Page 9 of Only If You're Lucky
“You’re interrogating her,” Sloane snaps back. “Lay off.”
The room grows silent again, the four of us sitting in a beat of uncomfortable quiet. The arguing, the hostility: for a second, it concerns me, thinking that the three of them might not be as tight as I thought—but then, I realize it’s the opposite. Eliza and I usedto bicker like this, too, throwing the kind of sharp jabs at each other only best friends could survive. Words can stick, wedging themselves fast into the tenderest parts of you—but when you have years of memories to thicken the skin, they aren’t quite as fatal. Instead, they bounce off, land with a whimper. Most of the time, anyway.
“Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the house,” Sloane says, standing up from the couch. “Then you can meet the boys.”
“The boys?” I ask.
“The boys next door,” Lucy says, pulling her legs beneath her. “They own the house—well, technically, the fraternity does. Kappa Nu. They use it for extra rooms when they need it, rent it out when they don’t.”
“That’s why it looks like this—” Sloane grunts.
“—and why it’s so cheap,” Nicole cuts in. “Our rent is, like, unheard of.”
“Trevor’s the president,” Lucy says. “Nicole gets defensive.”
“I’m not defensive,” she spits, definitely defensive. “I’m just saying we’re lucky to live here. Most people pay four times the amount to be on this side of town.”
Sloane and Lucy shoot each other a look, like they’ve had this conversation so many times before, and slowly, their blank stares break into smiles. Nicole looks annoyed for a second, being on the outside of this inside joke, but when Lucy and Sloane start to laugh, her shoulders slouch and she joins in, too.
“You’re whipped,” Lucy says, throwing a pillow in her direction.
“Trust me, I’m not.” Nicole laughs, tossing it back. “This is your fault, anyway. I told you I wanted to be single and you wouldn’t listen.”
“If you don’t want him, I’ll take him,” Lucy mocks, provocative but playful. “I’m not going to apologize for introducing you to the most beautiful boy on campus.”
The three of them are grinning now, devious little smiles that make me feel even more like an outsider as I watch this unspoken thing blooming between them, beautiful and mysterious and entirely theirs. It’s like we’re back on that lawn again, all four of us in the exact same roles: me, watching curiously from a distance. Them, oblivious to their surroundings and the strange effect they have on everyone else.
I continue to sit, not wanting to intrude, until Lucy throws the pillow at me next and I catch it quickly against my chest, my heart slamming hard against the fabric.
“Margot saw him this morning,” she says. “She knows what I mean.”
It feels like an unspoken invitation, an outstretched arm pulling me into whatever this thing is between them, and I hold the pillow tight between my fingers and watch as she winks, that little curl in her lip making my cheeks flush hot.
Making me think, for just a second, that I would take her hand and follow her anywhere.
CHAPTER 8
Sloane and I have covered it all, starting with the upstairs. She took me into her room first, then Nicole’s, both of which were adorned with the type of modest, mass-produced décor that comes with a college budget, though even the smallest peek into their respective spaces revealed so much. The focal point of Sloane’s room was a giant white desk covered with textbooks and papers and a sleeping laptop; a large calendar on the wall with old exam dates obsessively circled before getting crossed out in red. Her bedside table held a scrawny lamp and a colorful glass bowl with a nug of weed waiting patiently inside. A stack of thick paperbacks, a cup of water. A pack of matches with some bar logo I vaguely recognized.
Nicole’s room, on the other hand, showed no evidence of study. Hers was cluttered with clothes and makeup and mismatched shoes; it wasn’t dirty, butmessy,like she had a habit of simply flinging off her outfit and letting it live wherever it landed. I noticed some of Trevor’s things peeking out from behind her own: a pair of blue boxers, a white crew sock. A Kappa Nu sweatshirt draped over the back of her chair. The air was unusually stuffy up there—heat rises, naturally—and I found myself suddenly grateful for a room on thelower level. Mine, in comparison, was unusually cold, the floor frigid to the touch, and I wondered why. Maybe there was a vent by my bed I hadn’t noticed earlier.
I saw Sloane and Nicole’s shared bathroom next, tiny and clean and smelling of lavender, but mine and Lucy’s, I learned once we ventured back downstairs, had a malfunctioning toilet tank that caused water to run at all hours of the night.
“If it gets really annoying, just jiggle the handle,” Sloane had said, wiggling it with her fingers as if to show me how. “We’ve asked the boys to fix it, but, you know.”
She rolled her eyes and I nodded, inherently understanding the headaches that must come with frat boys as landlords.
Lucy’s bedroom door remained mysteriously closed and we skipped past it wordlessly, moving next into the kitchen, then the backyard, a surprisingly large plot of land obscured from view from the street. I survey the patchy grass now, the row of azaleas pushed tight against the side of the house. The single magnolia tree with its milky white flowers and the gravel driveway big enough for half a dozen cars, squinting my eyes in the sudden brightness of the sun reflecting off the bleached-white pebbles.
“This is the shed,” Sloane says, walking me over to a little wooden shack at the edge of the property. “It connects our backyard to Kappa Nu’s. It’s the quickest way to get over there.”
She opens the double doors and a blast of musty air hits me, a combination of smells fighting for attention. I recognize the metallic tang of rust; the cold damp of fresh dirt. But there’s something else, too. Something different: earthy and sweet-smelling like barrels of hay or freshly mown grass. It isn’t until I peer over the edge of the door that I see what’s inside: tight rows of leaves dangling from ropes on the ceiling, each of them swaying gently like hundreds of hangmen in the breeze.
“They’re drying tobacco,” she explains, reading my mind. “Don’t ask.”
I’m momentarily speechless as I stare at the maze of leaves in front of me. They’re absolutely massive, the size of my head, bunched in clusters of three and five. I can barely see past them, the inside of the shed much deeper than it appears, though Sloane forges on, pushing the leaves out of her way like a stage curtain as she moves farther away. I move in quickly behind her, a swirling scent of moss and wood and sweet vanilla making my eyes water. Most of the leaves are yellowing, but some of them are brown, and before I can think twice, I reach up and touch one, its sticky consistency making me think of a spoiling corpse: juicy and putrefied.
“Here’s the frat house,” Sloane says as we make our way out the back doors and into the Kappa Nu backyard. I’m strangely relieved to be out of that place, though I try not to show it. There’s just something about it that makes me uneasy: the ropes and the leaves hanging from the ceiling, obscuring my view, like someone could come up behind me and I’d never even know it. The long, curved blades I had glimpsed dangling from hooks on the wall, dried animal blood caked to their edges. The way the scent of gore and tobacco seemed to mix in my mind, creating something sweet and unsettling like looking down at a rare steak on your plate, stomach roiling as you lick your lips and watch the blood pool.
