“To us,” she had said, glass lip smoking. Taking a long swig and cementing herself in our minds as just that: us. One of us. Our ringleader, our North Star. The self-imposed brightest one of all. She had been everywhere, always, making her way down the hall in the dark and stepping into the showers in the morning. Rinsing off her hangover before appearing again, starting all over.
The three of them linked, forever intertwined. They did everything together.
“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” I say now, trying to wrap my mind around it. “She was there. She was always there.”
“She approached Nicole and me on move-in day,” Sloane says. “Introduced herself in the courtyard and we clicked. By that night, she was hanging out in our room like we’d known her forever.”
I picture that circle again; the RA, Janice, wrangling us into the common room, reciting the rules. The twenty-four girls of hall 9B grouped together, huddled in twos—except for Lucy. Lucy wasn’t there with a roommate, hip attached to the only other person she knew like the rest of us. But she wasn’t like the rest of us, was she? She never had been. She was just there, standing behind Sloane and Nicole. Biding her time until Janice left and she could step into the center, make herself known. Eternally comfortable with being alone.
“There were twenty-five,” I say, mentally counting us all. Twelve rooms, twelve sets of roommates … and Lucy. But in my mind, Lucy didn’t belong in a set; she belonged in a trio. It was always the three of them with her in the center.
It never struck me as odd until now.
“She told us she didn’t like her roommate,” Sloane recounts. “That’s why she was always in our room.”
“Did she sleep there?” I ask. “She was on the hall all the time.”
“Sometimes on our futon. Not always.”
“And you never asked to meet her roommate?”
Sloane shrugs, like the thought had occurred to her, but in the end, she’d simply dismissed it. “She said she was boring, never left her room,” she says, biting her lip as soon as the words escape. I feel my cheeks flush. I can tell she feels bad. “No offense.”
“It’s fine,” I say, waving it off. “But maybe she lived on another hall or something. A different floor?”
“That’s what I thought at first, too.”
“When did you start thinking otherwise?”
Sloane sighs, rolling her neck, and I can’t help but dart my eyes over to my closed door again, always aware of the possibility that Lucy might be listening.
“After finals were over, when it was time to move out of Hines and into the house, Nicole and I couldn’t find her,” she says at last. “We were calling her phone, looking in the lobby. Even if she lived on another floor, she should have been there, too, right? Moving out with everyone else?”
“Right,” I say, nodding, remembering the swarm of girls with their campus-owned carts. The metal corners crashing into our ankles; rickety old wheels and neon numbers stuck to the back.
“We finally figured she was at work or something and was going to get her stuff later, but when we pulled up to the house, she was already here unloading shit out of her car. Where did it all come from?” she asks, leaning forward. “If she didn’t move it out of Hines, where was she keeping it?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, thinking. Remembering that night on the roof; Lucy’s admission that didn’t feel like much at the time suddenly looking different in this strange new light.
“I left right after school, figured I’d just come here and get a job and a cheap apartment.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
“Yeah,” Sloane says. “She shrugged me off, said she moved out early because she wanted to avoid the crowds, then acted like I was the crazy one for questioning her about it.”
I think back to my first day in this house, the very moment I met the others. Lucy calling me into the living room and the harsh hostility emanating off Sloane. The way she had been glaring at me, snapping at her.
“Where’d you find her?” she’d asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“She lived on our hall.”
I still remember the inflection in Sloane’s voice when she responded, incredulous: our hall? I always thought she said it like that because she couldn’t believe I’d lived there, too. Like it was their hall, not mine, that humiliating sting shooting through my chest when I thought about all the days I’d wasted tucked away in my room.