Only If You’re Lucky

I wait until Maggie is out of sight before Lucy and I join Sloane and Lucas sitting around a makeshift bonfire out back.

“How are you feeling?” Lucy asks, a smirk on her lips. I’m still a little rattled about the encounter, a little on edge, but the chemical concoction coursing its way through my bloodstream is making it impossible to feel too bad.

“Good,” I say at last. “I feel good.”

And that’s the truth, at the heart of it, despite the guilt still tickling for my attention. I do feel good. And it isn’t just the pill, either. Or the alcohol. Or the fact that I finally got in my apology to Maggie, albeit I can’t quite tell if it was actually accepted or if she was just being nice as always. It isn’t even the way every single person in this circle suddenly feels like family to me, the little shed between us a portal to another world. It’s because I’ve just now realized, whether consciously or not, that I haven’t been looking for Levi this entire time. We’ve spent the last two months tiptoeing around each other, attempting to coexist like two plants repotted into too small a container. Our respective roots trying to branch out, bury deep, but instead getting tangled together in the process. It’s almost felt like a competition between us—like one of us needs to wither in order for the other to thrive—but right now, sitting here, I’m not so sure it has to be that way.

“This is some party,” I say, turning to Lucas. He’s reclining in a lawn chair so ratty and worn he’s practically sitting on the ground, a cowboy hat tipped low over his eyes.

“This is nothing,” he responds, staring into the flames. “Just wait until January.”

“What’s in January?”

“Initiation,” Sloane says on his behalf. “The first party where the pledges aren’t pledges anymore.”

I nod, reminiscing on the last few months. The freshmen are required to spend every free second at the house during their first semester. I’m always seeing them coming over in the mornings and in the evenings after class, cleaning the house and running errands. Sacrificing Friday nights to be the upperclassmen’s designated drivers, chauffeuring them around town with no questions asked.

“There’s this little island a few miles off the coast,” Lucas continues. “An older brother found it years ago and it’s become a tradition, throwing it out there. No neighbors, no cops. Our own little slice of paradise.”

“How do you get there?” I ask. “By boat?”

I watch as Lucas tips a beer back to his lips, takes a long swallow before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. I’ve learned by now that having access to a boat is the highest form of social currency at a coastal college like Rutledge, little skiffs and dinghies cluttering up students’ lawns. Center consoles and speedboats for the locals who are lucky enough to use their parents’.

“Their last task is to drive everyone out there, set up camp,” Lucas says, nodding. “Once we’re settled, their obligations are over. It’s their first real night of freedom.”

I try to imagine it: hordes of students making their way to the water, bow lights bobbing as we venture out and into the night.

“Doesn’t it get cold in the winter?” I ask.

“We have a fire, heaters for the tents. Liquor blankets,” he adds, grinning. “It gets pretty feral.”

Sloane suddenly perks up, twisting around to face the house.

“Where is Nicole?” she asks for the second time tonight, as if this conversation suddenly sparked her memory. I realize, too, that we still haven’t seen her. Not since this morning.

“She’s wasted,” Lucas says. “She’s been here for, like, eight hours.”

“Should we go find her?” I ask, turning around, too. Waving my hand through the air as the wind picks up, pushing smoke from the bonfire directly toward me.

“Trevor has her. She’s fine.”

The circle settles back into a heavy, stoned silence, our limbs light and minds numb. The house is still thumping, still thrumming, still pulsing with the energy of hundreds of people still inside. I can practically feel the sweat dripping, the body heat radiating, and eventually Sloane and Lucas get up to grab another drink, leaving Lucy and me alone again.

I look over at her, blue eyes ablaze as she stares into the flames, feeling another rush of warmth in my chest.

“How was it complicated?”

It takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me. She’s still staring into the fire, completely entranced, her voice barely above a whisper. I look around, checking to see who else she could be directing the question to, but still, we’re alone.

“What?” I ask at last.

“Your friend,” she says. “You never said how she died. Only that it was an accident. That it was complicated.”

I feel a quick twinge in my chest like a popped guitar string, my insides buzzing. Remembering that conversation on my bed, the three of them staring as I started to talk.

“She fell,” I say at last, still staring at her profile. I wait for Lucy to turn and face me but she never does. “There was an argument, and she had been drinking … Honestly, it’s one of those things that doesn’t even feel real. Like I dreamed it or something.”

I’m quiet as I turn back toward the fire, my eyes getting lost in the glowing logs, the licking flames. Watching them travel up the pile of wood before transforming into curling black smoke and disappearing altogether.

“Where did it happen?” she asks.

“A party,” I respond. “I didn’t want to go, and she went with him.”

I swallow, close my eyes, remembering how it felt to be lying in bed that night, tapping through Instagram and seeing the videos of them together. Eliza and Levi. I knew she must have been drunk to be posting them like that, raw and unfiltered, one after the other in quick succession. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, a vacant stare, and I could so perfectly picture her heavy fingers punching at her phone screen as Levi draped an arm around her shoulder, the weight of him heavy. Pulling her down.

I remember sitting up fast, my screen glowing in the dark and alarm growing in my chest. Watching the two of them giggle uncontrollably, stagger around. A bottle of vodka clutched in his hand that he lifted to her lips, tipping it back.

I open my mouth, ready to speak again, when the body of a boy comes out of nowhere and slams into the seat beside me, making me jump.

“Holy shit,” he says. “Lucy Sharpe?”

Maybe it’s because everything feels so detailed tonight, the edges razor-sharp like a freshly whetted blade, but I can’t help but register the way Lucy’s eyes swell at the sight of him, her face freezing for just a second before slipping back into that indifferent façade.

“Jesus, we all thought you were dead or something,” the boy continues, laughing, missing the fact that Lucy is ignoring him. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. “Where have you been? Do you go here?”

I watch as she gives him her full attention, finally, a fair-faced blonde wearing a short blue dress slathered in blood. Even from behind, I can see his shoulders tense beneath her scrutiny, a self-conscious laugh escaping his lips.

“Yeah, I know, I didn’t pick the costume,” he says, grabbing the dress. “All the pledges had to wear something stupid. I’m one of the twins from The Shining. What year are you?”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea who you are,” Lucy says at last, crossing one leg over the other. “We’ve never met.”

“Yes, we have,” the boy says, shaking his head. He doesn’t seem drunk—in fact, compared to the rest of us, he seems shockingly sober.

“You said you’re a pledge?” she asks, leaning forward, the light from the fire making her eyes shine. “A freshman, then?”

“Yeah, I’m Danny, remember?”

“Then why aren’t you getting me a drink?”

She thrusts her cup in his direction, the liquid inside barely half gone, and I look back and forth between Lucy and the boy, her cold eyes trained on his, something heavy traveling between them. It isn’t like Lucy to be so casually cruel like this. Blunt? Sure. She gets off on making people uncomfortable, commanding them around, but it’s usually with an air of intimacy, like she’s teasing them because she loves them. People would kill to be bossed around by Lucy, wearing her attention like a badge of honor … but Danny looks concerned right now, uneasy, cataloging the way she’s staring at him. Like she doesn’t even know him at all.

“I … I was just going…”

He gestures behind us, farther into the backyard, before closing his mouth and shaking his head, like he’s suddenly thought better of whatever he was about to say.

“Yeah, sure,” he says at last, standing up and taking her cup. “Coming right up.”

We watch in silence as he walks away, nothing but the popping of the fire and the distant echo of music masking the utter stillness between us. I wonder if she’s going to bring it up again, Eliza, nudge me to continue, but instead she turns toward me and smiles like she only just realized I’m here.

“Terrible pickup line.”

“You really didn’t know him?” I ask, looking back at the house where the boy disappeared, my own voice suddenly sounding strange in my ears. “It seems like he knew you.”

“No idea,” she says. “I bet one of the guys put him up to it. They always try to embarrass the pledges like that.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding vaguely, suddenly feeling a little nauseous. Slowly, quietly, the sense of euphoria I had earlier feels like it’s being replaced with something else now. Something more like unease. “Listen, should we find Nicole? I don’t want to leave her—”

Before I can finish, I hear the bang of the shed door swinging open behind us; the slap of the wood hitting the siding, hard. I twist around, relieved, expecting it to be Nicole—maybe Lucas was wrong; maybe she hasn’t been here after all, but instead, in her room, and now she’s mad at us for leaving her behind—but almost immediately, I feel the color drain from my skin as I register the body standing before me, his familiar face streaked with dirt.

“Levi,” I say, noticing the wild look in his eyes. It seems both haunted and hollow, like he’s just seen something terrible—or maybe it’s my eyes, distorting things. Twisting his face into something demonic, not unlike the way it looked immediately after they found Eliza, his pupils large and impassive as he stared into the lights, the cameras. His face on the news and his sweat-soaked skin as pale as a corpse. “What are you—?”

I stop, taking in the rest of him. He’s wearing something old and tattered like some kind of Tarzan-inspired loincloth but I can’t tell if it looks like that on purpose or if he’s been doing something to soil it that way. His bare chest is scratched, jagged little lines like fingernail streaks dotted with blood, and his eyes dart back and forth between Lucy and me like we just caught him red-handed doing something he shouldn’t.

My heartbeat picks up a little, my hands begin to shake, and I realize with a sense of sinking dread that if Levi is coming into the backyard through the shed, that means our house is the only place he could be coming from.