Page 36 of Only If You're Lucky
“Molly,” Lucy says. “I was an idiot and gave her a whole pill.”
That explains the euphoria, then. The overwhelming sense of love I felt as I looked at all of them around that fire, dreamily pondering the possibility of Levi and me living together in perfect harmony. What is it about Lucy, I wonder, that causes us all to simply do as she asks? I hadn’t even questioned her about what that pill was. I didn’t even hesitate. I just saw the way she was looking at me, all eager and expectant, and tipped my head back. Hoped for the best.
“Speaking of disappearing, where the hell wereyou?” Sloane asks, directing the question at Nicole now. I walk to the couch and take a seat beside her, making sure to leave a little room between us.
“I don’t even know,” she says at last. She’s holding a cup of coffee, too, but it’s completely full, quivering in her hands. “I went over there early, right after class, and started drinking too fast. I think I was with Trevor the whole night.”
“Not the whole night,” Lucy says, putting her empty mug on the floor. “He was outside for a little.”
“Maybe—” She stops, bunching her eyebrows like she’s trying to remember something. I watch the side of her face as she swallows, shakes her head gently. “Maybe I fell asleep. But somehow, I got home. I woke up in Margot’s room.”
Lucy flings her head back and laughs again, clapping her hands together. This is our normal morning ritual—recounting stories from the night before, bleary and bashful, amused at all the little things we could hardly remember—but right now, it doesn’t feel like it normally does. There’s a darkness to it, a creeping dread like marbled clouds gathering before another summer storm. There were too many things about last night that went wrong and I watch as Lucy and Sloane get up, making their way into the kitchen for more coffee, but Nicole is still sitting, staring. Her eyes on the couch in a way that feels the opposite of focused—like she’s no longer trying to remember something, but instead, trying to forget.
“Are you okay?” I whisper once the others are gone. She still has her wrists covered with her sweatshirt and I try to remember the look of those bruises I saw—unless they weren’t actually bruises at all. It could have been a trick of the light, maybe. A cluster of shadows; a smudge of makeup. It’s tempting to believe that, but still, there was something about them that felt eerily familiar. Something about the placement like five large fingers that makes my stomach twist. “Nicole?”
I reach out to touch her leg, my hand barely grazing the skin when she winces, a physical recoil that makes me yank it straight back.
“Sorry,” I say, alarm creeping into my chest. “Sorry, it’s just… are you—?”
“I’m fine,” she says, placing her cup on the coffee table and pushing it away like it’s something repulsive. “Sorry, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” I nudge. “Last night—”
“Last night was a shitshow,” she says, finally turning to face me. “Honestly, I’m embarrassed.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” I say. “But when I found you this morning, I thought I saw bruises…”
“Oh, yeah.” She laughs, rolling her eyes and pushing up her sweatshirt, the blue from before already morphing into a deep, plum purple. “I vaguely remember Trevor trying to help me walk at one point, holding my arms. I bruise so easily.”
I try to picture it: Trevor grabbing her forearms, guiding her forward, not unlike the way my own fingers dug into her armpits as I yanked her up off the floor and got her in bed. For the first time, I wonder if I left bruises on her, too. I wonder if I’m capable of leaving that kind of mark, evidence of the way I had hoisted her up, clawed at her skin. The dead weight of her almost impossible to hold. I feel a small relief flood into my chest when I remember the time her thigh slammed into the coffee table last month, leaving behind a welt the size of a baseball. The time she tripped in the shed, smacked her shin, and spent three weeks slapping away Lucy’s hand every time she tried to poke at the pooling blood with her finger. That maniacal laugh and devious grin.
“Thanks for being worried,” she says at last, cracking a smile, though it doesn’t really reach her eyes, “but I promise, I’m fine. Remind me to eat dinner the next time we go out.”
CHAPTER 31
It’s unnaturally cold the week leading up to Thanksgiving, the temperature dropping into the forties every time the sun dips down. Everything has felt so stilted since Halloween, so strange, and I can’t help but feel like some cataclysmic change took place that I haven’t picked up on. A tectonic shifting, the very ground no longer solid, but trembling. Threatening to buckle beneath us all.
The day after the party, Trevor and Nicole got into a blowout fight: screaming, crying, Nicole slamming her way out of his room and charging past the rest of us before barreling back into the house. Of course, we chased right after her, asked what was wrong, but she never told us. Never even came close. They made up hours later—they always do—but every time we’re all together now, the tension is so thick, so heavy, it’s almost unbearable. The weight of it all like an anvil on the chest; a crushing mass that makes it hard to breathe.
“She needs to move on,” Lucy says to me now, the two of us making our way out back. The weeds have gotten out of hand this week, the grass calf-high, scratchy against my exposed ankles. “I mean, seriously. It needs to stop. I’m honestly relieved she’s gone.”
Lucy had convinced me to stay on campus over Thanksgiving break.“It’ll feel like summer all over again,”she’d said, crisscross on my bed, making me yearn for those twelve perfect weeks that suddenly felt so far away. In truth, I had been dreading going home to my parents, anyway. Dreading their inevitable questions about my major and whether or not I still wanted to keep it; their nosy inquiries about my new life, new friends, sniffing around for some small detail for them to pick apart. I’ve told them virtually nothing about my roommates—I haven’t wanted to taint them,this,this thing I have that finally feels so blissfully removed from my life back home—so while Sloane left this morning, Nicole two days ago, I hung back, settled in.
Starting tonight, it’s just me and Lucy for one entire week.
“What do you think happened?” I ask, trying to pry information instead of share it myself. I haven’t told anyone about how I found Nicole that night: dress slipped off in the hallway, hair caked with vomit and stuck to the side of her neck. She explicitly asked me not to just before Sloane and Lucy came back from the kitchen. She said she didn’t want to deal with Lucy’s jokes about her being a lightweight, said she just wanted to forget, so I had nodded, agreed, and kept my mouth shut. Because her story made sense. I could see it so vividly: Trevor’s fingers digging into her wrists, pulling her down the fraternity halls. Trying to separate her from the rest of the party once he realized she drank too much. Maybe she got sick on his shirt and that’s why he wasn’t wearing one; maybe that’s what their fight was all about—but lately, I’ve started to feel the emergence of a new feeling in my chest. The same feeling I had when I watched Eliza stomach-down on her bed, knowing that Levi was just outside, watching her in the dark. The same feeling that flared up every time she strutted down the dock, played with her bathing suit.
The same feeling that’s screaming at me right now, flailing its arms. Begging me to acknowledge that something’s not right.
“Oh, I know exactly what happened,” Lucy responds as she slaps away a bug on her arm. “She got shitfaced on Halloween and Trevor got mad because the president’s girlfriend shouldn’t be acting like that.”
“That seems a little harsh,” I say.
“Yeah, well, that’s how it is with them. He gets jealous, too. She’s flirty when she drinks.”
I open my mouth, then immediately close it, still not sure how much to say.
“But if she breaks up with Trevor, we lose the house,” Lucy continues. “The president picks the tenants. We’ll all be homeless.”
