I glance back at the fire, and although I can’t make out faces from this far, I can still see them, Lucy and Levi, huddled close in the exact same spot. I think about the way Lucy had looked when I told her those stories about Eliza and Levi, that curl to her lip like she was subtly amused. The way she kept asking about her after that, nudging me to tell her more like there was some simmering jealousy I could never understand.
“That’s not possible,” Danny says at last, shaking his head. “Parker’s dead.”
The shock of the sentence bolts me in place: the casualness of it, so matter-of-fact, not at all what I was expecting.
“Parker,” I repeat, the unfamiliar name feeling strange on my tongue. The confusion on my face must be apparent because Danny keeps talking.
“Lucy’s boyfriend,” he explains. “They were together for years.”
“What happened?” I ask, my head swimming at this sudden shift. And just like that, I’m back to square one, the flimsy theory I was starting to form already deflating slowly in my hands.
“Car accident. Right before she left.”
I think about us up on that roof again; the way Lucy had looked at me and kept talking in the dark, eyes wide like there was something big she wanted to admit. Something she was working up to, maybe. Something deeper she wanted to say.
“There are things from back then I didn’t want to bring with me.”
“Was Lucy in the car when it happened?”
Danny sighs, rolling his neck before downing the rest of his beer and crunching the can in his grip.
“No,” he says. “But people blamed her for it.”
“How could people blame her if she wasn’t there?”
“They were at a party the night he died and got in an argument. A bad one. People saw her slap him before taking off and he tried to chase after her. Got behind the wheel after he’d been drinking and ran into a ditch.”
“That’s not—” I start, my mouth hanging open when I can’t find the words. Imagining Lucy’s sad smile at the dinner table; the way she averted her eyes, like she was ashamed. “People can’t blame her for that,” I say at last. “That’s not her fault.”
“You know how rumors start,” he says. “First, she provoked him, then she slapped him. Then the slap turned into her actually mauling the guy, scratching his eyes so it messed with his vision. Then people started speculating that she fucked with his car so the brakes wouldn’t work. All kinds of stupid stuff.”
I think back to freshman year, Maggie and me on that lawn. The stories about Lucy that were swirling around, ever-present, practically invisible like dandelion seeds getting swept up in the breeze. But all you really need is one to settle in your mind and plant itself there, growing slowly until it takes over everything.
All you need is one person to believe it until the others do, too.
“Sometimes people can’t accept the randomness of it,” Danny continues, with a gentle shrug, like this isn’t the first time he’s thought about death. “Sometimes, people just die.”
“Yeah,” I say, remembering that night with Mr. Jefferson on the porch. After the funeral, his brown-liquor breath, both of us dropping crumbs of doubt as we glanced at one another, silently hoping the other would follow. Both of us looking to ease our own guilt, for someone else to pin it on. Some stupid reason to make it make sense.
“You know, you’re the second person today to ask me about Lucy,” Danny says, turning to look at me like the thought just occurred to him. “I had forgotten the girl even existed until three months ago and now she’s all I talk about.”
My head jerks back in his direction, another bomb I wasn’t expecting.
“Who else was asking?”
“Levi,” he says. “Just before we left the house.”
I can feel it again: that pinch of envy, of greed, even though I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how I can still feel this protectiveness over her after everything she’s lied about. How I can still find myself wanting to step between them like I did with Eliza, every little stolen look feeling like a personal betrayal? A knife to the back?
“Did he say why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Danny laughs, jerking his head back to the fire. “Look at them.”
I twist back around, squinting in the dark, the two bodies I assume to be theirs huddled so close they’ve melted into one inky black spot and I wonder, for the very first time, if I need to just swallow my pride and talk to Levi next. Ask him outright the things I’ve been thinking; see if there’s something more that he knows.