Fairfield, North Carolina.
The ID shakes in my fingers, Lucy’s blue eyes staring back from that thin strip of plastic. All the other information is correct: her name, her picture. Her hometown. It could still be a fake, my mind tries to reason. The little part of me that still desperately wants to believe the best. She could have found someone to copy her real one and only alter her age—but already, I know I’m lying to myself.
I know, deep down, this birthday is real.
“Who are you?” I whisper, Lucy’s expression in the picture as cryptic as always, and suddenly, I remember Danny’s voice beside that fire on Halloween. His incredulous stare as the three of us sat outside, sparks glowing in our eyes.
“Do you go here?” he had asked. “What year are you?”
I pull my phone out of my pocket, snapping a picture of the ID before putting everything back in her purse and making my way over to her desk. I flip open her laptop next and tap at the keys—it’s locked, of course it is—so I close it again before reaching for the drawers and pulling them open … but those are locked, too.
I stand back, eyeing the drawers, wondering how to get inside. They have to be locked for a reason. Nobody takes the time to lock their desk unless there’s something valuable inside. Something they don’t want anyone else to see—and suddenly, I think of Halloween again. The way I sat shivering on the floor, those handcuffs still cinched tight across my wrist. The way Lucy had walked into the living room and grabbed her keys, unlatched the cuffs, my skin red and raw from the pressure. I walk back into the living room, noticing them still hanging from their regular hook on the wall, and this, too, seems strange—Lucy left for work, why wouldn’t she bring her keys?—but at the same time, she walks to Penny Lanes. It’s only a few blocks away. We never lock our doors, either, a bad habit she once blamed on Nicole that I now know not to be true.
I glance out the window again before grabbing the keys and dead-bolting the door, just in case. Then I head back to her desk and flip through them, one by one, recognizing the house key we never use, her car key dangling from a leather keychain. The key to the handcuffs and finally, a smaller one that looks different, older.
I push it into the lock and it slides in easily before twisting it to the right and pulling the drawer open.
Inside, I find the usual clutter—pens, notebooks, Post-it Notes with grocery lists and random reminders scrawled in cursive—and continue to dig, fingers shaking, knowing there has to be something to find. Finally, my hands brush up against something glossy and smooth and I pull it out, flip it over, my breath catching in my throat when I register what I’m holding.
For a second, I wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me again. If I’m still seeing Eliza everywhere like I have every other day for the last nineteen months: in the living room at Kappa Nu, head bent low as she eyed us from afar. Sitting next to Levi, hand on his thigh, that skinny string of blood dripping out of her mouth. In Lucy’s little tics and that diamond necklace that, now that I’ve actually seen it up close, doesn’t really look like Eliza’s at all. But it’s indisputable, no matter how many times I shake my head, try to blink it away: I’m staring at a picture of Eliza and me, a picture I haven’t seen in two years but that I’ve thought about so many times. The reason for that final fight, really. The mystery that came between us that we never actually solved.
The one that turned me against Levi, Eliza against me.
I’m staring at the picture that was stolen from her bedroom.
CHAPTER 56
AFTER
“It’s on!”
Sloane calls us to the living room and turns up the volume, Dean Hightower’s voice creeping into the silence of the house around us. Bouncing off the newly bare walls. We’ve been moving our things out slowly, methodically, hauling boxes to the new apartment between classes. The furniture that came with the house is staying, of course, and we haven’t decided what to do with Lucy’s room yet. Right now, it’s simply sitting untouched as if we’re all just waiting for her to step through the front door, throw herself down on the couch with a sigh. Hit us with some half-hearted apology for causing such a fuss before crossing her legs and tilting her head, demanding we fill her in on everything.
I make my way out of my bedroom, the sound of snapping cameras and murmuring journalists leaking from the TV, and smile at Nicole when I see her emerge on the landing.
“Can’t wait to hear this,” she says, plopping down next to Sloane. I take a seat next to them and pull my legs up, settling in, trying not to think too hard about how this is probably the last time we’ll all be nestled together on the couch like this.
“Good afternoon,” he says, fiddling with his tie. The dean of Rutledge is as stereotypical as they come: white hair, tortoiseshell glasses, bulbous nose, and a slow Southern drawl. Lucy’s been missing for three weeks now and while he’s held press conferences since Levi’s death, long-winded speeches devoid of any real detail, this is the first time he’s expected to say something about her.
“As I’m sure you all know, Rutledge College has been mourning the death of one of our own: freshman Levi Butler, who tragically passed away at a fraternity function on Saturday, January 12,” he says, refusing to peel his eyes from the paper in front of him. “The fraternity in question, formally known as Kappa Nu, has been suspended amid the official investigation and several members have been brought in for questioning.”
“Okay, get to it,” Sloane says, rolling her wrists. The dean is flanked by a few officers behind him, a show of solidarity, and I can’t help but stare at Detective Frank just off to the left, twirling his wedding ring on his finger.
“Here at Rutledge, we value honesty and transparency above all else, so we would like to inform the public of the latest development. While Mr. Butler’s death is still being investigated as an accident, you may have also heard that police are searching for a missing woman who they now believe may have vital information related to the case. That woman is twenty-three-year-old Lucy Sharpe, who has not only been connected to the deceased but is believed to have been the last person to be seen with him alive.”
“Here we go,” Nicole says, rubbing her hands together. I can feel the giddiness radiating off her, off all of us, this heavy secret we’ve been carrying around slowly being released. Like every other time I learned a new truth about Lucy, though, the initial surprise about her age was replaced with a kind of obvious understanding once I really thought about it: that first day in Hines when she appeared with a case of beer at hand, the rest of us so fresh out of high school, so na?ve. Just starting to scheme about how to find our fakes as we searched for upperclassmen with a passing resemblance, maybe. Someone we could bribe into passing one back. But Lucy always felt so much older than the rest of us, so much more mature, grabbing those bottles from Penny Lanes at random. Not at all concerned about getting caught. And while I know that twenty-three isn’t all that old, when you’re cocooned inside a place like Rutledge, a place where everyone is simply a carbon copy of everyone else, it’s old enough to somehow feel predatory, wrong.