“The first full moon of the summer,” I say at last, nodding slowly. “It’s usually pitch-black out there without any power, but when the moon is out and the sky is clear, it’s suddenly light, too. You can see everything.”
Even from my phone, I remember thinking it looked impossibly bright: the midnight moon reflecting off the water like a giant mirror, a pane of glass, cloaking everything in a ghostly glow. The kind of eerie luminescence that appears just before a tornado, still and haunting, dark and light, the sky itself sending a warning of certain danger to come.
“Radically both,” Lucy mutters and I turn to face her, the crackle of a faraway firework like white noise in my ears.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it is.”
I look up at the sky now, the peek of the moon like something shy and wary, flitting in and out of the haze above. Picturing Eliza and Levi climbing those steps, ascending higher, stumbling perilously close to the edge. A single misplaced cloud could have called the whole thing off, made it too dark to see, but that night had been perfect, as good as they come: the moon glowing bright against the ink-black sky like a flashlight in the dark, exposing them all.
CHAPTER 45
It’s our first week back at Rutledge and nothing feels the same. Nothing has felt the same since Halloween, really, that cursed night that cast a spell over everything.
I close my eyes, massage my temples, my bed cold and hard as the image of Lucy and Levi replays in my mind for the millionth time. I had hoped things would feel different once we got back, the clean slate of Christmas break wiping the bad away, but instead, from the second Lucy and I stepped through the front door together, everything just felt different, strange, like we somehow wandered into the wrong house.
Despite the week we had together, my best efforts to shrug it away, I don’t know what to think about seeing the two of them together like that, my mind oscillating between the only two explanations so often I’m finding myself caught somewhere in the middle, suspended. Stuck. I honestly don’t know which one I’m more afraid of: the idea of Lucy actually falling for Levi the same way Eliza did, watching him pluck another one of my friends out from under me and holding her tight in his palm before crushing her in his grip, or the concept of Lucy playing us all in another of her games.
I think about that very first night on this very bed, telling stories about Levi and who he is. The wheels turning in her eyes like she was starting to form an idea, a plan. Leaning into him at Penny Lanes and whispering that question like she already knew the answer.
Sloane and me in her bedroom, the two of us huddled beneath the sheets in the dark.
“That’s what Lucy does. She dangles.”
Maybe that’s what this is all about: Lucy dangling her power, her knowledge, peppering Levi with questions about Eliza like pushing on a bruise with building pressure. Ripping the legs off a spider, one by one. Seeing how long she can go until he screams. What is her endgame, though? What is her goal? Like Sloane had said: Lucy is calculated, cunning. She’s singling Levi out for a reason and I need to know what that reason is. It almost feels like she’s testing us both, Levi and me, pulling our strings and making us dance. Worming her way into my thoughts every night like a parasite gnawing its way through my brain, making me feverish and sick.
Forcing me to think things, feel things, I never thought I would.
“Margot.”
I open my eyes to see Sloane standing in my doorframe, her expression grim enough to make me sit up quick. She looks truly worried for the first time since I’ve known her: not bored like she usually is, mildly detached like she’s simply scrutinizing the rest of us for her pleasure alone, but visibly alarmed. Maybe even afraid.
“It’s gotten worse,” she says.
“What has?”
“Nicole.”
She scurries into my room and shuts the door behind her, dropping her voice even though, as far as I know, we’re the only people in the house. Lucy’s been working a shift all day and Nicole is next door, talking to Trevor. It’s the first time she’s willingly gone over there since I can remember, which struck me as progress until I realized the pledge party is tonight. The first Saturday of the new semester.
“Margot, this is serious,” Sloane says. “She looks really bad.”
“How bad?”
“Skeletal.”
I chew on my lip, thinking. There was barely any time between Nicole getting home from Thanksgiving and leaving again for Christmas, so none of us said anything about her rapidly withering figure. And what would we even say? She’s refusing to tell us what’s wrong, why something seemed to flip in her psyche the second she woke up the morning after Halloween. All we have to work with are flashes of that night, none of which feel very concrete thanks to the chemical concoction that had been coursing through our bloodstreams: Nicole lost in that party for hours, Lucas grumbling about her getting too drunk. Me finding her on the bathroom floor, limp and confused and mottled in bruises.