Page 15 of Only If You're Lucky
My guard dropped and I started talking. I started telling them everything.
“You’re getting scared,” Sloane says now, her hand on my leg. “You shouldn’t be. This was her idea to begin with.”
“I know,” I say again.
“She’s the one who got us into this.”
“I know.”
“The Butlers are filing a lawsuit against Kappa Nu,” Nicole adds. “Wrongful death.”
I nod, my eyes drilling into my bedspread. I had heard that, too, the breaking news alert chirping across my phone. Eventhough Levi’s death was initially deemed an accident, it happened at a fraternity function. Alcohol was involved… a lot of it. None of us were of age, yet all of us had been wasted, guzzling cheap booze before passing out around a giant open flame as the temperature plummeted around us, frozen fingers and plumes of breath visible in the night. He had marks and bruises on his skin, possible evidence of being hazed. His blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.
It’s a miracle, his parents would argue, that there weren’t more fatalities.
I can see the impending articles now; all the blame being pointed at Rutledge and Greek life and the way we students were able to run wild, drinking ourselves into a stupor with barely any oversight. Surely, it would go national: endless headshots of Levi flashing across the television, poised and professional and not at all the party animal I had always known him to be. He would be painted an athlete, a scholar, despite the fact that he ran track for one year in high school before dropping out, his smoking habit decimating his lungs. Despite the fact that he was a solid C student who was probably only admitted because his dad was a donor. Nevertheless. The entire country would still mourn his promise, his potential, all of it washed away with the water of an outgoing tide. Kappa Nu would be seen as a mere casualty; an innocent bystander caught in the cross fire.
But were they innocent? Were they, really?
I can’t bring myself to feel bad about the consequences that have already come for the rest of the brothers: the suspensions and the fines. The collective black spots that will follow them around campus, the rest of their lives, forever marring them as the reason one of their own had died. Because they brought this upon themselves, too, the way they looked at us like part of their property.The way they treated us like things they owned; mere decorations that came with the house itself.
The way they used us, dangled us like carrots. Hung us up like a neon sign flashing in the night: GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS.
They deserve it all.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, remembering. The brightness of the stars that night and the way they shone like diamonds in the sky. The totality of the darkness around us, a deep, dank, velvety black. The way Levi stood up and immediately stumbled, pitching forward in his bare feet before lurching off into the distance.
The way Lucy had stood up, too, glancing in my direction before following him into the cattails, quick and quiet. Disappearing into the night.
“Yeah,” I repeat, my confidence growing. “It’s gonna work.”
CHAPTER 14
BEFORE
“Levi Butler was my best friend’s next-door neighbor,” I say at last, picking at a loose cuticle until it bleeds. The three of them are sitting beside me, chins in their hands. “And he’s the reason she’s dead.”
The bluntness of the statement catches me by surprise, the way it spewed out of my mouth like a sneeze. Powerful and without permission. I look up at them, registering their shocked expressions. Their bunched-up foreheads and wide, white eyes.
“Like, hekilledher?” Nicole asks.
I open my mouth, then immediately close it, the answer too difficult to form into words.
“It’s complicated,” I say at last. “It was ruled an accident, officially, but there was more to it than that.”
“What happened?” she asks, and eventually, I sigh, my body back in that lukewarm water. The tangle of seaweed caught in my toes and the flitter of minnows grazing my thigh. Later that night, during dinner, Eliza’s parents told us that the Butlers were from somewhere in state. That their son, Levi, was a year younger thanus and rightfully bitter at having been yanked out of high school the summer going into his junior year.
“He doesn’t know anyone in the Outer Banks,” Eliza’s mom had said, stabbing at a chunk of salmon with her fork. I still remember the sound of the metal scraping against the inside of her teeth, harsh and grating, spraying goose bumps across my arms. “So you girls be nice.”
“Why did they move?” I had asked, my sun-stung eyes darting in the direction of the Butlers’ house. Even though there were two thick walls and a full yard between us, I could still feel him there, as if he were sitting at that very table, nestled between Eliza and me. Already cutting me out.
“Said they needed a lifestyle change.” Mr. Jefferson shrugged. “Didn’t elaborate more than that.”
Eliza was unusually distant that night, lost somewhere deep in the fissures of her own wild mind. I watched as she sat there quietly, gnawing on a fingernail as Mr. Jefferson stood up and cleared the plates before lowering the needle down on an old record player; grabbing Mrs. Jefferson’s hand and swinging her around the kitchen the way he always did after dinner. I remember closing my eyes, listening to the music leaking out through their wide-open windows; the acoustics and laughter drifting across the water like some kind of birdsong that felt exotic and rare.
I remember thinking she’d get over it, that it was just another one of her brooding moods, but in the weeks that followed, it only got worse.
“What happened,” I echo back, Nicole’s question haunting me like a whisper in the night. I can’t even count the number of times I listened to those words tumbling out of the mouths of my parents that summer as they watched the news in the dark, shaking their heads and a film of tears sitting stagnant in their eyes. How manytimes I imagined the Jeffersons screaming them into the phone, at each other. Overheard my curious classmates as they tried to pry information out of anyone they could find. Running on repeat in my mind like a broken record, night after night, as I tried to understand it, come to terms with it all—and not just the singular moment, the accident itself, but everything that came before it.
