“Why don’t you let Danny handle that,” Trevor says, squeezing his shoulder, hard. “Let’s get you a drink.”
Levi looks back at me one last time before nodding silently and slinking into the house, Trevor’s grip still firm against his skin. There’s a certain energy to him tonight, Trevor, one that sometimes creeps in when I’ve seen him bossing around the pledges, drunk on power and playing God. It feels coked up and dangerous, like he’s looking for a fight or maybe just returned from one, adrenaline pounding around him like a pulse.
Or maybe that’s just me again, my own imagination, whatever I ingested earlier making everything feel so good until it took such a violent turn in the opposite direction.
“Here,” Danny says, turning to Lucy once the others are gone. He hands her the drink, arm outstretched, but she doesn’t take it.
“I’m not thirsty anymore,” she says instead, standing up before walking toward me and grabbing my arm. “We’re going home, anyway.”
We step around the fire and stumble through the grass, Lucy’s fingers digging hard into my wrist as she pulls me through the shed. My head is dipping, spinning, and I’m relieved to be leaving, the sights and sounds and smells of the party suddenly too much—but at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about Levi slinking around in our house just minutes before. I can’t stop imagining him creeping through my bedroom the way he once crept through Eliza’s, fingers flipping through my clothes. Scanning the pictures on my mantel, maybe. His greedy eyes on her still, even now.
“Wait,” I say, stopping abruptly in the backyard, feet from the door. Lucy turns and looks at me, her head cocked to the side. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, hands on her hips.
I think of him on Eliza’s bed, his head on her pillow. The faint smell of him staining her sheets.
“Levi,” I say at last. “He wasn’t in the shed. He was in the house.”
Lucy is quiet, staring at me, before twisting her head and looking at the back door.
“We were sitting around that fire for over an hour,” I continue. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long.”
“Margot,” she says, smiling. “We were out there for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Still,” I say, feeling my cheeks burn hot. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long looking for lighter fluid.”
She sighs, rolling her neck like she’s trying to stretch something out.
“Maybe he was tinkering with the toilet tank or something. I told Trevor the other day they need to take care of that. The noise is pissing me off.”
“Why would Levi be doing that?”
“Trevor always sends the pledges to handle that stuff,” she says. “He’s too lazy to do it himself, plus he can’t use a tool to save his life.”
“In a loincloth?” I ask. “In the middle of a party?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“We need to start locking the doors,” I say. “We always leave them open.”
“Yeah, because Nicole can’t keep track of her key,” she says. “She lost her keycard to Hines the second day of freshman year.”
“But the boys can’t just come in here without asking—”
“Yes, they can,” she says, cutting me off. “They own the house, Margot. They can do whatever they want.”
“They own the house,” I echo, realizing, for the first time, what exactly that entails. I didn’t even have to sign a lease to live here. Levi isn’t just my neighbor anymore. He isn’t just some guy next door who looks through the windows or loiters out back.
He’s more than that. He can do more than that.
“Look, you’re messed up,” Lucy says, touching my arm. “You’re paranoid, having a bad trip. It’s my fault, honestly. I should have only given you half.”
I look down at her fingers on my forearm, feeling a twist in my chest. Thinking of the pill she placed in my palm; the bitter pinch of it as I swallowed it dry. She’s right, I know she’s right, but at the same time, the energy back there was unmistakably off. It felt like I was on the outside of something among all of them, Levi included, a sinister secret pulsing around them like a shared heartbeat.
“Let’s go inside, get you some water,” Lucy says. “Then you can sleep it off.”
CHAPTER 28
The night that follows is one I’ll never forget, the music from next door pulsing like blood in my ears. It goes on for hours until the sound eventually dwindles into a faint trickle of the final stragglers: a single laugh, someone tripping in the gravel. The metallic kick of an empty can skidding across the road.