“Anyway,” Danny says, standing up from the driftwood like he’s suddenly decided he’s had enough. “You’re a good friend for worrying about her, but there’s no need. Lucy can hold her own.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I say, standing up, too. Trying to mask the disappointment I feel in leaving our talk with more questions than answers. “I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“You’re not a bother,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t blame her for leaving. Fairfield’s too small a town to shrug off rumors like that.”
“Fairfield,” I repeat, the familiar name pulsing through my mind like a budding headache as I try to place it. “Fairfield, North Carolina?”
“Yeah, you know it?” he asks, a surprised smile like this is the most interesting thing to come out of our conversation. “That’s our hometown.”
CHAPTER 51
I feel my fingers trailing their way across Eliza’s clothes, folded tight and undisturbed. That worn envelope stuffed in the back and my hands sensing the bulk of it, notably out of place.
Pulling it out, opening the flap. All that money stuffed inside and an address on the back I didn’t recognize. The picture of it on my phone I had forgotten all about ever since Lucy showed up, commandeering my attention.
“Where have you been?” she asks me now, plopping down in the sand beside us. Sloane, Nicole, and I are sitting cross-legged, side by side, observing everyone else’s slow descent into madness. The party is still going, still raging like the fire around which we’re gathered, though the crowd is beginning to dwindle now, people starting to stagger into their tents. Exploring the island, maybe. Couples sneaking off and into the trees.
“I had to pee,” I say, turning to face her. Her cheeks are flushed and pink from the fire and I see that envelope again, so clear in my mind.
Fairfield, North Carolina.
I watch as she turns in the direction of the foliage behind us, a cluster of untamed shrubs and long, sharp grass. Swaying cattails and barren trunks with branches like brittle bones stripped of their skin. I wonder if she really did see Danny and me walk off in the opposite direction together. I wonder if she knows, on some subconscious level, how close her secrets are to suddenly slipping away. If she knows that I’m lying.
“I got lost,” I add, grabbing the bottle of wine beside me and tipping it back, swallowing too much. For the heat, the courage. The numbness I know it’ll soon provide. I can already feel the whiskey from before filling my limbs up slowly, pushing down on my eyes so they feel heavy and hard. “It’s dark out there, away from everything.”
I look at Sloane, nursing her beer, a tension in her jaw that calcified the second Lucy showed up. Nicole right next to her, cheekbones angular and harsh in the shadow of the flames. She looks sunken-in, hollow, like someone jabbed her with a needle and she’s been deflating slowly, losing her shape, and there’s something so desolate about it. About all of us, really. Sitting here, side by side, trying to pretend that everything is fine.
Trying to convince ourselves that nothing has changed when really, everything has.
“Huh.”
She says it in a tone that’s painfully unconvincing and the entire thing reminds me of Eliza and me in those final few days. Of graduation, bumping into each other outside the auditorium, our parents pushing us together without even registering the stiffness in our arms or the lies in our smiles. That picture still tacked to the wall in my bedroom, framed on my mantel, the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. In that moment, we knew something big had fractured between us, something possibly even permanent. We knew, after that argument, that we would never be whole again—but still, we tried. We tried to look happy, normal, Eliza’s fingers hovering behind my back like she couldn’t stand the thought of touching me. Her mom counting down, camera in hand, and the sigh of relief that escaped from her lips as soon as the flash went off and we could peel ourselves apart. We hadn’t spoken a word since that fight in my bedroom. It was the longest we had ever gone without talking, an entire decade of friendship whittled down to nothing but stone-cold silence, but neither of us wanted to be the first to crack so instead we let it grow between us like a tumor, getting bigger, denser. As if ignoring it completely would make it go away on its own.
“Oh shit,” Sloane mutters and I look up now, tracking her gaze, watching as Trevor trips in the sand. He goes down hard, dangerously close to the fire, limbs like rubber as his legs splay out in two opposite directions.