Only If You’re Lucky

According to Google Maps, Fairfield, North Carolina, is a two-hour drive from my house in the Outer Banks. It has a population of 226 and I can’t help but think about what Lucy told me that night on the roof, how she would go entire years without meeting a new person.

She wasn’t lying about that, at least. Fairfield is small, claustrophobically so, her entire town easily fitting into Kappa Nu during a particularly large party.

I grab my phone and navigate to the picture of Lucy’s ID again, zooming in first on her face. I look next at the book on my bed, little dots of sweat smeared from my fingers. The illustration on the cover showing the face of one person with two entirely different auras: good and evil, foreign and familiar. Some murky combination of right and wrong. I wonder, for the very first time, if the Lucy I’ve come to know is simply a mirage like this, an optical illusion. My own subconscious snapping its fingers and creating the very thing it thought I needed. If I merely imagined all her similarities to Eliza, those subtle little signs that they were the same, because, deep down, that’s what I wanted: another shot, a second chance.

Eliza reincarnated, the sudden and startling appearance of Lucy in my life allowing me to simply forget what happened and replace her entirely.

I zoom out of the picture so I can see her address again, typing it in and watching it load. The screen zeroes in on a little red pin plotted firmly in the middle of nowhere and I switch to satellite view, a single house materializing amid what seems to be acres of untouched land. I take in the algae-green roof, the dirty white siding. The haphazard shutters and rusted red pickup parked in the grass. I can’t help but feel a sting of something in my chest when I see it all, something I can’t quite name, because right now, taking in this house I can only assume to be Lucy’s, it’s impossible not to think about the ways we grew up, so glaringly different: me in my waterfront mansion with wraparound porches, oyster tabby driveway, and luxury cars. The nearby beaches and long, winding docks that we used to run down barefoot, so untethered and free.

I switch out of Google Maps and navigate to the county website next, over to the tax department, and finally, property records. Then I type in her address again, fingers drumming against the keys while it loads. I’ve always wondered why tax records are made public like this—why any curious stranger should be able to simply search an address and learn everything there is to know about its owner—but right now, I’m just grateful for the opportunity to finally find some answers. After a few seconds, a single link pops up on the screen and I click it, holding my breath until the result appears—but once it does, confusion pummels me, the name glaring back looking strange and out of place.

I stare at the computer, then back at the picture, wondering, for a second, if I typed in the wrong address. If my subconscious is playing tricks on me again, making me see people from my past like they’re right there in front of me, fleshy and solid and undeniably real. I was expecting to find Lucy’s mom, maybe. A person to pair with the stories I’ve heard. Another name I could google or a phone number to call, any morsel of information I could add to my pile—but finally, I’m beginning to grasp the truth, the answers coming to me one by one like the steady drip of a faucet, filling me up with a sense of sick understanding. All the things I thought I knew are suddenly different, warped, like staring at my own reflection in the water and barely recognizing the face that stares back.

I’ve been wrong about Eliza, about Lucy, about Levi.

About everything.