“Thanks for being worried,” she says at last, cracking a smile, though it doesn’t really reach her eyes, “but I promise, I’m fine. Remind me to eat dinner the next time we go out.”
CHAPTER 31
It’s unnaturally cold the week leading up to Thanksgiving, the temperature dropping into the forties every time the sun dips down. Everything has felt so stilted since Halloween, so strange, and I can’t help but feel like some cataclysmic change took place that I haven’t picked up on. A tectonic shifting, the very ground no longer solid, but trembling. Threatening to buckle beneath us all.
The day after the party, Trevor and Nicole got into a blowout fight: screaming, crying, Nicole slamming her way out of his room and charging past the rest of us before barreling back into the house. Of course, we chased right after her, asked what was wrong, but she never told us. Never even came close. They made up hours later—they always do—but every time we’re all together now, the tension is so thick, so heavy, it’s almost unbearable. The weight of it all like an anvil on the chest; a crushing mass that makes it hard to breathe.
“She needs to move on,” Lucy says to me now, the two of us making our way out back. The weeds have gotten out of hand this week, the grass calf-high, scratchy against my exposed ankles. “I mean, seriously. It needs to stop. I’m honestly relieved she’s gone.”
Lucy had convinced me to stay on campus over Thanksgiving break. “It’ll feel like summer all over again,” she’d said, crisscross on my bed, making me yearn for those twelve perfect weeks that suddenly felt so far away. In truth, I had been dreading going home to my parents, anyway. Dreading their inevitable questions about my major and whether or not I still wanted to keep it; their nosy inquiries about my new life, new friends, sniffing around for some small detail for them to pick apart. I’ve told them virtually nothing about my roommates—I haven’t wanted to taint them, this, this thing I have that finally feels so blissfully removed from my life back home—so while Sloane left this morning, Nicole two days ago, I hung back, settled in.
Starting tonight, it’s just me and Lucy for one entire week.
“What do you think happened?” I ask, trying to pry information instead of share it myself. I haven’t told anyone about how I found Nicole that night: dress slipped off in the hallway, hair caked with vomit and stuck to the side of her neck. She explicitly asked me not to just before Sloane and Lucy came back from the kitchen. She said she didn’t want to deal with Lucy’s jokes about her being a lightweight, said she just wanted to forget, so I had nodded, agreed, and kept my mouth shut. Because her story made sense. I could see it so vividly: Trevor’s fingers digging into her wrists, pulling her down the fraternity halls. Trying to separate her from the rest of the party once he realized she drank too much. Maybe she got sick on his shirt and that’s why he wasn’t wearing one; maybe that’s what their fight was all about—but lately, I’ve started to feel the emergence of a new feeling in my chest. The same feeling I had when I watched Eliza stomach-down on her bed, knowing that Levi was just outside, watching her in the dark. The same feeling that flared up every time she strutted down the dock, played with her bathing suit.
The same feeling that’s screaming at me right now, flailing its arms. Begging me to acknowledge that something’s not right.
“Oh, I know exactly what happened,” Lucy responds as she slaps away a bug on her arm. “She got shitfaced on Halloween and Trevor got mad because the president’s girlfriend shouldn’t be acting like that.”
“That seems a little harsh,” I say.
“Yeah, well, that’s how it is with them. He gets jealous, too. She’s flirty when she drinks.”
I open my mouth, then immediately close it, still not sure how much to say.
“But if she breaks up with Trevor, we lose the house,” Lucy continues. “The president picks the tenants. We’ll all be homeless.”
“I don’t think she’s going to break up with Trevor,” I respond, even though Lucy is right. Nicole’s the whole reason we got this place.
“You sure about that?”
“No,” I admit. “But it doesn’t really seem like Trevor’s the thing she’s so upset about.”
“What do you mean?” she asks as we approach the shed, double doors shut tight. “What else would it be?”
I hesitate, my mind on another memory. The same one that flared up on Halloween as I held Nicole’s body in the dark, staring at those grapelike bruises clustered around her wrist. The one I had tried to push down, tried to forget.