I would always care about Eliza, even and especially when she didn’t care about herself.
“What are you guys talking about?” Sloane asks, leaning forward, but I can’t bring myself to respond. Instead, I’m still back there, back in my bedroom, my body hot beneath the sheets as I let out a sigh, opened my eyes. Realized I could never go to sleep as long as Eliza was still with him, that sick boy next door who watched her through the window. The one who had broken into her room, lain on her bed. Wedged his way between us in a way nobody had ever been able to before.
I remember flinging off the covers, frustration mounting as I crawled out of bed. Silently cursing her for making me take care of her the way I always did as I tiptoed through the dark and threw on my shoes, crept through the back door while my parents were asleep just down the hall. The school itself was only a short walk away and I was stewing the entire time, muttering the things I planned to say to her. That old, burnt building looking haunted and strange as the moon shone down, looming like a shadow puppet cast across the wall.
“Margot,” Sloane says, but I can’t peel my eyes from Lucy.
Lucy, who has asked me about that party so many times. Who has nudged me along, showered me with questions, almost as if she knew the truth and was trying to get me to say it myself. I think about that conversation back in the Outer Banks, New Year’s fireworks popping in the distance and our eyes trained on the stars above. Lucy had brought it up again: that night, that final night, Eliza and Levi stumbling around that old school together. Arms like loose nooses wound around each other’s necks and the vodka pouring down their gullets all tingly and warm.
“He told me about the party,” she had said. “The night she died.”
But that wasn’t true; it was another one of her lies. Levi didn’t tell Lucy about the full moon that night and the way they all gathered, drawn to it like a spell. Like some primordial instinct, some ancient rite, Eliza the sacrificial lamb left bleeding at the altar. Lucy knew about the party because she had been there the way she had always been there, the way she still is: appearing out of nowhere, all feline and quiet.
Watching in the distance, her body blending into the dark.
“I saw it happen,” she says to me now, reading my mind as I remember the way I walked into that building, the party already dying by the time I arrived. Sidestepping people I vaguely recognized as they staggered onto the sidewalk, looking straight through me as if I were a ghost. I had always been invisible when I wasn’t with Eliza and that night had been no different, all those limp bodies with glassy eyes stumbling home like people possessed. “I saw it all.”
I remember poking my head into every single room, each one littered with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. The sour smell of vomit mixing with the sea breeze as I made my way up the stairs. I just kept climbing—the second floor, the third—searching every corner, trying to find her. The roar of waves in the distance somehow sounding louder the higher I went.
“Margot, talk to me,” Sloane says, grabbing my wrist. “What is this about?”
It’s all suddenly too much—the memories, this room, the feel of Sloane’s hand on my arm and the heat of their stares, all eyes on me—so I stand up fast before walking into the kitchen and out the back door, desperate for space to think. For air to breathe. But the rain is beating down hard as I stagger into the yard, loud cracks of thunder vibrating my bones.
A flash of lightning illuminating the shed, those big double doors still latched shut.
I walk toward it, the smell of blood prickling the skin on my neck as I swing the doors open and stumble inside, breathing heavily. My hair dripping wet as I drop my head in my hands, my mind fully immersed in that final night now like it’s happening all over again, so unbearably real. The memory of my body ascending higher, those rickety stairs with the full moon above illuminating it all. I was so close to leaving. I was so close to just giving up, going home—until I heard that noise.
Something like a kicked can, the scrape of aluminum as it skidded across the floor.
“What was that?”
I remember my head snapping to the side, Eliza’s voice just barely above a whisper. It sounded strange, slurred, so I rounded a wall and that’s when I saw it: two bodies moving in unison in the corner; pale, bare skin glowing bright in the dark.
“It’s fine,” Levi said, his voice breathy and hoarse. “It’s nothing.”
“Is there someone there?”
“I said it’s nothing.”
I crept closer, blinking my eyes, each flip of the lids making everything a little bit clearer, a little more real. It was them, I could tell, even in the darkness: it was Eliza and Levi, completely unclothed, lying on the floor of that disgusting place. They were surrounded by empty bottles and sleeping bags, cigarette stubs and discarded trash. Levi’s body moving in a rhythmic motion, his hands clenched tight around her wrists, fingers digging into her skin while Eliza lay beneath him, open eyes on the sky.
I opened my mouth and started to take a step forward—but then I stopped myself, remembering the night of the break-in. The way I could smell Levi in her bedroom, the scent of him stained deep in her sheets.
Realizing, with a jolt, that what I was watching wasn’t the first time.
I still don’t know which part was worse: seeing Eliza like that, the way she kept lowering her standards for him, digging herself deeper into this hole I somehow knew would trap her forever, or finally understanding the magnitude of their relationship and what it entailed. The reality of just how far apart we had drifted: all the things she had kept from me, all the things she felt she couldn’t say. I remember watching with pure detachment as they finished, unable to look away. Levi rolling off with a grunt before standing up, pulling on his shorts. Eliza self-consciously gripping her chest while she looked around for her sundress, fingers skimming the floor.
“I’ll be back,” he had said, not bothering to help her up before heading to the stairs and walking down. “Gonna grab another beer.”
It was pure reflex that finally pulled me out of the shadows, my body stepping forward as Eliza got dressed. She was standing a little too close to the edge, swaying gently as she pulled on her clothes. Her body eclipsed by the glow of the moon. I remember feeling such sadness then, watching as she tried to pull herself together: brushing her fingers through tangled hair, cupping a hand to her mouth as a hiccup escaped. Thinking that the person I was looking at then wasn’t the Eliza everyone envied. That it wasn’t the Eliza I looked up to, the one I spent my entire life wanting to be.
The person in front of me was someone else entirely.
It took her a few seconds to realize I was there, but then she turned around, somehow feeling the presence of another body behind her, and I registered the shock in her expression, the unmistakable shame.
“Margot,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to make sure you were okay.”
She was quiet, a subtle wetness in her eyes, and for a single, stupid second, I actually thought she might run over and hug me.
“You don’t have to protect me,” she said instead, crossing her arms tight across her chest. “I told you that.”
“Obviously I do,” I said, gesturing to the corner where she had just been. Dipping my voice an octave lower, trying to hide the judgment that was so clearly there. “Eliza, I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Yeah, well, neither do I.”