“Have you seen Nicole?” Sloane asks, jolting me from my daydream. She says it bored, almost like an afterthought, but I can tell by the way she avoids my eyes that she’s curious about my answer.
“Not yet,” I say. “I heard her come in earlier, but then she left again.”
“She’s lost, like, ten pounds.”
“In a week?”
“Margot, I can see her spine.”
I chew on my lip. Nicole has always been skinny, a trait she attributes to genetics and a fast metabolism, but now that I think about it, ever since I found her that night cheek-down on the tile, she’s been picking at her food more than eating it.
I think of her holding that mug of coffee in her hands, eyes empty as she pushed it away.
“Do you know what happened?” Sloane asks, looking at me now. “On Halloween?”
“No,” I say slowly, hesitantly, remembering the way Nicole had asked me not to tell. “I mean, not really.”
“Margot,” she says again, eyes trained on mine. “She’s my best friend. Please.”
I’m quiet, thinking about those bruises on her wrist. The way Nicole’s been so different lately, so reserved. The way the dynamic between us all has been so indisputably off. I want to keep my promise to her, but at the same time, this isn’t Lucy asking—Lucy, who would never let her live it down. Who would bring it up again and again, using her embarrassment as the butt of some joke. This is Sloane.
“I found her,” I say before I can change my mind. “Late. After everyone was already asleep.”
“What do you mean you found her?”
“She was on the floor in my bathroom. She got sick … it was pretty bad.”
Sloane sighs, stretching her neck, eyes on the ceiling.
“I mean, we knew she was wasted,” she says at last. “Lucas told us, right?”
“Yeah, but the next morning, she seemed a little weird.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything,” I recount, remembering the way she had flinched, crossed her arms, muttered that apology like she had just snapped out of a daydream. “It’s just the way she was acting.”
Sloane looks down at the floor again, busying herself with a T-shirt. I watch her fold and refold it—three, four times—trying to work it out in her mind, fit the pieces together.
“Levi was on our property that night,” I blurt out, against my better judgment. Not only do I have no idea if Sloane knows about the cave, but I don’t have any proof of Levi being anywhere other than inside it all night. If what Lucy told me is true—if he wasn’t in the house on Halloween, but instead, below it—then that means he couldn’t have done anything to Nicole, anyway … unless, of course, he wasn’t in the cave at all, a possibility I’ve been massaging around in my mind ever since I remembered that admission he made on Thanksgiving.
Maybe he had walked through the shed, toward the little door behind the azaleas, but instead of going under the house like he was supposed to, he went in. Maybe it started simple: he didn’t want to do it. He was claustrophobic, dreading another night in that cramped little space. He thought nobody was home, that we were all next door, so he decided to go inside and wait it out there. Just lie to the brothers when he came back out.
But he wasn’t alone. Nicole was there, the worst possible person.
Nicole, Trevor’s girlfriend.
I wonder what he would have thought: seeing her in the house, her big eyes bulging as he walked inside. Nicole was afraid of him already. She had listened to my stories, shuddering as I described the way he broke into Eliza’s bedroom. Maybe she thought it was happening all over again and started yelling, calling out for Trevor, and Levi knew that a single slip of the tongue about him coming into our house uninvited, waiting out his hazing on a comfortable couch instead of where he was supposed to be, would lead to him not only getting in trouble, but being kicked out for good. So maybe he had run to her, tried to stop her from screaming as her nails scratched at his chest.
Maybe he had grabbed her wrists, twisting just a little too hard.
“What are you insinuating?” Sloane asks. “Are you saying—？”
“I don’t know,” I interrupt. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Just … he was here. That’s all.”
Sloane looks back down at her laundry, unfolding that same T-shirt. Folding it again. Whatever happened to Nicole that night, Levi is somehow involved. I’m sure of it. I think of those fingerprint bruises and the way they completely ignored each other after, a tension between them that didn’t exist before. The fight between Trevor and Nicole the next morning and the way nothing has been the same since. Maybe she tried to tell Trevor and he got jealous, blamed her instead of Levi, the idea of the two of them alone in the house together too much for his brittle ego to take. Or maybe he didn’t believe her. Levi is a legacy, after all. Trevor couldn’t just kick him out without some kind of solid evidence.