Only If You're Lucky

by Stacy Willingham

One day we were strangers and the next we were friends. That’s usually how it works with girls.

Some words should be ours to own, at-times-vicious yet tender terms of endearment we toss around like glitter that suddenly taste sour in the mouths of men. Girls is one of them.

I remember that first night so vividly: the twenty-four girls of hall 9B being called into the common room.

Our RA was a junior named Janice, who recited the rules in a cursory clip: no drinking, no boys. Silence after midnight.

Then she walked out and left the rest of us to get to know one another, everyone simply staring in a timid unease until Lucy seemed to appear out of nowhere, stepping forward from the corner and unzipping her bag. We watched in silence as she pulled out a case of beer before plopping it onto the carpet, bottles jangling.

“Now that that’s over,” she had said, as if Janice had been nothing more than her own opening act. “Everyone, grab one.”

“To us,” she had said, tipping the lip in our direction. “Nine floors of whores.”

I’ve always been something of a hoarder—no, that’s the wrong word. A collector, maybe. The kind of person who saves ticket stubs and old receipts, applying sentimental value to inanimate objects. Like they have feelings. The idea of tossing even a single happy memory into the trash is enough to make my eyes prickle—and that’s not even the worst of it. There’s also the whittled-down pencil stubs and practically empty nail polish bottles; the crusty tubes of expired mascara and the used notebooks that pile up in my desk drawers for no reason other than the fact that I just can’t seem to throw them away. Mom says I have attachment issues; Dad says I’m a slob. I think I’m just afraid of getting rid of something prematurely; of dipping my hand into my purse and looking for some familiar comfort only to remember that I had disposed of it.

That it’s gone forever. That I’m left with nothing.

used to get so lost in these imaginary worlds, slipping into another skin every time I parted their covers. The musty scent of the pages curling beneath my nostrils like an elixir that ripped me from one reality and implanted me into the next. That’s the beauty of fiction, of words: when your life becomes too boring, too bland, too hard or depressing or chaotic or calm, they allow you to simply float away and inhabit another, try it on for size. With so many options so ripe for the picking, it would be a shame to only taste just one.

I guess that’s the thing about grief, loss: it changes everything, not just you. Colors are duller, foods are blander. The words don’t sing like they used to.

And it had scared me for a while, realizing that any second could be the end of it: something as simple as a trip into traffic, a cramp while you’re swimming. That a life as bright as hers could be extinguished without even the courtesy of a heads-up. But at the same time, the abruptness of it all made me realize that she was right. You’re only young once, and only if you’re lucky.

I

want Lucy to bend me, break me. Rip me to pieces and reassemble me into something different, better. New.

If Levi Butler never came into our lives that day,

Eliza would still be here, safe, with me. Eliza would still be alive.

think I hurt her because I loved her—that’s what people do, after all. Destroy the very thing they desire the most.

“The only thing that makes bad things bad are the consequences, right? Think about it. The fact that we’re all here right now means we’re all a little morally loose.”

once you bend one rule without consequence, it feels a lot easier to break the others.

if you claim you’re above killing someone, it’s only because you haven’t found a reason to do it yet.”

She smells the same: a permanent scent of sunscreen seeped into her arms mixed with the perfume my father gifts her each year for Christmas. She’s always dropping hints that she wants something different, but every single year, she unwraps it and acts surprised.

when whoever Levi is talking to walks into view, pulling my attention back. It takes a few seconds for me to register what I’m seeing, her body coming into focus after a few long blinks: slender arms, that shock of black hair. Curls bouncy and wild as she saunters into the frame and sits down next to him. Then I watch as Lucy’s long fingers weave their way through his hair, holding him close, his lips on hers as she goes in for a kiss.

!!!!

There is no right or wrong, noble or evil, but simply the existence of people who dabble in their own combination of each.

“As a parent, you usually get it wrong more often than you get it right.”