Only If You’re Lucky

“Levi Butler was my best friend’s next-door neighbor,” I say at last, picking at a loose cuticle until it bleeds. The three of them are sitting beside me, chins in their hands. “And he’s the reason she’s dead.”

The bluntness of the statement catches me by surprise, the way it spewed out of my mouth like a sneeze. Powerful and without permission. I look up at them, registering their shocked expressions. Their bunched-up foreheads and wide, white eyes.

“Like, he killed her?” Nicole asks.

I open my mouth, then immediately close it, the answer too difficult to form into words.

“It’s complicated,” I say at last. “It was ruled an accident, officially, but there was more to it than that.”

“What happened?” she asks, and eventually, I sigh, my body back in that lukewarm water. The tangle of seaweed caught in my toes and the flitter of minnows grazing my thigh. Later that night, during dinner, Eliza’s parents told us that the Butlers were from somewhere in state. That their son, Levi, was a year younger than us and rightfully bitter at having been yanked out of high school the summer going into his junior year.

“He doesn’t know anyone in the Outer Banks,” Eliza’s mom had said, stabbing at a chunk of salmon with her fork. I still remember the sound of the metal scraping against the inside of her teeth, harsh and grating, spraying goose bumps across my arms. “So you girls be nice.”

“Why did they move?” I had asked, my sun-stung eyes darting in the direction of the Butlers’ house. Even though there were two thick walls and a full yard between us, I could still feel him there, as if he were sitting at that very table, nestled between Eliza and me. Already cutting me out.

“Said they needed a lifestyle change.” Mr. Jefferson shrugged. “Didn’t elaborate more than that.”

Eliza was unusually distant that night, lost somewhere deep in the fissures of her own wild mind. I watched as she sat there quietly, gnawing on a fingernail as Mr. Jefferson stood up and cleared the plates before lowering the needle down on an old record player; grabbing Mrs. Jefferson’s hand and swinging her around the kitchen the way he always did after dinner. I remember closing my eyes, listening to the music leaking out through their wide-open windows; the acoustics and laughter drifting across the water like some kind of birdsong that felt exotic and rare.

I remember thinking she’d get over it, that it was just another one of her brooding moods, but in the weeks that followed, it only got worse.

“What happened,” I echo back, Nicole’s question haunting me like a whisper in the night. I can’t even count the number of times I listened to those words tumbling out of the mouths of my parents that summer as they watched the news in the dark, shaking their heads and a film of tears sitting stagnant in their eyes. How many times I imagined the Jeffersons screaming them into the phone, at each other. Overheard my curious classmates as they tried to pry information out of anyone they could find. Running on repeat in my mind like a broken record, night after night, as I tried to understand it, come to terms with it all—and not just the singular moment, the accident itself, but everything that came before it.

“I don’t really know what happened,” I say at last. “That’s the hardest part.”

The three of them shift on my bed, uncomfortable, perhaps knowing on some subconscious level not to interrupt.

“I think she was just curious at first,” I say, remembering how I would catch her eyes skipping over to the house next door: to Levi, sweaty and shirtless, pushing around a manual lawn mower or doing push-ups on the patio while we sunned ourselves out back. She seemed only vaguely interested in the beginning, a window-shopper’s curious detachment. Strolling around the backyard the way she always did in nothing but her bathing suit, eyes on her phone as she walked the dock like a runway, pretending he didn’t exist. And he kept his distance, mostly. Sneaking the occasional glance when he thought we weren’t looking. Eliza sneaking it back. But then she caved after those first few weeks and searched for him on Instagram, scrolling through an endless array of Levis before throwing her phone onto her bed in defeat. His anonymity just made him more interesting to her, her mind filling in the blanks with details that were far more exciting than what likely existed. It didn’t help that we went to an all-girls school, either. That we spent every day of our lives enveloped in a heavy cloud of body mist and estrogen, dreaming about boys instead of seeing what they were actually like in real life.

If our parents sent us there with the intention of keeping us focused, of eliminating the distraction, it had the opposite effect. Instead, we were clueless and curious, a lethal combination, drawn to their bright colors like moths to a flame.

“She was always trying to branch out, meet new people,” I continue. “Then all of a sudden, this new guy shows up from somewhere different and starts taking an interest.”

“So, they dated,” Sloane says, and I shake my head.

“It was never serious.”

I look at Lucy and register the indifference in her expression; while Sloane and Nicole are totally rapt, shaken at the idea of a murderer next door, Lucy is looking at me in an almost clinical sense, cold and detached. Like she doesn’t quite believe what I’m saying. Like she’s trying to form a hypothesis of her own.

“The thing you need to understand about Eliza is that everyone loved her,” I say at last, looking down at the picture again. “But just because you loved her, it didn’t mean she loved you back.”

“What was so lovable about her?” Lucy asks. I can’t help but startle at the way she says it, venom dripping, almost like she’s jealous.

“Everything,” I say, and that’s the truth. Despite our differences, our occasional spats, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about her. “She was kind and funny and fearless … almost to a fault, you know? Nobody was a stranger.”

Lucy simply nods and I realize, despite how alike they sometimes seem, the two of them probably wouldn’t be friends. There would be too much envy between them, too much competition. That’s the whole reason girls like them choose friends like us: too-nice Nicole and studious Sloane and malleable Margot.

The kind of friends who are more than happy to take the back seat. The kind of friends who won’t get in the way.

“So, was he obsessed with her or something?” Nicole asks, scooting forward, fully absorbed like she’s soaking in a movie and not my real life, some slow-motion car chase seconds before the crash. “Like an ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can’ type of thing?”

I nod, remembering. It had started small between them: a mutual fascination, an innocent crush. A bud of a thing still curled up and cautious, but slowly, inevitably, it began to bloom. By the middle of that summer, I would come over and catch the two of them talking on the dock, one of Levi’s cigarettes dangling between her fingers. Eliza never used to smoke during the day like that, only at the occasional party when she was too drunk, but with Levi, her bad habits became more abundant. They mutated and metastasized; took on a life of their own. So I would approach them gently, respectfully, sitting cross-legged next to Eliza and trying to keep my distance, smiling weakly as their conversation hushed into a smothered silence—but at the same time, my very presence signaling that I wasn’t the intruder in that situation.

I wasn’t the outsider. He was.

Because that was the thing with Eliza, the thing Levi never realized: she was like that with everyone. She was just passing the time with him, a shiny new plaything to keep her occupied during those long, lazy days of summer. She liked the feeling of his eyes on her skin; the thought of him just next door, lying in bed, his mind on her. She was just starting to realize the power her own body could have on other people, just learning how to wield it like a weapon: moving her legs and chewing her lip and twirling her hair. A single batted eye bringing a boy to his knees.

“A couple months before she died, she told me she felt like she was being watched,” I say at last.

I’ll never forget it when she finally told me. We were halfway into our senior year and whatever this thing was between them had stretched on from the summer and into the school year, a curling tentacle holding her tight. I thought it would naturally fizzle out once classes started up again, but the distance only seemed to make it stronger. Nobody else looked at her the way he did. At school, she went back to being just another carbon copy of everybody else—long hair, starched skirt, knee socks, and scuffed-up clogs that made us all sweaty and shapeless—but back home with Levi, prancing around in her tank tops and short shorts, she was different, special. Perfect.

I remember studying on her bed that night, stomachs flopped down on the mattress and Eliza’s long legs scissoring in the air. We were still in our uniforms, shirts untucked and skirts riding high, and she kept glancing over her shoulder, toward the window, tucking her hair behind her ear like she was playing some kind of role in a movie. Like she knew she was on display.

“What are you doing?” I asked at last, tired of acting too stupid to notice. “Why are you being so weird?”

She just smiled at me, condescendingly coy, like I was on the outside of some inside joke.

“Is someone out there?” I asked, twisting around so I could look, too. I realized then how exposed we were: the brightness of her bedroom juxtaposed with the darkness outside; how the two of us, framed by the window, would be perfectly visible to someone outside, yet they would be perfectly invisible to us.

“I think he watches me,” she said at last, her chin tucked into her chest and her voice an inch above a whisper. “I think he’s out there right now.”

“What?” I gasped, standing up quickly. I started to walk over to the window but before I could reach it and peer outside, she grabbed my arm and yanked me back down.

“Don’t look,” she hissed. “Are you crazy?”

“Are you? Eliza, that’s so creepy. Do you not see how that’s creepy?”

“It’s not creepy,” she said. “It’s cute.”

“I’m sorry, but what exactly about being stalked is cute?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said, rolling her eyes. Shifting her weight from one arm to the other, letting the neck of her button-up yawn open wide.

“What is with you lately?” I asked her then, not bothering to hide the disdain in my voice. The judgment, the scorn, the frustration that I had been keeping bottled up at that point for far too long. “Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like this,” I said, throwing my arms up, gesturing to it all. “He’s just a boy, Eliza. Since when do you change yourself like this for a boy?”

“I’m not changing myself—” she started, but I interrupted her before she could finish.

“Yes, you are. You’ve been different. Distant.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered, and I let out a scoff.

“Try me.”

She looked up at me then, front teeth digging into her lower lip. I raised my eyebrows, egging her on, and watched as her eyes darted back to the window.

“There’s nothing wrong with letting him look.”

I stared at her then, disbelief washing over me, the thin line between danger and desire evaporating completely and melding the two together into something else entirely. It was so classically Eliza: driving without a seat belt, diving into the marsh when the tide was too low. Sometimes I thought she genuinely enjoyed the prospect of getting hurt, the threat of impending danger dangling over her heightening the sensation of being alive.

“Pretty soon he’s gonna want to do more than just look,” I said at last, my arms crossed tight. “What are you going to do then?”

Eliza just shrugged, ignoring me, lifting her pen to her lips and chewing on the cap in the same mindless way she used to saunter down the dock, adjusting the triangle of her bikini top before flipping onto her stomach and untying the straps. She was doing it on purpose, I realized, all of it cunning and calculated and entirely for him: cracking the window but never opening it completely. Flashing a glimpse of her bare back before clicking out the light and closing the curtains, letting him wonder what was happening in the dark.

I shot another look out the window, squinting my eyes against the inky beyond, and in that moment, I swear I could see him: a silhouette in the distance, standing on the dock.

The outline of Levi watching us both.