It only dawned on me later, after I arrived at Rutledge, that maybe Eliza actually liked being the biggest fish in a small, simple sea, despite her grand plans. The things that she said. She had picked this school, after all. She could have gone anywhere and I would have followed—but instead, she chose here, another small town where she could outshine us all.
“I just thought I’d never see them again,” Lucy continues, and I blink away the memories, focusing back on her. “So when Danny came up to me like that, catching me off guard … I don’t know. I just lied.”
“You never see them around town?” I ask. “When you go home?”
She’s quiet, staring at me as she chews on the side of her cheek. For a second, I think she didn’t hear me until she rolls back over and faces the sky.
“I don’t go home.”
I don’t understand it, at first, what she’s trying to say. She didn’t go home for summer, that’s true, but I didn’t, either. She didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, convincing me to stay here with her, keep her company—but slowly, it dawns on me. The quiet confession she’s trying to make.
She doesn’t go home, ever. She doesn’t have a home.
This is her home.
I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock. Lucy has always given off an air of independence, of being on her own. Her parents never seem to pay for anything the way ours do and a sudden sense of na?veté settles over me as I think about Lucy stalking off to Penny Lanes each night, permanent pimples around her hairline from the fryer grease and wet blisters on her heels from Rollerblades that are always half a size too small. Meanwhile, I’ve been blindly reliant on a direct deposit that appears by some dependable magic on the first of every month: rent, tuition, the very food that feeds me still being doled out by Mom and Dad. I’ve never seen Nicole want for anything, either—she flashes around her credit card so carelessly it can’t possibly be linked to her own account—and Sloane has that job with the registrar, sure, but it feels more like a résumé cushion, the kind of thing she uses not only for the money but as an extra opportunity to do her homework in an air-conditioned office with free coffee and snacks.
Not the kind of job, like Lucy’s, that keeps her on her feet all day. The kind of job that relies on tips for cash.
“I don’t get along with my mom,” she adds after a beat of silence. “Never have.”
“I’m sorry—” I say, the raw truth of it all stunning me into silence. It’s not the reality of Lucy being untethered that shocks me, a tumbleweed roaming through life by herself. That part actually makes sense in a strange sort of way. It’s the admission, the vulnerability of it.
I’ve learned not to expect this kind of openness from her.
“Don’t be,” she says. “I’m better off without her.”
“Do you ever talk?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I left right after school, figured I’d just come here and get a job and a cheap apartment. I haven’t reached out since and she hasn’t, either. She doesn’t even know where I am.”
“And your dad?”
I ask it hesitantly, tender as a tiptoe, the cloak of night making me feel bolder, braver, pushing me to venture into territory I would otherwise run from. But Lucy’s showing herself to me right now. She’s telling me things, intimate things, the kinds of things she’s always extracting from other people and never revealing herself.
I think of Sloane’s voice that morning in her bedroom, dipped down low so nobody else could hear: “You still don’t know anything about her, do you?” Lucy’s usually so bottled up, so tight-lipped, that bearing witness to this version of her that spills her secrets so freely is leaving me gutted, ripped apart like the corpse of that deer once the boys plunged a knife into its ribs and worked their way down. On the one hand, I don’t want her to regret this in the morning. I don’t want her to wake up, blink her bleary eyes, and think about the things I had pulled out of her in the dark, my nudging questions like a pair of fingers tugging at a piece of yarn. I know these are all things she would never tell me if we were sober. If we hadn’t just spent the entire week together, completely alone. If we weren’t sitting on top of a roof right now, the nightfall so dark and disorienting, it almost feels like talking to yourself.
But on the other hand, I don’t want her to stop.
“He didn’t know how bad things were,” she says at last.