“Relax,” Lucy says, a grin in her voice. I whip around to find her behind the bar, various bottles plucked from their homes and lined up in front of her. “The security sucks in this place. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”
I watch as she pours a clear liquor into four plastic cups, topping them off with soda from the gun before scooping them all up in her hands. She walks over to me then, arms extended so I can take the one closest to me, and my mind flashes back to Hines in this moment. To how she took charge in the common room and everyone else simply slid into place behind her, grabbing those bottles from the floor and pressing them to our lips.
How she had walked into my room without warning, trailed her fingers along all my things. Flashed me this exact same smile until I found my head nodding, my lips agreeing, seemingly all on their own.
“I guess this makes it official,” Lucy says, raising her cup. Sloane and Nicole are suddenly here now, too, sidling up beside us before grabbing their drinks and forming a circle. “You’re one of us now.”
I smile, clinking my drink before taking a sip, and in this moment, despite the warmth blooming in my chest, I can’t help but wonder again why she chose me. Why I’m the one Lucy is pulling into her circle like this, why I deserve to be brought into her space. I’ve been her roommate for three weeks now, and still, I haven’t seen any glimmer into her thought process, any indication of why. I’ve been waiting patiently for it to arrive, some aha moment that explains it all away, but so far, it hasn’t. Nothing has. I haven’t brought it up again since that day in the dorm, either, the moment I had looked at her and asked: “Why me?”
The indifference in her eyes, the bored curiosity, when she responded with a flat: “Why not?”
Now, for the very first time, I wonder if it really is that simple. If she really chose me because, well, why not? Here are three girls who lucked into a four-bedroom house too perfect to turn down. They had a spare room, nobody to fill it, and a lonely girl down the hall who seemed desperate enough to say yes. Maybe Lucy saw me on the lawn that day, staring in their direction with a longing in my eyes, and simply saw an opportunity, an answer to a problem.
Decided to do what she always does: take what she wanted and never look back.
The next four hours go by in a fluorescent haze: guzzling sweet margaritas and Amaretto sours so fast they make my throat feel wrecked and raw. Lucy coming up behind me with a refill every time my cup goes dry. Dancing to the music from the jukebox and devouring ice cream from the freezer; sliding down those long, slick lanes like some scene out of Risky Business and using the pins as microphones, screaming out every word. At some point, we collapse into a pile on the floor, limbs sweaty and tangled and warm to the touch, the ceiling spinning slowly above us.
Sloane checking her phone, muttering “Shit, we gotta go,” before pulling me up and into the night.
I vaguely remember Lucy putting back the liquor, flipping out the lights. The three of us leaving through the front door and waiting in the alley for her to shimmy back out the window, listening to her laugh as she landed hard on the dumpster. The four of us stumbling home with our arms threaded together like a daisy chain, wild and delicate, Lucy’s words pulsing through my mind like a meditation, a prayer.
“You’re one of us now.”
It isn’t until I wake up the next morning when I realize what happened, how the moment of Eliza’s passing came and went and I didn’t even feel it. How I had lost myself in Lucy completely, her attention the remedy I needed to make the pain go away. Instead, when the clock clicked to midnight and just kept going, time marching mercilessly on without her, I wasn’t suffocating the way I had expected to be, thinking about Eliza lying flat on the ground, her final breath ejected out of her with too much force.
Instead, I had been dancing, singing, wholly lost in the moment.
I had slept soundly for the first time in a year.
CHAPTER 17
I glance up at my door, a prickling on my neck alerting me to the presence of Lucy. She does this sometimes: appears without warning. Watches from the hallway all silent and still, waiting for me to notice.
“Hey,” I say, looking back down at my feet. I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom, legs arched, painting my toenails a neon blue.
“Where is everyone?” she asks.
“I think they’re next door.”
It’s the last week of summer, somehow, and we’ve been drinking it up madly, wildly, like roots in dry soil. Going out every night and sleeping until noon; sweating out our hangovers before starting the process all over again. We’ve passed the days at the beach, mostly, the four of us piling into Lucy’s old Mazda in the mornings; windows perpetually down, a warm breeze tangling our hair because her air conditioner is always broken. It’s a short drive to the coast—thirty minutes, tops; twenty when you’re speeding—and we’ve spent the empty hours burning patterns into our backs, eating watermelon bloated with vodka. Taking cold showers, napping in our towels, then going over to Kappa Nu in the evenings to smoke a bowl and play some beer pong, our cheeks and eyes poppy red.