Only If You're Lucky

Stacy Willingham

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

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Constellation Necklace

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

When Margot meets Lucy, she notices Lucy’s necklace with diamonds in the shapes of stars and constellations, remembering that Eliza wore a similar necklace. The novel reveals how Lucy took the necklace from Eliza after her death, and Margot then takes the necklace from Lucy’s body at the novel’s end. The necklace and the stars on it symbolize the energy Eliza had in her life, which both Lucy and Margot want to emulate. Whoever possesses Eliza’s necklace symbolically inherits Eliza’s charisma and attractive power. While Eliza was alive, she was popular and commanded the attention of everyone around her, and Margot notes that everyone loved Eliza’s personality, but she rarely returned that love. Thus, in Lucy’s pursuit of emulating Eliza’s life, she wears the necklace, sets her phone background to an image of stars, and plasters stars on the ceiling of her room.

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The constellation, specifically Gemini, adds another layer of symbolism to the necklace, as Gemini, the Twins, appears as two people holding hands. Lucy points the constellation out to Margot in a moment of bonding, and it comes to represent their bond of friendship. While Eliza was alive, she and Margot were like the Twins, always together and bound to each other; Lucy took Eliza’s place in Margot’s life, fulfilling the same role. Although the novel’s conclusion is open-ended, Margot’s possession of the necklace indicates that she’ll push forward in her transformation to become more like Eliza.

The Shed and Deer

A shed separates the Kappa Nu house from the women’s house, and the men use it to bleed the deer they kill and to dry and store deer meat for later consumption. The shed and the deer that the men hunt symbolize the perpetual threat of sexual violence in the novel and allude to the metaphor of women as prey and men as predators. The shed is between the men’s and women’s homes, drawing a line of death and violence between them. The women frequently cross this line, much as animals might wander into a trap, and the smell and sight of drying tobacco leaves, blood, and death in the shed disturb Margot, foreshadowing the sexual violence that later occurs. In the moment when Margot realizes that something has happened at the women’s house, Levi emerges from the shed, indicating a broken seal between the men and their “prey,” which Nicole later confirms when she reports that Trevor sexually assaulted her that day.

The novel then subverts the expectations of this dynamic when the women use the shed to cover up Lucy’s murder. The shed’s use for draining blood and for drying and storing meat transforms into the perfect place to hide the evidence of Lucy’s murder, and the women easily deceive Detective Frank when they tell him that the shed is used only for deer. Furthering the metaphor of deer and women, Lucy is, in a way, the last deer in the shed, killed by her own friends to protect themselves. Thus, at the novel’s end, the shed transforms from a symbol of men’s violence into one of the women’s hidden identities and self-protective impulses.

“Girls”

The term “girls” is a motif in the text that serves to emphasize how men view women in the novel. When used by the women, though infrequently, the term is used for endearment, such as Margot saying, “I would finally find my people, my girls” (2). However, the term is most often used by men, like Detective Frank, in the diminutive sense, meaning small or unimportant. In an early interaction, Margot notes that she “does not like the way he says that—Girls—like [they]’re children being scolded” (5), highlighting how “girls,” much like “boys” versus “men,” can express a power imbalance, in which the person saying “girls” assumes greater power and authority in a situation. While Detective Frank does have the authority of a police officer, approaching the women in this way shows his lack of respect for them and their abilities.

Detective Frank calls the women “girls” throughout the novel, but, in the end, Sloane explains how his diminutive view of them works in their favor. When Margot facetiously notes that their only crime was failing to see Lucy’s true identity, Sloane adds, “[W]e’re just […] a couple of harmless little girls” (362), emphasizing the “little” and “harmless” already implicit in the term to show how Frank’s perception of the women as lacking agency prevented him from seeing them as the true culprits. Because the men of the novel underestimate the women, Nicole easily kills Levi (though he wasn’t her target), and all three women outwit Detective Frank.