Only If You're Lucky(24)
I vaguely remember Lucy putting back the liquor, flipping out the lights. The three of us leaving through the front door and waiting in the alley for her to shimmy back out the window, listening to her laugh as she landed hard on the dumpster. The four of us stumbling home with our arms threaded together like a daisy chain, wild and delicate, Lucy’s words pulsing through my mind like a meditation, a prayer.
“You’re one of us now.”
It isn’t until I wake up the next morning when I realize what happened, how the moment of Eliza’s passing came and went and I didn’t even feel it. How I had lost myself in Lucy completely, her attention the remedy I needed to make the pain go away. Instead, when the clock clicked to midnight and just kept going, time marching mercilessly on without her, I wasn’t suffocating the way I had expected to be, thinking about Eliza lying flat on the ground, her final breath ejected out of her with too much force.
Instead, I had been dancing, singing, wholly lost in the moment.
I had slept soundly for the first time in a year.
CHAPTER 17
I glance up at my door, a prickling on my neck alerting me to the presence of Lucy. She does this sometimes: appears without warning. Watches from the hallway all silent and still, waiting for me to notice.
“Hey,” I say, looking back down at my feet. I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom, legs arched, painting my toenails a neon blue.
“Where is everyone?” she asks.
“I think they’re next door.”
It’s the last week of summer, somehow, and we’ve been drinking it up madly, wildly, like roots in dry soil. Going out every night and sleeping until noon; sweating out our hangovers before starting the process all over again. We’ve passed the days at the beach, mostly, the four of us piling into Lucy’s old Mazda in the mornings; windows perpetually down, a warm breeze tangling our hair because her air conditioner is always broken. It’s a short drive to the coast—thirty minutes, tops; twenty when you’re speeding—and we’ve spent the empty hours burning patterns into our backs, eating watermelon bloated with vodka. Taking cold showers, napping in our towels, then going over to Kappa Nu in the evenings to smoke a bowl and play some beer pong, our cheeks and eyes poppy red.
The truth is, I’ve absorbed more in these three months than I did my entire freshman year: how to shotgun a beer and roll a joint and blow perfectly circular smoke rings by arcing my tongue in just the right way. I’m still a little quiet around the boys, sometimes on edge, but Lucy has been opening me up slowly like a finicky houseplant still learning to be loved. She’s been hatching me out of my shell—gently, gradually—but in a way I know would have made Eliza proud … and I’ve been starting to understand why Eliza wanted this, too, the thrill of it unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t the parties or the games or the drinks she craved, I know that now, but the little things that appear in the moments in between: the way it feels to have someone recognize your face, know your name. Call you over to the other side of the room like they genuinely want you there. It’s the roar of laughter when a joke lands just right or the feeling of someone’s eyes on your skin that makes you feel so achingly alive.
Finally, I’m starting to get it—I’m starting to get her—and every single night, I collect those moments like I collect everything. Sentimental souvenirs I can’t stand to toss away.
“I have to work tonight,” Lucy says, leaning against the mantel. I look up again and notice she’s wearing her regular uniform: short shorts and crew socks and a red T-shirt with a bowling ball in the center, the logo for Penny Lanes emblazoned across the front. “You want to get the girls and come by after close?”
I smile, nod, eager to soak up these final few days together. I don’t know how things will change once everyone else comes back to campus but somehow, already, I know that they will. I can feel it, the shift in the air. The buzzing energy of other bodies nearby. I’ve noticed the moving trucks appearing around town, the first trickle of freshmen scoping out the dorms, and it’s strange, seeing them here. The presence of other people ripping me out of this reverie we’ve created like a stranger showing up unannounced in a dream—because that’s what these last three months have felt like. A dream, an alternate reality. The funhouse-mirror version of regular life. A college town in summer isn’t actually a college town at all and our little pocket of it has felt like a ghost town to us, a bunch of bored girls roaming around with nothing to do and all the time to do it.
Deserted and dangerous and ours for the taking.
* * *
We arrive at Penny Lanes an hour after closing, leaving Lucy enough time to clean up, close down, and ensure that everyone is gone. Sloane knocks three times on the front door as we wait, the summer air like a steam room, our skin like an oil slick. Another hot, humid night that siphons the energy out of us the second we step outside.
“I hope they have tater tots,” Nicole says, her left leg bouncing. “They’re so good here.”
Sloane looks at her, eyebrow cocked. “You know they just buy all their shit from Costco, right? It’s all frozen.”
Nicole shrugs. “Everything tastes better when it’s free.”
“It’s not free.” Sloane laughs. “We’re stealing it.”