by Victoria Lee
The choice of words makes me flinch. Even so, a part of me wants to say yes, just for the aesthetics. Another part of me wants to refuse entirely—because this feels like a play, like a move on a chessboard, a game for which I don’t know the rules.
But if I say no, that would answer Ellis’s suspicions in a different fashion. It would show her I can be rattled.
I slip out of my chair and we move to settle on my bed instead, Ellis passing me the deck to shuffle. She reclines back against my pillows, elbow propped on the mattress and her hair pooling black atop the duvet.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
I do mind. But for some reason I shake my head, and she withdraws a silver cigarette case from her jacket pocket. There’s a pack of matches with the candles lining my windowsill; she steals one, lights her cigarette, and waves the matchstick to quench the flame. The scent of red phosphorus lingers in the air.
“You need to think of a question to ask the cards.” I split the deck again, reshuffle.
“Do I have to tell you what it is?”
“It will help me interpret the cards if you do.”
“All right. Ask them about us. You and me.” Her lips quirk. “Are we going to become friends?”
I almost laugh, but she seems serious, so I bite my cheek and draw three cards. “Fine. ‘Are we going to become friends?’ The first card is you.” I tap the back of that card. “The second is me. The third card is us together.”
Ellis pushes herself upright, crossing her legs and placing her hands in her lap like a child in school. “I’m ready.”
I turn over the first card. It depicts a woman riding a stallion, her sword held aloft and her hair streaming out behind her like a banner. “The Knight of Swords,” I say. “You’re—surprise, surprise—ambitious and driven. You know what you want, and you pursue it at any cost. That can be a good thing, of course, but it has downsides; you can be impulsive and reckless, too, more focused on your goal than on its risks.”
She nods, and from the set of her lips, I take it she’s rather pleased with herself.
The next card: “The Hermit. This one’s me.” Cloaked and bearing a staff, my free hand extended to hold a lamp. The light cuts through the dark landscape around me, a star held in my palm. “I should prepare for a journey of self-discovery and introspection. Not everything will be clear at once; I’ll only ever be able to see a few steps ahead. I have to trust myself and my own intuition.”
I glance up at Ellis again. She has leaned forward slightly, her elbows braced against her knees and her gaze fixed on the cards: the twin pale faces of the Hermit and the Knight, the botanical design etched into the back of the third card still facedown.
“And the last one? Us together?”
I turn it over. It’s the card from before, the same one that had so fascinated Ellis when she first looked at the deck.
Death rides a pale horse, the light of the setting sun glinting off the blade of her scythe. Peasants and queens alike are slain by her passing. In her wake, a white rose blooms.
“That doesn’t look good,” Ellis says dryly.
“Death isn’t as fatal as you might think,” I tell her, trailing my fingertips over the card’s linen face. “It can mean change or upheaval of any kind. Something vital will come to an end. But”—I touch the five-petaled rose—“something new grows in its place.”
There’s an odd look on Ellis’s face when our eyes meet again. A crack in the mask, something once hidden shifting behind the lacquered facade.
Ellis sweeps the cards into her hand and leafs through them one after the other. She lingers on the last again, skimming her thumb over Death’s face. “Did you draw cards for her, too?”
For a moment I consider pretending I don’t know what she means. But I do, and Ellis knows it. It’s somewhat of a relief that she’s finally brought her up after dancing around the subject for so long.
“Yes. A few times.”
“Did you ever draw Death?”
My tongue flicks out to wet my lower lip; suddenly everything inside me feels brittle as leached clay. “No. Never.”
She hands the cards back to me, and I shuffle them into the deck, then shut all the cards away in their box, where I don’t have to look at them again.
Ellis never said Alex’s name, but Alex’s presence hangs like perfume in the air between us.
Even after Ellis has gone, the stench lingers. I can’t erase the suspicion that this is why Ellis is speaking to me in the first place. She’s the only one of them who has; she followed me back after the Boleyn party. Then again, that was two weeks ago. She’s ignored me ever since, at least until she tracked me upstairs today and had me read her future. What has changed?
It’s too easy to imagine Clara whispering in Ellis’s ear again, old and rotten tales about missing girls and desolate mountain cliffs, how Felicity Morrow claimed it was an accident, but no one else was there to say for sure.
Maybe it’s not the old murders at Dalloway that intrigue Ellis after all. Maybe it’s me. I’m the key, that lived experience she so badly wants to exploit for her book.
I trace the lines on my palms and wonder if Ellis sees my hands drenched in red.
Ellis’s absence has snapped whatever fragile nets had been holding the shadows at bay. Night fell hours ago, but it seems to deepen now, darkness creeping out from the corners and threatening to consume the house from the inside.
For a long time I lie in bed with my eyes squeezed shut and my heart pounding. My mind won’t stop—it tumbles from one image to the next, like I’m being forced to watch a gruesome film. I see bones rotting in unmarked graves, crawling with maggots; Cordelia Darling’s bloated body floating in the lake, hair a bloody halo around her face; a shadow figure with starlit eyes and skeleton fingers. Ellis’s face peers out from the darkness, a pale mask that fractures to reveal the sunken features of Margery Lemont’s corpse. Margery’s mouth opens wide, wider, a gaping chasm, her tongue like a black snake swollen between her teeth—
I turn on my bedside lamp. Its soft glow is barely enough to illuminate this corner of my bed. Anything could lurk in the hidden spaces outside its orbit.
I light candles on all the windowsills until the shadows vanish, then crawl back into bed with my tarot cards clutched to my chest. I don’t read them—it just makes me feel better having them near. I wish I held my crystals instead, black obsidian and staurolite heavy over my heart, their power like a golden field around me that no spirit could breach.
I can’t, of course. I know I can’t. Magic is dangerous for me. Maybe some people can toy with it, but me…
God. Just last week the party line was how magic isn’t real. And yet it is; I know it is. The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.
I tighten my grip on my tarot deck, shut my eyes, and think about light in the darkness, my feet steady on whatever path is laid for me, protected not by magic but by my own will. Your mind is powerful, Felicity, Dr. Ortega had said. You can summon terrible things. You also have the ability to banish them.
But as I lie under the covers with the duvet drawn over my head, the tree branch outside once again tap-tapping against my window like bone fingers scratching for entry, I’m more certain than ever that even the Hermit’s light won’t be enough to keep the ghosts in their graves.
This day there being Complaint issued by Anonymous sources, whereby these named daughters are suspected of moste heinous Murder of one Flora Grayfriar in profane fashion, this court demands Apprehension of Margery Lemont, Cordelia Darling, Beatrix Walker, & Tamsyn Penhaligon of Dalloway School to appeare before us and speak truth before God and Justice, to face the graete damage and havock which hath beene wrought at the Devil’s hands.
—Province of New York, Quarto Annoq’e Domini 1712, Hudson Court
Files, vol. 32, docket no. 987
Is there no way out of the mind?
—Sylvia Plath, “Apprehensions”
Alex and I fell in love via a series of accidents.
My first semester at Dalloway, I lived in Farquhar House, sharing a room with a skinny, anxious girl named Therese who had a bad habit of picking at her scalp and eating the scraps. Eager to distance myself from Therese’s orbit, I spent most of my time either in the Farquhar common room or pretending to belong to other houses: lurking in their common rooms, befriending their housemistresses, drinking their tea.
I met Alex at ten past midnight in the Lemont House common room. Normally I would have reluctantly returned to Farquhar—and Therese’s dandruff—by that hour, but there was a blizzard, and a severe weather warning was in effect, so we’d all been advised to shelter in place until the danger passed.
“I think you should go,” she said, standing in the doorway wearing a fleece jacket and hiking pants, her feet stuffed into those cozy wool booties that were popular for a few years despite how hideous they were.
“It’s still snowing.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen snow before.”
“Mmm,” I said, but all I could think was I’m done talking to this girl.
But she, clearly, was not done talking to me. Alex moved deeper into the room and planted herself in front of my chair with her arms crossed. There was no pretending not to notice her. I looked.
Alex was pretty. Maybe not in the conventional way—her jaw was too square, her eyes too far apart, her red hair always tangled and roped back into a fraying plait. But she exuded a fierce energy that ate up all the oxygen in a room.
I wanted her from day one.
First, though, we had to spend the whole night huddled on that sofa together, lighting a fire in the hearth to keep warm—because right as she had launched into a tirade about the moral faults of trespassing, the power went out.
It’s hard to maintain a consistent standard of animosity when you spend eight hours with someone in the dark. Alex could have gone up to bed. I would have, if it had been me. But she stayed downstairs, bundled up in one of the blankets off the sofa, and we discovered that we both loved Daphne du Maurier and Margaret Atwood, that we hated the snobby STEM students with equal fervency, and, most important, that we were both determined to be accepted into Godwin House.
Midnight secrets weren’t enough to build a friendship, though. I didn’t see much of her after that; at least not until I broke my wrist in December and encountered Alex in the same emergency department waiting room. She was curled up on a stretcher, sweaty and grimacing, from what would later turn out to be appendicitis, but she somehow spotted me and called me over. Mostly to make me hold her hair back while she vomited, but still.
I stayed with her after my wrist had been bandaged up. Her mother appeared right before Alex was about to be wheeled into surgery, a panicked woman whose frantic hands flit about like wild birds. I managed to get Ms. Haywood to take a seat and calm down, stroking her hair like she was a little child while Alex made faces at me from the cot.
I remember being so fascinated by Ms. Haywood: her tears and her soft words, the way Alex seemed to bloom in her presence, even sick. The maternal way Ms. Haywood pressed her lips to Alex’s temples.
“I’m so glad she has you, dear,” Ms. Haywood told me, blotting her wet cheeks with her wrist. “Alex told me how horrible all the Dalloway girls have been. But you’re so…so sweet. What a lovely friend.”
It turned out Alex was at Dalloway on full scholarship, one of only three girls in our year. Ms. Haywood had raised her as a single mother working two jobs. Alex had attended public school, not prep. These factors had resulted in Alex’s summary dismissal from every social group on campus.
Well, not anymore. I already had a generally low opinion of half the school, having seen how contingent their interest in me was upon whether they knew or didn’t know my mother’s name. Alex, I was fairly certain, didn’t have the first clue who Cecelia Morrow was—and that suited me just fine.
Alex and I became our own clique: inverse images of one another, the rebel and the heiress. Alex had her own charm; it was impossible not to love her.
Our first kiss was at a rooftop party in the city. It was just an hour’s drive away, so we’d gone out for Friday night, my mother’s credit card covering bottle service at a bar I hoped my mother had never actually visited. I didn’t want to hear the embarrassing stories if she had.
The roof was draped in greenery and market lights, which glimmered off the low reflecting pool that ran parallel to the bar. Alex and I were merely sixteen, but it didn’t matter—no one had even glanced at our fake IDs. We were wearing enough makeup to pass for twenty-three, smoky-eyed and red-lipped, in designer heels. Alex was luminous in lavender, her hair drawn up into a chignon and exposing her bared back, a fine lariat chain falling along her spine and punctuated by a single glittering garnet. I knew Alex, so I knew the gem was fake. But in this strange, warm light, anything could have been real.
I’d never wanted to touch someone so much in my life.
“I still can’t believe you failed the geography test,” Alex said, both of us leaning against the iron railing with sparkling wines in hand. It was the fourth time she had brought it up that weekend, ever since I made the mistake of telling her about my dismal score on our drive down from Dalloway.
She was gazing out across the city, her hair shining scarlet. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
I sipped my wine so I wouldn’t speak. That was my third glass already; the alcohol had started to make me feel unpleasantly weightless, light-headed. Half the girls I knew at Dalloway drank, but all I could think about was my mother. I knew this feeling could be dangerous. I wondered what Alex would say if I poured the rest of my drink off the edge of the roof.
At last, I managed a response. “An off day, I suppose.”
Alex looked over. “We studied,” she said, half an accusation.
My glass was cold and sweaty in my hand; I twisted the stem between my fingers. “I know.”
“What happened? You knew that material. You were quizzing me on it.”
I chewed my lower lip until it hurt. I didn’t know how to lie to Alex, even then. At last I sighed and tipped my head back, staring up at the stars. Or where the stars would have been if the sky weren’t obscured by all that light pollution.
“I failed the test on purpose.”
“You what?”
Alex grabbed my arm and tugged until I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if the expression on her face was more repulsed or amused.
“I know,” I said. “But…Well, you know Marie, from our class?”
Alex nodded.
“She loves geography. I was actually talking to her at a dinner thing the other day, and she said she’s going to major in it in college. She wants to go to grad school and get her PhD. And I suppose I thought…”
Alex was staring at me like she’d never quite seen me before.
I shrugged. “I have the top score in that class right now. And I figured maybe I should let that be hers. Only I guess I overcorrected, and I…ended up failing the test.”
It took a moment, but finally a small smile pulled at the corners of Alex’s lips. “You’re a good person, Felicity Morrow.”
I didn’t know what to say to that then. Now I know exactly what I would say.
I’m not good. I’m the furthest thing from good.
There on that rooftop, with the city alive around us, Alex slid her fingers along my cheek and stepped closer and kissed me. A breeze was picking up and my wineglass was shaking in my hand, but Alex was kissing me. Her lips tasted like chocolate.
But I can’t think about her anymore. I can’t remember that kiss now.
I don’t want to.
* * *
—
I’d decided that for my elective this year, I would take Art History.
It was a choice I made on impulse that I came to regret after the final two weeks of summer, watching my mother entertain a dozen art curators in our living room, giving them tours of our gallery—the walls repainted and hung with fresh art, no evidence of violence, even though it hadn’t yet been a month since my mother took a knife to her collection of priceless paintings and pushed over sculptures, shattering them on the marble floor.
I’d hidden in my room while she shouted and raged and broke things, and when I had finally ventured downstairs again I’d found her crouched in the middle of the wreckage, sweeping porcelain shards into a dustpan like they were nothing but spilled sugar.
“Come help me, darling,” she’d said, her words still angled and blurry from all the wine she’d had after dinner, and I didn’t have a choice.
I’m not interested in art anymore, but it’s too late to change my schedule. The first two classes, we went over the syllabus, and the prospect of all those looming projects and essays made me want to put my head in my arms and go to sleep.
Before last summer, I had vaguely anticipated all of us traipsing down the halls of an art museum in Kingston talking about patterns of brushstrokes and pigments mixed from arsenic. Now all I envision is endless hours of slides and falling asleep in a dim room to the click-click of an overhead projector.
I dread this class more than the rest, primarily because the syllabus says we will discuss our project assignments today. The word group isn’t explicitly appended before the word project, but it’s there nonetheless.
I slip into the room minutes before the bell, past our instructor, an emaciated woman with bird’s-nest hair and a fringed shawl, standing at the head. I remember thinking on the first day that the instructor looked like she might have emerged from between time, a relic of Dalloway’s witchiest years: the reincarnation of Beatrix Walker or Cordelia Darling.