“Why didn’t you just go live with him?”
I wait for her answer, but she’s suddenly so quiet, I feel the overwhelming urge to repent. I pushed too hard, pried too much, causing her to shut back down instead of open up further—but just as I’m opening my mouth to apologize again, attempt to reel her back in, she starts to speak.
“I don’t need him,” she says at last, and I can feel her lean over, her hand holding something silver around her throat. “But he gave me this.”
I lean in, too, my nose practically touching her neck, trying to see through the darkness. She’s holding a necklace. The same necklace I noticed that day in the dorm, the one I’ve seen her wear every day since: a silver chain with a cluster of tiny diamonds arranged around her clavicle like a constellation of stars.
“He said it reminded him of me because I was named after that song. Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
“You were named after LSD?” I joke, an attempt to ease the tension. Lucy snorts, punching my shoulder, but I can tell she’s smiling.
“That’s one interpretation,” she says. “But I think it’s because of the stars. I’ve always liked them.”
“Yeah, they’re nice,” I say, somewhat dazed. Thinking of all those stickers on her ceiling. I don’t even know what time it is anymore, how long we’ve been up here. “Eliza and I used to sit outside, too. Try to find the constellations. She had this big telescope we broke out sometimes when it was clear enough to see.”
“Do you know any?”
“The Big Dipper,” I say. “The Little Dipper.”
“Those are easy. Look, there’s Orion,” she says, pointing into the sky with her finger. Tracing the arms, the legs, the sword, and the belt. “And Taurus. Gemini, the twins.”
“Where are the twins? I don’t see them.”
“Just there.”
She grabs my hand from the roof, hers unusually warm in the otherwise chill of the night, and thrusts it into the air above us. Then she uses my own to draw the outline of two figures, arms connected, and I watch as the pattern emerges before my eyes.
“See the two people?” she asks, and suddenly, I do. I can see them so crisp, so clear, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time I didn’t. “They’re holding hands. Like us.”
CHAPTER 37
“What did you guys do when we were gone?”
I’m sitting on Sloane’s bed, watching as she folds clean clothes on the floor, though I don’t know why she’s bothering to unpack. She got back in town this morning and there are only two weeks of classes left until winter break. Pretty soon, she’ll just be packing again.
We’ll all be packing, preparing ourselves for an entire month apart.
“Just hung out,” I say, watching as she pulls a pair of jeans from her duffel. “It was nice.”
“Nice,” she repeats. “Sounds cryptic.”
I think back to that night, Lucy and me, the two of us eventually climbing down the lattice in silence. The way we had crept quietly into the hallway, said our good nights. The silent click of our bedroom doors behind us before we crawled into our respective beds and pulled the covers close.
I think about how I had lain there, reminiscing about our conversation, wondering if she was doing the same. The way I had longed to be alone with her, but at the same time, feared it more than anything.
Maybe it’s because Lucy has a way of talking that makes me uncomfortable, her voice burrowing into my skin like an insect, digging in deep and living there quietly. Maybe it’s the way she makes people admit things so readily, those eerie eyes that feel borderline hypnotic powerful enough to make your lips part without your permission; to force your arms to stretch out and hand her anything she wants.
Or maybe it’s because I’ve been starting to listen to her, really starting to believe the things she says. Over the summer, the way she spoke of murder at Penny Lanes with such indifference had sent a sharp chill down my spine. It had scared me, that murky moral logic—but in the months since, talking about life and the way I wished things were, the harshness of it all has started to dull like she’s been kneading the idea in my mind slowly, gently, until the jagged edges are no longer there.
“It was pretty low-key,” I say at last. “We didn’t leave the house much.”
I wonder now if anyone else knows what I do. If Lucy has told the others about the crawl space, her parents. Held their hands in the dark as she drew pictures in the sky.