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.

But friends for life is a myth, a fable. A feel-good fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid having to think too hard about facing the world alone.

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.

It’s like her existence alone is somehow threatening to the rest of us—we know we can’t compete, so instead, we recoil, snarling at her from the corner to make ourselves feel safe.

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.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted, really: for someone to scoop me up and tell me what I’m supposed to be. My entire life, I’ve contorted so easily in the hands of others—my parents, Eliza—shape-shifting at any given second to be the thing that everyone else wants. So maybe that’s who I am: a chameleon that can take on the appearance of its surroundings. A master of camouflage to stay invisible and safe. I need someone to mold me like putty; give me function and form.

His anonymity just made him more interesting to her, her mind filling in the blanks with details that were far more exciting than what likely existed.

I 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.”

“We break rules when we decide the cost of getting caught doesn’t outweigh the reward of doing it, right?” she asks.

“Nothing showed up because there is no Lucy Sharpe enrolled at Rutledge,” Sloane says at last, and I feel the twist of something sharp in my chest: fear, cold and hard, plunging in deep like a knife to the heart. “Lucy Sharpe doesn’t exist.”

None of our secrets would have been safe with her alive, dangling them over us the way she always did. Playing with us like another one of her games, her entire life an illusion she simply created and pretended to be true.