by Victoria Lee
I burst into the kitchen. Leonie is by the stove, an omelet sizzling in a skillet, Kajal cutting up a fresh bell pepper at the island. “Did you take it?” I demand.
Kajal puts down her knife. “Take what?”
“The book. There was a book in my room. Someone took it.”
I sense Ellis slipping into the kitchen behind me.
Kajal and Leonie glance at each other.
“I don’t think any of us would have gone into your room without your permission,” Leonie says, with a gentleness that is both surprising and irritating. It’s the same tone the nurses took with me at the facility: cautious, soft, like anything else would fracture me. Like I might get violent if they spoke too loudly.
All at once I’m aware of how this scene would look to an observer: Myself, wild-haired and hysterical at eight in the morning, demanding that someone confess to theft. Ellis, behind me, grim.
They think I’m insane. They all do.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp out, too late. “I’m sorry. I don’t…I barely slept. I…”
“It’s okay,” Leonie says, in that same too-calm tone.
I clench my teeth so hard my jaw hurts.
“Maybe a nice cup of coffee,” Ellis suggests at last, and she touches my elbow as she moves past me to the cabinet.
I stand there and stare at her back as she takes down the pour-over cups and filters, opens the ceramic box of fresh beans, and pours a tablespoonful into the grinder.
Leonie offers a hesitant smile across the island. “Do you want an omelet? We have plenty of eggs.”
I can’t speak. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll start crying and I won’t stop. So I shake my head, feeling my face crumple a beat before I escape the kitchen—back upstairs, back to my damn room with the dandelion on the floor and the scent of Alex’s perfume long since dissipated. I pace from the window to the dresser and back once, two times. It’s cold, it’s so cold.
The book was here. I know that much for certain. It was here, and then it was gone—the book we left at the cemetery, the book that smelled of Alex’s perfume.
She’s here.
I push the thought away, but a sick ribbon of nausea is tied to it. I can’t stop thinking about her.
She’s here.
I grab a candle from my collection and kneel down on the floor in the middle of that dandelion ring. I strike a match and light the flame, whisper, “Please go. Please. I’m sorry. Please leave me alone.”
I don’t know if I’m talking to a ghost anymore…or to something else.
A rap sounds against my doorframe. I jerk my head up; Ellis stands there with a mug of coffee cupped between both hands.
“I thought you might still like that coffee,” she says quietly.
I fall back onto my heels and exhale. At least when she’s here, the room feels warmer. “Thanks.”
I hold out a hand, and Ellis moves deeper into my bedroom, crouching down next to me and passing the mug. It’s still steaming hot; the liquid burns my tongue when I take a sip. I’m glad for the pain. It’s steadying.
I wish it were bourbon.
Only as soon as I think that, I think of my mother, with her empty wine bottles, glass shattered on the marble floor, and gag.
“I’m worried about you,” Ellis says.
I snort. “I know. So’s my mother. She called the other week to check in. For the first time all semester, but at least she’s performing her maternal duties.”
“What did you tell her?”
The coffee’s just as hot when I swallow it a second time. I clench my eyes shut and drink it anyway, my tongue numb and dry-feeling after. “I told her I was fine. I…” I laugh, “I told her I was going home with someone over break so I wouldn’t have to see her instead. I suppose I’ll have to get a hotel room in town.”
“Or you could stay here with me.”
My heart seizes in my chest. “What?”
“Stay here with me,” Ellis says again. Her hand finds my knee and squeezes once. “My parents will be traveling most of break, so I got special permission to stay at the school. My sibling, Quinn, is coming up to visit; I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”
A quavering smile rises to my lips despite myself. I shake my head. “I wasn’t trying to invite myself, for the record.”
“Duly noted. Please say you’ll do it.”
I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. “Yes. I’ll stay.”
Ellis grins and swats my leg before her hand retreats back to her own lap. I find myself bereft in the wake of her touch. I want more. I want her touching me everywhere.
I want more, I suspect, than Ellis has the capacity to give.
With the campus empty and Godwin all to ourselves, being at Dalloway feels like summer again.
Ellis and I play records in the common room with the volume turned up loud, hang out of bedroom windows with lit joints and our heads full of stars.
I know that I’m unwell. I know I shouldn’t keep denying it. I’d hoped distance from Alex’s death would erase the fear scrawled on the walls of my mind, but it hasn’t. Dr. Ortega once described psychotic depression as being like a gun: my genetics loaded the chamber with bullets, my mother passed the weapon into my hand, but Alex’s death pulled the trigger.
So maybe I imagined the book. Maybe Ellis is right and it was never there—maybe I wanted it to be there. Maybe I wanted Alex to punish me.
And maybe it’s all right to admit that.
Ellis’s sibling arrives on the third day of Thanksgiving break, their vintage Mustang barely visible through the trees around Godwin. From the third-floor hall window, I watch them ascend the path on foot, a narrow figure silhouetted against the setting sun.
“Ellis,” I call out, just loud enough to be heard from the floor below, where Ellis is hard at work on her novel. “Quinn’s here.”
Even from upstairs I can hear her chair scrape against the floor, then the clatter of her feet on the hardwood as she races down the stairs. I follow, trailing belatedly after Ellis out into the cool dusk, where she has thrown both arms around the newcomer, who squeezes her tight enough that Ellis’s feet lift off the ground.
They’re dark-haired, like Ellis, and tall—also like Ellis. But when they set Ellis down and I catch sight of their face, I realize they’re nothing like their sister at all. Their face is too open, too heart-on-their-sleeve. I don’t know how I can tell such things from a glance, but it feels true. Our gazes meet over Ellis’s head; Quinn’s is steady and black-hued.
“Felicity, this is Quinn. Quinn, Felicity,” Ellis says at last, a saving grace. “My friend from school that I told you about.”
“All lies, I’m sure,” I say, and when Quinn offers their hand, I shake it.
“I imagine Ellis didn’t talk about me very much at all,” Quinn says.
There’s no good response to that; it’s true, after all. Ellis only mentioned them twice. I know they’re much older than Ellis, by about ten years. I know from Ellis’s use of gender-neutral pronouns that Quinn is nonbinary. And I can tell by looking that, aside from their basic appearance, they have a lot of other things in common with their sister—at least if the blazer and flamboyant gold cravat are anything to go by.
“I know a little,” I end up saying, and Ellis folds her hands behind her back, smiling like a proud gallery curator who has just introduced a patron to a brand-new work of art.
Quinn gestures to the house. “Shall we go in and get to know each other, then?”
We head inside and to the common room, Ellis pushing me down into my favorite plush burgundy armchair. Quinn takes the seat opposite, lounging on the chaise and lighting a cigarette. I find myself unsurprised they’re smoking indoors; Ellis does it often enough that the shock has worn off. Perhaps she got the idea from Quinn.
For her part
, Ellis heads directly to her hidden stash of bourbon—the bourbon, I recall, that Quinn had gifted her. My gaze lingers too long, watching her elegant hands move to drip bitters into three crystal glasses. I manage to look away only when I realize Quinn’s watching me, assessing.
I clasp my hands together in my lap and attempt a smile. I feel like I’m trying to impress someone’s parents on a first date. Not that I’ve ever had one of those. Not really.
“Tell me about yourself, Felicity,” Quinn says.
What is this, a job interview? I dig the side of my thumbnail into my hand to keep from saying something I’ll regret. “I don’t know how much there is to say. I’m not a very interesting person, I’m afraid.”
“Felicity’s being modest,” Ellis says. “She’s the best academic in Godwin House, and I include Housemistress MacDonald in that assessment.”
I don’t blush easily, but I blush now. I hope the light here’s dim enough that Quinn doesn’t notice. “That’s not true.”
“What is your favorite class?” Quinn asks.
“English literature, broadly,” I say. “But I’m doing my thesis on the portrayal of witchcraft and mental illness in genre novels.”
Ellis frowns over her shoulder at us. “I thought you said you were writing about horror novels or something.”
“I am, but…I did so much work before, when my thesis was still about the Dalloway witches. It seemed a shame to let that all go to waste.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Ellis says, stirring one of the drinks. “After…”
Fortunately for me, Quinn takes that moment to step in. “Mental illness in genre,” they say. “Are you more interested in accuracy of portrayal? Or the significance thereof?”
“Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator’s perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters.”
“See?” Ellis says, returning with two of the cocktails in hand. “I told you she was brilliant.”
Heat rises in my cheeks, and when she hands me one of the drinks, our fingers brush. Does her touch linger a beat longer than necessary? Or am I imagining things?
Quinn glances down at their drink and lets out half a laugh. “Old fashioneds? Really, Ellis? You’re seventeen, last time I checked.”
“Are you going to turn me in?” Ellis says.
Quinn shakes their head. “No, but I am going to mock you mercilessly. When I let you try one of my whiskey sours over the summer, you hated it so much you puked in the hydrangeas.”
Ellis turns a delicate shade of rose; I’m fascinated. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her embarrassed.
I relate far more to the old Ellis than the new one, but I take a sip of my old fashioned anyway. I can tell intellectually that the sweetness is balanced perfectly by the bitters, that neither overwhelms the heat of the bourbon—that it’s an objectively good drink—but I still hate it. I set the glass aside on the end table and hope Ellis won’t notice if I don’t finish.
“What else?” Quinn presses me. “Where are you from? Where did you go before Dalloway?”
“Jesus, Quinn,” Ellis says, her tone sharp—still ruffled by Quinn’s taking her down a peg, I imagine. “What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” I say.
Quinn allows me a slight smile from across the room. Maybe I’ve won myself some credit with them after all.
“I’m from Colorado originally,” I tell them, “but I went to the Fay School before Dalloway. That was a long time ago now; I’m a senior.”
Senior plus, really, but Quinn doesn’t need to know this is my second attempt at finishing my prep school career. Assuming Ellis hasn’t already informed them of my flaws.
I decide not to give Quinn the chance to guide the conversation, by asking the next question. “My mother’s Cecelia Morrow. Of the Boston Morrows.”
Not that it needs to be clarified; my mother’s flight from the East Coast, unmarried and pregnant by a stranger, had been what passed for a scandal back in the aughts. Everyone knew all the nasty little details, no matter how fiercely my grandmother had tried to obscure them.
Quinn performs a dramatic shudder. “New Englanders.”
“You’re such a snob,” Ellis says affectionately. She has curled up on the sofa, long legs flung out along the floor and crossed at the ankles. Her trousers hitch up high enough that I can tell she’s wearing sock garters.
“What about you?” I shoot back before Quinn can resume the interrogation. “I already know where you went to university. But I don’t know what you studied.”
“Statistics.”
“Quinn’s a poker player,” Ellis elaborates.
“If my trans-ness didn’t murder our parents, the gambling certainly would have.” Quinn’s slow smirk suggests they don’t mind that at all. “Ellis has always been the darling child, although I can’t imagine why. She’s just like me.”
Ellis rolls her eyes, but it seems good-natured. She leans over, and Quinn hands her their cigarette.
“I think it’s almost time for bed,” Ellis says, blowing her smoke toward the ceiling. “It’s getting late, and you had a long drive.”
“Kicking me out already?” Quinn’s grin is slow and mischievous; I don’t have the impression they mind being bossed around by their little sister.
But I am surprised Ellis is attempting it in the first place. I get the sense she’s trying to reassert some kind of dominance after Quinn called her out for the fake whiskey habit.
“Oh, we’ll see quite enough of each other over the next few days, I’m sure,” Ellis says. She stabs out the cigarette and gets to her feet, finishing off her cocktail in a few long swallows.
It means I have to gulp down the rest of my old fashioned as well, and I waver a little when I stand. I tell myself that’s fatigue; I’m not such a lightweight as to be thrown off balance by one drink. “It was nice meeting you, Quinn. I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bright and early,” they say, clapping Ellis on the shoulder one last time before heading for the door. “I’m staying at a hotel in town. Not far at all; feel free to call if you need anything.”
And then they’re gone, as quickly as they arrived. If I were alone, I might wonder if the whole thing had been some bizarre drunken fever dream.
Ellis stands in the hall with her arms crossed, staring at the space where Quinn had stood.
“What?” I say, a teasing edge creeping into my tone. “Sick of them already?”
Ellis shakes her head. “Of course not. Although I do wonder why they bothered to come all this way if they’re only going to make fun of me.”
A sharp sound bursts out of my chest, almost a laugh. “Ellis, they weren’t making fun of you. They were perfectly nice.”
“Oh, yes, that’s Quinn. Perfectly nice.”
She stalks back into the common room, and I follow, sitting next to her on the sofa and—after a moment—patting her knee.
“Well they aren’t staying in Godwin, at any rate, so you’ll have plenty of breaks,” I say.
She sighs and tips her head back against the upholstery. Her cheeks are still pink. Maybe it isn’t embarrassment; maybe she doesn’t have nearly the alcohol tolerance she leads us to believe. “Yes,” she says. “Even so, perhaps we should have gone down to Savannah instead. My parents’ house is massive—you could get lost in those halls. We’d have had all the privacy we desired.”
“We could have, yes.”
I don’t ask her what we’d need privacy for. I’m afraid the answer would be something horrifically mundane.
“I used to call the house Manderley,” she says. “We weren’t near enough to the sea for the comparison to be p
erfect, but it was close enough.”
“Is Rebecca one of your favorites, too?”
“Of all time.” Ellis tilts her face toward me again. “Although I always related more to the eponymous mistress than our dear narrator.”
“I can believe that,” I say, and she reaches out and slips a hand into my hair, her thumb skirting the curve of my ear. I do my best not to shiver.
Maybe the privacy she wanted in Savannah wasn’t so mundane, after all.
In the firelight, Ellis’s eyes glitter like polished pewter. “I’m glad you stayed with me,” she murmurs, her voice as low and soft as the velvet sofa beneath us. “I would have been lonely if you hadn’t.”
Her words stay with me even after I’ve gone upstairs to bed, repeating in my mind as I light my candles and tuck tourmaline under my pillow.
I’m glad you stayed with me.
I’m glad you stayed.
* * *
—
The next morning, Quinn arrives early and makes breakfast, which we eat together in the dining room; the formal mahogany table is incongruous with the casual breakfast, but Ellis insists. We eat toast dipped in soft-boiled eggs and a side of bacon. “All Quinn knows how to cook,” Ellis informs me in a conspiratorial whisper, which earns a flick on the temple from her sibling.
After breakfast Quinn has to drive into the city for some poker thing, leaving Ellis and me to spend the morning reading. We splay ourselves across her bed, Ellis’s hair pooling by my elbow and my toes curled under her thigh; my horror novels aren’t so scary when we’re like this.
But after lunch Ellis makes me leave her alone to write, and I’m left to wander through Godwin’s empty halls: Past Kajal’s room, the door left open so I can see her neatly made bed, her shoes lined up along the wall beside her desk. Past MacDonald’s locked office. Through the common room, the kitchen, then upstairs again, to lie on my back in the hallway and feel gravity trying to pull me sidelong, the tilted floor daring me to roll left and press my nose to the baseboard.