“Anyway,” Maggie says, rolling back over and grabbing a Cheeto before popping it in her mouth. “I think I found us an apartment for next year. Two bed, two bath. It’s on the second floor, thank God. No more elevators.”
I hear myself mumble some distant mhmms, but I’m not listening. Not really. Two other girls have joined Lucy now—a blonde with braids and a dark-skinned girl with calves like baseballs that bulge beneath the skin. They live on 9B, too. Nicole Clausen and Sloane Peters. They’re almost always with Lucy, the three of them swigging from water bottles everybody knows aren’t filled with water before stumbling back hours later, eyes glassy and lipstick smeared. The first time I saw them, there was something about the way they walked that stuck with me: side by side, Lucy in the middle, arms hooked together like a chain-link fence. Like they couldn’t break apart even if they wanted to.
“Did you hear me?”
I whip back around at the sound of her voice to find Maggie looking at me, eyebrows raised.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said it’s close to the library so we won’t have to take the bus.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s great.” I smile, then turn back toward the girls. “Thanks for doing that.”
I watch as Sloane lays a towel on the grass and Nicole starts to slather sunscreen on her arms, though Lucy hasn’t even looked at them. Her eyes are still hidden behind her sunglasses as she stares up at the sky and the truth is, I do know what everyone sees in her. I’ve seen it myself all year. It’s the way her eyes seem to pierce you so deep, leaving behind microscopic little puncture wounds like a snake or spider bite. Something you can still feel on your skin long after she’s left. It’s the easy confidence she exudes, as natural as breathing, and the way she took control of that first night so effortlessly, just a handful of words making twenty-four strangers not only break the rules but simultaneously shatter some widely held belief about ourselves.
Some latent voice telling us to be embarrassed about our situation—nine floors of whores—when we should have been emboldened.
“All right, I’m done,” Maggie says suddenly, slapping her textbook shut with too much force. I crane my neck as she stands up, noticing the thin lines of sweat that have soaked their way through her tank top. Everyone is cramming for finals, meaning it’s only May, but it’s already hotter in Rutledge than it’ll ever be in most of the country by August. We’re used to it, though, students lugging backpacks through hundred-degree heat before stripping off their clothes and heading to the beach, drowning their stress in salt water and sweat.
“Do you want to grab dinner or something?” she adds, offering me one last chance at conversation I should probably take. Instead, I give her an apologetic smile, already feeling my neck threatening to turn back in Lucy’s direction like a quivering magnet.
“I’m going to stay a little longer,” I say. “Sorry.”
I watch as Maggie shrugs and walks off, a little string of pollen dangling from her thigh, but by the time my gaze makes it back to the girls, I’m not staring at the side of Lucy’s face anymore, her head tilted back with her face angled to the sun—instead, I’m staring straight into the sharp blue of her eyes as she looks into my own, sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose.
I feel a sudden jolt in my body, like the shock of wet fingers grazing the outside of an outlet. Then, before I can even realize what’s happening, she waves.
CHAPTER 3
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.