We’re both silent, memories from Halloween flooding right back. The way I had stood up by the fire, interrogated Levi as soon as I saw him emerge through the shed, my accusations fierce and unafraid. Later, shivering on the kitchen floor, a hatred so pure and razor-sharp it sliced straight through the silence, surprising us both.
“It should have been him.”
“That wasn’t me,” I say now. “I was angry—”
“It is possible to be both,” she interjects. “Radically both.”
I twist my head, eyes straining against the night. I still can’t see her, but I can feel Lucy’s smile stretching through the darkness: pulling wide, cheeky and taunting. The kind that bares teeth.
“You read Jekyll and Hyde,” I say, remembering that line, radically both, one of the many I’d highlighted before flipping it closed and tossing it across the couch. The concept of being mutually good and evil, dark and light, tickling my subconscious like an incessant itch growing stronger, harder to ignore. What a profound notion: that neither of those things needed to cancel out the other, but instead, could simply swirl together until you became your own unique mixture of each.
“I liked it,” she says.
“I knew you would.”
“It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
I pinch at the sand between us, rubbing the grains between my fingers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Lucy, one thing that’s become glaringly clear, it’s that to her, the entire world exists as a gradient, a sliding scale. Her moral compass isn’t broken, per se, but it’s definitely skewed, the magnets attracted to whichever direction she sees fit. Spinning madly around, guiding her whichever way she wants to go.
There is no good or bad for Lucy. There is no right or wrong, noble or evil, but simply the existence of people who dabble in their own combination of each.
“Your turn,” I say, handing the bottle back. Trying not to think about the gradual pull of it; those scales, tipping, just like she said they would. “Truth or dare.”
“In the spirit of trying new things: truth.”
I curl my legs into my chest, thinking about all the things I want to ask her. All the secrets I know she keeps—but still, there’s only one that comes to mind. One question I’ve been chewing over since the second she got here; one mystery on the tip of my tongue, the weight of it pushing my lips apart only for me to lose my nerve and swallow it back down.
“Why did you go over there?” I ask at last, picturing her in Levi’s room again. Fingers twisting in his hair and her palm delicate on his thigh as she leaned in close, her lips on his. “When you went to my house and I wasn’t there … why did you go to Levi’s?”
She rolls over to face me, the shadow of her eyes gaping wide.
“I told you—” she starts, but I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “You know what I mean. Why did you really?”
“I guess I was curious,” she says at last.
I’m quiet, picturing those early days with Eliza. The way she sauntered down the dock, eyes darting over to Levi when she thought he wasn’t looking. The way she would watch from a distance, a kind of bored awareness because there was nothing better to do. I remember her searching his name on her phone like he was some strange, exotic thing she simply wanted to study, try to understand. But then it morphed from there, an innocent interest turning into something bigger, stronger.
I can’t help but wonder if that’s what’s happening here, too.
“He told me about the party,” Lucy says, rolling back over to face the stars. “The night she died.”
I freeze, my body suddenly numb from the cold and the wine; the wind whipping off the water and this conversation, everything. I had been trying to work up the nerve to ask her about the kiss next, what I saw through that window, but this feels more important now.
“What did he say?”
“He mentioned the old high school,” she says. “The party that happens there every year.”
I see it in my mind, the way it’s always been: standing broken but tall on the edge of the beach, inside gutted from a lightning-strike fire that ripped through the rooms years ago. Structurally, it’s still standing, though nobody could call it sound. There are missing walls, no roof, only three stories of ash-black empty spaces cluttered up with charred furniture nobody ever bothered to move and phallic graffiti spray-painted over old chalkboards. Empty vodka bottles collecting dust in the corners, evidence of parties past; the occasional sleeping bag left behind by someone too drunk to drive home. Even I couldn’t deny that it was the perfect place for a bunch of underage kids: right on the beach, a view of the water. Abandoned and messy and ours for the taking.