Only If You’re Lucky

“I told you you had it in you.”

I whip around at the sound of her voice, the silhouette of Lucy between the open shed doors making my stomach turn. I hadn’t heard her follow me out here, hadn’t registered the slap of the back door above the roar of the rain. The rumble of thunder masking her steps as she approached me slowly, a predator slithering up silently behind their prey.

Fresh tears burn my eyes as I remember the two of us on the beach again, me muttering about how I wanted to be bolder, braver, different than I’ve always been. Not the kind of person who let other people walk all over me, and Lucy’s voice in my ear like a challenge, a dare—or maybe it was a reminder. Another little clue that she had been there, always, watching me in my lowest moments.

“I know you have it in you to be different. I’ve seen it.”

“It was an accident,” I say, shaking my head, the same thing I’ve been telling myself for the last two years. “I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t—”

“She never appreciated you,” Lucy says, walking closer. “I saw the way she treated you before you even saw it yourself.”

I imagine Lucy witnessing all those times Eliza rolled her eyes as I tried to help her, the way she and Levi hushed into a nasty silence as I approached them on the dock, and feel a shard of shame lodge in my chest at the thought of Lucy seeing me like that: so malleable, so weak. A rubber dummy that simply sprang back for more after taking a punch, ready and waiting to get hurt again.

My own words echo in my ears now, the four of us sitting on my bed on that very first night.

“The thing you need to understand about Eliza is that everyone loved her,” I had said, thinking only I knew the real truth of it all. “But just because you loved her, it didn’t mean she loved you back.”

“You deserved to know,” Lucy says, and I remember the sound that had alerted me to their presence: a kicked can followed by Eliza’s low voice. The only reason I rounded that corner and even found them at all. I always assumed Eliza, Levi, and I were the only people up there, the only ones left, but I realize now: that noise had to have come from somewhere.

“It was you,” I say, a sudden shudder cutting through me, quick and vicious, like swimming through a cold spot. The thought of Lucy pulling my puppet strings even then, even before I knew she existed. “You wanted me to see them like that.”

“I wanted you to do something,” she responds.

“Why?” I ask, imagining Lucy watching as I roamed. Knowing what Eliza was doing just around the corner and spotting that can, kicking it hard. Making a noise so I would find her.

“Because we’re the same,” Lucy says. “You and I are the same, Margot. Spending our lives wanting people who never wanted us back.”

The sound of the rain turns to white noise in my ears as a flash from outside illuminates us both. The thought comes to me quick, before I can stop it, as fast and fleeting as the lightning itself: Lucy is right. We are the same. We were both rejected by the very people who should have loved us the most: her father, my best friend. All we wanted was acceptance and belonging. A chance at being a part of something bigger than ourselves.

“I know you know who I am,” she says, taking a step closer. “I heard you and Sloane talking in your room. I know she looked me up at work, I saw you walk off with Danny at the party. I know you’ve been putting it together.”

I think about how Lucy is always there, always listening, always hiding herself in plain sight. I guess she wasn’t at Penny Lanes that day like we thought, instead creeping home early and listening to our whispers. Pushing her ear flush against the door. I guess she really did have one eye on me on that island after all and she had simply been biding her time with Levi, giving me space while she waited for me to figure it out.

“I saw what happened to Eliza that night and I took my chance,” she continues. “I saw that I could actually step into the life I wanted after having to watch her live it from a distance.”

I feel my body start to sway, that murky moral logic making my head nod gently along with her words. Strangely, in this moment, it feels like I understand Lucy more than I ever have before because I’ve felt that same way so many times: Maggie and me on the lawn outside Hines, the envy and awe as we watched Lucy from afar. Her comment on Halloween after we ran into each other, understanding how desperately I wanted to live another life. All those times I had looked at Eliza and felt that flame of resentment flare up in my chest when I saw the things she had that she always took for granted. Lucy had wanted them, too, and I can see it so clearly: her watching through the open window as we sat around the dining room table. The Jeffersons dancing in the kitchen and Eliza and me on the dock, staring up at the stars. Sharing our secrets like best friends do. Her curiosity growing, morphing, taking over everything and the impulse to keep getting closer, from the dock to the yard to inside the house. Flipping through Eliza’s planner; realizing, once she fell, how easy it would be to simply show up where she should have been. Start her new life in the very spot Eliza’s stopped.

Her best friend, her boyfriend, all of us ready and waiting for her.

“I’ve been trying to make you see it,” she finishes. “I’ve been trying to get you to understand that you don’t have to feel so guilty all the time. You don’t have to keep punishing yourself. She deserved it.”

I think back to that night at Penny Lanes, Lucy’s soapbox about murder and death. The way she had looked at me and winked, spewing out justifications like she was trying to tell me it was okay.

“I would kill someone who deserves it.”

I think back to all of us around the dinner table, that fragile stem twisting between her long, skinny fingers. Every little comment a chisel to my conscience, chipping away slowly, trying to make it disappear. I always thought it was Levi she was playing with, dangling the knowledge of what I told her like a cat clutching a mouse’s tail. Pawing at him, making him squirm. Torturing him slowly just because she could. But it was never Levi—it was me she was trying to get to confess, all those little moments when she asked me questions about Eliza, her death, before sitting back and waiting patiently, quietly trying to pry it all out. She wanted me to put it together and I had tiptoed around it so many times, so eager to ease the crushing weight of it all. This burden to carry that was solely mine. So I had sprinkled in my own truths when I could, telling Lucy about an argument, an accident. The guilt I carried and all the different decisions I wished I could have made. I had been attempting to justify it, too: sitting on the porch with Mr. Jefferson, frantically searching for someone else to pin it on. For a way to channel my guilt into rage.

I chose Levi, of course, the only other person who could shoulder my blame. He had been there with her and everyone knew it. Other than me, who nobody saw, he was the last person to see her alive. And in a way, it was true: none of it would have happened if he hadn’t come into our lives that day, Eliza’s lips dipped below the water as she watched him curiously. His tan legs ambling down the dock, him handing her a cigarette. All his vices turning into hers, changing her into somebody she wasn’t. Taking her from me even before she died.

I look at Lucy now, suddenly remembering the way she stood up and followed Levi into the trees, her eyes on mine like we were sharing a secret. Like she was granting my wish, that thing I had muttered to her in the kitchen. My hatred for Levi like a festering boil.

“Why did he have to die?” I ask, realizing now that it doesn’t make sense. If Lucy was there the night Eliza fell, then she knew Levi had nothing to do with it. She knew of his innocence all along. “Why did you kill Levi?”

“I didn’t,” she says slowly, leaning forward like she’s wondering when I’ll finally fess up. “You did.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, even though I can barely remember the end of that night. Even though Sloane said I had been looking for him, stumbling off on my own and waking up in the morning with mud on my pants. Even though I had that horrible feeling the next day, that sinking nausea, it wasn’t the same as the way I felt waking up after that last night with Eliza: the horror of realizing it wasn’t a dream. I’ll never forget that feeling: the terrible knowing that you’re the reason someone else is gone. The blood on your hands that’s always there, ever-present, no matter how hard you try to scrub it away. I understand better than anyone that something inside you changes after you’ve taken another life. Something cellular and permanent; an alteration of your very being, your very DNA. There is nothing muddy about it; in fact, it’s crystal clear.

If I killed Levi that night, I would have known it in the morning.

“I didn’t kill him,” I say, even firmer now. “I had no reason to.”

“Come on, Margot. You hated him,” she says. “You told me yourself you wished it had been him instead of Eliza.”

“Of course I wish it had been him,” I say, remembering the way Lucy had ambled up to me that morning, her voice in my ear: “It feels good, doesn’t it? To finally get what you want.” “But that doesn’t mean I killed him. You were the one who followed him out there.”

“I was trying to calm him down,” she says. “But he wouldn’t listen to me. He was a lot drunker than I realized, yelling at me that he couldn’t pretend anymore.”

“Pretend what?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“So you just left him out there?”

“Yes,” she says. “There was no reasoning with him like that. I tried for a while, but eventually I just left him alone to cool off.”

We’re both quiet, staring at each other, all our deceits tangling together in our minds until they’re impossible to unravel.

“What about Parker?” I ask at last, my final card, shame at the accusation creeping into my cheeks mixed with a hint of pride that I know her secrets, too. “It’s just a coincidence that your last boyfriend also died right after a big argument?”

Lucy looks at me like she’s just been slapped, a mixture of shock and hurt as she processes the question. I think about us up on the roof, all those rumors Danny told me about her swirling around like a cloud of smoke. The gossip she absorbed from everyone back home and how she had tried to outrun it only to be met with the same thing here.

“I had nothing to do with that,” she says, her voice suddenly so cold. “It’s not my fault he got into a car after drinking too much.”

“What were you arguing about?”

“If you must know, we were arguing about my dad,” she says, those final two words sounding so strange in her mouth. Like she still doesn’t think they belong to her. Like she’s tried them on so many times only to find that they’ll never truly fit. “My mom had just told me where to find him. I guess their agreement was that she would stay quiet as long as the money came—and then, one month, it stopped and she spilled.”

I think about the envelope I found in Eliza’s dresser and how it was made out to Lucy’s address. All that cash inside, thousands of dollars. Eliza must have intercepted it, somehow, all those nights she snuck into her dad’s office, poking around, stealing liquor from his private stash.

I close my eyes, wondering if she had any idea what she had stumbled across. The enormity of that single domino she inadvertently tipped over, removing it from wherever she found it and keeping it as her own.

“Parker told me not to go,” Lucy says at last, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to tears in her eyes. “He said it was a bad idea, that my dad wouldn’t want me, and that I shouldn’t even be thinking of him as my dad, anyway. That real dads don’t hide from their daughters with hush money. And maybe I should have listened to him”—she shrugs, wiping her nose—“but I was angry, okay? He was telling me hard truths that I didn’t want to hear. After he died, there was nothing else keeping me in Fairfield. I had nothing left to lose.”

I find myself nodding along, all these pieces that have been floating around for the last nine months now pushed together to reveal something whole. It makes sense, all of it, and despite the fact that Lucy has lied about so much, despite the fact that she’s a master of manipulation, of misdirection and deceit, I find myself believing her now. I find myself wanting to somehow still make this work, wanting to simply give in to her web of secrets, so sticky and strong, because it’s easier that way. It’s easier not to fight them but to wrap myself up in them like a blanket, all silky and smooth as she crawls even closer, whispering her little lies in my ear. Because what the four of us had this year was good, real. I know it was, even if it wasn’t entirely honest. There is no way those moments were manufactured: socked feet sliding around Penny Lanes and fits of laughter so intense, so pure, I thought my sides might split like a busted seam. My conscience healing slowly like scar tissue, something thick and hard growing over the spot in my heart that was once so raw. Secrets whispered in the night, bashful truths and audacious dares that wound us all together, so maddeningly tight that sometimes it hurt.

And that’s the problem, I suppose, when so many lives become so intricately entwined: one snag, one single loose thread, and it all threatens to come undone.

“I didn’t kill Levi,” Lucy says now, drawing my attention back. “But that detective thinks I did.”

I look at her, eyebrows bunched.

“He brought me in for more questioning,” she continues. “People are saying they saw me follow him. That they saw us fighting. It’s the same thing all over again.”

“Maybe it really was an accident,” I say, mostly to myself, but Lucy is already shaking her head.

“His neck,” she says. “Those bruises.”

“Trevor?” I ask, the next logical option. “Maybe they kept fighting and it went too far?”

“I don’t know who it was, but I’m going to find out,” Lucy says. “And I’m going to turn them in. I’m not going down for this.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I say, but I see Lucy’s eyes widen, some new understanding dawning on her as she starts to back up. The rain outside has slowed to a steady trickle now, a handful of stars peeking out from behind a blanket of clouds, and it makes me think of that night on the roof again, Lucy’s hand in mine as she traced them for me. The constellations so close and clear it felt like I could reach out and grab them like a handful of sand.

“I don’t want to keep running,” she says, almost to herself. She backs up some more, closer to the doors, and I have the strange sensation that they’re hiding from us now, all those stars. Aware of some impending disaster they don’t want to witness. “I’m not going to take the fall.”

“You won’t have to,” I say. “Lucy, we’ll handle it.”

“Margot, I think it was—”

But before she can finish, I watch her expression twist into something haunted, something strange, her mouth wordless and wide before her gaze travels down to her stomach, a bloom of red erupting through her shirt.