CHAPTER 2
BEFORE
She was everything and I was nothing. That’s always what I thought, anyway.
We spent our entire freshman year just a few doors down from each other. We were in the all-girls dorm, the unlucky few who got placed in the only same-sex building on campus: Hines Hall. It sat at the top of the single hill downtown, trapping us inside like a bunch of Rapunzels, untouchable, though it only made us more desirable. Like things to be won. I still think about move-in day: pulling my pile of boxes on a metal trolley, a neon 9 taped to the back and the hot flash of embarrassment every time a wheel squeaked too loud. Watching the boys loll past with their hands punched into their pockets, craning their necks, already scheming on how to get inside.
Everybody whined about it at first, skin slick with sweat and throwing scowls in every direction as we lugged comforters and futons up that long, winding stairwell, blaming each other for our own anatomy.
I remember that first night so vividly: the twenty-four girls of hall 9B being called into the common room. We stood there in oversized T-shirts and gym shorts so short we might as well be bottomless, arms like seat belts wound tight around our waists. Our RA was a junior named Janice, who recited the rules in a cursory clip: no drinking, no boys. Silence after midnight. And we just stood there quietly, nodding, mentally chewing over the fact that we had finally escaped to college just to be met with the same old restrictions, with a glorified babysitter to boot. Then she walked out and left the rest of us to get to know one another, everyone simply staring in a timid unease until Lucy seemed to appear out of nowhere, stepping forward from the corner and unzipping her bag.
We watched in silence as she pulled out a case of beer before plopping it onto the carpet, bottles jangling.
“Now that that’s over,” she had said, as if Janice had been nothing more than her own opening act. “Everyone, grab one.”
I can still hear the uncomfortable murmur rippling across the room; the nervous laughs and darting eyes. Then, as if showing us how, Lucy leaned forward and grabbed the first bottle, twisting off the cap and taking a sip.
“To us,” she had said, tipping the lip in our direction. “Nine floors of whores.”
After that, I always knew she was there—it was impossible to miss her, and that was probably the point. I’d catch a glimpse of her raven-black curls as she walked past my open door or pushed her way into the bathroom, neon-green shower caddy hooked into the crook of her arm. She used to bring canned wine coolers into the communal showers, sickly sweet smells like strawberry mango and peach fizz rising with the steam and fogging up the mirror; the crunch of the empties before her hand popped out of the curtain and dropped them onto the tile like crumpled candy wrappers. She was the only one who never covered up before stepping back out. While the rest of us swathed ourselves in towel wraps or monogrammed bathrobes, self-consciously gripping the gap before ripping back the curtain and flip-flopping past the stalls in our shower shoes, she would just step out naked, brazen and beautiful, like she owned the place.
And in a lot of ways, she did.
“I don’t know what they see in her.”
I glance up at my roommate now, trying to blink away the memory like a speck of dirt stuck in my eye. Lucy’s presence is like the first blast of air from an AC unit: noisy, chilling. The kind of thing that demands attention and makes your skin prickle. Her eyes are so blue they’re almost white, glacial water iced over until it turned cold and hard, and when she caught me staring at her once through a hand-swiped section of the fogged-up mirror, it made me physically shiver, the feeling of her gaze traveling down my spine like an ice cube dropped down the back of my shirt.
“Hmm?” I ask at last.
“Don’t act like you weren’t staring.”
Maggie and I are lying on the grass outside Hines, psychology textbooks splayed out in front of us and a torn-open bag of Cheetos wedged in the middle. She flips from her stomach to her back, propping herself up on two kickstand elbows.
“Everyone’s staring.”
She’s right: everyone is staring. I can see their eyes darting in Lucy’s direction from behind their sunglasses, their notebooks. Stealing a glance as she pushes her bikini top an inch to the right, head flopped back as she stares into the sun. She acts like she doesn’t even notice; like she’s on her own private beach somewhere, not sunning herself in the middle of campus. A busy intersection of horny teenagers who watch her rub lotion on her skin and immediately start to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.