Only If You’re Lucky

“What were you doing over there?” I ask, standing up from the lawn chair. I look past Levi, through the open shed doors, the dim lights of our living room barely visible through the windows. That first morning with Sloane comes rushing back, the two of us making our way through the shed and the unease in my chest as I thought about how easy it was for us to invade their space like that.

How easy it would be for them to invade ours.

“Answer me,” I say, taking a step forward, though the sudden movement makes me feel abruptly dizzy, everything going straight to my head while all the blood drops in the opposite direction.

I think of Eliza, that unmistakable feeling of someone else in her home, and all at once, I hate myself for thinking Levi and I could coexist like this.

“Nothing,” he says, lifting his hand behind his head. It’s the same gesture he did at Penny Lanes when he was put on the spot by Lucy, rubbing the back of his neck like that. “I was just … getting something. From the shed.”

“What were you getting?” I ask, grabbing my chair for support, handcuffs slapping against the armrest with a metallic clink.

“Lighter fluid.” His eyes dart around, looking at Lucy and me before landing on the flames between us. “For the fire.”

The three of us are quiet—Levi and me upright in a silent standoff while Lucy sits to the side, watching it all. His voice is cautious, careful, but I can’t decide if it’s because he’s hiding something or because he’s confused about this sudden line of questioning; about my voice, urgent and incessant.

I look over at the fire, then down at his hands, noticing they’re empty. Realizing he can’t have anything in his pockets, either; he’s practically naked. He doesn’t even have pockets.

“I couldn’t find any,” he adds.

“Butler!”

We all turn around at the sound of Trevor’s voice interrupting us, echoing across the lawn. He’s shirtless, too, even though the temperature is nearing fifty, and we watch as he walks out the back of the house and approaches us with a manic grin. Danny is behind him, Lucy’s Solo cup clutched in one hand, that gory blue dress seeming even more ridiculous than before. All these people, their costumes, it’s giving everything such a strange edge, like I’m standing in the center of a lifelike dream. Everyone is themselves, but also not—there’s something warped about their features, something wrong, like they’re all caricatures of who they should be, who they were just a few seconds ago, a strange energy emanating from them all.

I reach down and pinch my arm, feeling silly the second I do it, although I really wouldn’t mind if I snapped out of whatever this is and suddenly woke up, sheets damp and skin slick, gasping for air in my pitch-black bedroom.

“You doin’ okay, man?” Trevor asks, slapping his palm against Levi’s shoulder. “You look a little pale.”

“Yeah,” Levi says, a weak smile cracking across his face. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“I’ve been looking for you.” Trevor winks. “Where you been?”

“I was just—” He gestures to the shed again, the door still hanging open to reveal the back of our empty house. I watch as he looks at Trevor, then me, then Lucy sitting silently in the corner, a little curl to her lip as she watches him squirm. “Trying to bring this fire back to life.”

“Why don’t you let Danny handle that,” Trevor says, squeezing his shoulder, hard. “Let’s get you a drink.”

Levi looks back at me one last time before nodding silently and slinking into the house, Trevor’s grip still firm against his skin. There’s a certain energy to him tonight, Trevor, one that sometimes creeps in when I’ve seen him bossing around the pledges, drunk on power and playing God. It feels coked up and dangerous, like he’s looking for a fight or maybe just returned from one, adrenaline pounding around him like a pulse.

Or maybe that’s just me again, my own imagination, whatever I ingested earlier making everything feel so good until it took such a violent turn in the opposite direction.

“Here,” Danny says, turning to Lucy once the others are gone. He hands her the drink, arm outstretched, but she doesn’t take it.

“I’m not thirsty anymore,” she says instead, standing up before walking toward me and grabbing my arm. “We’re going home, anyway.”

We step around the fire and stumble through the grass, Lucy’s fingers digging hard into my wrist as she pulls me through the shed. My head is dipping, spinning, and I’m relieved to be leaving, the sights and sounds and smells of the party suddenly too much—but at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about Levi slinking around in our house just minutes before. I can’t stop imagining him creeping through my bedroom the way he once crept through Eliza’s, fingers flipping through my clothes. Scanning the pictures on my mantel, maybe. His greedy eyes on her still, even now.

“Wait,” I say, stopping abruptly in the backyard, feet from the door. Lucy turns and looks at me, her head cocked to the side. “I don’t want to go in there.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, hands on her hips.

I think of him on Eliza’s bed, his head on her pillow. The faint smell of him staining her sheets.

“Levi,” I say at last. “He wasn’t in the shed. He was in the house.”

Lucy is quiet, staring at me, before twisting her head and looking at the back door.

“We were sitting around that fire for over an hour,” I continue. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long.”

“Margot,” she says, smiling. “We were out there for, like, twenty minutes.”

“Still,” I say, feeling my cheeks burn hot. “He wasn’t in the shed for that long looking for lighter fluid.”

She sighs, rolling her neck like she’s trying to stretch something out.

“Maybe he was tinkering with the toilet tank or something. I told Trevor the other day they need to take care of that. The noise is pissing me off.”

“Why would Levi be doing that?”

“Trevor always sends the pledges to handle that stuff,” she says. “He’s too lazy to do it himself, plus he can’t use a tool to save his life.”

“In a loincloth?” I ask. “In the middle of a party?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“We need to start locking the doors,” I say. “We always leave them open.”

“Yeah, because Nicole can’t keep track of her key,” she says. “She lost her keycard to Hines the second day of freshman year.”

“But the boys can’t just come in here without asking—”

“Yes, they can,” she says, cutting me off. “They own the house, Margot. They can do whatever they want.”

“They own the house,” I echo, realizing, for the first time, what exactly that entails. I didn’t even have to sign a lease to live here. Levi isn’t just my neighbor anymore. He isn’t just some guy next door who looks through the windows or loiters out back.

He’s more than that. He can do more than that.

“Look, you’re messed up,” Lucy says, touching my arm. “You’re paranoid, having a bad trip. It’s my fault, honestly. I should have only given you half.”

I look down at her fingers on my forearm, feeling a twist in my chest. Thinking of the pill she placed in my palm; the bitter pinch of it as I swallowed it dry. She’s right, I know she’s right, but at the same time, the energy back there was unmistakably off. It felt like I was on the outside of something among all of them, Levi included, a sinister secret pulsing around them like a shared heartbeat.

“Let’s go inside, get you some water,” Lucy says. “Then you can sleep it off.”