A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “I didn’t go,” I say. “I stayed here with Ellis, at Dalloway.”

  Leonie and Kajal exchange looks. I wonder if they’ve been talking about me on the ride back from the airport, if they were taking bets on whether I’d be readmitted to the mental hospital before the end of term.

  The silence hangs heavy between us. We all try not to look at one another, Leonie grinding the edge of her nail into the groove of the wood counter, Kajal waiting for the water to boil.

  “I like your new hair,” I end up saying eventually, gesturing toward Leonie, whose braids have been replaced with loose waves that reach her waist.

  “Thanks. I just called in for the appointment yesterday. Your sweater looks nice, too.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Thank you. It’s vintage.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  Ellis has appeared in the doorway, one hand on either side of the frame: a saving grace wearing houndstooth. Her gaze lingers on me a half second longer than it does anyone else.

  “Clara said she’d go by the grocery store on her way back,” Kajal says. “I don’t remember what she said she was going to get, but it seemed like she had a plan.”

  The plan, it turns out, involves tacos. Somehow that’s the absolute last thing I ever expected to see the Godwin girls consume. But consume them we did, sitting around the dining room table dripping hot sauce and sour cream. Kajal picks at hers, but Ellis sucks the salsa from her fingertip, a sight that makes heat bloom low in my stomach.

  I help Clara clean up after dinner, once Leonie and Kajal have retreated to the common room and Ellis is upstairs—no doubt pounding away at her typewriter, creating the world’s next literary masterpiece. If Clara had expected me to disappear over break like the others had, she doesn’t show it.

  “How was your Thanksgiving?” I ask, feeling suddenly congenial. Clara is too focused on herself to notice anybody else.

  “It was good,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me as she scrubs down the stove top. “I went back to Connecticut and spent some time with my family. My little sister just turned four. She was running all over the house, getting into things—she tried to start herself a bath and ended up flooding the whole third floor. I mean, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t that stupid when I was four, right?”

  I didn’t know her when she was four, obviously. “I’m sure you weren’t.”

  “Well, at least she didn’t drown herself,” Clara says charitably. “Although not for lack of trying. Good thing it was too cold for beach trips.”

  “It snowed almost the whole time we were here,” I say. I’m at the sink washing dishes, done with the cast iron and moving on to the cutlery.

  “Oh, I know. Ellis told me. That sucks. Actually, I think I might skip classes for a few days and go somewhere. Like, apparently there’s this spa closer to the city, and it’s like…rustic? Only not really. You stay in a tent, but it has heating, and a bed, and a phone line. And it isn’t dirty.”

  So, glamping. If Alex were here, she’d have quite a few choice things to say about that. Clara might look like Alex—at least from behind—but the two of them have nothing in common.

  All of a sudden, I miss Alex more than anything. I miss the way she laughed. I miss how she always wanted to be outside, constantly wandering under the sun and trees. Leaves stuck in her hair, always with a book in her bag.

  And somehow thinking about Alex now…it doesn’t hurt. Or at least not the way it did. Maybe there’s still a chance to repair things with her spirit, to make amends.

  Maybe, at last, Alex can rest.

  “I hope you have a great time,” I tell Clara, surprising myself with my own sincerity. “It sounds wonderful.”

  When I do go back to my room, the shadows don’t seem as dark as they once did. The air is easier to breathe, despite the pitch dark outside. I gaze out my window for a while, waiting, but no figure emerges from between the trees. No chill creeps up my spine.

  I can still hear my mother’s voice echoing in my head, condescending, faux concerned: Have you been taking your medication? But it helps. I’m getting better. So I call the pharmacy and head out to pick up my order. As soon as I get back to Godwin, I swallow a pill with a glass of tap water and close my eyes.

  It’s surrender, in a way, but it’s not something to be ashamed of.

  That night, I take down the letters Alex sent me. I tie them in a neat stack with a length of ivory ribbon and slide them into my desk drawer. I leave the photo of us, pinned next to a postcard Alex sent me one summer.

  I fall asleep easily, and I sleep well.

  Perhaps too well.

  I oversleep.

  By the time I make it downstairs the next morning, everyone’s already had breakfast. The others have left for early-morning extracurriculars, and Ellis is curled up fully dressed on the common room sofa, dead to the world.

  I stand there for a little while, watching. I’ve seen Ellis sleep before, of course, but this feels different somehow. Maybe there’s a vulnerability in sleeping out in the open, without a blanket. Or maybe it’s that Ellis has never seemed the type to drowse in libraries.

  She’s wearing a point-collared dress shirt, still tucked into her trousers. One of the shirt buttons is undone; I glimpse the slightest swell of bare skin past white fabric, rising and falling in slow rhythm with her breath.

  I grip the back of the sofa so I won’t give in to the urge to reach down and brush back the hair that has fallen across her eyes. I don’t want to wake her—not if she was up writing all night.

  Robbed of my usual spot, I take my book back upstairs to the little reading nook nestled under the window at the far end of the third-floor hallway. Classes are barely back in session—a good excuse not to read horror and mystery. But I find myself choosing Strong Poison anyway. It’s not fascination with the macabre. It’s not that perverse need to terrify myself, a twisted penance for my crimes. I want to read Sayers. I want her elegant Oxonian prose, the fierce wittiness of Harriet Vane, the thrill of a chase.

  Wyatt told me the mark of a true scholar was passion for the subject above all else—passion that resumed despite obstacles, the academic circling back to her true love again and again.

  I think of the college applications I submitted before break, little missives darting off to Princeton, to Duke, to Brown. None of them were sent with much hope. The future had felt like a distant and abstract construct, a life that belonged to another Felicity—a mirror image of myself existing in some parallel world, a girl who stood a chance at living past the end of the year.

  When I was a child, I found it so hard to imagine ever turning sixteen. Sixteen. The age was laden with implication: sweet sixteen celebrations, cars, makeup, drinking at parties, and kissing lips I’d never remember. Only then I turned sixteen, and the impossible age became eighteen.

  And once I was eighteen, I hadn’t been able to see ahead past May. Alex’s ghost was a rising fog that obscured possibility, swallowing up every line that led into June, to July, to nineteen. None of the Dalloway Five had lived past eighteen; why should I?

  I sent those applications because it was what I was expected to do.

  Today, for the first time, it finally feels real.

  Maybe Ellis will come with me. We’ll share a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I’ll attend classes at Columbia during the day; at night I’ll return home to find Ellis still tilted toward her typewriter, notes and half-read books scattered over her desk like fallen leaves.

  When I wander down to the common room for lunch and a break from my thesis, Ellis has vanished from the sofa. Leonie is back, though, perched at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee, scribbling away in a notebook.

  “What are you working on?” I ask, and she immediately slaps the notebook shut, like she doesn’t want me to see.

  I lift my brows, and after a
long beat she wipes a hand over her eyes and shakes her head. “Sorry. I…well, I’ve been writing my grandmother’s story. A novelization of it, anyway. Don’t tell Ellis?”

  “Why would Ellis care?”

  Leonie shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t. But…well, writing is kind of her thing.”

  “Ellis doesn’t own writing. If you want to write about your grandmother, you should.”

  Leonie twists one of her waves around her forefinger and looks like she doesn’t believe me. I know Ellis better than anyone now, and I’d like to think Ellis would be pleased to hear that someone else has discovered a passion for writing and creation.

  I also know what it is to have a secret you’ve held close to your chest for so long it starts to poison you—to fear that if you show it to anyone else, it might poison them, too. But when I finally told Ellis about my mother, she hadn’t been poisoned.

  She’d understood.

  “I wanted to ask you about something,” I say once I’ve mustered the courage.

  Leonie nods slowly. “Okay,” she says. “Go for it.”

  “You were in the Margery coven. Weren’t you?”

  Leonie releases her hair. I can’t define the expression that settles on her face, her typically serene features twisting for a moment—almost as if in disgust. But the look is gone so quickly I might have imagined it. “Yes. I suppose I still am.”

  Well, I’m not, I almost say, but I swallow the words. Instead, I take a breath, one that shakes in my chest.

  “What do you think of them?” I ask.

  Leonie pats the seat next to her at the island, and after a beat, I take it. She crosses her arms over her shut notebook and meets my gaze straight-on.

  “You really want to know?” she says.

  “I really want to know.”

  A smile cuts across Leonie’s red-lipsticked mouth. “I think they’re full of shit.”

  I almost choke on my own laugh, startled, amazed—Leonie has to be the first person I’ve ever met to just come out and say it. But she’s right.

  “They’re all bluster. They make it seem like the coven is the only path to success after Dalloway, but that’s just propaganda.”

  “It’s not entirely propaganda. Margery girls always succeed.”

  “Because they’re rich, not because they’re Margery. They’re rich and they’re white.”

  My teeth catch my lower lip. There’s a bladed quality to Leonie’s voice; I’ve never seen her like this.

  “Why did you join then?” I ask.

  Leonie shrugs. “Why does anyone join? And I liked it, at first. They liked me, too. Only then last year I mentioned that one of their little bits of historical legend was technically inaccurate, and all of a sudden they started treating me differently. It was…let’s say illuminating.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Right? But that’s my point. They’re horrible.”

  I sit with her words for a moment, turning them over in my mind like stones. She’s right, of course. She’s right, but I didn’t want to admit it before. The Margery coven was all about appearances—from their feeble gestures at “magic” to their rejection of Leonie. Their rejection of me when I got sick.

  I wonder what part of the legend was inaccurate—if this is another piece of knowledge Leonie acquired during her research off-campus. I wonder how limited my own understanding of the Dalloway Five is, if by studying only what I found in the library, I’ve trapped myself in a certain view.

  I only ever wanted the Five to have been witches. I only ever saw what I wanted to see.

  Not like Leonie. For Leonie, it was never about what she wanted—it was about discovering the truth.

  “I’m really sorry, Leonie,” I say at last. “I…That’s repulsive.”

  Leonie rolls her eyes, but her smile is good-natured as she says, “See? Now you’re getting it.”

  I head to the fridge and take out the cheese plate Clara and Kajal assembled last night after dinner, peeling off the plastic wrap and bringing it back to the island.

  “Do you want to know something?” I say, impulsive, but suddenly I want her to know this about me. Leonie has confided in me about her dream of being a writer. I want to trade one secret for another.

  She opens her notebook again, setting her pen down at the binding. “All right.”

  I’d told Ellis, of course, if indirectly. I told Alex. Maybe putting words to this part of myself has already drained the secret of some of its power, because it’s easier now to meet Leonie’s gaze across the table and say, “I’m lesbian. It’s a little bit of a secret….Or…it was. Maybe not anymore.”

  To Leonie’s credit, she doesn’t even look surprised. “Oh. That’s cool.”

  “It is cool,” I agree, and I grin before I can stop myself. Leonie smiles back. And for a moment it feels like there’s a cord drawn between us, a link.

  “For what it’s worth,” Leonie adds, “I don’t think anyone in the house would think any differently of you, if you ever decide to tell them.”

  I’m sure that’s true. It’s never really been about fear of exclusion—not lately, anyway. Maybe it just felt like such a personal part of my identity. Maybe I didn’t want to let anyone so close.

  Ellis has changed all that.

  When evening falls, three of us Godwin girls play rummy in the common room till fatigue takes over. Clara is already off on her glamping trip, although I have no idea how she managed to get permission to skip class for something like that. And Ellis returned to the house after dinner, but she’d darted straight upstairs without speaking to anyone. Judging by the glassy look in her eyes we’d all gathered she was writing, too absorbed in the world of her characters to remember the rest of us existed.

  “I don’t know what you did to her over break,” Kajal says as we’re all heading upstairs to our respective rooms. “But whatever it is, it worked. I was starting to think she’d never finish that damn book.”

  The heat that rises in my cheeks has nothing to do with Ellis’s book and everything to do with what I did to her over break. I wonder if it’s written all over my face—if they both can tell exactly what I’m thinking, despite my efforts to appear cool and unruffled as I bid them good night on the second-floor landing.

  The candles on my windowsill have burned out; they’re stubs of melted wax now, the wicks charcoal smudges impossible to relight. I scrape the wax off with the edge of a ruler. It’s slow work, but I don’t stop until every sign of the candles has been rubbed away. In their place I put a row of colored flat marbles I bought at the antiques shop I went to with Ellis that one time. I’d gone back before break to purchase the pince-nez Ellis had worn. I’d meant to give them to her as a gift for surviving midterms, but I forgot; they presently rest in a velvet-lined case hidden in the back of my desk drawer. Maybe they’ll make a better gift for when Ellis finishes her book. She can revise with the glasses perched on the end of her nose, red pen in hand.

  The clock on my desk ticks past eleven, closer and closer to midnight. I ought to sleep. It’s Tuesday, but if I get in the habit of sleeping in too late it’s going to be hell getting myself out of bed for Art History. Eight on Tuesday morning is an ungodly time for a class, but at least I only have to do this for a few more months.

  Then summer. Then, I hope, college. The city. A new life.

  I’ve sworn off sleeping pills, but after half an hour of lying in bed and feeling equally as awake as I’d been at dinner, I flip my lamp back on and wander over to my bookshelf. I love Virginia Woolf, but to be completely frank, Mrs. Dalloway always puts me right to sleep.

  I trail my fingers along the spines, past Oryx and Crake and The Secret Garden—

  No.

  Time goes still—this moment, this room existing outside the rest of the universe—as I jerk my hand back
to my chest and clutch it there, not breathing. The old book is nestled there on my shelf, the cloth binding slowly peeling back from the spine and the lettering of the title faded to gray.

  It’s not possible. It’s…I’d finished this, the nightmare was over. I blink, almost expecting the book to vanish when I open my eyes again, like a trick of the light. But no. Nothing has changed.

  I tug the book free with shaking hands.

  A black dust tumbles from between the pages, scattering to the floor at my feet. I press my fingertips to the cover, and they come away dark.

  Grave dirt.

  My mind is full of static, a roaring sound that drowns out all else. I open the book, half expecting to find another wilted hellebore bloom.

  And there on the title page, in Alex’s handwriting, an inscription:

  I never told you that I love you, but it’s true. It was always true.

  Those words….they’re my words, from the letter I wrote Alex a week after she died.

  The letter that was buried in her empty casket.

  I slam the book shut and grip it between both hands, as if that will erase what I saw. My gaze flits back out the window, past the colored marbles—I should never have blown out those candles, should never have let down my guard—and out into the thick night.

  The first time I found this book in my room, I’d thought it must be Ellis playing a prank. But she wouldn’t have any way of knowing what I wrote to Alex.

  Then I’d thought I might have hallucinated the book.

  I’m not hallucinating now.

  I open the book again and reread the inscription. Alex’s handwriting is…There’s no mistaking it. Even so, I dig out the old letters she sent me and crouch down on the floor, comparing the swoop of Alex’s s in the book to her calligraphy from when she was still alive—the spiky peaks of her n’s, the way she always forgot to add punctuation and just began the next sentence with a capital letter.

  Alex wrote this inscription. Resuming my medication hasn’t chased her away, and she didn’t vanish in the face of what Ellis and I built together. She’s here. She’s always been here, her ghost called back by the legacy of magic sunk deep into the bones of this school, the dark curse that infected me the night I spilled my blood on the Margery Skull.