“It was you?” I ask, my mind hanging in some strange limbo between adrenaline and shock as I stare down at the body below me, my eyes following the single line of blood slowly leaking out of her mouth. Even in death, they’re so much the same: Lucy, Eliza, their light extinguished as quick and violent as a shooting star. “You killed Levi?”
And then, like somebody simply snapped their fingers, flicked on the light, I see it all so clearly: the way Sloane’s arm shot out to the side when Lucy appeared with the knife from the kitchen; the way she had begged me to talk to her that day in her room, folding that T-shirt again and again on the floor. The need in her eyes as she asked me about Halloween, what could have happened that night that made everything change.
“Margot,” she had said. “She’s my best friend. Please.”
Sloane isn’t protecting herself right now, that bloody knife still clutched in her hand. She’s protecting the person she always protects.
“Nicole,” I say, and I watch as she steps into view now, too. The two of them must have been just off to the side, behind the open shed doors, listening to Lucy and me talk in the dark. Absorbing our confessions, our secrets, all of them pouring out of us like water escaping two broken dams.
“I thought it was Trevor,” Nicole says, her eyes wet with tears as her lower lip shakes. Her thin arms snaked around her waist like she’s still trying to keep the pain inside. “It was so dark, and he was wearing Trevor’s shirt.”
“You thought Levi was Trevor,” I repeat, the truth dawning on me now as the events from that night come roaring back. Remembering the way Trevor had tripped by the fire and struggled to stand; the way Nicole stood up and left, refused to watch it, never even seeing the fight that came after. Trevor spilling that rum, Levi laughing in the distance. The two of them switching clothes before Levi stalked off and into the trees. Those woods were so dark away from the fire and I can see how the two of them could look alike from the back: their hair color, their height. All those boys just a shade away from being exactly the same. “Trevor hurt you on Halloween.”
I can picture it so easily now and I hate myself for not seeing it all sooner: Trevor hulking around that night with his shirt ripped off, that scary air to him like something bad had happened. Their fight the next morning and the way Nicole never wanted to go over anymore; him squeezing her leg on the boat, making her flinch.
I think of Nicole on the tile, so lifeless and limp. Vomit stuck to her hair and those finger-shaped bruises scattered across her arms as I tried to pick her up, bring her back to my room.
“Nicole, come on. Let’s get in bed.”
“I didn’t want to,” she says to me now, the humiliation in her voice still so deep. “I was so drunk and I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t get him off me. He made me do it, he held my wrists—”
“No,” she had said, trying to push me away. “No, stop.”
I had been so focused on Levi, remembering the way he gripped Eliza’s wrists in the dark. The way he had been on our property; the way I had gotten so used to blaming him for everything.
“Levi walked in on us,” Nicole continues, her gaze on the floor. On Lucy, staring straight back, the truth she had just worked out forever locked inside. “I remember him looking back and forth between Trevor and me, like he was trying to decide what to do.”
I see Nicole and me on the island, that bottle in her hand. Me asking about Levi and her shaking her head, taking a swig.
“He didn’t do a thing.”
“He just left,” she says at last, looking back at me. A plea in her eyes that cracks my heart open. “He just closed the door and left.”
That’s why Nicole and Levi avoided each other after that. That’s why they would always dart their eyes, refuse to talk. Both of them so ashamed for reasons related, but also entirely apart. Levi knew what he was witnessing and he did nothing to stop it. He was a pledge, Trevor the president, the only person with the power to make his life a living hell. The person who reminded him of that again and again, just to prove a point.
“I tried to talk to Trevor about it the next morning and he got so mad,” Nicole continues. “He started screaming at me for accusing him of something like that. He said it wasn’t even possible, anyway, since we were dating.”
“Nicole—” I start, but Sloane shakes her head, a silent cue for me to let her finish.
“I tried to just forget about it,” she says, the tears streaming faster. “But I couldn’t. Then that night, you were pushing me so hard, and I was getting so angry all over again. I couldn’t stand the thought of us sleeping in that tent together, of him touching me—”
“It’s okay,” I say, walking toward her, finally, before pulling her into a hug. “Nicole, it’s okay.”
“I thought it was Trevor,” she cries into my neck, little chokes erupting from her throat. “I went into the woods and I saw him stumbling around. He had tripped on a root or something and couldn’t get up like that time by the fire and before I even knew what was happening, I was holding him down and he was too drunk to fight back.”
I picture Nicole in the dark, her body pushed hard into Levi’s neck. She’s so small, so fragile, but her rage is big, all-consuming, growing inside her for the last few months. Adrenaline and anger and fear and hatred gnawing at her like an incessant itch. An open sore that could never truly heal.
“It felt good,” she whispers, almost to herself, and I think of the thrashing, the choking, the mud lodging itself deep inside Levi’s throat. The roles reversed; the power reclaimed. “That’s the worst part. It felt good when I was doing it, until he stopped moving and I realized my mistake.”
I look up at Sloane, staring at us from across the shed. The knife still hanging limp in her hand, blood dripping from the tip like that night on the boat as it leaked from Lucy’s finger, little red circles dotting the floor.
“She would have told Frank,” she says quietly. “She would have turned Nicole in.”
“We don’t know that,” I argue, but Sloane interrupts me, shaking her head.
“Yes, we do,” she says, pragmatic and even. Our voice of reason. “Lucy would have saved herself and you know it.”
“But she didn’t actually hurt anyone—”
“Are you kidding me?” Sloane snaps back. “She hurt all of us. Every single one of us.”
We’re all quiet, this familiar shed transporting us somewhere new now. Somewhere foreign and uncharted, though I’ve seen a glimpse of this place before: standing on the edge of that charred-black building, looking down, Eliza’s body bent and broken beyond recognition or repair. Swaying slightly with the breeze and the realization that I could just turn around, walk back home, and nobody would be the wiser.
Lucy’s voice in the wind like a whisper from the grave.
“If you knew you could get away with murder, would you do it?”
“All of this happened because of her,” Sloane says. “She started it all when she walked into our lives.”
I picture Lucy alone on the dock, her body the silhouette that kicked my fear into motion. My unease and my envy, all of it directed at the wrong person. If she hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t done that, maybe Eliza wouldn’t have felt the need to hide it all from me. Maybe she would have talked to me, told me the truth about Levi and the envelope she found. Maybe we never would have gotten into that fight: the missing picture still on her wall, the things we had said never escaping our lips. The resentment that built up between us still flimsy enough to tear back down, not the concrete barrier Lucy erected from afar.
I turn to Nicole next, still nuzzled into my neck, the gentlest soul I’ve ever known. Lucy led her to Trevor like a cat chasing a mouse into the jaws of a fox. She used Nicole’s kindness, her heart, her inability to let people down.
She maneuvered us all like chess pieces and people got hurt, people died.