Only If You’re Lucky

It’s dark by the time Lucy comes home, the scuff of her shoes ascending the porch steps alerting me to her presence.

I’ve been in my room this entire time, all eight hours, my door bolted and my laptop open and dead on my comforter. My thoughts on Lucy, on Eliza, on how the two of them have more in common than I ever could have imagined. I hear the front door slam as she makes her way into the living room, her feet heavy as she stomps through the house.

“Hello?” she calls, her voice echoing through the empty living room. “Where is everyone?”

She can be so quiet when she wants, so catlike and contained, but now, I feel her radiating through the walls, the floor, her very being pumping hard like an organ deprived of oxygen. Something atrophying slowly, a transplant suddenly rejected by its host.

I hear a banging on my door that comes out of nowhere: a hard, closed-fist pounding that makes the bones of the house rattle in place. I eye the knob jiggling back and forth, the door jerking wildly on its hinges.

“What is with the locked doors today?” Lucy yells, slamming her palm against the wood. “Margot, get out here. We need to talk.”

I stay rooted on my bed, frozen with fear, a million different scenarios running through my mind.

“All of us,” she adds, and somehow, I can tell she’s making her way back to the living room, waiting for me to follow.

Knowing that eventually, like always, I will.

After a few more seconds of silent debate, I stand up and walk to the door, twisting the dead bolt and opening it wide. The hallway is empty in front of me, the overhead lights all clicked off, and I creep into the living room, rounding the corner to find Lucy sitting on the couch. Her hair is frizzier than normal, her skin shiny and a little too damp, and I glance out the window, into the inky black night. Noticing, for the first time, that it’s started to rain.

“What’s going on?” I ask, a little tremor in my voice as I try to see through those sparkling eyes. They’re impenetrable, like always, tough as diamonds and just as rare.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” she says, glancing to the staircase just as Sloane and Nicole come creeping down. “Everyone, sit.”

Sloane looks at me, eyes wide and unusually afraid, before she and Nicole walk to the second couch and sit down in tandem. I stay standing at the edge of the room and Lucy turns to me next, willing me forward. I can feel the pull of her like a rope around my waist; I can feel the tension, the physical tug, and I let her gaze guide me farther into the room, though I stop short at the coffee table, refusing to get closer.

“There are clearly some things we need to get off our chests,” Lucy says at last, leading us like a meeting, and for the very first time, I see little glimmers of Mr. Jefferson in her face. I see those same faint lines around her eyes I never noticed before; the slight upturn of her mouth, his pointed chin. But it’s the hair, mostly, that charcoal color. As deep and dark as a bottomless hole.

Eliza took after her mother completely, bright-skinned and honey-blond-haired. At least that’s one thing Lucy got for herself.

“Come on,” she says when no one speaks up.

Sloane looks at me again, her lips pursed shut, and I wonder why she’s being so uncharacteristically quiet right now—until I think of that first conversation outside the shed. Me questioning her loyalty to Lucy and her shrinking back, revealing her truth.

“Maybe I’m being harsh,” she had said, suddenly doubting herself. “Or maybe I’m afraid of what would happen if I stopped.”

I glance to Nicole next, so wisp-thin it looks like she might disappear, and the tension in the room is so heavy, so solid, I can feel my insides caving like moist dirt is being heaped on my chest. The mounting pressure of being buried alive.

“I know someone wants to say something,” Lucy continues, crossing her arms. “Everyone’s been weird since the night on the island.”

We stay quiet, bodies paralyzed with the exception of our racing hearts, our darting eyes, though it’s not for a lack of things to say. The problem is I have too many questions, too many fears, all of them buzzing around in my mind like a swarm of insects, making it impossible to grab on to just one.

“Okay,” she says at last, standing up fast before stalking off into the kitchen. “If this is how it’s gonna be.”

Sloane and I exchange a look again, silently wondering what she’ll do next, before Lucy reemerges with a handle of Svedka in one hand and a knife from the knife block clutched in the other.

“What are you doing?” Sloane asks, instinctively scooting back, her arm launching up to shield Nicole next to her like a mother in the driver’s seat just before a crash. “Put that back.”

“Calm down,” Lucy says, plopping onto the floor before placing the knife in front of her. “I refuse to just sit here in silence. We’re going to talk, and this is how we’re going to do it.”

We all watch as she reaches out and flicks the knife, the metal tip turning in slow, somber circles.

“We’re not playing your stupid game,” Sloane says.

“There are obviously things we need to ask each other,” Lucy snaps back, staring at Sloane before diverting her gaze over to Nicole, to me. “So, let’s ask. Let’s get it out.”

She takes a swig from the bottle, smacking her lips before grabbing a sucker from the coffee table, tossing the wrapper on the floor and popping it into her mouth.

“Truth or dare,” she asks, looking down at the knife. Sloane shakes her head, though I can see her resolve melting. Her desperate need for answers, all those questions she wants to ask. Her anger toward Lucy over these last few weeks steadily mounting, getting stronger. Ready to rip right out of her like a raging storm.

“Fine,” Lucy says once it becomes clear Sloane isn’t going to bite. She turns her attention to me next, lowers her voice. “We’ll let Margot go first.”

My body goes rigid as my eyes dart over to Sloane, seeking out her permission like always. She just stares at me—she doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t shake her head, either—so I walk over to the center of the room before taking a seat on the floor, my back digging into the coffee table and my hand slowly gripping the knife.

Sloane lowers herself down beside me slowly, a show of solidarity as she leans against Nicole’s legs.

“Spin it,” Lucy says, and I feel myself blink. Everything feels muffled, hazy, as the memories of the last nine months pulse around me now; the many, many times the four of us have been in this living room, sitting in a circle just like this. Telling Lucy whatever she wants; readily doing anything she asks.

“Margot,” she says, and I lift my head, eyes on hers. Wondering how to word all the things I so desperately need to know. Because Lucy is a liar, yes, but I realize now that’s not even the problem. The problem is she’s been honest, too, and I have no idea how to tell what’s real and what’s not. What’s the truth, sprinkled in so carefully, so casually, and what’s nothing but an outright lie. She’s let me in on little things, cherished things. Things that have shown me the rarest of glimmers into who she really is.

Things that still make me love her, somehow. Despite or maybe even because of it all.

“Spin,” she repeats, and I exhale slowly, grabbing the bottle of vodka between us and taking a pull to coat my throat. Her pupils seem to be stretched to three times their natural size and she nods at me, a red stain on her teeth, before I flick the knife and watch it twirl, all of us leaning forward as it slows, breath smothered in our throats.

“Truth or dare,” I whisper, watching as Lucy grabs the handle, the knife tip pointed directly at her. I feel the air exit the room as Sloane straightens up and Lucy starts to smile.

“Truth,” she says, although the way she’s looking at me now, eyebrows lifted, I know she means it more as a dare. She’s taunting me, egging me on, challenging me to ask her the thing she knows I want to ask. This is her game, after all. It always has been.

This is what Lucy does. She dangles.

“Why did you do it?” I ask, that single question encompassing so much. The last two years pummel over me now as I picture Eliza and me in her bedroom, that silhouette outside in the dark. The missing picture and Lucy showing up at Rutledge; coming into my dorm room, singling me out. Finding out where Levi would live and casting her spell over him, too, before following him into a darkness so dark, he’d never be able to claw his way out.

I picture his body in the mud, eyes wide and afraid. The trail of death that seems to follow her around for reasons I still can’t explain.

Lucy looks at me, head tilted like she’s observing me from behind a piece of thick clear glass. Like I’m some foreign creature she doesn’t understand until a thin smile stretches slowly across her face. The look of a person who’s just realized they’ve won.

“Margot,” she says at last. “You, of all people, should know the answer to that.”