A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  The story sounds just like that: a story.

  “Are you all right, Felicity?” MacDonald asks, her eyes huge and owl-like behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “I know how close all you girls are. Have you been hanging in there okay?”

  “We all miss Clara,” I say. In the past week I have gotten very good at choosing my words. I use the present tense. I blend myself in with the larger group—no individualism, part of a faceless whole.

  MacDonald nods, and for a moment I think she’s going to let me leave. Only then she shifts forward, reaching across her desk to clutch my hand, squeezing hard enough that I flinch.

  “I’m so sorry,” MacDonald tells me. “I know she’s your friend. What a year for you….No one should have to lose two…two…” She breaks off, tears welling in her eyes.

  “I’m sure Clara’s fine, Housemistress.”

  But we can both tell neither of us believes that’s true.

  MacDonald sniffs and, producing a handkerchief from her jacket pocket, dabs at her nose. “Well,” she says. “You’ll let me know if you need any support. Won’t you? Perhaps…perhaps you should call your mother and have her come….”

  “I’m quite all right,” I say as firmly as possible. “Thank you. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”

  I go upstairs to my room, and I find the letter I wrote in Ellis’s handwriting. I bring it downstairs and slide it under Clara’s pillow.

  Wednesday the police show up with a subpoena to search Clara’s room.

  Godwin House is a mess: crime scene technicians and officers, yellow tape bracketing off Clara’s door, strangers tramping through our sacred halls.

  I don’t have to wonder what they make of us. I hear Liu and Ashby talking outside the front door as I lurk in the common room, doing my best to overhear.

  “A thousand bucks says that girl’s dead by now,” Liu is telling Ashby. “We’ll find her body floating in the Hudson in a few days, bloated up and half-rotten.”

  I think about where Clara’s body really is: buried six feet underground, pale and bloodless. Still preserved, perhaps, by the cold and snow.

  “Think one of the housemates killed her?” Ashby says, and my breath freezes in my chest.

  I can practically see Liu shaking her head. “What a weird lot. The outfits. The vocabulary. Did you see the way that one girl reacted when I asked what Clara did for fun? I might as well’ve asked if Clara liked torturing small puppies in her spare time.”

  “Well, it is Dalloway,” Ashby says dryly. “You heard about this place? Apparently they’ve got some real secret-society-flavored shit going on. I’m talking like séance parties, Satan worship…”

  No one worships Satan at Dalloway. No one even believes in any of the magic—no one except me.

  I can’t listen to more of this. I slip away from the door, back up the stairs toward my room.

  I only make it to the second floor.

  Ellis stands on the landing, a slice of shadow in all black. She lifts an envelope in one hand and arches a brow. “We need to talk.”

  * * *

  —

  Ellis leads me back into her bedroom, shutting the door behind us with a jab of her elbow. The air in the room feels alight with electricity, sparking and shivering between us like a lightning bolt that started a forest fire.

  “What is this?”

  She holds the letter aloft. My eyes glance off my own handwriting, which looks even less like Ellis’s from this angle.

  She has positioned herself between me and the door—there’s no escape, short of hurling myself out the window, that doesn’t involve passing close enough for her to grasp my arm.

  Ellis had promised she wouldn’t hurt me, not unless I forced her hand.

  Only I just tried to frame her for Clara’s murder. Does this count as forcing her hand?

  You can’t believe Ellis’s promises anymore, I tell myself.

  “It’s a letter,” I answer, keeping my voice low in an effort to sound firm and controlled. “You started this game, Ellis. Don’t act like two can’t play.”

  Even from here I can see the way Ellis’s shoulders rise and fall with swift, shallow motions. Her usual calm has been whittled away, revealing something brighter—something dangerous.

  “I never put that letter in Clara’s room,” Ellis says, although I can’t think of any other reason why she would have found this one. “I told you I wouldn’t. I promised I wouldn’t try to frame you unless you made me. Why would you do this, Felicity? Why?” Her voice arcs upward in pitch, louder.

  I glance toward the window, but the police cruisers are already pulling away from the house, descending the narrow lane toward campus proper. Everyone else is in class. There’s no one to overhear.

  “You’re the reason I came to this school,” Ellis says all of a sudden, and my attention snaps back to her. I take a quick step away, toward the bed. “Did you know that? I read about you in an article on Alex’s death. I didn’t care about the Dalloway Five. I wanted to write about you.”

  She says it like that’s an excuse—like I should soften into her arms and forgive her.

  But all I can think now is…what Ellis must have thought of me. How pitiful I must have seemed to her: the girl who may or may not have killed her friend, the girl who believed in ghosts, the girl who went mad. And I’ve proved her right, haven’t I? I’ve proved Alex right, too.

  I meet Ellis’s gaze and feel something cold close around my heart, a feeling like a door slamming shut.

  “No,” I snap, starting toward her abruptly enough that Ellis rears back, even though I never reach for her, never close my fist. “No. I won’t let you destroy my life for entertainment. I’m not Melpomene, to inspire your next great and tragic art. You don’t have the right.”

  Ellis’s cheeks have gone pallid. She stands out against the backdrop of her quick-darkening room like a ghost in the night. “Is that so?”

  For the first time, I think she might actually kill me. I can see her the way Clara must have seen her in that moment—a vengeful spirit ascended from hell, charging ceaselessly toward annihilation. My gaze flicks over to the épée hanging from its hook on the wall, equidistant from both me and Ellis.

  And Ellis, it seems, has the same idea.

  We both lunge for the sword at the same time, but Ellis—who has spent years training for this, has poured hours into practice at the gym, soaking her lamé with sweat in pursuit of mastering this sport—gets there first.

  “Stay where you are,” she demands, poised in perfect posture with the sword outstretched, its blunted tip inches from my face.

  “Or what?” I laugh. “These swords aren’t sharp. What are you going to do, poke me with it?”

  But Ellis doesn’t move, her gaze fixed, unblinking, around the vicinity of my shoulders.

  She holds the blade with her right hand. All those times I watched her practicing forgery…She isn’t left-handed. I could never have faked her handwriting, and she made sure of it.

  My chest hurts with every breath I manage to take. And there’s no way to know what Ellis is thinking: If she is even now calculating the worth of leaving me alive. Or if she will invite me on a final Night Migration, if my body will curl up with Clara’s corpse and Alex’s ghost in the ruined grave.

  I can’t stay here.

  I dart forward, but Ellis is faster. It’s a simple motion, a flick of her wrist, and pain erupts on my cheek. I stagger back, one hand rising to touch the blood that drips down my skin.

  “Don’t move,” Ellis snaps.

  This time, I obey.

  The tip of Ellis’s sword trembles. The edge of it is stained red.

  “I can’t trust you,” she murmurs, but she isn’t speaking to me. Her voice is low, tight. It’s not a statement; it’s a realization. “Sooner or later, you�
��ll betray me. Next time—”

  The slam of the front door cracks the tension like thin ice. I startle, and for a moment Ellis is frozen in place, épée grazing my throat.

  Then Kajal’s voice calls up the stairs: “Is anyone home?”

  Ellis’s sword falls away, dangling from one limp hand. We stare at each other, Ellis’s eyes pale and wide, her throat shifting as she swallows.

  I tilt my chin up. “I suppose you’ll have to kill me some other day.”

  I edge past her, shoulders brushing the wall in my effort to keep distance between us. Ellis’s gaze follows me until I’ve left and shut the door behind me, another barrier between me and her.

  For however long that lasts.

  Ellis and I circle each other in that house like twin vultures over dying prey.

  If I am in a room, she is sure to follow. She stalks at my heels, silent and watching, as Leonie ropes me into a game of checkers, as Kajal asks me to help pin her too-large skirt. Such casual activities, and yet they’re frayed, fraught. Leonie’s hand shakes when she moves the checker pieces. Kajal flinches when my fingers graze her spine.

  We are all ghosts in this house, waiting to hear the death knell.

  I don’t sleep that night, or the next. Even with my desk chair lodged under the doorknob, I flinch at every creak of the floorboards outside, every scrape of branches against my window. I light candles for protection. But if those couldn’t frighten off my own phantoms, they won’t do anything against Ellis.

  My world reduces to sensation. The lights are too bright, sounds overloud. People speak to me, and although I hear them and respond, two minutes later I can’t remember what they said or what it meant. Ellis and I exist on opposing planes. We scratch at that veil between us. Eventually, one of us will sweep it aside and move in. Eventually, one of us will lose.

  Alex hasn’t left. Even knowing that so much of her presence was Ellis’s machination does very little to erase her from my mind. I still see her in the shadows. I still watch her flit between the forest trees. Her voice wakes me in the night. Her memory stains my soul.

  Maybe I’m being unfair to Ellis. Maybe some nightmares are real.

  My mother appears at Dalloway on Friday night, an apparition trailing expensive perfume. For a moment I almost don’t recognize her, standing in my doorway with her hair spun in careful curls and her pink Isabel Marant dress. She got thin in Nice.

  “What are you doing here?” I demand.

  “Miss MacDonald called. She said your friend had gone missing.” My mother looks as if she doesn’t know what to do with herself in this place, her gaze darting from the books on my shelves to the candles on my desk to, at last, the tarot cards scattered across my floor. “Felicity, what’s all this?”

  “Nothing. You shouldn’t have come.”

  Surely Cecelia Morrow had better things to concern herself with—better vintages—than her mad daughter and the dead bodies that seem to fall in her wake like cut flowers.

  My mother drifts forward and kneels to stare at my spread. It was a bad spread, full of dark omens; I’d drawn the Hanged One and thought of Tamsyn Penhaligon swinging from that tree, strangled to death. I’d burned anise and clove over the cards to ward off her curse.

  Now my mother trails a finger through the ground spices and then rubs it against her thumb, a faint grimace passing over her lipsticked mouth. “I thought you were past this,” she says.

  “It’s for my thesis.”

  “Felicity…”

  I know what she’s going to say. She’s been talking to Dr. Ortega, who has filled her ears with stories about my paranoia, my obsession with the Dalloway Five. It was no use explaining how all academic passions veer toward obsession. She wouldn’t understand that magic can be a metaphor, like Ellis said. That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.

  “I’m fine,” I tell her. “You can go home. Go back to Aspen, or Paris, or wherever. Don’t worry about me.” I laugh. “You never do.”

  “I do worry about you. Felicity…darling…are you still taking your medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you show me the bottle?”

  My next breath is too sharp, hissing through my teeth on the inhale. “Why is it any of your business? Why are you here, pretending I’m the one who’s crazy—I’m not the one who’s crazy! I’m not the one who spends every hour of every goddamn day with her head in a wine bottle. I’m not devouring Xanax and ripping up priceless artwork and then telling everyone I’m perfectly happy.”

  I can’t tell if I’ve hit my mark. My mother’s face is as expressionless as the surface of an icy lake. Perhaps even now her emotions are drowned in six glasses of Côtes du Rhône red.

  “I think,” she says eventually, rising to her feet and dusting the spices from her hand, “you should take another leave of absence. Dr. Ortega said they can have a bed ready for you as early as next Friday.”

  “Fuck you.”

  This, at last, garners a reaction, my mother’s mouth forming a tiny moue of shock and her hand immediately rising to cover it. “Felicity Elisabeth, that language is not appropriate—”

  “Fuck,” I say again. “Fuck, fuck, shit, goddamn, fuck, shit!”

  The flush that darkens her cheeks is lovelier than anything she could buy at Chanel. “You aren’t well,” she says. “It’s clear that Housemistress MacDonald was right about that. It’s perfectly understandable that losing your friend would have this effect on you, after what happened last year.”

  Perfectly understandable. My mother has never understood a thing about me, not since the day I was born and she handed me off to the first in a string of nannies. “I’m not leaving,” I say.

  “You are. I had to talk to the police for you. Did you know that? The dean told me that you were being interviewed. I had to call the police and tell them you were nothing but a sick girl, grieving her friend. I had to tell them you were fragile, that you—”

  What she means is that she had to call one of her powerful East Coast friends and make them talk to the police.

  Or that she had to pay.

  “I’m eighteen,” I inform her. I grin, wild and sharp. “I’m eighteen. I’m an adult. You can’t make me do anything.”

  My mother looks so small to me now, a stick-limbed figure closed in a shell of designer clothing and an old-money name. A single tap and she might break.

  “I might not be able to force you to get help, but I can speak to the dean and have you withdrawn from school.”

  I shake my head. “No. You never cared about being my mother before. Don’t you dare start now.”

  Her shoulders quiver. For a moment I think she might cry. But then Cecelia Morrow lifts her chin and nods, just once. “I see.”

  “I bet you do.”

  I escort my mother to the door of Godwin House, stand in the foyer, and watch her figure retreat down the winding drive until she is nothing but a pink speck quickly obscured by the trees. She never belonged here. She never should have set foot on this unhallowed ground.

  I close the door, and she is gone.

  When I return to the kitchen, Ellis and Leonie are making dinner. Ellis catches my eye and stabs her knife into a hunk of meat. I imagine her cutting into my flesh the same way, carving it off bone. Blood on the floor.

  At last I understand.

  In this, as in all things, I am alone.

  * * *

  —

  It snowed Friday night. Saturday, at an assembly, the school tells us that the police are no longer looking for a girl. They’re looking for a body.

  Everyone stares at the Godwin House students as we drift home, draped in black. A lace veil flutters like a crown atop Kajal’s dark hair. Ellis, for once, has nothing to say. She
catches my gaze past the other two, and for a moment it’s like we understand each other. We alone know what happened to Clara Kennedy. We alone understand the odd relief that seeps in now, our heartbeats in rhythm: If they haven’t found her by now, they won’t find her. Not with the new snow.

  We got away with it.

  That night I sit on my bedroom floor and pick at the place in the rug where I spilled wax, back when Ellis burst into my room and I knocked over the candles. Downstairs they’ve put Etta James on vinyl, the sultry notes of her voice broken occasionally by the unsteady, racking wave of someone’s sobs. Four floors below me I feel Margery Lemont’s bones reverberate in the earth, calling out to me. And some distance away—not far; it could never be far—Alex’s. Two mad girls buried under Godwin House.

  There are two weeks left in the semester. Two weeks until winter break and I escape this place, escape Ellis’s eyes on me, the omnipresent threat of what she will do to me the moment we’re alone. Two weeks with her fingers round my throat. Can I survive for two weeks—fourteen days—in this place?

  Eventually I fall into an uncomfortable sleep there on the floor, my cheek pressed atop an open book and my knees drawn in close to my chest. In my dream it’s me and Alex on top of a mountain, the wind catching Alex’s red hair and tangling it about her neck. I shout and reach for her, but she’s choking, she’s choking…And she isn’t Alex at all—she’s Margery Lemont, black blood staining her veins and turning her skin gray, her eyes the color of the night sky.

  I lurch awake. For a second I’m disoriented, the ceiling curving wildly overhead and my vision blurry. That sound…

  Then it happens again: a slow creak at my door, someone turning the knob.