Only If You’re Lucky

We sprint the four blocks to Penny Lanes, our feet damp and dirty by the time our sandals slap against the puddles in the parking lot. It’s only drizzling now, but my skin is still clammy beneath my raincoat, my hair wiry from moisture. The outside air musky and vegetal, smelling of wet grass and churned-up dirt, and I inhale it slowly, a welcome change from the stuffiness of my bedroom.

We approach the building and I start to walk toward the front door, but instead, Lucy grabs my hand and leads us into an alleyway and I watch as she hoists herself on top of a dumpster, shoes squeaking against the wet metal.

“What are you doing?” I ask, although it’s obvious from the second I see the window just above, too tiny to fit most adult bodies but perfectly adequate for someone as small as her.

“Getting inside,” she says, so matter-of-fact, standing on her toes as she pushes it open. I watch as she pulls herself over the ledge and slithers into the building on her stomach, disappearing in the dark like a burrowing snake.

“They don’t lock that?” I ask, addressing no one in particular, my neck swiveling as I check our surroundings.

“They do,” Sloane says, turning to look at me, eyes wide and blank. The insinuation is clear, what she’s saying. They lock it, but Lucy unlocks it.

Sloane and Nicole lead me back around to the front and we wait for what feels like an unusually long time, though I don’t want to keep asking questions, appearing concerned when nobody else seems to be. Finally, I hear the sound of the door unlocking and watch as Lucy pushes it open from the inside, lifting her arms above her head like a magician reappearing after her final trick.

“How often do you do this?” I ask as I step inside, simultaneously anxious and impressed. I watch as she flips on the lights, bracing myself for an alarm to blare.

“Special occasions,” she says, walking past me before squeezing my arm.

Everyone disperses slowly and I watch as they fall into what feels like a familiar rhythm: Sloane walks over to an old jukebox in the corner, sliding in her spare change and flipping through song selections before music starts to trickle out of the speakers above. Nicole plops down on one of the leather benches, bright red and ripping at the seams, while I take in the gumball machines and other dispensers pushed up against the wall, the kind that trade quarters for cheap jewelry trapped inside plastic capsules. There are racks of multicolored shoes stiff from foot sweat and sanitizer; arcade machines and basketball hoops and long wooden lanes leading to pins arranged in perfect arrows.

“Relax,” Lucy says, a grin in her voice. I whip around to find her behind the bar, various bottles plucked from their homes and lined up in front of her. “The security sucks in this place. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

I watch as she pours a clear liquor into four plastic cups, topping them off with soda from the gun before scooping them all up in her hands. She walks over to me then, arms extended so I can take the one closest to me, and my mind flashes back to Hines in this moment. To how she took charge in the common room and everyone else simply slid into place behind her, grabbing those bottles from the floor and pressing them to our lips.

How she had walked into my room without warning, trailed her fingers along all my things. Flashed me this exact same smile until I found my head nodding, my lips agreeing, seemingly all on their own.

“I guess this makes it official,” Lucy says, raising her cup. Sloane and Nicole are suddenly here now, too, sidling up beside us before grabbing their drinks and forming a circle. “You’re one of us now.”

I smile, clinking my drink before taking a sip, and in this moment, despite the warmth blooming in my chest, I can’t help but wonder again why she chose me. Why I’m the one Lucy is pulling into her circle like this, why I deserve to be brought into her space. I’ve been her roommate for three weeks now, and still, I haven’t seen any glimmer into her thought process, any indication of why. I’ve been waiting patiently for it to arrive, some aha moment that explains it all away, but so far, it hasn’t. Nothing has. I haven’t brought it up again since that day in the dorm, either, the moment I had looked at her and asked: “Why me?”

The indifference in her eyes, the bored curiosity, when she responded with a flat: “Why not?”

Now, for the very first time, I wonder if it really is that simple. If she really chose me because, well, why not? Here are three girls who lucked into a four-bedroom house too perfect to turn down. They had a spare room, nobody to fill it, and a lonely girl down the hall who seemed desperate enough to say yes. Maybe Lucy saw me on the lawn that day, staring in their direction with a longing in my eyes, and simply saw an opportunity, an answer to a problem.

Decided to do what she always does: take what she wanted and never look back.

The next four hours go by in a fluorescent haze: guzzling sweet margaritas and Amaretto sours so fast they make my throat feel wrecked and raw. Lucy coming up behind me with a refill every time my cup goes dry. Dancing to the music from the jukebox and devouring ice cream from the freezer; sliding down those long, slick lanes like some scene out of Risky Business and using the pins as microphones, screaming out every word. At some point, we collapse into a pile on the floor, limbs sweaty and tangled and warm to the touch, the ceiling spinning slowly above us.

Sloane checking her phone, muttering “Shit, we gotta go,” before pulling me up and into the night.

I vaguely remember Lucy putting back the liquor, flipping out the lights. The three of us leaving through the front door and waiting in the alley for her to shimmy back out the window, listening to her laugh as she landed hard on the dumpster. The four of us stumbling home with our arms threaded together like a daisy chain, wild and delicate, Lucy’s words pulsing through my mind like a meditation, a prayer.

“You’re one of us now.”

It isn’t until I wake up the next morning when I realize what happened, how the moment of Eliza’s passing came and went and I didn’t even feel it. How I had lost myself in Lucy completely, her attention the remedy I needed to make the pain go away. Instead, when the clock clicked to midnight and just kept going, time marching mercilessly on without her, I wasn’t suffocating the way I had expected to be, thinking about Eliza lying flat on the ground, her final breath ejected out of her with too much force.

Instead, I had been dancing, singing, wholly lost in the moment.

I had slept soundly for the first time in a year.