Only If You’re Lucky

She was everything and I was nothing. That’s always what I thought, anyway.

We spent our entire freshman year just a few doors down from each other. We were in the all-girls dorm, the unlucky few who got placed in the only same-sex building on campus: Hines Hall. It sat at the top of the single hill downtown, trapping us inside like a bunch of Rapunzels, untouchable, though it only made us more desirable. Like things to be won. I still think about move-in day: pulling my pile of boxes on a metal trolley, a neon 9 taped to the back and the hot flash of embarrassment every time a wheel squeaked too loud. Watching the boys loll past with their hands punched into their pockets, craning their necks, already scheming on how to get inside.

Everybody whined about it at first, skin slick with sweat and throwing scowls in every direction as we lugged comforters and futons up that long, winding stairwell, blaming each other for our own anatomy.

I remember that first night so vividly: the twenty-four girls of hall 9B being called into the common room. We stood there in oversized T-shirts and gym shorts so short we might as well be bottomless, arms like seat belts wound tight around our waists. Our RA was a junior named Janice, who recited the rules in a cursory clip: no drinking, no boys. Silence after midnight. And we just stood there quietly, nodding, mentally chewing over the fact that we had finally escaped to college just to be met with the same old restrictions, with a glorified babysitter to boot. Then she walked out and left the rest of us to get to know one another, everyone simply staring in a timid unease until Lucy seemed to appear out of nowhere, stepping forward from the corner and unzipping her bag.

We watched in silence as she pulled out a case of beer before plopping it onto the carpet, bottles jangling.

“Now that that’s over,” she had said, as if Janice had been nothing more than her own opening act. “Everyone, grab one.”

I can still hear the uncomfortable murmur rippling across the room; the nervous laughs and darting eyes. Then, as if showing us how, Lucy leaned forward and grabbed the first bottle, twisting off the cap and taking a sip.

“To us,” she had said, tipping the lip in our direction. “Nine floors of whores.”

After that, I always knew she was there—it was impossible to miss her, and that was probably the point. I’d catch a glimpse of her raven-black curls as she walked past my open door or pushed her way into the bathroom, neon-green shower caddy hooked into the crook of her arm. She used to bring canned wine coolers into the communal showers, sickly sweet smells like strawberry mango and peach fizz rising with the steam and fogging up the mirror; the crunch of the empties before her hand popped out of the curtain and dropped them onto the tile like crumpled candy wrappers. She was the only one who never covered up before stepping back out. While the rest of us swathed ourselves in towel wraps or monogrammed bathrobes, self-consciously gripping the gap before ripping back the curtain and flip-flopping past the stalls in our shower shoes, she would just step out naked, brazen and beautiful, like she owned the place.

And in a lot of ways, she did.

“I don’t know what they see in her.”

I glance up at my roommate now, trying to blink away the memory like a speck of dirt stuck in my eye. Lucy’s presence is like the first blast of air from an AC unit: noisy, chilling. The kind of thing that demands attention and makes your skin prickle. Her eyes are so blue they’re almost white, glacial water iced over until it turned cold and hard, and when she caught me staring at her once through a hand-swiped section of the fogged-up mirror, it made me physically shiver, the feeling of her gaze traveling down my spine like an ice cube dropped down the back of my shirt.

“Hmm?” I ask at last.

“Don’t act like you weren’t staring.”

Maggie and I are lying on the grass outside Hines, psychology textbooks splayed out in front of us and a torn-open bag of Cheetos wedged in the middle. She flips from her stomach to her back, propping herself up on two kickstand elbows.

“Everyone’s staring.”

She’s right: everyone is staring. I can see their eyes darting in Lucy’s direction from behind their sunglasses, their notebooks. Stealing a glance as she pushes her bikini top an inch to the right, head flopped back as she stares into the sun. She acts like she doesn’t even notice; like she’s on her own private beach somewhere, not sunning herself in the middle of campus. A busy intersection of horny teenagers who watch her rub lotion on her skin and immediately start to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.

“She’s crazy.”

I peel my eyes from Lucy and look back at Maggie, jealousy radiating from her skin like a bad smell. “Why do you say that?”

“Because she is,” she says. “I heard she blinded her boyfriend in high school.”

“What? No way.”

“I’m serious. They were arguing about something, fighting at a party, and she reached out and scratched him across the face,” she says, clawing at the air. “Like a fucking cat.”

“I don’t believe that,” I say, eyeing her closely. Maggie isn’t usually like this: gossipy, mean. She’s one of the nicest people I know, actually. Irritatingly so. But at the same time, Lucy seems to bring out this side of people. It’s like her existence alone is somehow threatening to the rest of us—we know we can’t compete, so instead, we recoil, snarling at her from the corner to make ourselves feel safe.

“Swear to God, it’s true,” Maggie says, holding her hands up, defensive. “Her nail was kind of jagged or something and it ended up puncturing his cornea.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Rachel down the hall had a friend visit a few months ago. She said her boyfriend knows a guy who saw it happen.”

I cock my eyebrow.

“I’m just relaying what I heard.”

I turn back toward Lucy, noticing the way her fingers itch absentmindedly against her chest; the way her long, skinny nails leave little white streaks in the angry red of her sunburn. It isn’t the first rumor I’ve heard about her, each one more outlandish than the last. Some other girl on our hall swears she’s a foreign exchange student, undercover royalty shipped over from somewhere rich and exotic, although I’ve detected zero trace of an accent any time I’ve heard her speak. Another is convinced she’s sleeping with her professors—all of them, females included—the only logical explanation for how she seems to get by without studying.

“Anyway,” Maggie says, rolling back over and grabbing a Cheeto before popping it in her mouth. “I think I found us an apartment for next year. Two bed, two bath. It’s on the second floor, thank God. No more elevators.”

I hear myself mumble some distant mhmms, but I’m not listening. Not really. Two other girls have joined Lucy now—a blonde with braids and a dark-skinned girl with calves like baseballs that bulge beneath the skin. They live on 9B, too. Nicole Clausen and Sloane Peters. They’re almost always with Lucy, the three of them swigging from water bottles everybody knows aren’t filled with water before stumbling back hours later, eyes glassy and lipstick smeared. The first time I saw them, there was something about the way they walked that stuck with me: side by side, Lucy in the middle, arms hooked together like a chain-link fence. Like they couldn’t break apart even if they wanted to.

“Did you hear me?”

I whip back around at the sound of her voice to find Maggie looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said it’s close to the library so we won’t have to take the bus.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s great.” I smile, then turn back toward the girls. “Thanks for doing that.”

I watch as Sloane lays a towel on the grass and Nicole starts to slather sunscreen on her arms, though Lucy hasn’t even looked at them. Her eyes are still hidden behind her sunglasses as she stares up at the sky and the truth is, I do know what everyone sees in her. I’ve seen it myself all year. It’s the way her eyes seem to pierce you so deep, leaving behind microscopic little puncture wounds like a snake or spider bite. Something you can still feel on your skin long after she’s left. It’s the easy confidence she exudes, as natural as breathing, and the way she took control of that first night so effortlessly, just a handful of words making twenty-four strangers not only break the rules but simultaneously shatter some widely held belief about ourselves.

Some latent voice telling us to be embarrassed about our situation—nine floors of whores—when we should have been emboldened.

“All right, I’m done,” Maggie says suddenly, slapping her textbook shut with too much force. I crane my neck as she stands up, noticing the thin lines of sweat that have soaked their way through her tank top. Everyone is cramming for finals, meaning it’s only May, but it’s already hotter in Rutledge than it’ll ever be in most of the country by August. We’re used to it, though, students lugging backpacks through hundred-degree heat before stripping off their clothes and heading to the beach, drowning their stress in salt water and sweat.

“Do you want to grab dinner or something?” she adds, offering me one last chance at conversation I should probably take. Instead, I give her an apologetic smile, already feeling my neck threatening to turn back in Lucy’s direction like a quivering magnet.

“I’m going to stay a little longer,” I say. “Sorry.”

I watch as Maggie shrugs and walks off, a little string of pollen dangling from her thigh, but by the time my gaze makes it back to the girls, I’m not staring at the side of Lucy’s face anymore, her head tilted back with her face angled to the sun—instead, I’m staring straight into the sharp blue of her eyes as she looks into my own, sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose.

I feel a sudden jolt in my body, like the shock of wet fingers grazing the outside of an outlet. Then, before I can even realize what’s happening, she waves.