I watch as Levi glances at Trevor like a child looking for an escape, but Trevor only shrugs, his eyes red and worn.
“She’s not wrong.”
The entire room is silent again, bated breath as we stare at Lucy, wondering what she has in mind. A single sentence from her has the power to change an entire night’s dynamic, alter the very air between us, and I try not to overanalyze how she’s clearly singled Levi out again, almost all of her attention directed at him like that night at Penny Lanes.
I wonder what she’s doing, what this new game is, the way she plopped down right beside him on the couch, her legs kicked up on his lap and her fingernails trailing their way down his arm. If she really doesn’t find anything wrong with the way she’s acting or if there’s something more to it. Something I can’t yet see.
“Fine, truth,” Levi says, downing his drink. Lucy reaches for the open bottle on the floor but he holds his hand over his glass and shakes his head. I hear a faint scratch from the corner of the room, Lucas setting a record on the turntable and lowering the needle down.
“What are you afraid of more than anything?” she asks, resting her head in her hand. “Anything in the whole world?”
A long, dense silence packs the room—the kind that makes it feel like there’s cotton in my ears, drowning the sound—before the hazy hum of Janis Joplin trickles into all of us.
“Heights,” Levi says at last, looking into his drink like he’s studying something hidden in the bottom. “I’m afraid of heights.”
I stare at him, trying to decide if this is some kind of sick joke, and without warning, his words summon her again: Eliza, materializing out of nowhere. Sitting beside Levi with her hand on his thigh, her eyes on mine.
A single trickle of blood, skinny and serpentine, snaking its way out of her mouth.
“And small spaces,” he adds, making me blink. “I’m kind of claustrophobic.”
Trevor clears his throat, like he’s trying to mask a laugh, and I look over at him smiling into his cup. I can see it in Lucas, too, and James and Will and even Lucy: some unsaid thing bouncing around the room, pinging off all of them.
“Heights and small spaces,” she echoes as she finishes her drink. “Good to know.”
CHAPTER 33
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, it feels like I’ve traveled back in time to two years ago. To that night in my bedroom, my phone alight in the dark, watching my best friend play with fire while I stayed wrapped in the cool safety of my duvet, wound around me like a fiberglass blanket. Looking at Eliza and Levi on that screen felt like looking through someone else’s window and seeing something I shouldn’t, something dangerous: a child in the kitchen reaching for the knife block. Little fingers fiddling with the safety of a loaded gun.
Watching, waiting, wondering what would happen.
Knowing, deep down, how it would end.
We had always been so different, Eliza and me, but that’s the reason we worked so well. Without her incessant nudging, her never-ending efforts to get me to go out, do something spontaneous, I never would have left the house—but without me around to constantly reel her back in, remind her of her own mortality, she never would have come back.
And then, that night, she didn’t.
Now, sitting in the living room and staring at Lucy, it’s like I’m looking at a carbon copy of all those nights together, fuzzy and fading and just different enough to let me know that this is real. This really is happening: Lucy’s legs stretched across Levi like a seat belt, pinning him back, long and lean and smooth under his touch. The way she laughs when he talks, twirling a curl around her finger the same way Eliza used to tinker with that pen in her bedroom, suck on her diamond necklace. Kicking her legs, biting her lip. Anything to get him to look.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, Eliza and Lucy being as similar as they are. Even when I talked about Eliza that first night on my bed, Lucy had a wariness to her, an obvious envy emanating from her eyes like she felt the need to compete with someone already in the grave. Eliza loved the danger and Lucy does, too, so maybe the idea of dangling herself in front of someone who might lash out and bite, someone who already has, makes him all the more appealing. A danger so palpable she can taste it every time he gets close, like metallic on your tongue just before lightning strikes.
I keep turning it over in my mind, trying to understand it, when I hear a noise from outside. The same muffled movement I heard on Halloween: a slapping door, a gentle scraping. Someone clearing their throat.
I sit up, listening quietly before climbing out of bed and turning on my light. Just like last time, it sounds too close to be coming from the yard—but it’s not coming from inside the house, either. I open my door and tiptoe into the hallway, glancing into the bathroom, just in case.
It’s empty, like I knew it would be: no Nicole on the tile, loose limbs at harsh right angles. The heave of bile trying to claw its way out.
“Lucy?” I whisper, walking to her room next. The door is shut, the way it usually is, and I think about knocking, but instead, I just place my hand on the knob and twist. “Luce, do you hear that?”
Her room is partially illuminated by the glow of the moon through the curtains, those neon stars alight on the ceiling, and almost immediately, I see that it’s empty.
“Lucy?” I ask again, opening the door wider, even though she’s clearly not here. Her comforter is flung back, an imprint of where her body once was on the mattress. A single pillow housing the shape of her head. I resist the urge to step in farther, instead closing the door again and making my way into the living room, perching myself on the edge of the couch.
I think back to earlier in the night, when the boys were leaving. I had stood up, collected our glasses, a silent cue that the evening was over. Lucy acted like she was heading to bed, too, hands on her hips, yawning in the hallway. Watching until they all filed out the back door, into the shed, and disappeared into the dark.
Unless, of course, she was waiting for me to shut myself in before she left, too.
But if Lucy went next door, who would she have gone with? In the months we’ve lived together, I’ve never once seen her spend the night anywhere other than here. It can’t be Trevor, surely. Judging by the way she looked at me at dinner, eyes on mine as he worked his charm, she would never go home with our roommate’s boyfriend … although I do remember her laughing about it the day I moved in, teasing Nicole as she tossed the pillow in her direction.
“If you don’t want him, I’ll take him. I’m not going to apologize for introducing you to the most beautiful boy on campus.”
Maybe, once I left, Trevor had stayed, lingering in the yard before walking back inside, convincing Lucy to head home with him, too. She was drunk tonight, more so than usual, but it still doesn’t feel like the kind of thing Lucy would do. It’s definitely not Lucas—she always acts so annoyed at his immaturity, his silly sense of humor—and she couldn’t care less about Will or James. She hardly even talks to them.
Which only leaves Levi.
“She wouldn’t,” I whisper, but already, I know that she would. She’s just like Eliza: drawn to the risk of him like adrenaline, like pheromones, some chemical reaction that leaves her helplessly high. The fact that he’s been dubbed dangerous, off-limits, is only making him more desirable to her, the same way Eliza would flaunt herself in front of her window. The way she was still out with him that night, even after we found the proof of what he did, who he was: the missing picture, her open door. The stomach-churning smell of him everywhere we looked.
I think about going back to my room, getting in bed, trying to forget about it all the same way I tried to forget about those videos on my phone, when I hear a noise again—but this time, it’s different. Unmistakable.
This time, it’s coming from above. A heavy thump like someone walking on the roof.
CHAPTER 34