I twist my head, eyes straining against the night. I still can’t see her, but I can feel Lucy’s smile stretching through the darkness: pulling wide, cheeky and taunting. The kind that bares teeth.
“You read Jekyll and Hyde,” I say, remembering that line, radically both, one of the many I’d highlighted before flipping it closed and tossing it across the couch. The concept of being mutually good and evil, dark and light, tickling my subconscious like an incessant itch growing stronger, harder to ignore. What a profound notion: that neither of those things needed to cancel out the other, but instead, could simply swirl together until you became your own unique mixture of each.
“I liked it,” she says.
“I knew you would.”
“It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
I pinch at the sand between us, rubbing the grains between my fingers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Lucy, one thing that’s become glaringly clear, it’s that to her, the entire world exists as a gradient, a sliding scale. Her moral compass isn’t broken, per se, but it’s definitely skewed, the magnets attracted to whichever direction she sees fit. Spinning madly around, guiding her whichever way she wants to go.
There is no good or bad for Lucy. There is no right or wrong, noble or evil, but simply the existence of people who dabble in their own combination of each.
“Your turn,” I say, handing the bottle back. Trying not to think about the gradual pull of it; those scales, tipping, just like she said they would. “Truth or dare.”
“In the spirit of trying new things: truth.”
I curl my legs into my chest, thinking about all the things I want to ask her. All the secrets I know she keeps—but still, there’s only one that comes to mind. One question I’ve been chewing over since the second she got here; one mystery on the tip of my tongue, the weight of it pushing my lips apart only for me to lose my nerve and swallow it back down.
“Why did you go over there?” I ask at last, picturing her in Levi’s room again. Fingers twisting in his hair and her palm delicate on his thigh as she leaned in close, her lips on his. “When you went to my house and I wasn’t there … why did you go to Levi’s?”
She rolls over to face me, the shadow of her eyes gaping wide.
“I told you—” she starts, but I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “You know what I mean. Why did you really?”
“I guess I was curious,” she says at last.
I’m quiet, picturing those early days with Eliza. The way she sauntered down the dock, eyes darting over to Levi when she thought he wasn’t looking. The way she would watch from a distance, a kind of bored awareness because there was nothing better to do. I remember her searching his name on her phone like he was some strange, exotic thing she simply wanted to study, try to understand. But then it morphed from there, an innocent interest turning into something bigger, stronger.
I can’t help but wonder if that’s what’s happening here, too.
“He told me about the party,” Lucy says, rolling back over to face the stars. “The night she died.”
I freeze, my body suddenly numb from the cold and the wine; the wind whipping off the water and this conversation, everything. I had been trying to work up the nerve to ask her about the kiss next, what I saw through that window, but this feels more important now.
“What did he say?”
“He mentioned the old high school,” she says. “The party that happens there every year.”
I see it in my mind, the way it’s always been: standing broken but tall on the edge of the beach, inside gutted from a lightning-strike fire that ripped through the rooms years ago. Structurally, it’s still standing, though nobody could call it sound. There are missing walls, no roof, only three stories of ash-black empty spaces cluttered up with charred furniture nobody ever bothered to move and phallic graffiti spray-painted over old chalkboards. Empty vodka bottles collecting dust in the corners, evidence of parties past; the occasional sleeping bag left behind by someone too drunk to drive home. Even I couldn’t deny that it was the perfect place for a bunch of underage kids: right on the beach, a view of the water. Abandoned and messy and ours for the taking.
“The first full moon of the summer,” I say at last, nodding slowly. “It’s usually pitch-black out there without any power, but when the moon is out and the sky is clear, it’s suddenly light, too. You can see everything.”
Even from my phone, I remember thinking it looked impossibly bright: the midnight moon reflecting off the water like a giant mirror, a pane of glass, cloaking everything in a ghostly glow. The kind of eerie luminescence that appears just before a tornado, still and haunting, dark and light, the sky itself sending a warning of certain danger to come.
“Radically both,” Lucy mutters and I turn to face her, the crackle of a faraway firework like white noise in my ears.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it is.”
I look up at the sky now, the peek of the moon like something shy and wary, flitting in and out of the haze above. Picturing Eliza and Levi climbing those steps, ascending higher, stumbling perilously close to the edge. A single misplaced cloud could have called the whole thing off, made it too dark to see, but that night had been perfect, as good as they come: the moon glowing bright against the ink-black sky like a flashlight in the dark, exposing them all.
CHAPTER 45
It’s our first week back at Rutledge and nothing feels the same. Nothing has felt the same since Halloween, really, that cursed night that cast a spell over everything.
I close my eyes, massage my temples, my bed cold and hard as the image of Lucy and Levi replays in my mind for the millionth time. I had hoped things would feel different once we got back, the clean slate of Christmas break wiping the bad away, but instead, from the second Lucy and I stepped through the front door together, everything just felt different, strange, like we somehow wandered into the wrong house.
Despite the week we had together, my best efforts to shrug it away, I don’t know what to think about seeing the two of them together like that, my mind oscillating between the only two explanations so often I’m finding myself caught somewhere in the middle, suspended. Stuck. I honestly don’t know which one I’m more afraid of: the idea of Lucy actually falling for Levi the same way Eliza did, watching him pluck another one of my friends out from under me and holding her tight in his palm before crushing her in his grip, or the concept of Lucy playing us all in another of her games.
I think about that very first night on this very bed, telling stories about Levi and who he is. The wheels turning in her eyes like she was starting to form an idea, a plan. Leaning into him at Penny Lanes and whispering that question like she already knew the answer.
Sloane and me in her bedroom, the two of us huddled beneath the sheets in the dark.
“That’s what Lucy does. She dangles.”
Maybe that’s what this is all about: Lucy dangling her power, her knowledge, peppering Levi with questions about Eliza like pushing on a bruise with building pressure. Ripping the legs off a spider, one by one. Seeing how long she can go until he screams. What is her endgame, though? What is her goal? Like Sloane had said: Lucy is calculated, cunning. She’s singling Levi out for a reason and I need to know what that reason is. It almost feels like she’s testing us both, Levi and me, pulling our strings and making us dance. Worming her way into my thoughts every night like a parasite gnawing its way through my brain, making me feverish and sick.
Forcing me to think things, feel things, I never thought I would.
“Margot.”
I open my eyes to see Sloane standing in my doorframe, her expression grim enough to make me sit up quick. She looks truly worried for the first time since I’ve known her: not bored like she usually is, mildly detached like she’s simply scrutinizing the rest of us for her pleasure alone, but visibly alarmed. Maybe even afraid.
“It’s gotten worse,” she says.
“What has?”