While nobody else ever remembered my face, knew my name, when I walked into a room with her, I saw it click: the recognition, the respect. Eliza’s friend.
“Coming!” I yell, standing up before propping the photo onto the mantel.
That’s why, when Eliza died, it felt like my identity did, too. Her death erased us both completely and I wonder if that’s the reason why I feel so drawn to Lucy. Why my eyes always gravitated to her when she walked down the hall or lay out on campus. Why I agreed to any of this. There are certain similarities between them and I wonder now if I had sensed them all along, my subconscious pulling me toward the closest thing I could find to my friend. After all, being loved by Eliza was like a sudden hit of adrenaline—a gateway drug, something addicting and freeing that left you craving your next hit the second she stepped away. And if Eliza was adrenaline, that makes Lucy something even more. Something more addicting, more dangerous.
Something I probably shouldn’t be dabbling in—but at the same time, something impossible to refuse.
CHAPTER 6
AFTER
I plop down on my bed with an exaggerated huff. Detective Frank is gone, finally, and I want to take advantage of the precious time to think.
I glance around my room, taking in all the subtle changes that have taken place over the nine months since I’ve made this space my home: the pictures cluttering up the mantel are with Lucy, Sloane, and Nicole now, our lips pursed in puckery pouts and our cheeks smashed together with too much force. Most of them were taken in the early days: those sweet weeks of summer when we were just getting to know each other. Those first few months when everything was fine. You can tell by how different we all look, Nicole especially, her cheeks still baby-round and not the concave craters they would slowly shrink into. Then there’s the string of Christmas lights hung up around the walls that I never bothered to take down; the cigarette burns visible on the floor, little black dots peppered across the hardwood from when Lucy was too lazy to grab an ashtray. All of the evidence of the life I’ve built in this house. The person I’ve become.
That person is almost unrecognizable to the person I was when I first stepped foot in here—though, I suppose, that was the point.
I wonder how much time we have until the search for Lucy really ramps up. I know, right now, they’re grasping at straws: an adult gone for three days is hardly enough to call her a missing person, especially considering what they’ll soon come to learn. And Sloane wasn’t lying when she said it before: Lucy does this kind of thing. Everyone who knows her knows it.
But still, Levi is dead. Levi is dead, Lucy is gone, and someone has to pay.
I roll over now and reach for my bedside table, yanking the drawer open. Inside, I sift through all the typical clutter: a TV remote, a couple empty lighters I haven’t bothered to throw away. Wrinkled receipts and dried-out pens, until finally, my fingers wrap around something cold and smooth shoved into the back and I pull it out, tap it awake.
It’s Lucy’s phone, a smattering of stars sprinkled across the lock screen.
I know I can’t hang on to this forever. I know they’ll eventually track it and it’ll lead them back here, to this house. To the three of us—Sloane, Nicole, and me—her roommates and confidants. Her best friends. But it’s better than Lucy having it, we all knew that. There were certain things that made sense for her to keep: her ID, her wallet. A handful of credit cards, although of course she’d have to use those to be tracked down. Her phone, on the other hand, was something we couldn’t risk. At least this way, by the time they find it, it’ll be stashed underneath her bed or something, completely obscured by dirty clothes and rogue shoes. The battery will be dead, which will explain how we never heard the ringing of various people trying to reach her.
Which will explain why, after always getting voice mail we stopped trying ourselves.
But by the time that happens, they will have already found their answers … only they won’t be the answers I know they’re expecting. Lucy’s unpredictable like that. No, the answers they’ll find will only lead to more questions, and slowly, carefully, we’ll slink back into the shadows and let all those other things crawl quietly into the light. We’ll remove ourselves from the story completely, letting it morph into something different, better. Staged.
What Detective Frank doesn’t yet know is that nothing with Lucy is ever as it seems.
I stare at the stars on her phone now, my eyes gravitating toward all the constellations she once taught me: Orion, the hunter, and Taurus, the bull—but it’s Gemini where they linger. I couldn’t see it at first, Lucy and me lying on the roof, her hand in mine as she lifted my arm into the air and traced it for me.
“Just there,” she had said, her smoky breath warm against the early fall chill. “See the two people? They’re holding hands. Like us.”
Then, once I saw it, it never went away. Every single night I would look up and find it, my eyes gravitating to it naturally like one of those inkblot pictures: something that, once seen, could never be unseen. Lying on my back, a once-smoldering fire dying in the night and mounds of warm bodies passed out around it. I remember training my eyes on the sky, thinking of Lucy. Knowing that she was out there, somewhere—that they were out there, Lucy and Levi. Spending his final few hours together without him even knowing it.
I remember lying there, staring at those stars, and feeling the familiar pinch of envy in my chest.
I remember thinking that, wherever she was, she was looking at them, too.
CHAPTER 7
BEFORE
The living room has been picked up, sort of, beer bottles collected and tossed into the trash. There’s a candle burning on the coffee table, something citrusy and herbal like eucalyptus and lemon, the equivalent of spraying Febreze on dirty laundry. As if the scent alone could somehow render the place clean.
I walk out of my room and clear my throat, three pairs of eyes turning toward me.
“Girls,” Lucy announces, a grin on her lips. “This is Margot. Roommate number four.”
I raise my hand, a sheepish wave, and walk toward them on the couch, trying to make a quick calculation in my mind: Do I plop down, too, just pretend that I’m one of them? Or stand at a distance and wait to be invited?
“Where’d you find her?” Sloane asks, eyeing me like I’m some stray dog Lucy dragged in from the street. Like I might have fleas.
“She lived on our hall.”
“Our hall?”
“Yes,” Lucy says, a hint of annoyance peeking through. “The last door on the left.”
“Why have we never met her before?”
“You’re meeting her now.”
I stay standing, taking in Sloane’s skeptical gaze. Nicole is chewing on her lip, like she’s trying to work out some math problem in her mind. I’m not surprised they don’t know my name. I barely left my room at all last year—but still, the fact that my face isn’t even vaguely familiar sends a deep sting through my chest.
“Sit,” Lucy says, and I glance around, deciding to take a seat on the couch adjacent to them. A little distance suddenly seems safe. “Tell us about yourself.”
I blink, my eyes flitting between the three of them as they stare at me expectantly, and I feel a sudden sense of vertigo, a sharp pang of panic, like I’m standing on a hot stage and suddenly forgot my lines.
“I’m Margot,” I say at last, even though they know that already. “I’m an English major from the Outer Banks—”
“No,” Lucy says, interrupting me. “All of that is bullshit. That’s not you. Tell us about you.”
I can feel my heartbeat rise into my throat, my cheeks growing warm as my mind goes blank. The sad truth of it is, there’s not much else to say.
“Why’d you pick Rutledge?” Nicole asks, wide doll eyes and a gentle tone. Already, I can tell she’s the nicest.