They want answers, all of them, a thirsty need for information that won’t be quenched until I spill.
“It’s a long story,” I say instead, already knowing that won’t cut it.
“We’ve got time,” Lucy says, throwing herself onto my bed. Sloane and Nicole follow her lead, taking their own places on the mattress, and I stand in the center of the room for a second, eyeing them there. Numbly watching as Nicole flashes a smile and pats an empty spot on the comforter like she’s trying to seduce me.
I chew on the side of my cheek, thinking. Trying to decide how much to reveal. These girls are still strangers to me, still enigmas I can’t quite crack—but isn’t this how friendships are born? From shared traumas and bedroom bonding? Eliza and I used to do this, too, curled up on her dock in the dark, whispering secrets that drew us closer in the night. It was always the topics that felt taboo that ended up pulling us in the tightest: Eliza, age ten, revealing that she had bought her first bra but was too embarrassed to wear it. Too afraid of the straps poking through the fabric of her T-shirt; of the boys zeroing in and snapping them against her skin. Me, age twelve, showing her my ravaged ankles from trying to shave with my mom’s old razor I had dug out of the trash; the nicks and the cuts and the dried, crusty blood. Her fingers grazing over all those prickly patches I couldn’t quite reach. The two of us talking about boys and tampons and growth spurts and braces, all those tumultuous things that present themselves during the fragile years—years so fragile they were always in danger of shattering completely if not for that one friend who helped you hold it all together.
How many times had we come home from school with our uniforms on, shirts untucked and bras flung off, retreating into her bedroom to talk about our problems, each one seemingly larger than the last? Every conversation tying us tighter until, at last, we were two threads knotted into one: indivisible, inseparable. Eternally intertwined.
I grab the picture from the mantel now and hold it in my hands. I know I can’t keep Eliza from them forever. I know I’ll have to explain it all eventually: her, us. What happened back then and how I came to be here, alone. Levi Butler and why his appearance next door was enough to make me break down completely, buckling like rotten lumber beneath the overwhelming weight of him. A stilt house just waiting to collapse. The truth is, Levi was the very first splinter between us. Like salt-stained wood, it started small: a hairline fracture, skinny as a paper cut, but still, I could feel it. Even then, I could feel it. Beneath that dock, I had been hiding—but Eliza, she had been watching. Watching Levi, her lips dipped beneath the water and a dark curiosity washing over her like an ominous cloud blotting out the light. I watched her while she watched him and somehow, I knew that splinter would just continue to grow, expanding slowly from a crack to a crevice to something else entirely.
I knew it was only a matter of time until he would split us apart: forcefully, violently. I just didn’t know how violent it would be.
“Margot,” Lucy says, and I pull my gaze upward at the three of them sitting frog-legged on my bed. They’re looking at me so strangely and that’s when I register the wetness on my cheeks, two twin tears that have managed to snake their way down my face.
I lift my hand and wipe them away, smiling weakly.
“You can tell us,” she continues, Sloane and Nicole on either side of her, nodding like bobbleheads. “We’re your friends.”
CHAPTER 13
AFTER
“It’s gonna work.”
I look up from my bed, Lucy’s phone still clutched in my hand. Sloane is in the doorway; behind her, Nicole hovers, like neither of them quite want to come in.
“Margot,” she prods when I don’t answer. “It’s gonna work.”
I sigh, letting the phone fall asleep and sliding it back in my bedside table before gesturing for them both to come closer. They push the door all the way open, scampering across the floor in their bare feet, and I fling the covers back, inviting them in.
“They won’t find her,” she adds, scooting in beside me. “It’s Lucy.”
“I know,” I say, knowing Sloane is right. Lucy, who is known to take off on her own without warning. Whose only predictability is being impossible to predict. Lucy, whose own mother is still blissfully unaware that she’s even gone. I wonder if she’s even thought about her recently, Lucy’s mom—if there’s been some kind of primal tickle in the back of her subconscious, alerting her that something is wrong—or if this kind of sustained silence is so normal for them that maternal instinct has long since left.