Only If You’re Lucky

We’ve been in a state of comfortable quiet since Lucy told me about the cave, Levi, that secret thing they do when the four of us are fast asleep.

It feels strange now, thinking about it: all those nights I had been lying in bed, closing my eyes, not even knowing there was another body beneath me. Their hidden presence like a fifth roommate I never knew we had. But now that I’m in on it, now that I know, it’s hard to imagine I didn’t somehow feel the company of another person down there. That I didn’t pick up on the reason I always felt so cold, that underground pocket of concrete and dirt drafting into my bedroom, emitting through the floor.

That I didn’t feel their nervous energy, hear their shallow breaths. Pick up the panicked beating of their pulse beneath the floorboards, shrill and haunting. My very own telltale heart.

“That guy from the fire,” Lucy says to me now, breaking the silence. “His name is Danny DeMarcus. I do know him. He went to my high school.”

I roll over to my side, curled up in a ball like we’re lying in bed and not on rigid asphalt, shingles rough beneath the weight of us.

“Danny DeMarcus,” I repeat, remembering him from Halloween. The blond boy in the blue dress who had plopped down next to us, striking up that conversation Lucy desperately didn’t want to have. He had been so insistent, so sure he was right, and Lucy had just brushed him off the way she always does, asserting ignorance. But still. I had seen something different in her expression that night. I knew she was lying.

“I guess I just prefer for people around here not to know about my past,” she says, rolling over to face me, too. “I wanted a fresh start. I figured you’d understand.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding, hand under my head like a pillow. “I understand.”

“There are things from back then I didn’t want to bring with me.”

I’m quiet, not knowing how to respond, Lucy’s eyes on mine like she’s waiting for me to say something next.

“It was such a shitty school,” she continues when the silence stretches on for a beat too long. “There were nine people in my graduating class. Nine. I would go years without meeting a new person.”

I think of Eliza and me, just like this, two years ago: the hard wood beneath us, the stars up above. Listening to the cicadas on the dock, reliable like a metronome, steady as a sound machine, their lullaby soothing me into a trancelike state. Nodding vaguely as she talked about all the places she wanted to go, people she wanted to meet, our little town and private school suffocating her like a boa constrictor: the harder she fought, the tighter they squeezed. It was hard not to take it personally.

“I honestly didn’t think any of them would go to college, let alone come here,” Lucy says. “This random little place.”

It only dawned on me later, after I arrived at Rutledge, that maybe Eliza actually liked being the biggest fish in a small, simple sea, despite her grand plans. The things that she said. She had picked this school, after all. She could have gone anywhere and I would have followed—but instead, she chose here, another small town where she could outshine us all.

“I just thought I’d never see them again,” Lucy continues, and I blink away the memories, focusing back on her. “So when Danny came up to me like that, catching me off guard … I don’t know. I just lied.”

“You never see them around town?” I ask. “When you go home?”

She’s quiet, staring at me as she chews on the side of her cheek. For a second, I think she didn’t hear me until she rolls back over and faces the sky.

“I don’t go home.”

I don’t understand it, at first, what she’s trying to say. She didn’t go home for summer, that’s true, but I didn’t, either. She didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, convincing me to stay here with her, keep her company—but slowly, it dawns on me. The quiet confession she’s trying to make.

She doesn’t go home, ever. She doesn’t have a home.

This is her home.

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock. Lucy has always given off an air of independence, of being on her own. Her parents never seem to pay for anything the way ours do and a sudden sense of naïveté settles over me as I think about Lucy stalking off to Penny Lanes each night, permanent pimples around her hairline from the fryer grease and wet blisters on her heels from Rollerblades that are always half a size too small. Meanwhile, I’ve been blindly reliant on a direct deposit that appears by some dependable magic on the first of every month: rent, tuition, the very food that feeds me still being doled out by Mom and Dad. I’ve never seen Nicole want for anything, either—she flashes around her credit card so carelessly it can’t possibly be linked to her own account—and Sloane has that job with the registrar, sure, but it feels more like a résumé cushion, the kind of thing she uses not only for the money but as an extra opportunity to do her homework in an air-conditioned office with free coffee and snacks.

Not the kind of job, like Lucy’s, that keeps her on her feet all day. The kind of job that relies on tips for cash.

“I don’t get along with my mom,” she adds after a beat of silence. “Never have.”

“I’m sorry—” I say, the raw truth of it all stunning me into silence. It’s not the reality of Lucy being untethered that shocks me, a tumbleweed roaming through life by herself. That part actually makes sense in a strange sort of way. It’s the admission, the vulnerability of it.

I’ve learned not to expect this kind of openness from her.

“Don’t be,” she says. “I’m better off without her.”

“Do you ever talk?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I left right after school, figured I’d just come here and get a job and a cheap apartment. I haven’t reached out since and she hasn’t, either. She doesn’t even know where I am.”

“And your dad?”

I ask it hesitantly, tender as a tiptoe, the cloak of night making me feel bolder, braver, pushing me to venture into territory I would otherwise run from. But Lucy’s showing herself to me right now. She’s telling me things, intimate things, the kinds of things she’s always extracting from other people and never revealing herself.

I think of Sloane’s voice that morning in her bedroom, dipped down low so nobody else could hear: “You still don’t know anything about her, do you?” Lucy’s usually so bottled up, so tight-lipped, that bearing witness to this version of her that spills her secrets so freely is leaving me gutted, ripped apart like the corpse of that deer once the boys plunged a knife into its ribs and worked their way down. On the one hand, I don’t want her to regret this in the morning. I don’t want her to wake up, blink her bleary eyes, and think about the things I had pulled out of her in the dark, my nudging questions like a pair of fingers tugging at a piece of yarn. I know these are all things she would never tell me if we were sober. If we hadn’t just spent the entire week together, completely alone. If we weren’t sitting on top of a roof right now, the nightfall so dark and disorienting, it almost feels like talking to yourself.

But on the other hand, I don’t want her to stop.

“He didn’t know how bad things were,” she says at last.

“Why didn’t you just go live with him?”

I wait for her answer, but she’s suddenly so quiet, I feel the overwhelming urge to repent. I pushed too hard, pried too much, causing her to shut back down instead of open up further—but just as I’m opening my mouth to apologize again, attempt to reel her back in, she starts to speak.

“I don’t need him,” she says at last, and I can feel her lean over, her hand holding something silver around her throat. “But he gave me this.”

I lean in, too, my nose practically touching her neck, trying to see through the darkness. She’s holding a necklace. The same necklace I noticed that day in the dorm, the one I’ve seen her wear every day since: a silver chain with a cluster of tiny diamonds arranged around her clavicle like a constellation of stars.

“He said it reminded him of me because I was named after that song. Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

“You were named after LSD?” I joke, an attempt to ease the tension. Lucy snorts, punching my shoulder, but I can tell she’s smiling.

“That’s one interpretation,” she says. “But I think it’s because of the stars. I’ve always liked them.”

“Yeah, they’re nice,” I say, somewhat dazed. Thinking of all those stickers on her ceiling. I don’t even know what time it is anymore, how long we’ve been up here. “Eliza and I used to sit outside, too. Try to find the constellations. She had this big telescope we broke out sometimes when it was clear enough to see.”

“Do you know any?”

“The Big Dipper,” I say. “The Little Dipper.”

“Those are easy. Look, there’s Orion,” she says, pointing into the sky with her finger. Tracing the arms, the legs, the sword, and the belt. “And Taurus. Gemini, the twins.”

“Where are the twins? I don’t see them.”

“Just there.”

She grabs my hand from the roof, hers unusually warm in the otherwise chill of the night, and thrusts it into the air above us. Then she uses my own to draw the outline of two figures, arms connected, and I watch as the pattern emerges before my eyes.

“See the two people?” she asks, and suddenly, I do. I can see them so crisp, so clear, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time I didn’t. “They’re holding hands. Like us.”