Only If You’re Lucky

It’s strange: standing on the sidewalk, less than a year since the first time I found myself planted in this very spot with my bags by my side. Looking up at this house and imagining all the things that could happen: the friends I could make, the person I could become. Wondering how it would all play out. I had no idea, back then, the things I would be capable of. The way Lucy would bend me and break me; the way three strangers would slowly turn into friends, then family, the bond between us turning from liquid to solid. Curdling in the heat until it was thicker than blood.

Messier, too.

“Ready?” Sloane asks, emerging from the living room and stepping out onto the porch. I watch as she sticks a piece of paper on the front door before she closes it, locks it, and hoists the last box under her arm.

“Yeah,” I say, wondering now what that girl would think if she somehow knew how it would all end. If she would be impressed or horrified.

Probably both.

I turn around to find Nicole stacking bins of clothes in her car and I catch a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, an undercover cruiser rounding the corner and making its way toward the house.

“Frank is here.”

Sloane and Nicole stop what they’re doing and watch now, too, the three of us waiting as Detective Frank parks across the street, steps out of the driver’s seat, and slams the door behind him, walking toward us with that familiar stride. We instinctively form a line on the sidewalk like that first day in the dining room, anticipating his questions. Rehearsing our answers.

“Girls,” he says, tipping his hat.

Rutledge has finally settled back into a strange sense of normalcy, although everything still feels a little bit off, a little bit strange, like the world got knocked off its axis and we’re all struggling to stand up straight, staggering around, wondering if we’ll ever feel normal again. Downtown is filling up slowly, cautiously, the streets coming alive with students who are starting to trickle out of their houses. Our mandatory time of mourning complete. The sidewalks are crushed with lines again, elbows jostling to get into bars, Levi’s face starting to fade from the posters that were hung up around town as a somber reminder to drink responsibly.

It’s funny: I’ve spent my entire life being anonymous, but now I finally know what it’s like to be them. To be Lucy, to be Eliza, to be the kind of girl who attracts stares. The one who elicits whispers, rumors swirling around me like a thick mist of perfume. No longer a castaway or a sidekick but a part of the pack, a piece of a whole. We’re a unit now, inextricably linked. A clique that feels a little bit jarring, a little bit off, when one of us tries to venture out on our own, Lucy’s aura still clinging to us like a spider’s thread, sticky and strong. Something we can feel more than we can see. And that’s what I had wanted in the beginning, what I would have given anything for, but now I understand the strange feeling I got when I used to see the three of them walking down the hall together, arms attached like a chain of paper dolls.

Rip one of us away, and we’ll never feel whole again.

“Moving day?” Detective Frank asks, and I blink back into the conversation, his toe kicking at a box at my feet.

“This is the last of it,” Sloane says.

“And Lucy’s things?”

“Still inside,” I say. “We locked up so nobody would take them. We assumed her parents would be coming.”

Frank looks at me, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“The fraternity isn’t using the house for anything until the lawsuit blows over,” Sloane adds. “They said we can just leave it for now.”

“Well then it’s going to be sitting here indefinitely,” he says, shifting his weight. “The lawsuit isn’t blowing over and those boys aren’t coming back. What’s this?”

He gestures to the porch and we stay quiet, watching as he walks up the steps, peels our note from the door and holds his finger out, a blue Post-it stuck to the pad of his pointer. He skims it quickly, then looks back at us.

“Your new address?”

“It’s for Lucy,” Nicole says. “Just in case—”

“In case she comes back,” he interrupts, understanding settling over him slowly.

“She won’t have our numbers anymore,” I say. “Not without her phone.”

“We didn’t want her to think we just left—” Sloane adds, but Officer Frank interrupts her, holding his hand up.

“Girls.” He says it gently now, his eyes squinting like this is the first time he’s really noticed us before. The first time he’s ever seen us at all. “She’s not coming back. You understand that, right?”

We’re all silent, sheepish and embarrassed, staring at the piece of paper in his hand like kids getting scolded after our parents found something salacious hidden beneath our beds. Nicole looks down, rubbing the sole of her shoe against the concrete, because we know how childish this looks, leaving it behind like that. Such a desperate and deluded show of hope.

“Lucy Sharpe … she isn’t your friend,” Frank continues. “She’s not who you thought she was. You understand that.”

We stay firm, fierce in our commitment to her, our solemn vow, and I can see the slow shift in his face. The gentle softening as suspicion recedes and pity takes over.

We watch as he sighs, sticking the note back on the door for us and walking down the steps before planting himself on the sidewalk again, shaking his head. Eyeing the three of us now, a slow scan down the line before his gaze stops on me and I see him swallow.

“The two of you can go,” he says to Sloane and Nicole, refusing to avert his eyes from mine. “You and I need to have a talk.”