Not for me, for us.
So we wrote our admissions essays together and checked the mail for months, calling each other screaming the night we both got accepted. I broke the news to my parents, weathering their disappointment and distress over me choosing a small liberal arts school that was so far away, even though South Carolina was only one state over from our house in the Outer Banks. I could come home for the weekend if I really wanted to—but they knew, of course, that I wouldn’t. Then we submitted our roommate applications and put down our deposits and talked all night about finally being free of the cocoon of high school that always felt so smothering and small.
It all felt so perfect, so according to plan … until that night. That night that changed everything and I found myself coming here, alone. Without her.
A body slams against my open door, startling me out of the memory as quick as a slap. I spin around, expecting to see Maggie—still angry from earlier, frowning at me from the hallway—but that’s not who it is.
Instead, I see her.
“Hey.”
Lucy is leaning against my doorframe, arms crossed tight and her denim shorts unbuttoned to reveal the cherry red of her bathing suit bottoms.
“Hey,” I echo, though it comes out more like a question. I can feel my heart beating hard in my chest and I wonder if she’s going to ask me about earlier, finding me staring at her on the lawn like some voyeur sneaking a peek through a peephole. I had snapped my neck back down when I saw her waving at me like that, shame burning my cheeks like a sunburn, before collecting my textbooks and taking off fast.
I feel an apology start to bubble up my throat like bile, some half-hearted attempt to explain it all away.
“Are you staying for the summer?”
I close my mouth, suddenly speechless, and realize she’s looking at me like we’re old friends—like this isn’t unusual, her showing up here. Like this isn’t the first time we’ve ever actually talked.
“Um, no,” I say, jumping slightly as the microwave beeps. “I’m leaving after my last final.”
“I have an open room,” she offers. “Great house right off campus.”
I look at her, confused, my fingers picking at a hangnail to give them something to do. The truth is, I don’t want to go home for the summer—really, I don’t want to go home at all. I can feel Eliza’s absence here, in this very room, but at home, it’s even worse. At home, I can feel it everywhere: the ghost of her trailing me around, hovering over my shoulder. A persistent, painful reminder of everything that could have been.
“It’s not just for the summer, actually,” Lucy nudges, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. “We can stay through next year. Have you signed a lease yet?”
“No,” I say again, noticing a small silver necklace resting in the dip of her clavicle. It looks like a constellation of some sort; a little cluster of diamonds as stars. Eliza used to wear something like it, I think. A birthday present from her parents that she never took off, though I don’t know if they’re actually similar or if I’m still just seeing her everywhere I look. “Not yet.”
Technically, it’s the truth. I never signed a lease. Maggie did.
“Wait,” she says suddenly, a little curl to her lip. “You weren’t going to live with Mary again, were you?”
“Maggie,” I correct, embarrassed for us both. “I … haven’t decided yet.”
I think of my roommate and what she said to me earlier: the apartment she got for us by the library and the fact that I couldn’t have cared less. Suddenly, it feels so depressing, another year spent together because neither of us ever found anyone else. I pull my gaze from the necklace and look at Lucy again, standing in my doorway with those bright blue eyes. They’re mesmerizing, truly, like looking into a kaleidoscope and watching the world contort into something else entirely. I register a little twitch in her lip, like she’s finding something funny she can’t bring herself to say. I think of the way she, Sloane, and Nicole always walk like one—the way Eliza and I did, too—and suddenly, I crave that. I crave it more than I’ve ever craved anything: the kind of friendship that I once knew so well, not comfortable and contained but something messy and maniacal and real.
“Well,” Lucy says, that twitch of a smile morphing into a full-blown grin. “Looks like I just decided for you.”
CHAPTER 4
By the end of the week, I’m standing on the sidewalk with three suitcases full of stuff, a single bead of sweat trickling down my spine and an old gray house looming before me. The past few days have gone by in a blur: finishing finals, packing up the dorm. It’s like I’ve been operating on autopilot, my mind blank and body simply going through the motions as if all of this is normal.
As if I’m not about to move into a house with three girls I know nothing about.
“Why me?” I had asked.
Lucy had invited herself into my room by then, trailing her fingers along my desk, her eyes drinking in all the knickknacks tacked to my corkboard. I’ve always been something of a hoarder—no, that’s the wrong word. A collector, maybe. The kind of person who saves ticket stubs and old receipts, applying sentimental value to inanimate objects. Like they have feelings. The idea of tossing even a single happy memory into the trash is enough to make my eyes prickle—and that’s not even the worst of it. There’s also the whittled-down pencil stubs and practically empty nail polish bottles; the crusty tubes of expired mascara and the used notebooks that pile up in my desk drawers for no reason other than the fact that I just can’t seem to throw them away. Mom says I have attachment issues; Dad says I’m a slob. I think I’m just afraid of getting rid of something prematurely; of dipping my hand into my purse and looking for some familiar comfort only to remember that I had disposed of it.
That it’s gone forever. That I’m left with nothing.
“Why not?” Lucy had responded, picking up my perfume and spraying a spritz on her wrist. I watched as she brought her nose to her skin and sniffed, wincing, before setting it back down.
“You don’t even know me,” I continued. “Why do you want to live with someone you don’t know?”
She looked up at me then, saucer-round eyes drilling into mine.
“Why do you?”
I blink now, my own eyes stinging in the brightness of the summer sun, and start to wonder if this was a mistake. I think about breaking the news to Maggie, admitting that I had made other plans in the hour between her telling me about the apartment and coming back from the dining hall, my mind still trying to process what had just happened. My vague explanation of a house off-campus and the hurt in her eyes as her lower lip quivered. The twist in my chest as she turned away, pretended to look for something in her backpack, too humiliated to even act mad. The truth is, she had every right to be mad. I left her, abandoned her, flicked her to the side like a cigarette the second some swanky new vice came prancing along.
Not only that, but Maggie saved me this year. Without her, I don’t know what I would have done.
It’s true that I didn’t feel any real attachment to her, I didn’t love her in the way I loved Eliza, but that’s only because I didn’t feel any attachment to anything. I spent the entire year floating, totally unmoored, completely removed from not only my body but from reality, too. In hindsight, I was definitely depressed: spending day after day in that concrete box, Eliza’s smiling face tacked to my corkboard mocking me as I got ready in the mornings, studied in the evenings. Lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, replaying the events of that night over and over and over again. My parents never noticed; my teachers didn’t, either. I was required to go to counseling after the college learned of Eliza’s passing but my grades never suffered so they simply egged me on, signed my slips, told me to keep doing what I was doing.