Only If You're Lucky

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 13

Chapters 14-27

Chapters 28-41

Chapters 42-55

Chapters 56-67

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Dualities of Identity and the Facade One Presents to the World

Content Warning: This section describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of death and murder, domestic abuse, sexual violence, and drug and alcohol misuse.

While the novel presents a physical duality in Lucy, who presents herself as a student and Margot’s peer even though she’s older and doesn’t attend Rutledge, the deeper meaning of dual identity in the text is internal. Lucy argues that any person would commit murder “under the right circumstance” (110), implying that every person has a hidden, violent side that would lash out if they knew that their actions would have no consequences for them. This idea is a common theme in literature, and the novel directly references one of the most famous examples, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, adding dimension to this theme. As Margot struggles to become more like Eliza or Lucy, she encounters her own violent internal persona, and the same violence emerges from Sloane and Nicole, implying that feelings of anger, love, and betrayal can provoke this violent element of humanity.

For Margot, feelings of betrayal spark the moments in which her hidden identity surfaces, such as when she rejected Eliza and pushed her, perhaps accidentally, to her death. Margot likens her feelings to Lucy’s: “We were both rejected by the very people who should have loved us the most” (338). In the moment of that rejection, when Eliza told Margot that she wouldn’t be going with Margot to Rutledge in the fall, those feelings reached a breaking point. Critically, at the end of the novel, Margot is wearing Eliza’s necklace, which she took from Lucy and which Lucy took from Eliza after her death. Taking the necklace is a purely selfish act, in which Margot harnesses the hidden elements of her identity to become more like Eliza. In addition, wearing the necklace displays a lack of remorse, showing how Margo, having gotten away with murder, feels absolved of guilt.

The concept of a hidden, violent identity underneath an outward demeanor of normality isn’t unique to Margot, however. Nicole and Sloane display a similar pattern in their own acts of violence. Nicole acts out of anger, killing Levi (whom she thinks is Trevor) out of rage because Trevor sexually assaulted her. Sloane then kills Lucy to protect Nicole, so her act of violence is also an act of love. Sloane tells Margot, “[Lucy] figured it out” and “It was the only way” (353), implying that she felt she had to kill Lucy to keep Nicole’s secret. The common element in all three acts of violence is the disconnect between them and the women’s daily lives and outward personalities and the strong emotion necessary to draw out their hidden selves.

Trust, Betrayal, and the Complexities of Loyalty Within Friendships

The friendships in the novel develop quickly and sharply: Margot, Sloane, Nicole, and Lucy form close bonds with each other over a single summer. These bonds develop through trust, as is evident in the moment that Margot reveals Eliza’s death to her three new friends. However, Margot feels dependent on Lucy just as she was on her former best friend, Eliza: “I remember wondering if that kind of power imbalance was normal in a friendship—if every pair consisted of one half who seemed to love the other just a little bit more” (32). This element adds a layer of complexity to the apparent closeness of the friendships. Eliza and Lucy both wield more power than Margot, and Sloane wields more power than Nicole, forming three unbalanced pairs of friends in the text. Critically, the betrayals largely occur within the pairs, with a crucial, final betrayal crossing between the Sloane/Nicole and Lucy/Margot pairs.

When Eliza betrayed Margot, it was a gradual change during their senior year, and Eliza’s declaration that she was delaying going to Rutledge pushed Margot past her limit of tolerating Eliza’s increasing distance. The betrayal stemmed from the power imbalance between them, as Margot notes: “I was perfectly content with the way things were—just the two of us, the way it had always been” (102). Eliza tried to push Margot out of her comfort zone, and this pressure created a situation in which Eliza inevitably betrayed Margot simply by outgrowing her. In addition, it fostered the unhealthy conditions that prevented Eliza from telling Margot about Lucy. In Eliza and Margot’s friendship, trust was impossible once Margot became dependent on and idealized Eliza and her life, foreshadowing Eliza’s tragic end. In Eliza’s death, Margot was the one committing an act of betrayal by failing to accept Eliza for who she was, and though Eliza’s death may have been accidental, Margot secretly wanted Eliza to suffer for distancing herself from Margot.

Likewise, a preemptive feeling of distrust marks the novel’s most dramatic betrayal, when Sloane kills Lucy. Just as Margot killed Eliza for abandoning her, even though Eliza didn’t try to end their friendship, Sloane kills Lucy on the assumption that Lucy will reveal that Nicole killed Levi. In each situation, the root of the violence is a lack of trust. At the end of the novel, Margot notes, “What we did together is tattooed across all of us now, a permanent mark like a friendship bracelet tied tight around our wrists,” adding, “[I]f one goes down, we all go down” (366). This conclusion resolves the issue of trust by placing all three women in a mutually dependent scenario, in which no one woman is more dependent on any other. All three know of each other’s crimes, and all three conspire to hide Lucy’s death from the police, fundamentally cementing their friendship as a matter of survival and subverting the imbalances of the other friendships in the text.

The Unique Challenges Facing Young Women

A perpetual threat of sexual violence facing the young women pervades the novel because they live in a building that the Kappa Nu fraternity owns and maintains. Early on, when Lucy introduces Margot to some of the fraternity men, Margot notes, “I stand still as their collective gaze turns in my direction and I can feel it slipping all over me: my face, my neck. My chest, where their eyes linger too long”; she can feel them “trying to imagine how everything looks underneath” (51). This gaze is always present: Margot notes throughout the text how the fraternity men make her and her friends feel like prey animals, meat, or objects to conquer. Additionally, the men have unlimited access to the women’s home, allowing them to invade their space at any time. Therefore, when Margot finds Nicole bruised and sick in the bathroom, she immediately assumes that Nicole was sexually assaulted. This near confirmation of sexual violence punctuates the novel’s overall atmosphere of sexual danger and vulnerability.

The sexual violence that Nicole endures fits within the novel’s events: She and Trevor both drink alcohol, Nicole tells him that she doesn’t want to have sex, and he insists, after the fact, that he couldn’t have sexually assaulted her “since [they] were dating” (355). Levi, too, perpetuates the conditions that enable sexual violence by choosing his connection with Trevor over his ethical obligation to stop the sexual assault. The men of the novel operate almost in unison and within their own hierarchy, which excludes women. Much as James notes when he compares hunting to murder, “Humans and animals are two completely different things” (170). For the fraternity men, women constitute a different “thing” separate from humans and animals. This disconnect is a fundamental element of “rape culture,” in which some tend to view male sexual violence as normal and instead implicate those who experience sexual assault as instigators. In such a dynamic, Margot and her friends are like prey, and the threat of violence follows them wherever they go.

The text subverts this challenge for young women through the apparent benefits of their being underestimated. At the party, Nicole, though drunk, tracks down Trevor (not realizing that it’s Levi she finds) and strangles him to death, reversing the dynamic she faced with Trevor in which he forced himself on her. After the fact, no one suspects Nicole because of her fragile appearance, and even though Margot, Nicole, and Sloane are lying to the police, they hide behind a demeanor of innocence, which Detective Frank encapsulates when he refers to them as “girls.” Margot notes how the women “h[o]ld fast, doe-eyed and innocent, and it [i]s easy, really, because that’s all [they] are to him" (257), reversing the dynamic of prey and predator to their advantage. Although being seen and treated as prey constitutes a perpetual threat in the novel, it allows the women to get away with murder and rightfully punish Trevor and Kappa Nu.