Only If You're Lucky(53)
“What do you mean you found her?”
“She was on the floor in my bathroom. She got sick … it was pretty bad.”
Sloane sighs, stretching her neck, eyes on the ceiling.
“I mean, we knew she was wasted,” she says at last. “Lucas told us, right?”
“Yeah, but the next morning, she seemed a little weird.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything,” I recount, remembering the way she had flinched, crossed her arms, muttered that apology like she had just snapped out of a daydream. “It’s just the way she was acting.”
Sloane looks down at the floor again, busying herself with a T-shirt. I watch her fold and refold it—three, four times—trying to work it out in her mind, fit the pieces together.
“Levi was on our property that night,” I blurt out, against my better judgment. Not only do I have no idea if Sloane knows about the cave, but I don’t have any proof of Levi being anywhere other than inside it all night. If what Lucy told me is true—if he wasn’t in the house on Halloween, but instead, below it—then that means he couldn’t have done anything to Nicole, anyway … unless, of course, he wasn’t in the cave at all, a possibility I’ve been massaging around in my mind ever since I remembered that admission he made on Thanksgiving.
Maybe he had walked through the shed, toward the little door behind the azaleas, but instead of going under the house like he was supposed to, he went in. Maybe it started simple: he didn’t want to do it. He was claustrophobic, dreading another night in that cramped little space. He thought nobody was home, that we were all next door, so he decided to go inside and wait it out there. Just lie to the brothers when he came back out.
But he wasn’t alone. Nicole was there, the worst possible person.
Nicole, Trevor’s girlfriend.
I wonder what he would have thought: seeing her in the house, her big eyes bulging as he walked inside. Nicole was afraid of him already. She had listened to my stories, shuddering as I described the way he broke into Eliza’s bedroom. Maybe she thought it was happening all over again and started yelling, calling out for Trevor, and Levi knew that a single slip of the tongue about him coming into our house uninvited, waiting out his hazing on a comfortable couch instead of where he was supposed to be, would lead to him not only getting in trouble, but being kicked out for good. So maybe he had run to her, tried to stop her from screaming as her nails scratched at his chest.
Maybe he had grabbed her wrists, twisting just a little too hard.
“What are you insinuating?” Sloane asks. “Are you saying—?”
“I don’t know,” I interrupt. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Just … he was here. That’s all.”
Sloane looks back down at her laundry, unfolding that same T-shirt. Folding it again. Whatever happened to Nicole that night, Levi is somehow involved. I’m sure of it. I think of those fingerprint bruises and the way they completely ignored each other after, a tension between them that didn’t exist before. The fight between Trevor and Nicole the next morning and the way nothing has been the same since. Maybe she tried to tell Trevor and he got jealous, blamed her instead of Levi, the idea of the two of them alone in the house together too much for his brittle ego to take. Or maybe he didn’t believe her. Levi is a legacy, after all. Trevor couldn’t just kick him out without some kind of solid evidence.
I can practically hear him now, that belittling voice. Commanding and masculine; always right. “You were drunk, Nicole. You don’t know what you saw.”
“We need to start locking the doors,” I say. “Lucy told me Nicole keeps losing her key, but we can’t just leave them open for anyone to come in.”
Sloane looks at me, opening her mouth like she’s about to tell me off.
“I’m not blaming Nicole,” I add, holding up my hands. “That didn’t come out right. I’m just saying we need to protect ourselves.”
She closes her mouth again and glances down at her lap, fingers working at the seam of a skirt for so long the thread has pulled, unraveling the fabric.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she says at last, nodding slowly. “We need to protect ourselves.”
CHAPTER 38
Finals go by in a sleep-deprived blur: waking up early, slogging to campus, those bleary morning hours desolate and dark despite the string lights wrapped tight around the fronds of the palmetto trees. Entire days spent hunched over textbooks in an always-abandoned corner of the library, underslept and overcaffeinated, my body buried between archaic desktop computers like the only mourner left in a forgotten graveyard.
Saying goodbye is strange once the semester is over and it’s finally time for us to all part ways. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent every single day of the last seven months together, suddenly inseparable the way Eliza and I once were: hips attached, finishing each other’s sentences. Oftentimes falling asleep in the same bed. So many nights, I wake up with a jolt to the glow of some old movie playing in the background, the sticky sensation of cotton mouth on my tongue. Turning to the side to see the three of them curled around each other like plaited roots, eyelids twitching in the dark and the twinkle of Christmas lights hung haphazard around my bedroom as I’m left wondering what I did to find myself here. How I’ve gotten so lucky with this second chance I know I don’t deserve.