Only If You’re Lucky

The house is packed so tight it feels like the walls are bulging, the seams are ripping, the compound weight of us too heavy for its fragile frame to hold. I’ve grown so used to it being just us and the boys, the boys and us, a small, select group as opposed to what feels like half the college standing shoulder to shoulder, the crush of warm bodies and the rhythmic thumping of bass so loud it’s making my teeth rattle.

“So what’s your major?” a guy in a pirate hat yells, a single black patch cinched tight over one eye. “I’ve never seen you around.”

I blink in quick succession—three, four times—and take a sip of my drink to coat my throat.

“English!” I yell back, but very quickly, judging by the way his exposed eye refocuses as if seeing me for the very first time, I realize my mistake.

“I was talking to your friend.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I say, turning to look at Lucy. She’s standing by my side, eyes skimming the crowd, looking bored as ever.

“Luce,” I say, nudging her, in case she didn’t hear. “Captain Hook wants to know your major.”

She turns to look at him, downing the rest of whatever bottom-shelf liquor is sloshing around in her cup before grabbing my forearm and pulling me away.

“I’m sure he does.”

We spend the next hour gliding around the house, making small talk with the people we know. Mostly ignoring the ones we don’t. Whatever that pill was, it’s making me feel alert, alive, the tips of my fingers tingling like they’re hovering over an outlet and channeling the charge. At some point, I realize I’m sweating profusely, the house so stuffed it feels like an oven, and I turn toward Lucy, grabbing her hand.

“I’m going outside!” I yell, probably too loud. “I’ll meet you out there.”

I’m pushing my way out of the house when my shoulder slams into another body, hard, so I swing around, start to apologize. Mumbly little words trickling out of my mouth. It takes a second to realize who’s standing in front of me—but when I do, it feels like a plug has been ripped out from beneath me, all the blood draining from my face.

“Margot,” she says, and although I can see her jaw tense, she offers a smile. Of course she does. “It’s so good to see you.”

I look at my old roommate, a strange mix of emotions coursing through my chest. She’s wearing black leggings and an orange T-shirt, awkwardly oversized, a jack-o’-lantern drawn onto the stomach in a strange kind of grimace. She looks so out of place here, so uncomfortable, and as I think back on the life we lived together, the kind of friends we used to be, I realize with a sense of startling clarity that I don’t regret what I did to her. I don’t regret it at all.

I wonder what kind of person that makes me.

“Maggie,” I say, realizing now that it’s been months since I’ve thought about her. In the beginning, my mind used to flash back to her constantly. Every time I started settling in, feeling content as I curled up next to Lucy or Sloane or Nicole on the couch, our limbs tangled together as we watched a movie in the dark, I would see her, always, the outline of Maggie burned into my brain: the two of us on the futon, so comfortably uncomfortable. Her perpetual small talk, always polite. I would see that look on her face when I first broke the news; the hurt in her eyes as she packed her things quietly, bottom lip quivering through another forced smile. And I used to dread this moment, the inevitable moment when I’d have to face her in the flesh instead of in my own mind. The place where I rehearsed the apology I knew I’d never say to her over and over and over again.

“How are you doing?” she asks, taking a step closer. I watch her eyes focus in on mine, a look of concern flashing across her face. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” I say, trying to smile, act normal, ignore the incessant hammering of my own heart in my neck. “Yeah, I’m good. How are you?”

“I’m great,” she responds, polite but clipped.

“How’s the apartment?”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I found someone to take your—I mean, the room. The extra room.”

“That’s good.”

“We met at the dining hall,” she offers, even though I didn’t ask.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out, unable to take it any longer: the tiptoeing, the tension, even though I’m not sure if it’s really there or if it’s just me, projecting and paranoid. I rub my palms against my dress, trying to fight the deep, debilitating urge to keep blinking. “I’m really sorry, Maggie. About, you know—”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says. “Really, I understand. It’s just good to see you out. Happy.”

“It’s not that I wasn’t happy living with you—” I start, but she waves me off, shaking her head.

“It’s fine,” she says. “You don’t have to explain it. You wanted a different life.”

We stand in silence for a second, the crowd around us humming like a beaten hive: too many bodies, too small of a space. The very air around us chaotic and charged. I can’t help but think about the contrast of this setting from the way she probably remembers me—frozen on the futon, eyes glazed over, nothing but Eliza’s face thumping through my mind like a heartbeat pulsing in an open wound—and I wonder what she’s really thinking right now, seeing me like this.

If she really understands it, if she’s really this kind, or if it’s all an act manufactured to avoid any more tension, any more hurt.

“Well, listen, I should get going—” I start, but before I can finish, I feel a hand on my shoulder, five long fingers curling their way around my neck.

“Oh my gosh, Mary!”

It’s her eyes that get me: the subtle bulge, that flash of pain, not unlike a character in a movie the second they realize they’ve been shot. I watch as Maggie looks back and forth between Lucy and me, disbelief and understanding settling over her at the exact same time.

“Is this—” she starts, looking at me, motioning to her.

“Roommates,” Lucy interrupts, nodding. “We live over there, just next door.”

Maggie swallows, nods, and I’m horrified to find the faintest prickle of tears magnifying her eyes. I’m sure she’s thinking it; I am, too. That day on the lawn. Maggie telling me about the apartment she found and Lucy sunning herself in her bathing suit as we gossiped, imagined, pretended we could possibly know her at all. The disdain in her voice, the skepticism in mine, as I listened to that unusually sharp hiss between her teeth.

“I heard she blinded her boyfriend in high school.”

Somehow, after getting to know her, it feels more believable now.

I watch as Maggie sputters out a good to see you, and then a goodbye, making her way back inside. It’s not lost on me that these two roommates of mine could not be more different—if Lucy is darkness, then Maggie is light; pure, clean, angelic light—and that’s probably what’s hurting her the most right now: the realization that I met Maggie, got to know her, and actively chose the opposite. But the truth is, this has nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. Maggie’s only flaw is that she reminds me too much of me: too mild, too meek. Like Sloane said that day in the yard: “You seem … I don’t know. Too nice.” I had tried that before. I had tried to be the watchful one, the protective one, the one that was always cautious and careful. Like Maggie coddling me in the dorm, always alert for some subtle sign that I was putting myself in danger, I had been that person for Eliza, too. I had been her voice of reason, trying my hardest to keep her safe. I had pushed back against her perilous urges and none of it ever worked.

She just pushed back harder, pushed me away.

So maybe that’s the reason I had to get away from her, this kind, quiet girl who not only reminds me of me, but of all my failures. Of everything I didn’t do.

Maybe that’s why I’m finding myself oscillating toward the opposite, toward Lucy, a swinging pendulum making my way slowly to the other side.