They were just trying to understand her. Trying to make sense of this curious girl living among us who nobody knew anything about.
“What do you know?” I ask, leaning forward slowly.
Sloane looks at me for a beat longer than necessary, like she’s trying to make some calculation in her mind. Finally, her eyes dart to the door, her mouth starts to open, but the moment is interrupted by a wooden groan in the hallway, long and grating, and we both look to the side, the sudden noise sending an inexplicable pang of panic through my chest. This house makes sounds, it’s old like that, and even though I know it’s probably just the air conditioner kicking in, Nicole getting up to pee in the dark, I have the sudden sensation of someone standing just outside, ear flush against the door.
“It’s a waste of time trying to figure Lucy out,” Sloane says at last, rolling back over to face the wall. “Just trust me on that.”
CHAPTER 22
It takes time to settle back into classes. Like trudging through marsh mud, relaxed and lazy, my mind fights me on it every step of the way. Maybe it knows, on some subconscious level, that the farther I move away from the summer, the deeper I sink into Lucy and this house and all the thoughts of Levi just next door, the harder it’ll be to pull myself out. Crawl back to safety before it’s too late.
For the first few days, I sit in class and zone out completely, the slow drone of my professors turning into static as I reminisce on the last few months, trying to convince myself that they were, in fact, real. Back in the presence of other people, it feels like a fantasy, like something imagined. An old movie that runs on repeat in my mind, my favorite scenes popping back into my awareness without warning: Nicole and me side by side in the sand, both of us in stitches over something stupid that happened the night before. Sloane and me watching movies in bed, burning popcorn in a saucepan and drinking wine straight out of the bottle. Lucy bursting into my room at random, each time sending a nervous quiver down my spine like that very first day when I swung around in my dorm, her presence sharp and sweet like a shot of morphine. Penny Lanes and those syrupy cocktails and the four of us belting out old songs with new meaning until the whites of our eyes were bleeding red.
Maybe the madness of these last three months has finally caught up to me, the beer and liquor and cheap, shitty weed causing my brain to slow way down, processing things that used to be easy in a kind of sluggish slow motion. I’m definitely sleep-deprived, consistently hungover, but in truth, I think I just miss the way those days bled together like watercolor, twelve entire weeks stitched into a single memory like a mosaic, a quilt. One long fever dream that couldn’t possibly end. But when it did end, I blinked my eyes and found myself loopy and disoriented like waking up wrecked after a cough syrup stupor: bumbling and bleary-eyed, unable to discern the real from the imagined. Fact from fiction. Reality from dream.
I’m curled up on the couch now with a pile of books on the cushion beside me, the smallest of them nestled in my lap. I’m enrolled in a Great Books class this semester and the reading list is exorbitant, a fast slap back to reality: Homer and Dostoevsky and Twain and Tolstoy, all of us warned on the very first day that we’ll need to get through a book a week in order to be prepared for the final, no matter if the selected text is ninety pages or nine hundred. I never could have gotten through them all last year, the way my mind constantly wandered without warning, but now, somehow, I find that I’m able to relax into the words again, the sentences stringing together in my mind without effort as I slip into another body, another world.
More undeniable evidence that this summer has changed me in more ways than one.
I look up just as Lucy bursts out of her bedroom, her open door revealing a peek inside. I can see clothes cast away on an unmade bed, a single dreamcatcher spinning sluggish beneath the air vent. She keeps stick-on stars on the ceiling, the same kind I had when I was a kid, and the quick glimpse reminds me of my very first day here, taking stock of every single space, trying to piece together what the clues might say. Sloane’s and Nicole’s were fairly easy to decipher, the pictures their rooms painted straightforward and clear, but I still can’t get a grasp on Lucy’s, even after so much time spent inside. I still can’t discern what, exactly, it says about her. What it reveals.
I probably never will.
“What are you reading?” she asks now, walking over to the couch. She stands above me, peering over the pages, and I hold the book up, showing her the cover: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “What’s it about?”