A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “Who are you with?” Leonie asks, meeting my gaze and offering a tentative smile. And although I still suspect she’s sympathetic only on Ellis’s orders, I smile back.

  “Wyatt.”

  “Kajal’s with Wyatt, too,” Leonie says, gesturing toward Kajal herself, who crushes another garlic clove under the flat blade of her knife and doesn’t look up.

  I’m not used to feeling uncertain in social situations. My junior year at Dalloway—the year before everything fell apart with Alex, before that climbing trip and its aftermath, my subsequent withdrawal from classes—I was popular. Or if not popular, then at least envied; my mother sent large allowances every month and had little interest in how I spent it, so I wasted all that money on tailored dresses and hair appointments and weekend trips to the city for my Godwin friends. And although I was far from the richest girl at Dalloway, the way I chose to spend my money bought me a certain immunity from social faux pas. Everyone has awkward moments; I was forgiven mine.

  At least I didn’t have to buy my friends, Alex had said the night she died, cheeks blotchy with rage; and even then I’d known she was right.

  But I don’t have any interest in buying the friendship of Ellis Haley or her cabal. I find it hard to care about social hierarchies these days.

  Alex would have been proud.

  “What is your thesis on?” I ask Kajal, because I no longer think feigning indifference proves superiority, and she looks up—surprised, I suspect, that I’m still talking to her.

  “Female thinkers and philosophers of the Enlightenment,” Kajal says. “Work from the salons. Macaulay, d’Épinay, de Gouges, Wollstonecraft…”

  “Mary Astell? A Serious Proposal?”

  “Of course.” Kajal’s posture has eased; she chops up the garlic with quick, smooth motions of her hands. “She was a little too religious for my preference, but I suppose that was unavoidable at the time.”

  “Although that relatively Cartesian approach produced her concept of virtuous friendship,” I say, “so one can’t fault her too much.”

  Kajal shrugs, probably preparing the same old argument: whether Astell’s conceptualization of friendship was truly virtuous or, as Broad argues, merely reciprocal.

  “Just so,” Ellis interjects. “As Astell said herself: ‘It were well if we could look into the very Soul of the beloved Person, to discover what resemblance it bears to our own.’ ”

  When I look, a slight smile has taken up at the corners of Ellis’s mouth—there only for a moment, her gaze flicking over to meet mine before she turns back to the dough.

  “I like Lady Mary Chudleigh,” Clara supplies from the corner, a smudge of ink on her cheek.

  “Hmm,” says Ellis. “I’ve always found Chudleigh rather derivative.”

  Clara’s pale face goes scarlet, and she says, “Oh. Well, I mean…yes, she was clearly influenced by Astell, so…”

  Ellis has nothing to say to that, which only makes Clara flush worse. I don’t completely understand why she’s so upset by the prospect of disagreeing with Ellis, but then again, I don’t pretend to understand the cult of personality the new members of Godwin House have constructed around Ellis, either.

  “I think Chudleigh even admitted as much,” I say, folding another ravioli and tossing it into the bowl. “Clara, maybe you could look it up on your phone.”

  The derisive look Clara shoots my way could burn through steel. “I don’t have a phone.”

  “None of us do,” Leonie adds. “Technology is so distracting. I heard people’s attention spans are actually getting shorter because they read everything online these days.”

  I glance toward Ellis, but she’s moved to the sink to start washing up. No doubt she started this fad.

  I finish the last ravioli and dust my flour-covered hands against my apron. It’s not that I’m so very attached to my phone, but…still, I can’t imagine eschewing it entirely. I’m not incredibly active on social media, but I do like to listen to music when I run. Me and Alex used to text each other constantly, our phones hidden under desks and behind books: This class is interminable and Climbing this weekend? and Brush your hair—you look like a hedgehog.

  Maybe life’s easier without all that.

  * * *

  —

  We eat in the dining room, a white cloth spread over the mahogany table and candles burning between the array of cracked ceramic dishes. I don’t talk much this time, either, but unlike the first night in the common room, I don’t feel excluded. I’m here at the table with the rest of them, my chair between Leonie’s and Clara’s, my water poured from the same glass bottle as theirs. Ellis’s slate gaze catches mine when Kajal mentions how quickly Ellis left the Boleyn party, a sharp cut of a smile before she looks away.

  MacDonald doesn’t join us. She would have, last year. I wonder if that’s more to do with Ellis or with me.

  “Shall we?” Ellis says when the last of us puts down her fork.

  She leads us into the common room, where Kajal draws a slim green leather-bound book of poetry off the shelf and Ellis unearths a crystal decanter of bourbon concealed in a low cabinet, setting it down on the coffee table with a clink of glass on wood.

  Leonie’s brows lift. “What is that?”

  “Bourbon. Castle and Key,” Ellis says, lining a row of five glasses along the table’s edge. “The very first barrel. My sibling got it for me when they went to the distillery last winter; the work the new owners have done on the Old Taylor restoration is really fantastic.”

  I have no idea how to interpret any of the words that just came out of Ellis’s mouth. But Ellis discusses bourbon like she knows things, her slow southern drawl as calm and confident as if she were as much an expert with whiskeys as she is with literature.

  She glances up. “Do you like old-fashioneds, Felicity?” Ellis has a little brown bottle in hand, squeezing a dark liquid from an eyedropper into each glass.

  “What’s an old-fashioned? It sounds…old-fashioned.”

  Ellis laughs. “Oh, you’ll love this. Sit down.”

  “Ellis is on a whiskey kick,” Kajal informs me, arching her perfect brows. She says it as if she’s spent enough time with Ellis now to know everything there is to know about Ellis and her kicks. “Apparently the character in her new book likes whiskey. So of course that means Ellis has to like whiskey.”

  “How can you understand a character’s mind without sharing their experiences?” Ellis says archly. She has a knife in one hand and an orange in the other, a twist of peel curling from under the blade. “If your writing isn’t authentic—if you’re just making it up—the reader will know.”

  “So, method acting,” I say.

  It earns me a sharp grin. “Precisely. Method writing.” Ellis squeezes the peel over the nearest drink; a fine mist sprays the glass.

  “Once, Ellis slept outside in the Canadian winter for two weeks and bought heroin off a truck driver in an arcade bathroom,” Clara says.

  I find that incredibly hard to believe. It’s the kind of Ellis Haley trivia you’d read in a literary magazine—hyperbolic and dramatized for effect, nothing whatsoever like the kind of behavior any parent would let their high-school-aged child get away with.

  But Ellis doesn’t deny it, either.

  Because it didn’t happen?

  Or because it did?

  Ellis finishes the cocktails and passes one to each of us. The fine crystal is heavy in my palm. Ellis, perched on the arm of the sofa, opens the little book of poetry and starts to read from St. Vincent Millay: “Death, I say, my heart is bowed / Unto thine, O mother!…”

  I lift the glass and take a sip. The old-fashioned is surprisingly bitter, the heat of whiskey cut with something low and smoky. The sweetness, when it comes, is an afterthought. I’m not sure I like it.

  Judging by the grimaces on the o
ther girls’ faces, I’m not the only one.

  “This red gown will make a shroud / Good as any other.”

  Ellis passes the book to Leonie, who pages through with her free hand and chooses a new poem. We go around the room, each of us reading something; when it’s my turn I choose Dickinson. From the glance Ellis shoots my way, shadowed under the fringe of her dark lashes, I wonder if she finds me as uninventive as Mary Chudleigh.

  We take six rounds of the book, and after we’ve tired of poetry, Ellis makes coffee and ropes us all into a lively debate about the recursive feminine nature of birth and death; Leonie and Clara share a cigarette by the open window, the night breeze playing in Clara’s russet hair and Leonie’s sock feet tucked under Clara’s thigh. Kajal falls asleep on the sofa with Dear Life draped over her face. Ellis reads in an armchair, teeth catching her lower lip and chewing till the skin flushes red. I go back upstairs, to the silent gray of my bedroom. But for once the shadowed corners don’t hold threats.

  I draw a card: the Page of Cups. My room smells like Alex’s perfume.

  Closed inside the books on my shelf are all the letters she ever sent me: notes passed in class, postcards mailed from those unbearable camping trips she used to take with her mother. I pin one of the postcards to the wall next to the mirror. Her signature—the big looping A, the spiky consonants—gazes back at me.

  Alex is dead. And maybe her spirit is still here, maybe she still haunts the crooked halls of Godwin House. But I turn to face the empty room and say it anyway:

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  When classes fall into full swing, it’s easier to forget I’m haunted.

  The Godwin House poetry-and-existentialism sessions retreat from nightly to weekend occurrences over the next two weeks as attention turns away from dead poets and lyricism and toward homework and deadlines. More than once I catch Leonie sitting on the kitchen floor reading an assignment while dinner boils over, forgotten, on the stove behind her. My own reading list has gotten longer and longer; there’s no shortage of female horror to consume, and not nearly enough time in the semester to read it all.

  I find a first edition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at a used bookstore in town and quickly discover it’s impossible to read that book inside Godwin. There’s nowhere to sit that doesn’t position my back to either a window or door; I can’t make it half a page without lurching around to look over my shoulder, half expecting to find a grotesque faceless figure gazing back at me from the dark corners. So I do a lot of my reading outside, during the day, a crocheted blanket tossed onto the quad grass and a thermos of tea at my elbow, devouring the dark and the macabre with white sunlight burning the nape of my neck.

  The quad serves as the perfect vantage point to observe the full life cycle of a day’s activities at Dalloway School. I watch the engineering interns dart down the sidewalks with ducked heads and arms full of blueprints; the artists meander over grass, trailing the scent of patchouli; instructors glare at wristwatches they can’t afford as they hurry to the next meeting. I even spot Clara once, crossing from the library back toward Dalloway with a book held aloft. She doesn’t seem to notice the way other students have to weave around her, her mind floating in a world very far away.

  Ellis emerges from Godwin House just once, even though it’s a Friday afternoon. Maybe Ellis Haley isn’t required to attend classes. I watch her go across the yard, chin level with the ground and wearing a pantsuit, into the administrative building. She stays there about twenty minutes before I spy her again. This time she’s holding an armful of paperwork. I raise my voice and call her name; she looks over and our gazes meet. But then she turns away and keeps walking, as if I’m not there at all.

  It doesn’t matter. I’m not an Ellis groupie. I must have done something to offend her—still using a cell phone would probably be sufficient crime to find myself permanently exiled from the clique.

  But when I return to Godwin at dusk Ellis is there, cross-legged on the floor with the grandmother clock facedown on the rug and its insides strewn around her like war shrapnel.

  “This is harder than it looks,” she says, gesturing to the clock with a screwdriver.

  “I’m sure we could call a professional.”

  She shrugs. “I was bored. And I found this in the library, so…” She has a book open by her knee, all clockwork diagrams. “Maybe I can write this into a novel, if I figure it out.”

  This seems like a lot of work for a scene that may or may not ever materialize. Then again, I suppose procrastination is universal. Not even the great Ellis Haley is immune.

  I leave her there and retreat upstairs. I have an essay for Wyatt due tomorrow; I’m so absorbed in it that I ignore MacDonald’s call for dinner, flicking on my desk lamp when the sun finally slips the rest of the way below the horizon. I’ve just written page seven and shut my laptop to push against the wall with my toes, arching my back and stretching both arms over my head, when someone knocks.

  I expect MacDonald with a plate of leftovers, but when I call for her to come in, the door swings open and it’s Ellis instead, coffee mug in hand.

  “I thought you might need sustenance,” she says.

  More black coffee is the last thing I need at eleven p.m. when I have an early class the next day. I’m about to tell her that when she slides the mug onto my desk and I glance down.

  “This isn’t coffee,” I say.

  “It’s chamomile,” Ellis says. “One squeeze of lemon and a half teaspoon of honey. That is how you take it, right?”

  I had no idea she’d even noticed how I drink my tea—or that I drink tea to begin with. And yet here she stands, hands clasped behind her back and the tea itself steaming right next to my potted echeveria. I arch my brows, pick up the mug, and take a tiny sip.

  God, she even got it to the perfect temperature.

  “It’s good.”

  “I know.”

  It’s things like this that make me entirely unsure where I stand with Ellis Haley. I don’t understand how she could seem so patently disinterested in me on the quad earlier today, but within the crooked walls of Godwin House we might have known each other for months. I decide it’s the dichotomy of Ellis’s twin identities: Ellis Haley the famous writer, the prodigy whose face graced the cover of Time magazine, and Ellis the prep school student, who completely ruins antique grandmother clocks and tests new whiskey cocktails on her roommates, who shows up sweaty and flush-cheeked in the Godwin foyer after fencing practice with her épée scabbard slung over one shoulder and hair plastered to her brow, a modern Athena in lamé.

  It feels like a peace offering, so after a moment I say, “How is the book going?”

  She grimaces. “Not well. I’m starting to think writing about murder wasn’t the best of plans, considering—”

  “Considering you can’t kill someone to see what it’s like.”

  “Precisely.” Ellis sighs. “Of course, the story isn’t about murder, per se, it’s a character sketch, but I’m sure when the book’s out I’ll hear all sorts of complaints from murderers regarding my insufficiently accurate representation of their pastime.”

  Ellis’s gaze is steady, and there’s nothing about her eyes or the set of her mouth that implies any deeper meaning than what she’s said. But all at once I feel as if she has knotted her fingers in the threads that hold me together, pulling them taut and close to breaking.

  “I suppose you could read memoirs.”

  Ellis laughs, which isn’t at all the reaction I expected from a girl who—according to Hannah Stratford—takes her writing habits so seriously that she intentionally got arrested in small-town Mississippi just to see what it’s like. “Yes, I suppose I could. Do you have any recommendations?”

  This can’t be innocent. Ellis is a writer; she knows how to choose her words. She’s implying something. She’s imply
ing guilt.

  My next words come out stiff and synthetic: “I’m afraid I’m not as well versed in the murder memoir genre as I should be.”

  “But your thesis is on the Dalloway witches,” she says. “Surely you know quite a lot about these murders in particular. You can’t imagine all the research I’m going to have to do in order to re-create their lives and deaths faithfully on the page.”

  My stomach has turned into a stone. I’m frozen with the tea halfway to my lips, all the excuses dead in my mouth—

  Not that she would accept my excuses. How could I explain the way my past feels as if it’s intertwined with theirs? The dark magic that bites at my heels no matter how fast I run?

  She knows.

  She can’t possibly know.

  But Ellis’s gaze has already slid away from mine, fixing instead on my bookshelves. “What are these?”

  I twist round to look. For a moment I think she’s pointing at Alex’s postcard—but no, it’s right below that. I’ve stopped putting them in their hiding place.

  “Tarot cards.”

  “Tarot?”

  “You use them to read the future. Allegedly.”

  One of Ellis’s dark brows goes up. “Are you a psychic, Felicity Morrow?”

  “No. But they’re fun to play with anyway. I don’t really believe in…all that.”

  The words taste false on my tongue in a way they didn’t before. Maybe it’s how the air in the room has felt heavier ever since Ellis came in, a prickle rolling along the back of my neck. I shift my weight, and my chair—balanced on three legs with this uneven floor—wobbles.

  Ellis picks up the deck and flips through my cards, pausing on Death. Everyone does.

  “Can you read mine?” she says abruptly.

  “Right now?”

  “Unless you’d rather wait for the witching hour.”