Page 43 of Only If You're Lucky
It takes a second for me to realize what she’s referring to, but then it returns to me slowly, like recalling a dream. It’s been living quietly between us for the last four weeks, really, my admission curled up like a hibernating animal. Neither of us wanting to poke it awake, acknowledge its presence. Talk about those words I had muttered as my body trembled cold in the kitchen; Lucy feeding me water, baby sips in the dark. It had barely been conscious, the thought ejecting itself from my mind like an exorcism: demonic and violent, completely out-of-body. I just had to get it out, the terrible belief that had been living inside me for far too long.
“I wish it was him. It should have been him.”
“Of course I meant it,” I say at last. And I expect to feel ashamed afterward, maybe even embarrassed. I expect to feel disgust or surprise but instead I feel lighter the second I say it, like the thought itself had been tied around my ankle. A ball and chain weighing me down. “Eliza didn’t deserve to die like that. Levi did.”
CHAPTER 35
AFTER
I can feel the collective intake of breath, all three of us sucking it in. This is a detail we hadn’t accounted for, a fuzzy memory we had forgotten all about.
Lucy’s blood, Levi’s clothes.
We can work with this, though. We can use it to our advantage if we play it right.
“How do you know it’s Lucy’s?” I ask at last, remembering the way it had dripped from her finger like a leaky faucet, little red spots polka-dotting the floor. Detective Frank can clearly tell he caught us off guard, a satisfied smile emerging on his lips.
“Her parents provided DNA samples for us to compare it to,” he says, his eyes trained on me now. Me, and only me. “It was a match.”
I rub my temples, the idea of it all so hard to grasp.
“They want to see their daughter found just as much as the rest of us,” he adds.
“I’m sure they do,” Sloane snaps, her voice sarcastic and sharp.
“What’s important here is we know your friend was with Levi Butler the night he died and we know they were in close enough proximity for her blood to get on his clothing,” Frank says, growing impatient. “Why was she bleeding, girls?”
The moment flashes through my mind again and suddenly, we’re back together, all four of us, the citrus sky giving everything an unnatural glow. It had felt like another dream, another bad trip, Lucy’s hand bleeding in such a steady, rhythmic drip that the sound of her blood hitting the floor reminded me of the second hand of a ticking clock, strangely soothing in the silence.
I see her lift her finger to her lips, eyes on mine as she sucked it dry.
“Did he hurt her?”
“No,” Sloane says, and I blink out of the memory. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Did he hurt any of you?”
We’re all quiet, hands wringing nervously in our laps.
“We know this boy’s background,” Frank says, eyes darting back over to me again. “You can tell us.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she repeats.
“The marks on his body… they weren’t natural. This wasn’t just some accident—”
“You heard her,” I interrupt, realizing too late that my fingers are digging into my palms so hard the thin skin is starting to sting. I release my grip and wipe the sweat from my hands, placing them on my lap to hide the little crescents left behind by my nails. “It wasn’t like that. And we don’t know where she is.”
The room falls into a heavy silence and Detective Frank just stands there, waiting for us to fill it, even though he knows, by now, that we’ll only refuse. Finally, he exhales, looking at the officersstill standing behind him and jerking his head toward her bedroom door before turning his attention back at us.
“Well, all right,” he says, chubby fingers back in his belt loops. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be, I’m going to need you girls to wait outside while we search.”
CHAPTER 36
BEFORE
We’ve been in a state of comfortable quiet since Lucy told me about the cave, Levi, that secret thing they do when the four of us are fast asleep.
It feels strange now, thinking about it: all those nights I had been lying in bed, closing my eyes, not even knowing there was another body beneath me. Their hidden presence like a fifth roommate I never knew we had. But now that I’m in on it, now that I know, it’s hard to imagine I didn’t somehow feel the company of another person down there. That I didn’t pick up on the reason I always felt so cold, that underground pocket of concrete and dirt drafting into my bedroom, emitting through the floor.
