I stop, taking in the rest of him. He’s wearing something old and tattered like some kind of Tarzan-inspired loincloth but I can’t tell if it looks like that on purpose or if he’s been doing something to soil it that way. His bare chest is scratched, jagged little lines like fingernail streaks dotted with blood, and his eyes dart back and forth between Lucy and me like we just caught him red-handed doing something he shouldn’t.
My heartbeat picks up a little, my hands begin to shake, and I realize with a sense of sinking dread that if Levi is coming into the backyard through the shed, that means our house is the only place he could be coming from.
CHAPTER 26
“Eliza, you need to tell someone.”
I can see her here, behind the fire, staring at me with an emptiness in her eyes.
Neck crooked, accusatory. The hypocrisy of it all.
I wonder what she would think if she could see the two of us together like this, like that night at Penny Lanes. If she could somehow know from beyond the grave that Levi and I are running in the same circle, grabbing beers out of the same cooler. Both of our lips touching a single joint as it passed between us.
My spit on his, his on mine, not too removed from sharing a kiss.
“He broke into your house.”
Would she be happy, at last, that we were tolerating one another? That we were learning to get along? We aren’t friends—we were never friends, never would be friends—but at the very least, we’re being civil.
Or would she be jealous, like I was, seeing me spend so much of my time with somebody else? Would she feel betrayed, like I did, watching me slip into this other life?
“Margot, you’re being insane,” Eliza had said, hands on her hips, surveying her empty bedroom. “He did not break into the house.”
It was nearing the end of our senior year and we had come home one night, late, to find the Jeffersons’ back door swung wide open, the warm breeze snaking its way through the living room making the interior curtains flutter in the wind. We had been at the movies together—Eliza, her parents, and I, the four of us the family I always preferred—and her mother had screamed when we walked inside to find it open like that, as if someone had bolted out the back as soon as our car pulled into the driveway. Mr. Jefferson kept insisting there was a logical explanation, muttering vague rationalizations like “Maybe we just forgot to lock it” or “Maybe the dog pushed it open,” even though their golden retriever was twelve years old and could barely walk, let alone dislodge a set of French doors. He was refusing to make a scene, call the police, but there was an aura in the house that we could all feel; a foreign energy that was obvious from the second we stepped inside and found the double doors swung open, monster-sized moths flapping around the ceiling light.
“He was here,” I said, even though there was no proof. Nothing was missing, as far as we could tell. Nothing was disturbed. But there was the faint smell of him on her bedsheets, a boyish odor of sweat and Old Spice, and I could picture him lying there, on top of her duvet, eyes on the ceiling as he imagined her kicking her legs for him through the window. The way her spaghetti strap would slip and her pen would dangle between her lips, his breath getting deeper, heavier, as his hand worked at his zipper. Snaking his way down, down, down.
“Wait a second,” I said, my attention drifting to the bulletin board Eliza kept mounted above her desk. “Didn’t you used to have a picture right there?”
I pointed to the wall, an empty rectangle of space that I was sure was covered up before. Eliza kept it cluttered with a giant calendar, posters of our favorite celebrities, snapshots of various summers spent with our backs digging into the sand. And in the very center of it was a picture of us—Eliza, her dad, and me—huddled together on the back of her parents’ boat. I could still remember when it was taken, her mom pushing us together the way she always did to document some mundane memory she promised we would appreciate more when we were older. I had been wrapped in a towel, hair wet and dripping after taking a swim, but Eliza was in her bathing suit, that little string bikini she used to walk around in when Levi was looking.
It was there, I knew it was—until suddenly, it wasn’t.
“Eliza…”
“Yeah, I see it,” she said, her face suddenly a shade too pale. She crossed her arms across her torso, tight, like she was about to be sick. “There has to be an explanation. He wouldn’t … he wouldn’t do that.”
I knew right then that she would never tell. She would never admit to what was going on with Levi; what she had invited into her room, her life, this leech of a boy who latched on from the beginning and refused to let go. It wasn’t her fault, of course it wasn’t, but in her mind, she had led him to this. She had beckoned him in, forefinger curling, daring him to get just a little bit closer. She had tested him, teased him, and now he was testing her right back. How would she explain it to her parents? How would she tell them what she was doing at night, curtains open, letting him watch from the other side of the lawn? How would she ever look them in the eye after that, the creeping shame as their foreheads bunched, their little girl no longer so little?