Page 7 of Only If You're Lucky
“You’re wasting your life,”she had said, me glowering in my sweatpants as she shimmied on some cutoff shorts. She was wearing makeup, too, which was weird to look at. She never wore makeup.“You’re only young once.”
It hurt to realize she had started to think of our Friday nights together as a waste, but I knew what she meant. We had been doing the same thing for practically a decade: bike rides to 7-Elevento spend our allowance on sweet things and Slurpees before hightailing it back home. Staying up late, giddy and gossiping, then sleeping in in the mornings before doing it all over again. Of course, things evolved as we grew older, swapping gummy worms for wine we grabbed out of her parents’ refrigerator, occasionally the good stuff Eliza found hidden in her dad’s office, but the thing that stayed the same was the way I lived for those weekends, clinging to them even harder once I sensed her desire to start doing something different.
I remember wondering if that kind of power imbalance was normal in a friendship—if every pair consisted of one half who seemed to love the other just a little bit more—but I didn’t want to question it. I was content with the way things were.
I never felt like I needed anybody else—but slowly, inevitably, Eliza did.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her now, my fingertips touching her static face. I wish I could take back every stupid argument, every meaningless fight. Her death had shocked the Outer Banks, sending a ripple of uncomfortable contemplation across everyone who ever knew her. It was a stark reminder that none of us are immortal—especially the ones, like Eliza, who lived like they were. And it had scared me for a while, realizing that any second could be the end of it: something as simple as a trip into traffic, a cramp while you’re swimming. That a life as bright as hers could be extinguished without even the courtesy of a heads-up. But at the same time, the abruptness of it all made me realize that she was right.
You’re only young once, and only if you’re lucky.
“Margot.”I jump at the sudden banging on my door. “Girls are up. Get out here.”
I take one last glance at the picture, guilt washing over me. It’s pretty obvious, now, what I’m doing here. I’m trying to replaceher. Eliza is my phantom limb: an amputation that still hurts me, haunts me, despite the fact that she doesn’t even exist. She is the dull, constant throb that wakes me in the night and doubles me over; sometimes, in those early morning hours, I forget she’s even gone. I’ll click open my eyes and reach out to the side, half expecting to feel her warm body beside me like during those summertime sleepovers. My fingers dragging their way across my comforter, searching for the familiar feel of her—but then, every time, I find it cold and empty, the pain increasing until it’s so unbearable I think I might faint.
I know now that if I’m ever going to move on, if I’m ever going to be whole, I need something to take her place. Someone else who can slip into her skin; who can give me everything she once did—or, rather, someone who can show me who I am without her. Because the truth is, I’ve only ever been Eliza’s best friend, ever since that first day in kindergarten when we clicked so easily. And even though we were opposites—me, brainy and bookish, and her, wild and alive—I was the yin to her yang, the quiet sidekick who talked reason into her ear when she got the sudden urge to do something stupid. I used to think that her standing next to me was the contrast I needed to stand out on my own, but I know now that was never the case. Instead, she was simply something I could cling to; a safety blanket that felt familiar and warm.
While nobody else ever remembered my face, knew my name, when I walked into a room with her, I saw it click: the recognition, the respect.Eliza’s friend.
“Coming!” I yell, standing up before propping the photo onto the mantel.
That’s why, when Eliza died, it felt like my identity did, too. Her death erased us both completely and I wonder if that’s the reason why I feel so drawn to Lucy. Why my eyes always gravitatedto her when she walked down the hall or lay out on campus. Why I agreed to any of this. There are certain similarities between them and I wonder now if I had sensed them all along, my subconscious pulling me toward the closest thing I could find to my friend. After all, being loved by Eliza was like a sudden hit of adrenaline—a gateway drug, something addicting and freeing that left you craving your next hit the second she stepped away. And if Eliza was adrenaline, that makes Lucy something even more. Something more addicting, more dangerous.
Something I probably shouldn’t be dabbling in—but at the same time, something impossible to refuse.
CHAPTER 6
AFTER
I plop down on my bed with an exaggerated huff. Detective Frank is gone, finally, and I want to take advantage of the precious time to think.
I glance around my room, taking in all the subtle changes that have taken place over the nine months since I’ve made this space my home: the pictures cluttering up the mantel are with Lucy, Sloane, and Nicole now, our lips pursed in puckery pouts and our cheeks smashed together with too much force. Most of them were taken in the early days: those sweet weeks of summer when we were just getting to know each other. Those first few months when everything was fine. You can tell by how different we all look, Nicole especially, her cheeks still baby-round and not the concave craters they would slowly shrink into. Then there’s the string of Christmas lights hung up around the walls that I never bothered to take down; the cigarette burns visible on the floor, little black dots peppered across the hardwood from when Lucy was too lazy to grab an ashtray. All of the evidence of the life I’ve built in this house. The person I’ve become.
That person is almost unrecognizable to the person I was when I first stepped foot in here—though, I suppose, that was the point.
I wonder how much time we have until the search for Lucy really ramps up. I know, right now, they’re grasping at straws: an adult gone for three days is hardly enough to call her a missing person, especially considering what they’ll soon come to learn. And Sloane wasn’t lying when she said it before: Lucy does this kind of thing. Everyone who knows her knows it.
But still, Levi is dead. Levi is dead, Lucy is gone, and someone has to pay.
I roll over now and reach for my bedside table, yanking the drawer open. Inside, I sift through all the typical clutter: a TV remote, a couple empty lighters I haven’t bothered to throw away. Wrinkled receipts and dried-out pens, until finally, my fingers wrap around something cold and smooth shoved into the back and I pull it out, tap it awake.
It’s Lucy’s phone, a smattering of stars sprinkled across the lock screen.
I know I can’t hang on to this forever. I know they’ll eventually track it and it’ll lead them back here, to this house. To the three of us—Sloane, Nicole, and me—her roommates and confidants. Her best friends. But it’s better than Lucy having it, we all knew that. There were certain things that made sense for her to keep: her ID, her wallet. A handful of credit cards, although of course she’d have to use those to be tracked down. Her phone, on the other hand, was something we couldn’t risk. At least this way, by the time they find it, it’ll be stashed underneath her bed or something, completely obscured by dirty clothes and rogue shoes. The battery will be dead, which will explain how we never heard the ringing of various people trying to reach her.
Which will explain why, after always getting voice mail we stopped trying ourselves.
But by the time that happens, they will have already found their answers… only they won’t be the answers I know they’re expecting. Lucy’s unpredictable like that. No, the answers they’ll find will only lead to more questions, and slowly, carefully, we’ll slink back into the shadows and let all those other things crawl quietly into the light. We’ll remove ourselves from the story completely, letting it morph into something different, better. Staged.
What Detective Frank doesn’t yet know is that nothing with Lucy is ever as it seems.
I stare at the stars on her phone now, my eyes gravitating toward all the constellations she once taught me: Orion, the hunter, and Taurus, the bull—but it’s Gemini where they linger. I couldn’t see it at first, Lucy and me lying on the roof, her hand in mine as she lifted my arm into the air and traced it for me.
“Just there,”she had said, her smoky breath warm against the early fall chill.“See the two people? They’re holding hands. Like us.”
Then, once I saw it, it never went away. Every single night I would look up and find it, my eyes gravitating to it naturally like one of those inkblot pictures: something that, once seen, could never be unseen. Lying on my back, a once-smoldering fire dying in the night and mounds of warm bodies passed out around it. I remember training my eyes on the sky, thinking of Lucy. Knowing that she was out there, somewhere—thattheywere out there, Lucy and Levi. Spending his final few hours together without him even knowing it.
I remember lying there, staring at those stars, and feeling the familiar pinch of envy in my chest.
