all, pushing and pulling, daring us to indulge in the dirty little parts of ourselves we’re constantly trying to repress. I’ve shrugged it off since then, discounted the entire conversation as just another one of Lucy’s stunts meant to shock and awe—but at the same time, I can’t deny that, in the moment, we had all been thinking it, considering it. Pondering the perfect balance between risk and reward, scales quivering, each of us wondering what it would take to finally make them tip. The mental tally of everyone in our lives who had wronged us flipping through our minds as quick as a deck of cards.
“Can I read it when you’re done?” she asks, and I look at her, studying the way her face is cocked so curiously. Her eyes dart back and forth between me and the book as if she wants it, desperately, so I flip it closed, toss it across the couch.
“Take it,” I say at last, curling my legs up beneath me. “It’s yours.”
CHAPTER 23
Fall arrives in the way of all the seasons: slowly, at first, a sense of giddy anticipation spreading through campus with each unusually crisp morning or crunch of dead leaves beneath our feet. We could all feel it happening, the creeping change in the air. Our spiked fruit and summertime tans being slowly replaced with warm whiskey cider and bonfires behind the shed.
We still go next door, of course, but with eight A.M. lectures and late nights at the library bookending our days, the frequency has dwindled to a steady trickle at best, no longer every night, but strategically scattered depending on our workload. And not only is the frequency different, but the feeling is, too: now, there are always other people there, no longer just the small, exclusive pocket of us it was in the weeks before. There are girlfriends back from summers abroad, sorority girls eyeing us with not-so-subtle curiosity. I can’t help but feel territorial every time I step into the place and find someone else sitting in my usual spot on the couch, some other girl chatting up Trevor when Nicole isn’t around. I try to let it slide, shooting over a shy smile when I catch them staring, but the gush of other students on campus has been an unexpected shot of reality, a splash of cold water just when I was starting to get comfortable.
A humbling reminder, really, that the place was never truly ours to begin with.
“Costume parties are stupid,” Sloane says to me now as she sits cross-legged on my bed, watching me fling various clothes around my room. We’ve been watching the pledges decorate the house all week: stuffed bodies swaying from the magnolia tree out back, faux cobwebs strangling the branches. A skeleton doing a keg stand and strobe lights pulsing to the rhythm of a playlist that’s been running on repeat for so long, I’ve started hearing the songs in my sleep. “Draw whiskers on your cheeks and call it a day.”
“I’m tempted,” I say, taking in her flannel button-up and baggy jeans. She has a green beanie sitting snug over her hair, a budget-friendly lumberjack she pulls off well, and I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first. “How seriously do they take this thing?”
“Like a heart attack, unfortunately.”
I flip through a few more hangers, chewing on the inside of my cheek. Out of all the roommates, Sloane is the one I’ve seen the least of since school started back up again. If she isn’t in class, she’s at work at the registrar’s, and she’s the smartest of us all by a landslide, vanishing every Monday morning and rarely making another appearance outside of fishing around in the kitchen until it’s time to go out on Friday night. I’ve caught glimpses of Nicole studying at the kitchen table, Lucy reading in front of the TV, but they’re both more than willing to party on the weeknights in a way that Sloane typically isn’t. Nicole tends to power through her hangovers, shamelessly reporting to class in sunglasses and sweatpants, whereas Lucy just skips them entirely, spending entire days in her room with the lights off and door closed.
“Dressing up shouldn’t be a prerequisite to get drunk,” I say, pulling out a cheetah-print sweater—but before I can hold it up to my chest, I feel that familiar presence behind me, already knowing it’s Lucy in the door.
I twist around, registering her costume: a black tank top, leather pants, and combat boots complete with felt ears and thin little lines scratched across her face. The outfit makes her mane of curls look even darker, her eyes glow even brighter, and there’s something chilling about the contrast: cold and hard like the silent slink of a panther as it weaves its way through the dark.
“Well,” I say. “There goes that idea.”
“Be a prisoner,” Lucy says, walking toward my closet and plucking a black-and-white-striped dress from the back. “I have some handcuffs you can attach to your wrist.”
“A prisoner,” I echo, tossing the sweater onto the floor and slipping the dress off the hanger instead. “And why do you have handcuffs?”