It’s unnaturally cold the week leading up to Thanksgiving, the temperature dropping into the forties every time the sun dips down. Everything has felt so stilted since Halloween, so strange, and I can’t help but feel like some cataclysmic change took place that I haven’t picked up on. A tectonic shifting, the very ground no longer solid, but trembling. Threatening to buckle beneath us all.
The day after the party, Trevor and Nicole got into a blowout fight: screaming, crying, Nicole slamming her way out of his room and charging past the rest of us before barreling back into the house. Of course, we chased right after her, asked what was wrong, but she never told us. Never even came close. They made up hours later—they always do—but every time we’re all together now, the tension is so thick, so heavy, it’s almost unbearable. The weight of it all like an anvil on the chest; a crushing mass that makes it hard to breathe.
“She needs to move on,” Lucy says to me now, the two of us making our way out back. The weeds have gotten out of hand this week, the grass calf-high, scratchy against my exposed ankles. “I mean, seriously. It needs to stop. I’m honestly relieved she’s gone.”
Lucy had convinced me to stay on campus over Thanksgiving break. “It’ll feel like summer all over again,” she’d said, crisscross on my bed, making me yearn for those twelve perfect weeks that suddenly felt so far away. In truth, I had been dreading going home to my parents, anyway. Dreading their inevitable questions about my major and whether or not I still wanted to keep it; their nosy inquiries about my new life, new friends, sniffing around for some small detail for them to pick apart. I’ve told them virtually nothing about my roommates—I haven’t wanted to taint them, this, this thing I have that finally feels so blissfully removed from my life back home—so while Sloane left this morning, Nicole two days ago, I hung back, settled in.
Starting tonight, it’s just me and Lucy for one entire week.
“What do you think happened?” I ask, trying to pry information instead of share it myself. I haven’t told anyone about how I found Nicole that night: dress slipped off in the hallway, hair caked with vomit and stuck to the side of her neck. She explicitly asked me not to just before Sloane and Lucy came back from the kitchen. She said she didn’t want to deal with Lucy’s jokes about her being a lightweight, said she just wanted to forget, so I had nodded, agreed, and kept my mouth shut. Because her story made sense. I could see it so vividly: Trevor’s fingers digging into her wrists, pulling her down the fraternity halls. Trying to separate her from the rest of the party once he realized she drank too much. Maybe she got sick on his shirt and that’s why he wasn’t wearing one; maybe that’s what their fight was all about—but lately, I’ve started to feel the emergence of a new feeling in my chest. The same feeling I had when I watched Eliza stomach-down on her bed, knowing that Levi was just outside, watching her in the dark. The same feeling that flared up every time she strutted down the dock, played with her bathing suit.
The same feeling that’s screaming at me right now, flailing its arms. Begging me to acknowledge that something’s not right.
“Oh, I know exactly what happened,” Lucy responds as she slaps away a bug on her arm. “She got shitfaced on Halloween and Trevor got mad because the president’s girlfriend shouldn’t be acting like that.”
“That seems a little harsh,” I say.
“Yeah, well, that’s how it is with them. He gets jealous, too. She’s flirty when she drinks.”
I open my mouth, then immediately close it, still not sure how much to say.
“But if she breaks up with Trevor, we lose the house,” Lucy continues. “The president picks the tenants. We’ll all be homeless.”
“I don’t think she’s going to break up with Trevor,” I respond, even though Lucy is right. Nicole’s the whole reason we got this place.
“You sure about that?”
“No,” I admit. “But it doesn’t really seem like Trevor’s the thing she’s so upset about.”
“What do you mean?” she asks as we approach the shed, double doors shut tight. “What else would it be?”
I hesitate, my mind on another memory. The same one that flared up on Halloween as I held Nicole’s body in the dark, staring at those grapelike bruises clustered around her wrist. The one I had tried to push down, tried to forget.
I think of Levi leaving the shed, that haunted look on his face.
I think of Nicole half naked on the floor, fetal and broken. The way she tried to fight me off when I touched her, her pathetic little limbs pushing into mine and her voice so fragile. Those single-syllable words flopping off her tongue like they were too heavy for her mouth to hold.
“No. Stop.”
Once again, there’s just something about Levi, and it isn’t even how he had been on our property before I found her, having free rein of our home like that night at Eliza’s. It isn’t even the way those bruises had been on her wrist, of all places, sending a sharp pain through my chest like a knife to the heart. It’s that I’ve noticed, ever since Halloween, that Nicole and Levi hardly even look at each other anymore. It’s not like they ever really had a friendship before—Nicole listened to me when I told her those stories about Eliza, his watching, what happened between them on the night she died—and after that, she always kept her distance, albeit pleasantly, politely, such is Nicole. But now, it isn’t just her staying away. It’s him, too. A mutual ignoring that feels deliberate on both their parts.
Like something happened between them they equally want to forget.
“I’ve just been thinking—” I start, but before I can finish, I open the shed and jump straight back, my hand shooting to the base of my neck. “Jesus, that’s disgusting.”
In front of us, a dead deer hangs from a rope on the ceiling, bubblegum tongue lolled out to the side and a steady stream of blood flowing into a floor grate I’ve never once noticed.
“They must’ve gone hunting,” Lucy says, unperturbed, watching curiously as the carcass sways. “It’s finally cold enough.”
I suddenly remember the way the shed smelled the very first time I stepped inside: that metallic tang, like something decayed, that has since become as commonplace as the vanilla perfume dabbed behind Lucy’s ear, Nicole’s peppermint shampoo pushed into the pillows. I barely even notice it anymore, the smell of death. The odor of rust and rot that’s always there, airborne, stained into the place.
“They’re bleeding it,” she observes, tilting her head, her eyes following that thin trickle of red. “I wonder if we can convince them to make us dinner.”
“No, thank you.”
“You’ve never had venison before?”
“No.”
“You should try it. It’s good.”
“I don’t know,” I say, staring into its pupils. Seeing myself in the inky reflection before forcing myself to look away. “It feels a little different when you look into its eyes before eating it.”
Lucy just shrugs, continues walking.
“Who else is here this week?” I ask as we skirt our way around the interior walls. The deer keeps turning as we move; a slow, somber circle.
“Lucas, Trevor, James, Will,” she says. “They’re all local so they’re just going home for the day.”
“That’s it?”
“A couple of pledges,” she adds, deliberately not looking at me. “They always make a few of them stay behind to take care of the house.”
“Which ones?” I ask, suddenly more alert. We’re almost to the back door now, the faint eruption of laughter leaking through the windows. The scrutiny of the deer on my back making the little hairs on my neck stand up straight.
“Levi,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I saw his Jeep out front.”
I stop, barely a few feet from the door now, and Lucy twists around, annoyance on her face.
“Look, I know you don’t like him, but you can’t hide in your room every time he comes around. You were here first.”