I glance around, taking in the others. Lucy and Levi are standing by the flames, his arm flung around her shoulder in a way that makes me think of him and Eliza on that very last night: stumbling, laughing, fingers intertwined. Sloane and Nicole are sitting together by the tents, their eyes on Trevor as he lurches around in the sand. There’s a bottle of rum clutched in his hand that hasn’t left his grip since we got here, but that hasn’t stopped him from barking out orders. Still bossing around the freshmen, playing God, even though their duties are over and his power is gone. After a few more seconds, I find who I’m looking for and stand up quick, brushing the sand from my jeans as I make my way toward him. I glance back at Lucy every few seconds, relieved to see her still swept up in Levi, paying no attention to my slow slink into the dark.
I approach him furtively, standing by the water with a couple other brothers, noticing he looks different than the last time I saw him: no more blood slathered across his skin, his cheeks. Long blond hair now buzzed short against his scalp.
No more costume, that stupid blue dress.
“Excuse me, Danny?” I ask, watching as he turns around at the sound of his name. He doesn’t recognize me at first, but slowly, I see it: the memory of Halloween, of me, of the three of us sitting around that fire out back. Lucy pretending not to know him and the way he scurried away with his tail between his legs. “Do you have a second?”
Danny DeMarcus, Lucy’s old classmate.
The only person here who might know her at all.
CHAPTER 50
We walk along the shore together, away from the fire, the sand spongy beneath our feet and the sharp shriek of whistles echoing out around us.
“Ignore them,” Danny says at last, one hand in his pocket and the other nursing a can of Bud Light. The sounds from the party grow steadily more distant until we finally stop at a collection of driftwood and sit side by side, the silhouettes of the others dancing in the dark. “So, you said you wanted to talk?”
“Yeah, about Lucy,” I say, trying to choose my words wisely. “Halloween.”
“Right,” he says, looking back at the water. I can hear it lapping in the distance, the scuttle of fiddler crabs as the tide washes out, and suddenly remember what Lucas said earlier about all the other life out here prowling around in the dark.
“She told me you went to school together,” I say at last. “How she grew up. That she doesn’t really like people knowing about her past.”
Danny is quiet, forcing me to continue.
“I think she pretended not to know you before because I was sitting right there.”
“I guess I can’t blame her,” he says at last, taking a drink.
“Why’s that?”
He turns to look at me, eyebrows raising.
“She’s your roommate. Why don’t you ask her?”
“I know it has to do with her home life,” I continue, using my toe to draw circles in the sand. “Not getting along with her mom.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Was it really that bad?”
Danny shrugs, takes another drink.
“Let’s just say her mom has a reputation,” he says. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy to live with.”
I nod, filing the information away.
“I also know she had a boyfriend who might have … hurt her.”
Danny turns to face me, finally, and I’m suddenly grateful for the pitch-black sky shielding my expression. I’m trying to piece it together, form a narrative that might make it make sense. All the little clues Lucy has fed me, either deliberately or not: whispered truths she shared in the dark and those little admissions I extracted right out of her, pushing carefully until they came gushing out. I can’t yet bring myself to say what I’ve started to think, the pieces slipping together like a jigsaw puzzle. The bewildering enigma of Lucy slowly starting to resemble something solid, something whole.
I can’t tell Danny that ever since I saw Lucy and Levi through that bedroom window, all their little moments together have started replaying in my mind in a strange new light: the first time he saw her at Penny Lanes, that subtle look of shock as his eyes roamed all over. The way he turned to me, cocked his head: “Do you know her?” he’d asked, like he couldn’t quite believe it. The way Lucy would always single him out after that, almost as if they had a shared history neither one of them wanted to admit.
“I’m just worried about her,” I add. “I think they might be talking again.”