I glance to Nicole next, so wisp-thin it looks like she might disappear, and the tension in the room is so heavy, so solid, I can feel my insides caving like moist dirt is being heaped on my chest. The mounting pressure of being buried alive.
“I know someone wants to say something,” Lucy continues, crossing her arms. “Everyone’s been weird since the night on the island.”
We stay quiet, bodies paralyzed with the exception of our racing hearts, our darting eyes, though it’s not for a lack of things to say. The problem is I have too many questions, too many fears, all of them buzzing around in my mind like a swarm of insects, making it impossible to grab on to just one.
“Okay,” she says at last, standing up fast before stalking off into the kitchen. “If this is how it’s gonna be.”
Sloane and I exchange a look again, silently wondering what she’ll do next, before Lucy reemerges with a handle of Svedka in one hand and a knife from the knife block clutched in the other.
“What are you doing?” Sloane asks, instinctively scooting back, her arm launching up to shield Nicole next to her like a mother in the driver’s seat just before a crash. “Put that back.”
“Calm down,” Lucy says, plopping onto the floor before placing the knife in front of her. “I refuse to just sit here in silence. We’re going to talk, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
We all watch as she reaches out and flicks the knife, the metal tip turning in slow, somber circles.
“We’re not playing your stupid game,” Sloane says.
“There are obviously things we need to ask each other,” Lucy snaps back, staring at Sloane before diverting her gaze over to Nicole, to me. “So, let’s ask. Let’s get it out.”
She takes a swig from the bottle, smacking her lips before grabbing a sucker from the coffee table, tossing the wrapper on the floor and popping it into her mouth.
“Truth or dare,” she asks, looking down at the knife. Sloane shakes her head, though I can see her resolve melting. Her desperate need for answers, all those questions she wants to ask. Her anger toward Lucy over these last few weeks steadily mounting, getting stronger. Ready to rip right out of her like a raging storm.
“Fine,” Lucy says once it becomes clear Sloane isn’t going to bite. She turns her attention to me next, lowers her voice. “We’ll let Margot go first.”
My body goes rigid as my eyes dart over to Sloane, seeking out her permission like always. She just stares at me—she doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t shake her head, either—so I walk over to the center of the room before taking a seat on the floor, my back digging into the coffee table and my hand slowly gripping the knife.
Sloane lowers herself down beside me slowly, a show of solidarity as she leans against Nicole’s legs.
“Spin it,” Lucy says, and I feel myself blink. Everything feels muffled, hazy, as the memories of the last nine months pulse around me now; the many, many times the four of us have been in this living room, sitting in a circle just like this. Telling Lucy whatever she wants; readily doing anything she asks.
“Margot,” she says, and I lift my head, eyes on hers. Wondering how to word all the things I so desperately need to know. Because Lucy is a liar, yes, but I realize now that’s not even the problem. The problem is she’s been honest, too, and I have no idea how to tell what’s real and what’s not. What’s the truth, sprinkled in so carefully, so casually, and what’s nothing but an outright lie. She’s let me in on little things, cherished things. Things that have shown me the rarest of glimmers into who she really is.
Things that still make me love her, somehow. Despite or maybe even because of it all.
“Spin,” she repeats, and I exhale slowly, grabbing the bottle of vodka between us and taking a pull to coat my throat. Her pupils seem to be stretched to three times their natural size and she nods at me, a red stain on her teeth, before I flick the knife and watch it twirl, all of us leaning forward as it slows, breath smothered in our throats.
“Truth or dare,” I whisper, watching as Lucy grabs the handle, the knife tip pointed directly at her. I feel the air exit the room as Sloane straightens up and Lucy starts to smile.
“Truth,” she says, although the way she’s looking at me now, eyebrows lifted, I know she means it more as a dare. She’s taunting me, egging me on, challenging me to ask her the thing she knows I want to ask. This is her game, after all. It always has been.
This is what Lucy does. She dangles.
“Why did you do it?” I ask, that single question encompassing so much. The last two years pummel over me now as I picture Eliza and me in her bedroom, that silhouette outside in the dark. The missing picture and Lucy showing up at Rutledge; coming into my dorm room, singling me out. Finding out where Levi would live and casting her spell over him, too, before following him into a darkness so dark, he’d never be able to claw his way out.
I picture his body in the mud, eyes wide and afraid. The trail of death that seems to follow her around for reasons I still can’t explain.
Lucy looks at me, head tilted like she’s observing me from behind a piece of thick clear glass. Like I’m some foreign creature she doesn’t understand until a thin smile stretches slowly across her face. The look of a person who’s just realized they’ve won.
“Margot,” she says at last. “You, of all people, should know the answer to that.”
CHAPTER 62
I can still feel myself lying in bed, phone alight in the dark. Those videos of Eliza and Levi playing on repeat, branding themselves right into my brain. I couldn’t help but watch them, study them: the way they swayed in unison, his arm on her shoulders. That bottle of vodka passing between them before she leaned her head back and howled at the moon.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say now, my heart hard in my throat as Lucy stares, smiling.
“Oh, I think we both know that you do.”
I had heard about the party, of course. It was an annual thing. A sacred senior tradition to descend upon that old school during the first full moon of the summer, a rite of passage before we all parted ways—but of course, I didn’t go. It was three weeks into summer and Eliza and I still weren’t speaking. Not since graduation, anyway, our smiles fake and fleeting as we posed for that picture. Arms rigid by our sides as we pretended to be friends. We were leaving for Rutledge in just two months and I was starting to wonder how it would work, the two of us living together when we could barely stand to be in the same room. We would have to get over it eventually, one of us would have to crack, but Eliza had yet to apologize so I hadn’t either, opting instead to stay in that night and watch her life unfold through my phone.
I remember the sky growing darker, the shrieks getting louder. Eliza looking drunker as the night wore on. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to see her suffer the consequences of her actions instead of relying on me to save her the way I always did. I wanted her to stumble home drunk and get grounded by her parents, her senior summer ruined because I wasn’t there to keep her quiet when we crept in late. Because the truth was, the truth I had secretly known for so long: she never appreciated it. She never appreciated me, the way I always propped her up, kept her safe, so instead, I turned my phone off and flipped over in bed. I pinched my eyes shut and I tried, so hard, to just forget about it all. To forget about her, about Levi, about the stinging betrayal I felt every time I thought about the way she had looked at me in my bedroom, those horrible words hissing loudly between her teeth. I tried to tell myself I didn’t care, that she could go ahead and ruin her life if she wanted to—but I did. I did care.