“I’ve been looking for you.” Trevor winks. “Where you been?”
“I was just—” He gestures to the shed again, the door still hanging open to reveal the back of our empty house. I watch as he looks at Trevor, then me, then Lucy sitting silently in the corner, a little curl to her lip as she watches him squirm. “Trying to bring this fire back to life.”
“Why don’t you let Danny handle that,” Trevor says, squeezing his shoulder, hard. “Let’s get you a drink.”
Levi looks back at me one last time before nodding silently and slinking into the house, Trevor’s grip still firm against his skin. There’s a certain energy to him tonight, Trevor, one that sometimes creeps in when I’ve seen him bossing around the pledges, drunk on power and playing God. It feels coked up and dangerous, like he’s looking for a fight or maybe just returned from one, adrenaline pounding around him like a pulse.
Or maybe that’s just me again, my own imagination, whatever I ingested earlier making everything feel so good until it took such a violent turn in the opposite direction.
“Here,” Danny says, turning to Lucy once the others are gone. He hands her the drink, arm outstretched, but she doesn’t take it.
“I’m not thirsty anymore,” she says instead, standing up before walking toward me and grabbing my arm. “We’re going home, anyway.”
We step around the fire and stumble through the grass, Lucy’s fingers digging hard into my wrist as she pulls me through the shed. My head is dipping, spinning, and I’m relieved to be leaving, the sights and sounds and smells of the party suddenly too much—but at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about Levi slinking around in our house just minutes before. I can’t stop imagining him creeping through my bedroom the way he once crept through Eliza’s, fingers flipping through my clothes. Scanning the pictures on my mantel, maybe. His greedy eyes on her still, even now.
“Wait,” I say, stopping abruptly in the backyard, feet from the door. Lucy turns and looks at me, her head cocked to the side. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, hands on her hips.
I think of him on Eliza’s bed, his head on her pillow. The faint smell of him staining her sheets.
“Levi,” I say at last. “He wasn’t in the shed. He was in the house.”
Lucy is quiet, staring at me, before twisting her head and looking at the back door.
“We were sitting around that fire for over an hour,” I continue. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long.”
“Margot,” she says, smiling. “We were out there for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Still,” I say, feeling my cheeks burn hot. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long looking for lighter fluid.”
She sighs, rolling her neck like she’s trying to stretch something out.
“Maybe he was tinkering with the toilet tank or something. I told Trevor the other day they need to take care of that. The noise is pissing me off.”
“Why would Levi be doing that?”
“Trevor always sends the pledges to handle that stuff,” she says. “He’s too lazy to do it himself, plus he can’t use a tool to save his life.”
“In a loincloth?” I ask. “In the middle of a party?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“We need to start locking the doors,” I say. “We always leave them open.”
“Yeah, because Nicole can’t keep track of her key,” she says. “She lost her keycard to Hines the second day of freshman year.”
“But the boys can’t just come in here without asking—”
“Yes, they can,” she says, cutting me off. “They own the house, Margot. They can do whatever they want.”
“They own the house,” I echo, realizing, for the first time, what exactly that entails. I didn’t even have to sign a lease to live here. Levi isn’t just my neighbor anymore. He isn’t just some guy next door who looks through the windows or loiters out back.
He’s more than that. He can do more than that.
“Look, you’re messed up,” Lucy says, touching my arm. “You’re paranoid, having a bad trip. It’s my fault, honestly. I should have only given you half.”
I look down at her fingers on my forearm, feeling a twist in my chest. Thinking of the pill she placed in my palm; the bitter pinch of it as I swallowed it dry. She’s right, I know she’s right, but at the same time, the energy back there was unmistakably off. It felt like I was on the outside of something among all of them, Levi included, a sinister secret pulsing around them like a shared heartbeat.
“Let’s go inside, get you some water,” Lucy says. “Then you can sleep it off.”
CHAPTER 28
The night that follows is one I’ll never forget, the music from next door pulsing like blood in my ears. It goes on for hours until the sound eventually dwindles into a faint trickle of the final stragglers: a single laugh, someone tripping in the gravel. The metallic kick of an empty can skidding across the road.
It’s even worse once it’s quiet, though, the thought of Levi creeping through our house the same way he once crept through Eliza’s forcing my brain to stay awake. It comes to me in flashes, the juxtaposition of then and now blurring together until they’re indistinguishable: his calloused hands on our doorknob, twisting it gently before stepping inside. The fluttering of wind in the curtains, Eliza’s living room and the marshy smell that seeped its way in like he brought something dead inside with him. Walking around her bedroom, plucking that picture from her wall and running his fingers over it before slipping it into his pocket.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, my body sinking down with the creak of the springs.
I’ve slipped into sleep a couple times, but it’s always a restless, stressful dip out of consciousness before I’m startled back awake after only a few minutes—and every single time, I see flashes from my past, carnivalesque and over the top. The same way the circle of us around that bonfire felt otherworldly and wrong: Eliza and me lying out on the dock, our limbs stretched so long they look like melting taffy pulling in the sun. Levi’s white smile, the corners of his lips fish-hooked so high I can see his gums.
Darkness, total darkness, so disorienting that I feel myself falling far and fast until I hit the ground with a quick, wet splat.
I glance at my bedside table, little digital numbers glowing red and the pair of handcuffs coiled on the clock, serpentine in the dark. It’s almost four in the morning and even though the effects of whatever I took earlier have mostly worn off, there’s still that lingering discomfort that borders on fear.
My legs won’t stop pulsing, thrashing, my body begging me to run.
“It’s totally harmless,” Lucy had said, grabbing her keys from a hook on the wall and unlocking the cuffs. Then she sat me down on the kitchen floor and fed me little sips of water, hand cupped tight under my chin. I had been shaking uncontrollably at that point, trembling jaw like a chattering-teeth toy. “Just gives everything a bit of a glow until, you know. It doesn’t.”