Only If You’re Lucky

I plop down on my bed with an exaggerated huff. Detective Frank is gone, finally, and I want to take advantage of the precious time to think.

I glance around my room, taking in all the subtle changes that have taken place over the nine months since I’ve made this space my home: the pictures cluttering up the mantel are with Lucy, Sloane, and Nicole now, our lips pursed in puckery pouts and our cheeks smashed together with too much force. Most of them were taken in the early days: those sweet weeks of summer when we were just getting to know each other. Those first few months when everything was fine. You can tell by how different we all look, Nicole especially, her cheeks still baby-round and not the concave craters they would slowly shrink into. Then there’s the string of Christmas lights hung up around the walls that I never bothered to take down; the cigarette burns visible on the floor, little black dots peppered across the hardwood from when Lucy was too lazy to grab an ashtray. All of the evidence of the life I’ve built in this house. The person I’ve become.

That person is almost unrecognizable to the person I was when I first stepped foot in here—though, I suppose, that was the point.

I wonder how much time we have until the search for Lucy really ramps up. I know, right now, they’re grasping at straws: an adult gone for three days is hardly enough to call her a missing person, especially considering what they’ll soon come to learn. And Sloane wasn’t lying when she said it before: Lucy does this kind of thing. Everyone who knows her knows it.

But still, Levi is dead. Levi is dead, Lucy is gone, and someone has to pay.

I roll over now and reach for my bedside table, yanking the drawer open. Inside, I sift through all the typical clutter: a TV remote, a couple empty lighters I haven’t bothered to throw away. Wrinkled receipts and dried-out pens, until finally, my fingers wrap around something cold and smooth shoved into the back and I pull it out, tap it awake.

It’s Lucy’s phone, a smattering of stars sprinkled across the lock screen.

I know I can’t hang on to this forever. I know they’ll eventually track it and it’ll lead them back here, to this house. To the three of us—Sloane, Nicole, and me—her roommates and confidants. Her best friends. But it’s better than Lucy having it, we all knew that. There were certain things that made sense for her to keep: her ID, her wallet. A handful of credit cards, although of course she’d have to use those to be tracked down. Her phone, on the other hand, was something we couldn’t risk. At least this way, by the time they find it, it’ll be stashed underneath her bed or something, completely obscured by dirty clothes and rogue shoes. The battery will be dead, which will explain how we never heard the ringing of various people trying to reach her.

Which will explain why, after always getting voice mail we stopped trying ourselves.

But by the time that happens, they will have already found their answers … only they won’t be the answers I know they’re expecting. Lucy’s unpredictable like that. No, the answers they’ll find will only lead to more questions, and slowly, carefully, we’ll slink back into the shadows and let all those other things crawl quietly into the light. We’ll remove ourselves from the story completely, letting it morph into something different, better. Staged.

What Detective Frank doesn’t yet know is that nothing with Lucy is ever as it seems.

I stare at the stars on her phone now, my eyes gravitating toward all the constellations she once taught me: Orion, the hunter, and Taurus, the bull—but it’s Gemini where they linger. I couldn’t see it at first, Lucy and me lying on the roof, her hand in mine as she lifted my arm into the air and traced it for me.

“Just there,” she had said, her smoky breath warm against the early fall chill. “See the two people? They’re holding hands. Like us.”

Then, once I saw it, it never went away. Every single night I would look up and find it, my eyes gravitating to it naturally like one of those inkblot pictures: something that, once seen, could never be unseen. Lying on my back, a once-smoldering fire dying in the night and mounds of warm bodies passed out around it. I remember training my eyes on the sky, thinking of Lucy. Knowing that she was out there, somewhere—that they were out there, Lucy and Levi. Spending his final few hours together without him even knowing it.

I remember lying there, staring at those stars, and feeling the familiar pinch of envy in my chest.

I remember thinking that, wherever she was, she was looking at them, too.