Only If You’re Lucky

My room is empty by the time I make it back to the dorm. I was hoping to catch Maggie, maybe. Join her for dinner like she had asked. She’s probably sitting in the dining hall by now, pretending to study or read something riveting on her phone to mask the embarrassment of eating alone. For a second, I consider walking down there, scooting in beside her. I can even picture her looking up at me, relief flooding her features as she realizes she won’t have to pretend anymore. The silent apology we would exchange before launching into some pointless small talk about our summer plans.

Instead, I grab a carton of Easy Mac and rip off the lid, dumping a splash of water inside before popping it in the microwave.

It’s not that I don’t like Maggie. I like her fine. She’s nice enough; the perfect roommate even, kind and considerate. Always letting me bum one of her Diet Cokes out of the mini fridge and never letting her dirty clothes pile up. We hang out together almost every night, sitting silently on the futon with some mid-tier movie drowning out the shrieks from the other girls down the hall; the laughs and the screams we pretend not to notice, instead munching on popcorn and convincing ourselves we chose this instead. During those first few weeks of freshman year, I remember watching the other girls scramble around, mad and frantic like headless chickens, everyone desperate to make their friends and find their place. Maggie and I never really found ours, so instead we just made our own and lived there quietly, settling into a friendship that was born out of nearness and necessity and sustained by a lack of effort on both of our parts to find anything better.

And the worst part is: she knows it, too.

I still remember meeting her, a blind-match pairing the college cobbled together a month before move-in. It could have been awful; I had no idea what to expect. I spent the entire drive wondering what kind of person would need to rely on a campus questionnaire to find a single friend—a person like me, I supposed—but when I showed up, her overeagerness was the only flaw I could find. I remember her being antsy, fidgeting with her fingernails as she greeted me with an obviously rehearsed introduction the second I stepped inside. Her side of the room had already been decorated and I noticed that she had purchased two of everything: matching floral throw pillows for my bed and hers; two picture frames for each of our desks. I could tell she had dreams of us becoming instant best friends, filling those frames with photographs of us … but the second I saw her there, all eager and excited like the runt of the litter just dying to be picked, I didn’t see visions of us sharing clothes or pulling all-nighters or giggling uncontrollably after sneaking a bottle of wine into the dorm and passing it back and forth, lip gloss on the rim sticky and smeared.

Instead, all I saw was Eliza.

Eliza, my best friend since kindergarten who asked me to sleep over the first day we met. Eliza, who dipped her finger in sunscreen and drew broken hearts on our hips so when we lay out in the sun and our skin turned tan, we could push our stomachs together and make them whole. Eliza, who pierced my ears in her closet and taught me how to dive; who blasted oldies in her parents’ convertible with the top dropped down the day she got her license, pushing eighty on abandoned back roads and letting her hair tangle in the wind.

Eliza, my would-be roommate who died three weeks into the summer after our senior year.

So, yeah, that’s the problem: Maggie reminds me of everything I should have had. Eliza and me living together the way we had talked about for all those years, curled up in a blanket on her parents’ dock, night after night, imagining us together in some other life. Decorating our dorm together just the way we wanted it, filling the walls with an entire decade of memories we already had and leaving room for the ones that would follow. I had applied to Rutledge because of her: my parents wanted me at Duke, somewhere prestigious and important, but Eliza convinced me that this was the place for us.

Not for me, for us.

So we wrote our admissions essays together and checked the mail for months, calling each other screaming the night we both got accepted. I broke the news to my parents, weathering their disappointment and distress over me choosing a small liberal arts school that was so far away, even though South Carolina was only one state over from our house in the Outer Banks. I could come home for the weekend if I really wanted to—but they knew, of course, that I wouldn’t. Then we submitted our roommate applications and put down our deposits and talked all night about finally being free of the cocoon of high school that always felt so smothering and small.

It all felt so perfect, so according to plan … until that night. That night that changed everything and I found myself coming here, alone. Without her.

A body slams against my open door, startling me out of the memory as quick as a slap. I spin around, expecting to see Maggie—still angry from earlier, frowning at me from the hallway—but that’s not who it is.

Instead, I see her.

“Hey.”

Lucy is leaning against my doorframe, arms crossed tight and her denim shorts unbuttoned to reveal the cherry red of her bathing suit bottoms.

“Hey,” I echo, though it comes out more like a question. I can feel my heart beating hard in my chest and I wonder if she’s going to ask me about earlier, finding me staring at her on the lawn like some voyeur sneaking a peek through a peephole. I had snapped my neck back down when I saw her waving at me like that, shame burning my cheeks like a sunburn, before collecting my textbooks and taking off fast.

I feel an apology start to bubble up my throat like bile, some half-hearted attempt to explain it all away.

“Are you staying for the summer?”

I close my mouth, suddenly speechless, and realize she’s looking at me like we’re old friends—like this isn’t unusual, her showing up here. Like this isn’t the first time we’ve ever actually talked.

“Um, no,” I say, jumping slightly as the microwave beeps. “I’m leaving after my last final.”

“I have an open room,” she offers. “Great house right off campus.”

I look at her, confused, my fingers picking at a hangnail to give them something to do. The truth is, I don’t want to go home for the summer—really, I don’t want to go home at all. I can feel Eliza’s absence here, in this very room, but at home, it’s even worse. At home, I can feel it everywhere: the ghost of her trailing me around, hovering over my shoulder. A persistent, painful reminder of everything that could have been.

“It’s not just for the summer, actually,” Lucy nudges, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. “We can stay through next year. Have you signed a lease yet?”

“No,” I say again, noticing a small silver necklace resting in the dip of her clavicle. It looks like a constellation of some sort; a little cluster of diamonds as stars. Eliza used to wear something like it, I think. A birthday present from her parents that she never took off, though I don’t know if they’re actually similar or if I’m still just seeing her everywhere I look. “Not yet.”

Technically, it’s the truth. I never signed a lease. Maggie did.

“Wait,” she says suddenly, a little curl to her lip. “You weren’t going to live with Mary again, were you?”

“Maggie,” I correct, embarrassed for us both. “I … haven’t decided yet.”

I think of my roommate and what she said to me earlier: the apartment she got for us by the library and the fact that I couldn’t have cared less. Suddenly, it feels so depressing, another year spent together because neither of us ever found anyone else. I pull my gaze from the necklace and look at Lucy again, standing in my doorway with those bright blue eyes. They’re mesmerizing, truly, like looking into a kaleidoscope and watching the world contort into something else entirely. I register a little twitch in her lip, like she’s finding something funny she can’t bring herself to say. I think of the way she, Sloane, and Nicole always walk like one—the way Eliza and I did, too—and suddenly, I crave that. I crave it more than I’ve ever craved anything: the kind of friendship that I once knew so well, not comfortable and contained but something messy and maniacal and real.

“Well,” Lucy says, that twitch of a smile morphing into a full-blown grin. “Looks like I just decided for you.”