Finals go by in a sleep-deprived blur: waking up early, slogging to campus, those bleary morning hours desolate and dark despite the string lights wrapped tight around the fronds of the palmetto trees. Entire days spent hunched over textbooks in an always-abandoned corner of the library, underslept and overcaffeinated, my body buried between archaic desktop computers like the only mourner left in a forgotten graveyard.
Saying goodbye is strange once the semester is over and it’s finally time for us to all part ways. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent every single day of the last seven months together, suddenly inseparable the way Eliza and I once were: hips attached, finishing each other’s sentences. Oftentimes falling asleep in the same bed. So many nights, I wake up with a jolt to the glow of some old movie playing in the background, the sticky sensation of cotton mouth on my tongue. Turning to the side to see the three of them curled around each other like plaited roots, eyelids twitching in the dark and the twinkle of Christmas lights hung haphazard around my bedroom as I’m left wondering what I did to find myself here. How I’ve gotten so lucky with this second chance I know I don’t deserve.
Or maybe it’s because I know, once we all leave, that Lucy will stay. That while the rest of us will be making our way home, four whole weeks getting fattened up with home-cooked meals and spoiled with piles of intricately wrapped presents, Lucy will still be here, alone. Without us. She’ll be making her own meals or probably picking up takeout, plastic fork nudging at the leftovers from Penny Lanes. The house will be eerily quiet around her—even Kappa Nu will be empty, every last one of the boys gone, too—and it’s such a depressing thought, so un-Lucy-like, picturing her all forsaken and small.
“Are you going to be okay?” I ask now, my hand on the door as I hesitate outside my running car. Exhaust is billowing out as Lucy stands on the porch in sweatpants and bare feet, arms crossed tight against her chest. “Being here by yourself?”
“Margot,” she says after a beat of silence, the tip of her nose chapped and pink. “Are you serious?”
“You can come home with me. We’d be happy to have you.”
Ever since that night on the roof, her voice raspy and raw as she told me her secret, I’ve felt the offer threatening to rip right through me so many times before simply swallowing it back down and forcing myself to forget. I know she’ll refuse, maybe even get angry at me for feeling an ounce of pity for her, but now that I’m standing here, the last one to leave, it feels wrong to just drive away without saying something.
“I’m touched,” she replies, hand over heart, monotone and mocking.
“Really. My parents are … I mean, they’re parents. They get annoying sometimes. They’ll probably interrogate you the second you step inside—”
“You’re doing a really great job selling me on this.”
“—but at least you won’t be by yourself on Christmas,” I finish. “Come on, Luce. You don’t deserve that. Nobody does.”
She hesitates, and for a single second, I imagine her stomping down the steps and wrapping me in a hug, her nose nuzzled tight into my neck and her breath warm on my ear. I picture her sliding into the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio. Bare feet on the dash as she pokes around the cupholders, curious fingers collecting loose change.
Instead, she crosses her arms tighter and leans against the doorframe.
“I want to be by myself,” she says at last. “Really, it’s fine.”
* * *
I see the silhouette of my mom in the yard the second I pull onto my street. She’s waving frantically, standing on her tiptoes with one long arm flailing in the air while my father hovers behind her with his hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable.
I haven’t seen either of them since last March, nine long months ago, over freshman year spring break. Maggie went on a family vacation to Disney World and everyone else on my hall had apparently planned some trip to the Keys that I only learned about the day before they departed. I would have happily chosen to stay in my room by myself, spending the week catching up on schoolwork or simply watching TV, but Hines was closed during break. All the dorms were. For one fleeting moment, I thought about staying behind anyway, getting locked inside after the RAs left. Roaming the abandoned building like some kind of purgatoried ghost. But I hadn’t moved quick enough when Janice came around, poking her head into every room to make sure they were empty.
When she saw me sitting on the futon, eyes wide and faking innocence, I heard her swear under her breath before walking into our room and hovering while I packed.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mother says to me now as I step out of the driver’s seat, pulling me in for a hug. She smells the same: a permanent scent of sunscreen seeped into her arms mixed with the perfume my father gifts her each year for Christmas. She’s always dropping hints that she wants something different, but every single year, she unwraps it and acts surprised. “Thank God you’re here.”
“Hey, Mom.”
“How were finals?”
“Fine,” I say, detaching myself. “I feel good about them.”
“You’re still wanting to major in English, then?”
I stay quiet, already knowing what she’ll say next.
“I’m really not sure about that, Margot. It’s not practical, and the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be to change it—”
“I like English,” I say. “I’m not changing it.”
“But what are you going to do with that, though?”
“Honey,” my dad interrupts. “Let’s let her get unpacked first.”
“Right, right,” my mother says, holding up her hands. “And your friends?” she asks. “They’re good?”
“They’re good.”
I force myself to smile, walking around to the trunk and hoisting a duffel bag out of the back.
“Well, I would hope so, considering they’ve completely stolen you from us.”
“They haven’t stolen me,” I say, pulling the bag over my arm. “I’ve just been busy.”
“You’ll tell us all about them,” she continues, a command more than a question, before turning around and making her way back toward the house. My father nods at me, his version of a hug, before twisting around and trailing her silently. “Everything there is to know.”
Dinner goes by in the way it always does: the clinking of silverware against my mother’s best china, the three of us rattling off the kind of sterile small talk you’d expect to overhear at a networking event. It’s so vastly different than the family dinners I used to have at Eliza’s, I can’t help but compare them: the ever-present music filling their house compared to the long, heavy stretches of silence in ours. Their belly laughs and genuine conversation next to our stale, recycled lines. I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with my parents. They’ve always loved me, provided for me, given me whatever I’ve needed and more—it’s just that they don’t really seem to like each other that much. Their marriage feels like a transaction, purely business, and I am the output of twenty years’ worth of work. Maybe that’s why my mother hounds me so much about my life, my choices. Why my father always seems to be silently assessing me like I’m a line item in one of his spreadsheets.
I am an investment to them, their only child. If I fail, they fail, and everybody knows it.