Only If You’re Lucky

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, but messy, 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 the lower 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.

We stand there for a second, right outside the open shed doors, an uncomfortable quiet relaxing over us as we stare at the side of the house. I realize now that it isn’t the shed that’s strange, or even the things in it. I’ve seen my share of shotguns and hunting knives, fishhooks and fillet blades. We’re in South Carolina, after all. Rutledge is a tiny little town in the middle of nothing but forest and fields: thirty minutes to the water in one direction, thirty minutes to the woods in the other. What seems strange to me is the unrestricted access we have to someone else’s property. How easy it was for us to simply let ourselves into their space … and by that logic, how easy it would be for them to let themselves into ours. I don’t want to say anything, though, knowing that a full year spent living in Hines probably just made me too sheltered. I never got to experience the co-ed dorms. The shared living between us and them.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Sloane asks suddenly, the bluntness of her question taking me by surprise. I turn to face her, realizing too late she’s already looking at me.

“Do what?” I ask, wondering how long she’s been doing that: staring. Taking in my expression as I tried to work through my thoughts, a jumbled coil in my brain I still can’t untangle. “Meet the boys?”

“This,” she says, gesturing vaguely around us. “Live here. All of it. You seem … I don’t know. Too nice.”

I have a sudden flash of Maggie in my mind: too nice. What she really means is too boring, too bland, masking the bite of her words with a pinch of politeness in hopes that I won’t taste that comment for what it truly was.

“How do you know Lucy?” she asks again.

“Remember, I lived on your hall—”

“No,” she interrupts, shaking her head. “How do you know her? How did you meet?”

“Well, I don’t know her,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “Not really. We didn’t actually meet—”

“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem like her flavor.”

“Her flavor? What does that mean?”

“You’re very vanilla.”

“Thanks,” I say, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.

“That’s not a dig,” she says.

“Kind of sounded like it was.”

“I just mean that’s what Lucy looks for,” she says, resting her arms on her hips. “You can turn vanilla into anything, right? It’s a blank slate. It’s malleable.”

“Okay—?”

“She’s a fucking liar,” Sloane interrupts, a viciousness in her voice I never expected from her. “Like, pathological. Did you know that?”

“I … don’t really know anything about her.”

“Yeah,” she says, looking away, as if that somehow proved her point. “Just take everything she says with a grain of salt. Trust me.”

“Look, don’t you take this the wrong way, but if that’s how you feel, then why are you friends with her?”

I don’t know what drove me to say it, but suddenly, standing here listening to Sloane bash her best friend sitting just inside, a strange protectiveness has settled over me, like Lucy somehow needs me to defend her honor in her absence. I don’t know her, not really, but she gifted me an opportunity—an opportunity of belonging, of friends—and so far, she hasn’t given me any reason to doubt her intentions.

So far, she’s been nothing but nice.

Sloane looks back at me, her eyebrows bunched like she’s never actually asked herself that question before. Maybe she’s jealous, I think, the same way Maggie was jealous in the courtyard outside Hines. Maybe she’s threatened by Lucy—or, I realize with a sudden sense of surprise, maybe she’s threatened by me. By another person stepping in, taking her place. I can understand that: the envy that blooms in your chest when you see your best friend with somebody else. The fear of being replaced.

Sloane is quiet for a while longer, considering, before turning back toward the shed like she’s afraid Lucy might be hiding in it.

“She’s fun,” she says at last. “She gets you into places.”

“Lots of people are fun,” I counter.

“When you’re friends with Lucy, she makes you feel special,” Sloane says, exhaling, like the statement finally unburdened her from a truth she’s been carrying around for far too long. “Like she chose you for a reason.”

That, too, I intimately understand. I’ve been feeling that way ever since she stepped into my dorm room, the piercing blue of her eyes pulling me into some kind of trance. It’s almost as if I’ve been hypnotized ever since, entranced by the spell of her, moving through the motions of whatever she tells me to do without a second thought.

“I don’t know.” She sighs again, like she’s doubting herself now. “Maybe I’m being harsh.”

“Maybe a little bit.”

“Or maybe I’m afraid of what would happen if I stopped.”

She looks at me now, an intensity in her eyes that makes my skin crawl. This veiled warning of hers cloaked as concern is making me feel light-headed, dizzy, like standing on a ledge and looking down, feeling my body start to sway. I know I should probably take a step back and reassess what I’m doing here, but I also know that if I think too hard about it, I’ll come to my senses and scamper back to safety. To a place where I can feel my own two feet planted firmly on the ground.

I think of what Sloane just called me: vanilla, malleable. A blank slate. That’s what I was with Eliza, too, if I’m being honest with myself; not my own person but a mirror she could stare into and see a reflection of herself gazing back. Sloane is trying to tell me that, if I’m not careful, Lucy will do the same. She’ll turn me into something I’m not. She’ll twist me and mold me until I’m unrecognizable, transforming in her hands like soft, wet clay. She’ll shape me into whatever she wants me to be. Something useful to best fit her needs, a deliberate instrument of her own design.

But here’s the thing Sloane doesn’t know: I want to be changed.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted, really: for someone to scoop me up and tell me what I’m supposed to be. My entire life, I’ve contorted so easily in the hands of others—my parents, Eliza—shape-shifting at any given second to be the thing that everyone else wants. So maybe that’s who I am: a chameleon that can take on the appearance of its surroundings. A master of camouflage to stay invisible and safe. I need someone to mold me like putty; give me function and form.

I want Lucy to bend me, break me. Rip me to pieces and reassemble me into something different, better. New.