“That night at Penny Lanes,” I say. “The boys will remember it, too. They can corroborate it if they’re asked.”
Nicole nods, her cheeks hollow and pale before walking to the couch and collapsing onto the cushions, pushing her head deep into her hands.
“They’ll just think we’re na?ve,” I say, walking over to her now and rubbing her shoulders. “That our only crime is being too innocent to see her for who she really is.”
“That we’re just girls,” Sloane adds, her eyes distant and detached. “Just a couple of harmless little girls.”
CHAPTER 67
NOW
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.