Page 62 of Only If You're Lucky
“She told us she didn’t like her roommate,” Sloane recounts. “That’s why she was always in our room.”
“Did she sleep there?” I ask. “She was on the hall all the time.”
“Sometimes on our futon. Not always.”
“And you never asked to meet her roommate?”
Sloane shrugs, like the thought had occurred to her, but in the end, she’d simply dismissed it. “She said she was boring, never left her room,” she says, biting her lip as soon as the words escape. I feel my cheeks flush. I can tell she feels bad. “No offense.”
“It’s fine,” I say, waving it off. “But maybe she lived on another hall or something. A different floor?”
“That’s what I thought at first, too.”
“When did you start thinking otherwise?”
Sloane sighs, rolling her neck, and I can’t help but dart my eyes over to my closed door again, always aware of the possibility that Lucy might be listening.
“After finals were over, when it was time to move out of Hines and into the house, Nicole and I couldn’t find her,” she says at last. “We were calling her phone, looking in the lobby. Even if she livedon another floor, she should have been there, too, right? Moving out with everyone else?”
“Right,” I say, nodding, remembering the swarm of girls with their campus-owned carts. The metal corners crashing into our ankles; rickety old wheels and neon numbers stuck to the back.
“We finally figured she was at work or something and was going to get her stuff later, but when we pulled up to the house, she was already here unloading shit out of her car. Where did it all come from?” she asks, leaning forward. “If she didn’t move it out of Hines, where was she keeping it?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, thinking. Remembering that night on the roof; Lucy’s admission that didn’t feel like much at the time suddenly looking different in this strange new light.
“I left right after school, figured I’d just come here and get a job and a cheap apartment.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
“Yeah,” Sloane says. “She shrugged me off, said she moved out early because she wanted to avoid the crowds, then acted likeIwas the crazy one for questioning her about it.”
I think back to my first day in this house, the very moment I met the others. Lucy calling me into the living room and the harsh hostility emanating off Sloane. The way she had been glaring at me, snapping at her.
“Where’d you find her?”she’d asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“She lived on our hall.”
I still remember the inflection in Sloane’s voice when she responded, incredulous:ourhall? I always thought she said it like that because she couldn’t believe I’d lived there, too. Like it wastheirhall, not mine, that humiliating sting shooting through my chest when I thought about all the days I’d wasted tucked away in my room.
But it wasn’t that; it was never that. Sloane wasn’t doubting that I lived there. She was defying Lucy because shedidn’t.
“That’s why you were so upset,” I say now. “The day I moved in.”
“She was gaslighting me,” Sloane says, and our entire conversation outside the shed flares up to the forefront of my mind again. I play it back, scene by scene: Sloane, eyes darting, afraid of being watched. The venom in her voice, like somebody scorned:“She’s a fucking liar.”
“There has to be an explanation,” I say at last, trying to tread lightly. I don’t want Sloane to think I’m brushing her off, siding with Lucy, but at the same time, it doesn’t make sense. “If she didn’t live in Hines, how was she always getting in and out of the building? Wouldn’t you constantly have to be buzzing her in if she didn’t?”
“Nicole’s keycard,” she says. “You’re the one who made me see it.”
I think back to the two of us in Sloane’s bedroom, just after Thanksgiving. Talking about Nicole and how skinny she looked. The way I had demanded we start locking the door even though she could never keep track of her key.
Sloane opening her mouth before closing it again, looking concerned. Fingers working at that seam for so long the thread started to fray.
“She lost it—” I start, but already, Sloane’s shaking her head.
“She didn’t lose it,” she says. “Nicole still swears it was stolen. We just never figured out who took it.”
The thought of it makes my skin crawl: Lucy wandering up to Sloane and Nicole in the courtyard and talking her way inside. Swiping Nicole’s keycard so she could let herself into the dorm as she pleased before drifting down the hall, into the common room. Convincing us all that she belonged.
