I enter the apartment to find Sloane and Nicole on the living room floor, boxes ripped open and all our belongings scattered across the room.
“How did it go?” Nicole asks, standing up fast, eyes hopeful and afraid at the exact same time. She’s looking better, though, a certain buoyancy to her I haven’t seen in months. The color blooming back into her skin and her cheeks filling out, all fleshy and pink like a ripening fruit.
“Good,” I say, smiling weakly. “It’s all good.”
I watch her exhale and I take a seat in the middle of them, my head poking into the nearest box.
“Mr. Jefferson identified it all,” I say, thinking about the things we planted in Lucy’s bedroom; the evidence we snuck inside the locked drawers of her desk. Everything of Eliza’s that I had kept: that tube of used lipstick, a scrunchie with her hair still tangled in the fabric. All of it painting a picture of a person obsessed—which Lucy was, in a way, although I suppose that means that I was, too.
“Kappa Nu is done,” I continue. “None of them are facing charges except for Trevor.”
I look at Nicole, surprise and relief flooding into her face.
“The other boys admitted that he was hazing Levi, singling him out. That Trevor’s the reason he drank so much.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Sloane says, fingers reaching out to grab Nicole’s hand. All of us smiling at the thought of Trevor having to live with this forever; the consequences trailing him around for the first time in his life, for the rest of his life. “We’re going to be okay.”
We continue to unpack our things slowly, quietly, the magnitude of the last few months finally setting in. The fact that we actually got away with it, we got away with murder, not just once but three times over.
One was an accident, one a mistake, and one a necessity to save us all.
“I didn’t know you had one of those, too,” Sloane says suddenly, and I look up, tracing her gaze down to my neck.
To my hand, absentmindedly playing with the chain clasped tight around my throat: Lucy’s necklace, that constellation of stars. The one I had plucked from her body when nobody was looking, a familiar urge I couldn’t suppress.
“Lucy had one just like it,” she says. “From that jewelry dispenser by the door at Penny Lanes.”
“Oh, yeah,” I lie, remembering what Lucy had whispered on the roof.
“I don’t need him,” she had said. “But he gave me this.”
I picture her standing on the dock, listening to the music creeping out through the windows. Watching us dancing, singing, Eliza twisting the jewels around her neck as we looked up at the stars and found pictures in the sky.
Her body rigid by the door after Mr. Jefferson slammed it, banishing her to a life all on her own.
“He said it reminded him of me because I was named after that song. Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Another lie, though whether that one was meant for me or herself, I’ll never really know.
“I got it sometime over the summer,” I add.
Sloane nods, looking back down, and I can’t help but feel a pang of something new now, something fresh. Pity and understanding; the lengths that Lucy went to just to feel like her life was a little bit different, a little bit better, than what it really was. I dip my hand into my last box now, the one full of all my old books. The stories I used to get lost in, too; all the other lives I preferred to my own.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde resting on top, that single person capable of both good and evil. Love and violence. Emotions strong enough to take another life.
I look around our little apartment, at us three friends now bonded by blood. I know better than either of them that this kind of violence never really washes away. No matter how hard they try to scrub it off, how desperately they attempt to keep themselves clean, it’ll just keep seeping farther into their skin, their very foundation, all that blood running deep like a stain. What we did together is tattooed across all of us now, a permanent mark like a friendship bracelet tied tight around our wrists.
Like a broken heart drawn in sunscreen, only whole when we stick together.
In time, it may fade, but it’ll never truly be gone—because if one goes down, we all go down, which might be the most steadfast act of friendship I’ve ever known.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m going to start with a story. A story-within-a-story.
Some of what you just read is true.
During my junior and senior years at the University of Georgia, my roommates and I lived in a house off-campus owned by a fraternity. Our backyards were connected by a little old shed, so it was incredibly easy to move between the two properties. I once walked into that shed to find massive tobacco leaves hanging from the ceiling; another time, I walked into our kitchen to find a brother tenderizing deer meat with a mallet.
There really were specs of blood on the ceiling, and we really did eat it for dinner that night.
We decorated the living room with old vinyl records and it wasn’t unusual to walk out of my bedroom to see random boys in the house at all hours: collecting our rent, which was ridiculously cheap. Attempting to fix all the things that needed to be fixed. The insulation was terrible, our toes always frigid against the hardwood floor; one winter, when the heater broke, my roommate slept in oven mitts to keep her fingers from freezing. Then one night, after several months of living there, we discovered the house had a basement—well, more of a crawl space. It was tiny and, to be honest, a little bit terrifying. We heard rumors of brothers being hazed down there in the past. The concrete walls were covered in graffiti and the only way you could access it was by a little side door hidden behind the bushes out back. And despite the fact that I truly don’t think anyone ever went down there, learning of its existence after months of living in the room just above it was more than a little unsettling.
With that said, while the setting of this book was inspired by a very real place, everything else is entirely fictional, including and especially the characters themselves. The only character I stole from real life was the house itself, because trust me when I say: that house had character. It was weird and wonderful and I just had to memorialize it—but the rest of this thing, I completely made up. The brothers next door treated us with kindness and respect; the roommates I lived with are still, to this day, some of my very best friends.
Now that that’s out of the way, I want to start by thanking the original girls of Hartford House for allowing me (no, encouraging me) to share this special place with the world. I look back and laugh at those years so often; the memories are too ridiculous to recount. That place left a mark on us, but we left our mark on it, too: our names are still written in chipped paint across the siding, our doodles still preserved in the concrete out front. Thank you so much for talking me into letting our time there live on in these pages. This book was so special to write.
To my agent, Dan Conaway, who wears a million hats and always wears them well: you’ve changed my life in countless ways and you have my endless gratitude. To Chaim Lipskar, Peggy Boulos-Smith, Maja Nikolic, Kate Boggs, Sofia Bolido, and everyone else at Writers House: thank you so much for all you do.
To my editor, Kelley Ragland: thank you for your continued trust and confidence. You have no idea how relieved I was when you first expressed your love for this book—a book that is so vastly different than ones I had given you previously. Your edits are spot-on, your opinions invaluable, and your support unwavering. Thank you, too, to everyone at Minotaur, St. Martin’s Publishing Group, and Macmillan, especially Andy Martin, Jen Enderlin, Allison Ziegler (who titled this book!), Sarah Melnyk, Hector DeJean, Madeline Houpt, Paul Hochman, and David Rotstein. You guys just keep making my dreams come true.