“Margot,” she says at last. “You, of all people, should know the answer to that.”
CHAPTER 62
I can still feel myself lying in bed, phone alight in the dark. Those videos of Eliza and Levi playing on repeat, branding themselves right into my brain. I couldn’t help but watch them, study them: the way they swayed in unison, his arm on her shoulders. That bottle of vodka passing between them before she leaned her head back and howled at the moon.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say now, my heart hard in my throat as Lucy stares, smiling.
“Oh, I think we both know that you do.”
I had heard about the party, of course. It was an annual thing. A sacred senior tradition to descend upon that old school during the first full moon of the summer, a rite of passage before we all parted ways—but of course, I didn’t go. It was three weeks into summer and Eliza and I still weren’t speaking. Not since graduation, anyway, our smiles fake and fleeting as we posed for that picture. Arms rigid by our sides as we pretended to be friends. We were leaving for Rutledge in just two months and I was starting to wonder how it would work, the two of us living together when we could barely stand to be in the same room. We would have to get over it eventually, one of us would have to crack, but Eliza had yet to apologize so I hadn’t either, opting instead to stay in that night and watch her life unfold through my phone.
I remember the sky growing darker, the shrieks getting louder. Eliza looking drunker as the night wore on. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to see her suffer the consequences of her actions instead of relying on me to save her the way I always did. I wanted her to stumble home drunk and get grounded by her parents, her senior summer ruined because I wasn’t there to keep her quiet when we crept in late. Because the truth was, the truth I had secretly known for so long: she never appreciated it. She never appreciated me, the way I always propped her up, kept her safe, so instead, I turned my phone off and flipped over in bed. I pinched my eyes shut and I tried, so hard, to just forget about it all. To forget about her, about Levi, about the stinging betrayal I felt every time I thought about the way she had looked at me in my bedroom, those horrible words hissing loudly between her teeth. I tried to tell myself I didn’t care, that she could go ahead and ruin her life if she wanted to—but I did. I did care.
I would always care about Eliza, even and especially when she didn’t care about herself.
“What are you guys talking about?” Sloane asks, leaning forward, but I can’t bring myself to respond. Instead, I’m still back there, back in my bedroom, my body hot beneath the sheets as I let out a sigh, opened my eyes. Realized I could never go to sleep as long as Eliza was still with him, that sick boy next door who watched her through the window. The one who had broken into her room, lain on her bed. Wedged his way between us in a way nobody had ever been able to before.
I remember flinging off the covers, frustration mounting as I crawled out of bed. Silently cursing her for making me take care of her the way I always did as I tiptoed through the dark and threw on my shoes, crept through the back door while my parents were asleep just down the hall. The school itself was only a short walk away and I was stewing the entire time, muttering the things I planned to say to her. That old, burnt building looking haunted and strange as the moon shone down, looming like a shadow puppet cast across the wall.
“Margot,” Sloane says, but I can’t peel my eyes from Lucy.
Lucy, who has asked me about that party so many times. Who has nudged me along, showered me with questions, almost as if she knew the truth and was trying to get me to say it myself. I think about that conversation back in the Outer Banks, New Year’s fireworks popping in the distance and our eyes trained on the stars above. Lucy had brought it up again: that night, that final night, Eliza and Levi stumbling around that old school together. Arms like loose nooses wound around each other’s necks and the vodka pouring down their gullets all tingly and warm.
“He told me about the party,” she had said. “The night she died.”
But that wasn’t true; it was another one of her lies. Levi didn’t tell Lucy about the full moon that night and the way they all gathered, drawn to it like a spell. Like some primordial instinct, some ancient rite, Eliza the sacrificial lamb left bleeding at the altar. Lucy knew about the party because she had been there the way she had always been there, the way she still is: appearing out of nowhere, all feline and quiet.
Watching in the distance, her body blending into the dark.