“It was never serious.”
I look at Lucy and register the indifference in her expression; while Sloane and Nicole are totally rapt, shaken at the idea of a murderer next door, Lucy is looking at me in an almost clinical sense, cold and detached. Like she doesn’t quite believe what I’m saying. Like she’s trying to form a hypothesis of her own.
“The thing you need to understand about Eliza is that everyone loved her,” I say at last, looking down at the picture again. “But just because you loved her, it didn’t mean she loved you back.”
“What was so lovable about her?” Lucy asks. I can’t help but startle at the way she says it, venom dripping, almost like she’s jealous.
“Everything,” I say, and that’s the truth. Despite our differences, our occasional spats, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about her. “She was kind and funny and fearless … almost to a fault, you know? Nobody was a stranger.”
Lucy simply nods and I realize, despite how alike they sometimes seem, the two of them probably wouldn’t be friends. There would be too much envy between them, too much competition. That’s the whole reason girls like them choose friends like us: too-nice Nicole and studious Sloane and malleable Margot.
The kind of friends who are more than happy to take the back seat. The kind of friends who won’t get in the way.
“So, was he obsessed with her or something?” Nicole asks, scooting forward, fully absorbed like she’s soaking in a movie and not my real life, some slow-motion car chase seconds before the crash. “Like an ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can’ type of thing?”
I nod, remembering. It had started small between them: a mutual fascination, an innocent crush. A bud of a thing still curled up and cautious, but slowly, inevitably, it began to bloom. By the middle of that summer, I would come over and catch the two of them talking on the dock, one of Levi’s cigarettes dangling between her fingers. Eliza never used to smoke during the day like that, only at the occasional party when she was too drunk, but with Levi, her bad habits became more abundant. They mutated and metastasized; took on a life of their own. So I would approach them gently, respectfully, sitting cross-legged next to Eliza and trying to keep my distance, smiling weakly as their conversation hushed into a smothered silence—but at the same time, my very presence signaling that I wasn’t the intruder in that situation.
I wasn’t the outsider. He was.
Because that was the thing with Eliza, the thing Levi never realized: she was like that with everyone. She was just passing the time with him, a shiny new plaything to keep her occupied during those long, lazy days of summer. She liked the feeling of his eyes on her skin; the thought of him just next door, lying in bed, his mind on her. She was just starting to realize the power her own body could have on other people, just learning how to wield it like a weapon: moving her legs and chewing her lip and twirling her hair. A single batted eye bringing a boy to his knees.
“A couple months before she died, she told me she felt like she was being watched,” I say at last.
I’ll never forget it when she finally told me. We were halfway into our senior year and whatever this thing was between them had stretched on from the summer and into the school year, a curling tentacle holding her tight. I thought it would naturally fizzle out once classes started up again, but the distance only seemed to make it stronger. Nobody else looked at her the way he did. At school, she went back to being just another carbon copy of everybody else—long hair, starched skirt, knee socks, and scuffed-up clogs that made us all sweaty and shapeless—but back home with Levi, prancing around in her tank tops and short shorts, she was different, special. Perfect.
I remember studying on her bed that night, stomachs flopped down on the mattress and Eliza’s long legs scissoring in the air. We were still in our uniforms, shirts untucked and skirts riding high, and she kept glancing over her shoulder, toward the window, tucking her hair behind her ear like she was playing some kind of role in a movie. Like she knew she was on display.
“What are you doing?” I asked at last, tired of acting too stupid to notice. “Why are you being so weird?”
She just smiled at me, condescendingly coy, like I was on the outside of some inside joke.
“Is someone out there?” I asked, twisting around so I could look, too. I realized then how exposed we were: the brightness of her bedroom juxtaposed with the darkness outside; how the two of us, framed by the window, would be perfectly visible to someone outside, yet they would be perfectly invisible to us.