Page 63 of Only If You're Lucky
“Before I left for Christmas, I stopped by the registrar,” Sloane says. “Right before they closed for the holidays. I searched Lucy’s name.”
“You can’t just look at student records,” I say, eyes widening. “You could get expelled—”
“I know,” she says, holding up her hand. “But after realizing she was the one who took Nicole’s key, I had to know why.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Every time I searched her name, nothing showed up.”
“What do you mean,nothing showed up?” I ask, though I can see it now: Sloane sneaking to her computer, an empty office just before the holidays. Booting it up, glancing over her shoulder. Confirming she was alone. Pulling up records and typing Lucy’s name; brown eyes widening when it came up blank. “Are you sure you spelled her name right? Sharpe with ane?”
“Yes, I spelled her fucking name right.”
“Okay, sorry. I just don’t understand—”
“What is so hard to understand, Margot?”
I can tell she’s biting her tongue, trying not to scream, those ravaged fingers tugging at her hair as she begs me to just put it together. Figure it out. Her frustration is mounting, leaking out of her eyes, and I brace myself to hear the thing that, deep down, I’ve known was coming all along. All those little moments are bubbling up to the surface now. Moments with Lucy when someone asked about her major and she shrugged them off; when they mentioned never seeing her on campus and she just smirked and walked away. She never studies. Sure, she reads, but they’re books I’ve lent her. She was like that last year, too, jealous girls speculating about all the terrible things she must be doing to get by. She’s always coming and going out of the house like the rest of us, but she works, too.She’s the only one of us with somewhere to be that isn’t on campus, so how do we know she isn’t just grabbing her backpack and taking off to Penny Lanes instead of going to class like the rest of us?
The answer is: we don’t.
“Nothing showed up because there is no Lucy Sharpe enrolled at Rutledge,” Sloane says at last, and I feel the twist of something sharp in my chest: fear, cold and hard, plunging in deep like a knife to the heart. “Lucy Sharpe doesn’t exist.”
CHAPTER 47
AFTER
I walk inside to find Sloane and Nicole in Lucy’s bedroom, tired eyes drinking it in. The place is destroyed: floor to ceiling, wall to wall, drawers thrust open and clothes disheveled. Shoes kicked out of the closet and books splayed out like a bomb went off.
“Did you check under the bed?” I ask, joining them on her unmade mattress. I can still smell her here: vanilla and cigarette. Musky and delicate. Radically both.
“Yeah,” Sloane says. “Her phone’s not there.”
I nod, pulling my legs up under me. “How about in the desk?”
“Gone, too.”
I put my hand on Nicole’s knee, squeezing gently. This is the hardest for her, I know. The performance, the lies. She’s a good person.
“I’m sorry—” she starts, but Sloane shakes her head, cutting her off.
“I already told you, it’s not your fault.”
“What did Frank say to you out there after we left?” Nicole asks me next.
“Nothing,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine.”
“God, I hate this,” she says, sinking farther into the bed. She lays her head on Lucy’s pillow and I notice a black curl there, long and coiled, resting delicately on top. A little piece of her still stuck to the sham.
I bet, if we looked hard enough, we’d find pieces of her everywhere.
“It’ll be over soon,” Sloane says. “Give it a couple days. They’ll find the stuff on her phone.”
“How long until you think it all comes out?”
They both look at me and I just shrug, attention drifting around the room. I feel a bit dazed, seeing it like this, sort of like taking in the ruins of a place you once loved. Her room the epicenter of the earthquake that shook our lives apart.
“I have no idea,” I say at last. “The press is still reporting she’s a student. Rutledge has got to say something eventually.”
