That’s why Trevor had been laughing tonight. Hearing Levi admit that, his fear of small spaces, and knowing what he was forcing him to do.
“They think it’s some big secret but Trevor told me when he was drunk,” Lucy continues, and I think back to that night at Penny Lanes, her finger tracing its way around the rim of her cup. Her listening, the rest of us talking, spilling our secrets like she slit us right open.
I suddenly wonder how much she knows about people. I wonder what all she’s heard.
“The next morning, he made me promise not to tell anyone,” she continues. “If Rutledge found out, they’d definitely get disbanded.”
“Why would anyone agree to do that?” I ask. “It’s…”
“Degrading?” she interrupts. “Disgusting? It’s because they’re desperate.”
“Desperate,” I repeat.
“Desperate to belong.”
She says it like a slur, like something to be ashamed of, but for the first time since I’ve known him, I can see the smallest piece of myself in Levi: so eager to be a part of something, to be accepted, that you make yourself do things that you would otherwise never do. Sucking on the wrong end of a cigarette, tobacco grit burning hot on your tongue; eating old pizza off the floor or letting a drug dissolve into your bloodstream just because someone placed it in your palm and held your hand tight. It’s no different than what I did to get here, really: agreeing to live with three strangers I knew nothing about. Blindly going along with whatever they said, whatever they did, like if I faked it hard enough, I’d be one of them.
“Trevor says it bonds them.” She laughs. “Like trauma bonding.”
“That’s fucked up,” I say.
“Yeah. It’s just a matter of time before something happens.”
I turn to her again, eyes narrowing, waiting for her to continue.
“There’s a little door on the side of the house you open to get into it, behind the azaleas, but if it closes all the way and latches from the outside, you’re stuck in there. This house is not up to code,” she adds. “It’s too old.”
I hear those noises again in my mind, so distinct in the dark: a sliding door, a body scraping against something as it shimmied itself inside. A cleared throat, a dry cough. Settling in before the awful, endless waiting.
“They leave it cracked open when they’re in there, but … you know. Accidents happen. One little push and you’re trapped.”
I’m quiet, my heart beating hard in my throat. Thinking of Levi on Halloween; his bare chest, scratched and bleeding, like jagged fingernails cutting across the skin.
“Did you mean it?” Lucy asks me suddenly, twisting her neck so she’s facing me again. “What you said on Halloween? In the kitchen?”
It takes a second for me to realize what she’s referring to, but then it returns to me slowly, like recalling a dream. It’s been living quietly between us for the last four weeks, really, my admission curled up like a hibernating animal. Neither of us wanting to poke it awake, acknowledge its presence. Talk about those words I had muttered as my body trembled cold in the kitchen; Lucy feeding me water, baby sips in the dark. It had barely been conscious, the thought ejecting itself from my mind like an exorcism: demonic and violent, completely out-of-body. I just had to get it out, the terrible belief that had been living inside me for far too long.
“I wish it was him. It should have been him.”
“Of course I meant it,” I say at last. And I expect to feel ashamed afterward, maybe even embarrassed. I expect to feel disgust or surprise but instead I feel lighter the second I say it, like the thought itself had been tied around my ankle. A ball and chain weighing me down. “Eliza didn’t deserve to die like that. Levi did.”
CHAPTER 35
AFTER
I can feel the collective intake of breath, all three of us sucking it in. This is a detail we hadn’t accounted for, a fuzzy memory we had forgotten all about.
Lucy’s blood, Levi’s clothes.
We can work with this, though. We can use it to our advantage if we play it right.
“How do you know it’s Lucy’s?” I ask at last, remembering the way it had dripped from her finger like a leaky faucet, little red spots polka-dotting the floor. Detective Frank can clearly tell he caught us off guard, a satisfied smile emerging on his lips.
“Her parents provided DNA samples for us to compare it to,” he says, his eyes trained on me now. Me, and only me. “It was a match.”
I rub my temples, the idea of it all so hard to grasp.
“They want to see their daughter found just as much as the rest of us,” he adds.
“I’m sure they do,” Sloane snaps, her voice sarcastic and sharp.
“What’s important here is we know your friend was with Levi Butler the night he died and we know they were in close enough proximity for her blood to get on his clothing,” Frank says, growing impatient. “Why was she bleeding, girls?”
The moment flashes through my mind again and suddenly, we’re back together, all four of us, the citrus sky giving everything an unnatural glow. It had felt like another dream, another bad trip, Lucy’s hand bleeding in such a steady, rhythmic drip that the sound of her blood hitting the floor reminded me of the second hand of a ticking clock, strangely soothing in the silence.
I see her lift her finger to her lips, eyes on mine as she sucked it dry.
“Did he hurt her?”
“No,” Sloane says, and I blink out of the memory. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Did he hurt any of you?”
We’re all quiet, hands wringing nervously in our laps.
“We know this boy’s background,” Frank says, eyes darting back over to me again. “You can tell us.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she repeats.
“The marks on his body … they weren’t natural. This wasn’t just some accident—”
“You heard her,” I interrupt, realizing too late that my fingers are digging into my palms so hard the thin skin is starting to sting. I release my grip and wipe the sweat from my hands, placing them on my lap to hide the little crescents left behind by my nails. “It wasn’t like that. And we don’t know where she is.”
The room falls into a heavy silence and Detective Frank just stands there, waiting for us to fill it, even though he knows, by now, that we’ll only refuse. Finally, he exhales, looking at the officers still standing behind him and jerking his head toward her bedroom door before turning his attention back at us.
“Well, all right,” he says, chubby fingers back in his belt loops. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be, I’m going to need you girls to wait outside while we search.”
CHAPTER 36
BEFORE
We’ve been in a state of comfortable quiet since Lucy told me about the cave, Levi, that secret thing they do when the four of us are fast asleep.
It feels strange now, thinking about it: all those nights I had been lying in bed, closing my eyes, not even knowing there was another body beneath me. Their hidden presence like a fifth roommate I never knew we had. But now that I’m in on it, now that I know, it’s hard to imagine I didn’t somehow feel the company of another person down there. That I didn’t pick up on the reason I always felt so cold, that underground pocket of concrete and dirt drafting into my bedroom, emitting through the floor.
That I didn’t feel their nervous energy, hear their shallow breaths. Pick up the panicked beating of their pulse beneath the floorboards, shrill and haunting. My very own telltale heart.
“That guy from the fire,” Lucy says to me now, breaking the silence. “His name is Danny DeMarcus. I do know him. He went to my high school.”
I roll over to my side, curled up in a ball like we’re lying in bed and not on rigid asphalt, shingles rough beneath the weight of us.