I suddenly wonder how much she knows about people. I wonder what all she’s heard.
“The next morning, he made me promise not to tell anyone,” she continues. “If Rutledge found out, they’d definitely get disbanded.”
“Why would anyone agree to do that?” I ask. “It’s…”
“Degrading?” she interrupts. “Disgusting? It’s because they’re desperate.”
“Desperate,” I repeat.
“Desperate to belong.”
She says it like a slur, like something to be ashamed of, but for the first time since I’ve known him, I can see the smallest piece of myself in Levi: so eager to be a part of something, to be accepted, that you make yourself do things that you would otherwise never do. Sucking on the wrong end of a cigarette, tobacco grit burning hot on your tongue; eating old pizza off the floor or letting a drug dissolve into your bloodstream just because someone placed it in your palm and held your hand tight. It’s no different than what I did to get here, really: agreeing to live with three strangers I knew nothing about. Blindly going along with whatever they said, whatever they did, like if I faked it hard enough, I’d be one of them.
“Trevor says it bonds them.” She laughs. “Like trauma bonding.”
“That’s fucked up,” I say.
“Yeah. It’s just a matter of time before something happens.”
I turn to her again, eyes narrowing, waiting for her to continue.
“There’s a little door on the side of the house you open to get into it, behind the azaleas, but if it closes all the way and latches from the outside, you’re stuck in there. This house is not up to code,” she adds. “It’s too old.”
I hear those noises again in my mind, so distinct in the dark: a sliding door, a body scraping against something as it shimmied itself inside. A cleared throat, a dry cough. Settling in before the awful, endless waiting.
“They leave it cracked open when they’re in there, but … you know. Accidents happen. One little push and you’re trapped.”
I’m quiet, my heart beating hard in my throat. Thinking of Levi on Halloween; his bare chest, scratched and bleeding, like jagged fingernails cutting across the skin.
“Did you mean it?” Lucy asks me suddenly, twisting her neck so she’s facing me again. “What you said on Halloween? In the kitchen?”
It takes a second for me to realize what she’s referring to, but then it returns to me slowly, like recalling a dream. It’s been living quietly between us for the last four weeks, really, my admission curled up like a hibernating animal. Neither of us wanting to poke it awake, acknowledge its presence. Talk about those words I had muttered as my body trembled cold in the kitchen; Lucy feeding me water, baby sips in the dark. It had barely been conscious, the thought ejecting itself from my mind like an exorcism: demonic and violent, completely out-of-body. I just had to get it out, the terrible belief that had been living inside me for far too long.
“I wish it was him. It should have been him.”
“Of course I meant it,” I say at last. And I expect to feel ashamed afterward, maybe even embarrassed. I expect to feel disgust or surprise but instead I feel lighter the second I say it, like the thought itself had been tied around my ankle. A ball and chain weighing me down. “Eliza didn’t deserve to die like that. Levi did.”
CHAPTER 35
AFTER
I can feel the collective intake of breath, all three of us sucking it in. This is a detail we hadn’t accounted for, a fuzzy memory we had forgotten all about.
Lucy’s blood, Levi’s clothes.
We can work with this, though. We can use it to our advantage if we play it right.
“How do you know it’s Lucy’s?” I ask at last, remembering the way it had dripped from her finger like a leaky faucet, little red spots polka-dotting the floor. Detective Frank can clearly tell he caught us off guard, a satisfied smile emerging on his lips.
“Her parents provided DNA samples for us to compare it to,” he says, his eyes trained on me now. Me, and only me. “It was a match.”
I rub my temples, the idea of it all so hard to grasp.
“They want to see their daughter found just as much as the rest of us,” he adds.
“I’m sure they do,” Sloane snaps, her voice sarcastic and sharp.
“What’s important here is we know your friend was with Levi Butler the night he died and we know they were in close enough proximity for her blood to get on his clothing,” Frank says, growing impatient. “Why was she bleeding, girls?”