Only If You’re Lucky

I slam into my bedroom after making my way across the Kappa Nu backyard, through the shed and into the house, stalking past Nicole on the couch without uttering a single word. I’m hanging my head and massaging my temples—trying to think, to organize my thoughts—when I realize there’s someone already in here, a body hovering next to my bed.

“Jesus.” I jump, my hand shooting to my chest once I register her there. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Hi,” Lucy says, smiling like that day in the dorm. Like there’s nothing unusual about her being here, in my bedroom, without my permission.

“What are you doing?” I ask, though I regret it the second I say it. This is her house, after all. My room for just a few hours and my boxes barely unpacked.

“I left something in here,” she says, even though her hands are empty. “Who’s this?”

She points to the picture of Eliza and me on the mantel, the only decoration I’ve managed to put up, and I walk over to it, our tanned bodies tangled together on the dock mere feet from the spot Levi Butler once stood. Even now, after all this time, I can still feel the claustrophobic weight of him as we held our breath below; I can still register the hammering of my heart, the nervous energy generated from his presence alone.

“That’s my best friend,” I say at last. “Eliza.”

“If she’s your best friend, how come she’s never visited?”

I look at Lucy, eyebrows bunched, wondering what she could possibly mean by that. I haven’t even lived here a day. How could she have already visited?

“I would have noticed her in the dorm,” she clarifies. “She’s pretty.”

I tilt my head, realizing now that maybe Lucy had been watching me all year the same way I had been watching her—secretly, from a distance, eyes darting in the other direction after hovering in the same spot for a beat too long. I just never noticed. I open my mouth, ready to respond, when the door creaks behind me and I whip around, registering Sloane in the entryway.

“What the hell was that?” she asks, brown eyes boring into mine as she steps deeper into my room. “Who was that guy, an ex or something?”

“What guy?” Lucy asks, an eagerness in her tone. I see Nicole appear behind Sloane now, too, the dependent pet who can’t stand to be left alone for too long. The stares from all three of them attacking me at every angle.

They want answers, all of them, a thirsty need for information that won’t be quenched until I spill.

“It’s a long story,” I say instead, already knowing that won’t cut it.

“We’ve got time,” Lucy says, throwing herself onto my bed. Sloane and Nicole follow her lead, taking their own places on the mattress, and I stand in the center of the room for a second, eyeing them there. Numbly watching as Nicole flashes a smile and pats an empty spot on the comforter like she’s trying to seduce me.

I chew on the side of my cheek, thinking. Trying to decide how much to reveal. These girls are still strangers to me, still enigmas I can’t quite crack—but isn’t this how friendships are born? From shared traumas and bedroom bonding? Eliza and I used to do this, too, curled up on her dock in the dark, whispering secrets that drew us closer in the night. It was always the topics that felt taboo that ended up pulling us in the tightest: Eliza, age ten, revealing that she had bought her first bra but was too embarrassed to wear it. Too afraid of the straps poking through the fabric of her T-shirt; of the boys zeroing in and snapping them against her skin. Me, age twelve, showing her my ravaged ankles from trying to shave with my mom’s old razor I had dug out of the trash; the nicks and the cuts and the dried, crusty blood. Her fingers grazing over all those prickly patches I couldn’t quite reach. The two of us talking about boys and tampons and growth spurts and braces, all those tumultuous things that present themselves during the fragile years—years so fragile they were always in danger of shattering completely if not for that one friend who helped you hold it all together.

How many times had we come home from school with our uniforms on, shirts untucked and bras flung off, retreating into her bedroom to talk about our problems, each one seemingly larger than the last? Every conversation tying us tighter until, at last, we were two threads knotted into one: indivisible, inseparable. Eternally intertwined.

I grab the picture from the mantel now and hold it in my hands. I know I can’t keep Eliza from them forever. I know I’ll have to explain it all eventually: her, us. What happened back then and how I came to be here, alone. Levi Butler and why his appearance next door was enough to make me break down completely, buckling like rotten lumber beneath the overwhelming weight of him. A stilt house just waiting to collapse. The truth is, Levi was the very first splinter between us. Like salt-stained wood, it started small: a hairline fracture, skinny as a paper cut, but still, I could feel it. Even then, I could feel it. Beneath that dock, I had been hiding—but Eliza, she had been watching. Watching Levi, her lips dipped beneath the water and a dark curiosity washing over her like an ominous cloud blotting out the light. I watched her while she watched him and somehow, I knew that splinter would just continue to grow, expanding slowly from a crack to a crevice to something else entirely.

I knew it was only a matter of time until he would split us apart: forcefully, violently. I just didn’t know how violent it would be.

“Margot,” Lucy says, and I pull my gaze upward at the three of them sitting frog-legged on my bed. They’re looking at me so strangely and that’s when I register the wetness on my cheeks, two twin tears that have managed to snake their way down my face.

I lift my hand and wipe them away, smiling weakly.

“You can tell us,” she continues, Sloane and Nicole on either side of her, nodding like bobbleheads. “We’re your friends.”