Only If You’re Lucky

Lucy and I are on our own private stretch of beach, necks sandy as we stare up at the sky. We found this spot a few days ago while we were wandering around, shoes dangling from our fingertips as we stumbled through the dunes. Trying to escape the crowds that, despite the cold weather and biting sea breeze, never really seem to dissipate around here.

There’s a faint crackle of fireworks somewhere to the north of us and the crashing of waves down by our feet, though it’s too dark to see how close we are to the water. I hear a sloshing to my left and turn to the side, vaguely register Lucy’s outstretched arm holding the bottle of wine she snagged from my parents’ pantry.

“Happy New Year, Margot.”

She wiggles the bottle in my direction, the sudden sound of her voice making me realize we’ve been lying in silence for a long, long time: ten minutes, maybe twenty, quietly comfortable in each other’s presence.

“Happy New Year, Luce.”

I grab the bottle and take a pull, the sweet bite of rosé making my skin prickle. We’re bundled up in sweatpants and sweatshirts, two knit blankets spread out between us, but still, it’s cold out here. We should have brought hot chocolate or something. Spiked it with Bailey’s.

Lucy has been in the Outer Banks for about a week now, the two of us sleeping feet-to-head in my bed, even though my parents have two perfectly acceptable guest rooms they made up for her the second they realized who she was. After we left Levi’s, we had walked back into my house to find my mother doing laps around the living room until she heard our entrance and stopped abruptly, clasping her hands tight behind her back like we had caught her stealing. I tried to ignore the hot flash of embarrassment that shot up my chest at the thought of her spending the entire hour since Lucy’s unexpected arrival running around in a flurry of nerves: collecting the dishes, lighting candles. Barking out orders and madly fluffing the throw pillows like Lucy might take one look at their lumpy physique and shake her head, disappointed in us all. Once we settled in, though, it turned into a slow, lazy week the way the holidays usually are and I actually found that I didn’t mind it. Thanks to my mom’s incessant questioning, I’ve learned more mundane details about Lucy’s life in the last seven days than I have in the last seven months combined. She grew up with cats, apparently, even though she thinks she might be allergic. She doesn’t have any extended family—no aunts, no uncles, no cousins—and even though I warned my mother not to ask too much about that, about how she grew up, she still found a way to pepper in her nosy inquiries, feigning ignorance when I shot her looks across the table.

“How about a boyfriend?” she had asked the other night, the four of us sitting close in the dining room. I could see my dad’s shoulders hunch instinctively; the small cough he’d let slip, like something was caught in his throat. “A pretty girl like you has to have one.”

“Mom,” I warned, but Lucy just laughed.

“It’s fine. I had one in high school, but it didn’t work out.”

I heard Maggie’s voice in my ear then, that hiss on the lawn as we watched Lucy lie out there. “I heard she blinded her boyfriend in high school.” It felt like just another rumor at the time, one of the countless wild tales some student made up about her to feel relevant, but still. I felt myself leaning forward, not wanting to miss a word.

“His loss,” my mom said, spearing a piece of broccoli.

“Yeah,” Lucy said, averting her eyes, her voice suddenly sounding too clipped. Too strained.

“He didn’t … he didn’t hurt you or anything, did he?”

“Mom, seriously.”

“Margot, honey, we’re just having a conversation.”

“It’s fine,” Lucy said again, cutting into a chicken thigh. “No, nothing like that. At least, not physically.” She smiled.

“Truth or dare,” Lucy says to me now, and I feel myself blink. I brush off the memory along with a streak of sand on my cheek before rubbing both arms with my hands to warm them.

“Truth,” I say at last, another pop going off somewhere in the distance. A flash of light, a faraway cheer.

“That’s new for you.”

“Yeah, well, if I said dare you’d dare me to go skinny-dipping and I’m not trying to die of hypothermia.”

Lucy laughs, an open-mouthed snort that’s cut short by another slug from the bottle. She shakes her head, wipes her lips on her hand, and plops it down in the sand between us.

“You’re not wrong about that.”

I’m quiet as she thinks, fingers tickling at her chin until she flips to the side and rests her head on her arm.

“What’s your New Year’s resolution?”

“I don’t really have one,” I say, and that’s the honest truth. I’ve never been that kind of person. There have always been things I’ve wanted to change about myself, things I’ve disliked, but until I met Lucy, I could never imagine waking up one morning and just actively choosing to be somebody else. Shedding my insecurities like a too-small skin, leaving them behind. Outgrowing my old self and simply morphing into someone new.

“You have to have one. Just pick something.”

I take a minute to think about the past year, such a drastic detour from my life thus far. I can’t even believe that, 365 days ago, I was still living in the dorms with Maggie, cocooned in a cradle of junk food and mediocre movies to keep myself from having to think too hard about everything I had lost. So maybe that’s my resolution: to never go back to that place again. To never lose anything else so completely. And I don’t just mean Eliza; I mean myself, too. I had no idea how fragile I was back then, how my very being was held together by such a perilously thin thread. Because before I was with Maggie, I was with Eliza. I hadn’t lost her yet. We were still best friends, still doing everything together. We were still counting down the days until Rutledge when we could both finally be free … but was I happy back then? Was I, really? I don’t actually know. I never tried to change the things I didn’t like about myself, fix the things that needed to be fixed. Instead, I just latched on to Eliza, zeroing in on all the places she was full where I was hollow and hoped that if I lapped them up for long enough, they’d pool their way in and fill me up, too.

“I want to be different,” I say at last, the only way I know how to put it.

“Different how?”

“I don’t know,” I say, rolling over now, too. “I’m sick of being weak, I guess. Of being … malleable.”

“I don’t think you’re weak.”

“Lucy, come on.” We’re both quiet, nothing but the roar of waves between us. I want her to say something, to crack some kind of joke to break the tension, but instead, she stays silent. “You saw how I was last year.”

I’m grateful for the dark right now, the cover of night, so she can’t see the warm flush creeping into my cheeks. We’ve never really talked about this before: her choosing me, the anomaly of it. How it just doesn’t make sense, no matter which way you twist it.

I grab the bottle from the sand, surprisingly light in my grip, and take another drink.

“You were going through something.”

“I was always like that,” I say, shaking my head. “Even before Eliza. I was always too cautious. Always letting people walk all over me.”

“Well, I like you the way you are, but I know you have it in you to be different. I’ve seen it.”

We’re both silent, memories from Halloween flooding right back. The way I had stood up by the fire, interrogated Levi as soon as I saw him emerge through the shed, my accusations fierce and unafraid. Later, shivering on the kitchen floor, a hatred so pure and razor-sharp it sliced straight through the silence, surprising us both.

“It should have been him.”

“That wasn’t me,” I say now. “I was angry—”

“It is possible to be both,” she interjects. “Radically both.”

I twist my head, eyes straining against the night. I still can’t see her, but I can feel Lucy’s smile stretching through the darkness: pulling wide, cheeky and taunting. The kind that bares teeth.

“You read Jekyll and Hyde,” I say, remembering that line, radically both, one of the many I’d highlighted before flipping it closed and tossing it across the couch. The concept of being mutually good and evil, dark and light, tickling my subconscious like an incessant itch growing stronger, harder to ignore. What a profound notion: that neither of those things needed to cancel out the other, but instead, could simply swirl together until you became your own unique mixture of each.

“I liked it,” she says.

“I knew you would.”

“It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

I pinch at the sand between us, rubbing the grains between my fingers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Lucy, one thing that’s become glaringly clear, it’s that to her, the entire world exists as a gradient, a sliding scale. Her moral compass isn’t broken, per se, but it’s definitely skewed, the magnets attracted to whichever direction she sees fit. Spinning madly around, guiding her whichever way she wants to go.

There is no good or bad for Lucy. There is no right or wrong, noble or evil, but simply the existence of people who dabble in their own combination of each.

“Your turn,” I say, handing the bottle back. Trying not to think about the gradual pull of it; those scales, tipping, just like she said they would. “Truth or dare.”

“In the spirit of trying new things: truth.”

I curl my legs into my chest, thinking about all the things I want to ask her. All the secrets I know she keeps—but still, there’s only one that comes to mind. One question I’ve been chewing over since the second she got here; one mystery on the tip of my tongue, the weight of it pushing my lips apart only for me to lose my nerve and swallow it back down.

“Why did you go over there?” I ask at last, picturing her in Levi’s room again. Fingers twisting in his hair and her palm delicate on his thigh as she leaned in close, her lips on his. “When you went to my house and I wasn’t there … why did you go to Levi’s?”

She rolls over to face me, the shadow of her eyes gaping wide.

“I told you—” she starts, but I shake my head.

“No,” I say. “You know what I mean. Why did you really?”

“I guess I was curious,” she says at last.

I’m quiet, picturing those early days with Eliza. The way she sauntered down the dock, eyes darting over to Levi when she thought he wasn’t looking. The way she would watch from a distance, a kind of bored awareness because there was nothing better to do. I remember her searching his name on her phone like he was some strange, exotic thing she simply wanted to study, try to understand. But then it morphed from there, an innocent interest turning into something bigger, stronger.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s what’s happening here, too.

“He told me about the party,” Lucy says, rolling back over to face the stars. “The night she died.”

I freeze, my body suddenly numb from the cold and the wine; the wind whipping off the water and this conversation, everything. I had been trying to work up the nerve to ask her about the kiss next, what I saw through that window, but this feels more important now.

“What did he say?”

“He mentioned the old high school,” she says. “The party that happens there every year.”

I see it in my mind, the way it’s always been: standing broken but tall on the edge of the beach, inside gutted from a lightning-strike fire that ripped through the rooms years ago. Structurally, it’s still standing, though nobody could call it sound. There are missing walls, no roof, only three stories of ash-black empty spaces cluttered up with charred furniture nobody ever bothered to move and phallic graffiti spray-painted over old chalkboards. Empty vodka bottles collecting dust in the corners, evidence of parties past; the occasional sleeping bag left behind by someone too drunk to drive home. Even I couldn’t deny that it was the perfect place for a bunch of underage kids: right on the beach, a view of the water. Abandoned and messy and ours for the taking.

“The first full moon of the summer,” I say at last, nodding slowly. “It’s usually pitch-black out there without any power, but when the moon is out and the sky is clear, it’s suddenly light, too. You can see everything.”

Even from my phone, I remember thinking it looked impossibly bright: the midnight moon reflecting off the water like a giant mirror, a pane of glass, cloaking everything in a ghostly glow. The kind of eerie luminescence that appears just before a tornado, still and haunting, dark and light, the sky itself sending a warning of certain danger to come.

“Radically both,” Lucy mutters and I turn to face her, the crackle of a faraway firework like white noise in my ears.

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it is.”

I look up at the sky now, the peek of the moon like something shy and wary, flitting in and out of the haze above. Picturing Eliza and Levi climbing those steps, ascending higher, stumbling perilously close to the edge. A single misplaced cloud could have called the whole thing off, made it too dark to see, but that night had been perfect, as good as they come: the moon glowing bright against the ink-black sky like a flashlight in the dark, exposing them all.