“I have no idea,” I say at last. “The press is still reporting she’s a student. Rutledge has got to say something eventually.”
“They’re probably scrambling,” Sloane says, laughing a little. “Can you imagine the dean admitting that a random person spent an entire year shacking up in their dorm and nobody knew about it? She kept a shower caddy in the bathroom, for Christ’s sake.”
“The parents will have pitchforks,” I say. “And my mother will be leading the pack.”
Nicole smiles, finally, and I feel something lighten in my chest when I look at her. She glances at Sloane, then at me, and the three of us burst out laughing, a violent fit that leaves us in stitches. We must be tired, delirious, the stress and surreality of these last few weeks doing something strange to our brains.
It is sort of ridiculous, though, when you really think about it. The things Lucy was able to get away with. The people she fooled.
The people she’s still fooling.
“The cops have got to know by now,” Sloane says, wiping a tear from her eye.
“Yeah, well, we didn’t lie.”
And that’s the truth: we didn’t lie. Not outright, only by omission, crafting our responses slowly, deliberately, every time Detective Frank hit us with a question that could come back to bite. That very first morning, sitting in the dining room, the three of us swallowed by our oversized T-shirts as our plan lurched into motion: slow, at first, but gaining momentum. Soon it would take off and leave us all behind.
“Nobody’s getting into trouble, girls, but she hasn’t been accounted for since Friday.”
We held fast, doe-eyed and innocent, and it was easy, really, because that’s all we are to him: underestimated always. Just children, just girls.
“Have you talked to anyone in her classes?”
I can still hear her so clearly, stone-faced Sloane, chiming in with the perfect response while Nicole and I bit our tongues, tasted blood, a blend of terror and triumph pumping through our veins as we tried so hard not to laugh.
“Lucy doesn’t go to class.”
“Frank’s gonna be so pissed,” Nicole says now, threading her hands behind her head. “It makes him look like an idiot.”
Sloane’s the one to laugh this time, plopping down beside her and nuzzling close. “That’s because he is.”
I slide my way between them now and the three of us lie quietly in bed together, the way we have so many times before: staring up at the plastic stars on the ceiling, meticulously arranged.
Thinking of Lucy and everything she taught us.
CHAPTER 48
BEFORE
It’s unusually calm on the water, the gentle churn of the engine creating little waves that ripple out around us. Marmalade sky reflecting off the surface, casting everything in an orange glow. It would normally be such a scenic picture, something ripped straight out of a song, but the boat’s slow approach to the island in the distance makes it feel like we’re being transported to a prison somewhere, cut off from society with no way to escape.
“Margot.”
I turn around, tallying up the bodies in the boat. Nicole is sitting on Trevor’s lap, angular legs sticking out of a fleece blanket draped across her stomach. He’s drinking something out of a flask, stainless steel and small in his hand, the other palm placed on Nicole’s thigh as he nuzzles his nose deep into her neck. Sloane is leaning into Lucas to their left, visibly rigid as his fingers play absentmindedly with her hair, while Will and James are next to me in the back and Levi is driving, knuckles white as his hands grip the wheel.
“Margot.”
“Yeah,” I say slowly, twisting further, already feeling Lucy’s eyes on me. Ice-cold and kaleidoscopic; curious, like she somehow knows. She’s all the way in the front, perched on the bow like a figurehead pulling us forward.
Or maybe a siren, seductive and dangerous, her little lies fooling us all.
“Did you hear that?” she asks me.
“Hear what?”
“There’s a full moon tonight.”
I look at Lucy, registering that little twitch in her lip. Like that day on the lawn, our first talk in the dorm, laughing at something I still don’t understand. I don’t know why she’s telling me this, what she’s playing at, so I just nod, smile, and twist back around as I pull my own blanket tight around my shoulders, the sharp chill whipping off the water sending a shiver straight through me.
I think about this afternoon, just over an hour ago, the very moment when everything changed. Sloane and I pushed close on my bed; the things she told me lodged in my brain, stuck like a splinter. Harsh and throbbing as I tried to summon a single memory of Lucy on campus, in one of my classes. Black curls bobbing in a sea of other students or sharp blue eyes staring at me from the back of the library.
That whiff of vanilla hovering like the ghost of her trapped in an empty room.
It was a pointless exercise. Lucy was never there. I was starting to accept it with a certainty that was startling, so much so that it’s hard to imagine how I never noticed it before—but the truth is, it’s easy to blend in in a place like this. Rutledge may not be big, but it’s sprawling. The classrooms are scattered across the city, historic buildings tucked into little cracks and crannies, disappearing into their surroundings so naturally it’s hard to even know what belongs to the college and what doesn’t. There are full sections of the school I’ve never noticed before, entire buildings I haven’t had a reason to step inside. Not only that, but I’ve seen the same handful of people in my classes for almost two years now, all of us trapped inside a bubble of our own making. Completely unaware of what goes on outside it. I rarely catch glimpses of Sloane or Nicole during the day, either, both of them retreating to their respective spaces and staying there until it’s time to come home again, and when I think about all this, really think about it, it actually seems shockingly easy to do what Lucy has done: to simply step into this place and blend in so seamlessly.
To convince us all she’s one of us.
“She’s still our friend,” I said to Sloane, the implications of it all sitting stubborn between us, refusing to sink in. “I mean, this doesn’t change anything—”
“Margot, it changes everything.” She gaped. “We’re living with a stranger.”
“She’s not a stranger,” I said, somewhat mildly, humiliation blooming in my chest at how natural it was for me to keep jumping to Lucy’s defense like this, no questions asked. Same as that first day outside the shed, listening to Sloane’s slander, the reflex to protect her was automatic, instinctive, like a mallet to the knee.
“Well, she’s not who she says she is, either.”
It’s still tempting, even now, to give Lucy the benefit of the doubt. Sloane hadn’t been with us that night on the roof; she hadn’t heard Lucy talk about her childhood, her past. The way things were and her desire to get away.
“I wanted a fresh start,” she had said. “I figured you’d understand.”
I did understand, and I was starting to convince myself that maybe it was simple: maybe Lucy moved to Rutledge on her own but didn’t have the money or the grades to get in. She started working at Penny Lanes, saw the way the students lived, and wanted that for herself, too. A chance at belonging, at friends. Not so different from any of us, really, so she met Sloane and Nicole on the lawn and felt at home in their presence; she was invited into their dorm, into their lives, and didn’t want to admit that she was somehow different, less than, because of her parents. The way she grew up.