“Nicole.”
She scurries into my room and shuts the door behind her, dropping her voice even though, as far as I know, we’re the only people in the house. Lucy’s been working a shift all day and Nicole is next door, talking to Trevor. It’s the first time she’s willingly gone over there since I can remember, which struck me as progress until I realized the pledge party is tonight. The first Saturday of the new semester.
“Margot, this is serious,” Sloane says. “She looks really bad.”
“How bad?”
“Skeletal.”
I chew on my lip, thinking. There was barely any time between Nicole getting home from Thanksgiving and leaving again for Christmas, so none of us said anything about her rapidly withering figure. And what would we even say? She’s refusing to tell us what’s wrong, why something seemed to flip in her psyche the second she woke up the morning after Halloween. All we have to work with are flashes of that night, none of which feel very concrete thanks to the chemical concoction that had been coursing through our bloodstreams: Nicole lost in that party for hours, Lucas grumbling about her getting too drunk. Me finding her on the bathroom floor, limp and confused and mottled in bruises.
Levi on our property, skulking around.
“This is all Lucy’s fault,” Sloane mutters, immediately snapping me out of it.
“How could it be Lucy’s fault?” I ask. “I was with her the whole night.”
“She’s the one who set her up with Trevor,” Sloane says. “She practically forced them together last year even though I told her it was a bad match.”
“They’re not a bad match,” I say, even though it sounds hollow the second I say it.
“Margot, come on,” she says, shooting me a look. “They’re awful together and you know it.”
I think about all the moments I’ve witnessed between them, Nicole and Trevor, subtle little things that always bothered me; elusive discomforts I could never quite place. It was in the way he looked at her, more lust than love, transforming into something else entirely any time he had a few drinks: animal, almost predatory, like he wanted her just for the sake of owning something. A sick pride in draining the life out of a living thing just to mount it on a wall. And then there was the time he interrupted her at Penny Lanes, telling us their secrets. The look on his face, like he was reveling in her shame. Flirting with me when she wasn’t around and stalking around the yard on Halloween, shirt ripped off and that rapacious grin.
The glimmer in his eye that made me take a step back.
“Why did Lucy want them together so bad?”
“It was never Trevor,” Sloane says. “It was this fucking house.”
“The house?”
“Lucy wanted to live here. Trevor was going to be president.”
Sloane arches her eyebrows and I finally understand: Nicole dating Trevor was a means to an end. Lucy wanted the house, and the only way to get it was to get in with Trevor. She had practically admitted it to me that first day of Thanksgiving break when the two of us were trudging through the grass together, making our way out to the shed. Her fear over them breaking up and it going to someone else instead.
“If this is all because of that fight with Trevor, then why doesn’t Nicole just break up with him?” I ask. “I mean, the house is fine, the rent’s cheap, but we can live somewhere else next year—”
“She isn’t going to break up with him, Margot. She’s too nice. Don’t you get it?”
The way Sloane looks at me sends a wave of discomfort through my chest. She’s right: Nicole is too nice. She always has been, ever since that very first day when she tried to pry me out of my shell, her smile cutting through the pressure like a warm wet blade. She’s always the one smoothing things over, keeping the peace. That’s probably what she’s doing right now next door: alleviating any lingering tension before we’re all marooned on an island together without our own house to run to. Without any way to escape.
“Lucy picked her for a reason,” Sloane continues, leaning forward, and I can feel it now, radiating, some massive admission coming so close to barreling right out of her. The force of it something she can no longer contain. “I’ve been telling you that from the start.”
I think back to the two of us outside the shed; the way she stopped, seemed to think hard about something before turning my way, asking that question: “Are you sure you want to do this?” The way she had called me vanilla, malleable. A blank slate. The very thing Lucy wanted like she had picked me specifically, casting me to play some kind of role for her. A preordained purpose I still don’t understand.
“When you’re friends with Lucy, she makes you feel special,” she had said, that ache in her face like she hadn’t yet decided if that was good or bad. “Like she chose you for a reason.”
I had stopped questioning what my reason was, but I never even thought about the fact that Sloane and Nicole might have reasons, too.
“What do you know?” I ask, a chill creeping up my spine. “What do you know that you haven’t told me?”
She hesitates, glancing over her shoulder again before leaning closer on my bed.
“Lucy didn’t live in Hines last year,” she says at last, and I notice the way she’s ripping at her fingers now; pulling a loose nail so hard it bleeds.
“What do you mean? Of course she did. She was there all the time—”
“No, she didn’t,” she says, shaking her head. “Margot, you need to listen to me. Everything you think you know about Lucy … none of it is true.”
CHAPTER 46
I can still see her on that very first day, stepping into the circle of us with a case of beer in hand, bottles rattling. The way she plucked one out and twisted the cap, plunging her arm into the air like a call to arms, a battle cry.
“To us,” she had said, glass lip smoking. Taking a long swig and cementing herself in our minds as just that: us. One of us. Our ringleader, our North Star. The self-imposed brightest one of all. She had been everywhere, always, making her way down the hall in the dark and stepping into the showers in the morning. Rinsing off her hangover before appearing again, starting all over.
The three of them linked, forever intertwined. They did everything together.
“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” I say now, trying to wrap my mind around it. “She was there. She was always there.”
“She approached Nicole and me on move-in day,” Sloane says. “Introduced herself in the courtyard and we clicked. By that night, she was hanging out in our room like we’d known her forever.”
I picture that circle again; the RA, Janice, wrangling us into the common room, reciting the rules. The twenty-four girls of hall 9B grouped together, huddled in twos—except for Lucy. Lucy wasn’t there with a roommate, hip attached to the only other person she knew like the rest of us. But she wasn’t like the rest of us, was she? She never had been. She was just there, standing behind Sloane and Nicole. Biding her time until Janice left and she could step into the center, make herself known. Eternally comfortable with being alone.
“There were twenty-five,” I say, mentally counting us all. Twelve rooms, twelve sets of roommates … and Lucy. But in my mind, Lucy didn’t belong in a set; she belonged in a trio. It was always the three of them with her in the center.
It never struck me as odd until now.
“She told us she didn’t like her roommate,” Sloane recounts. “That’s why she was always in our room.”
“Did she sleep there?” I ask. “She was on the hall all the time.”
“Sometimes on our futon. Not always.”
“And you never asked to meet her roommate?”
Sloane shrugs, like the thought had occurred to her, but in the end, she’d simply dismissed it. “She said she was boring, never left her room,” she says, biting her lip as soon as the words escape. I feel my cheeks flush. I can tell she feels bad. “No offense.”