by Victoria Lee
My heart seizes, and I pitch upright, watching as the brass handle twists toward the latch and catches. Gently, someone releases it back into place.
I stare at the door, stare hard enough that I can practically see Ellis on the other side of it with her head tilted in close to the frame, her pale fingers curving over the knob.
Go away. Go away.
Silence, for a moment. Then a soft scraping noise like nails against glass.
She’s picking the lock.
I shove myself back on both hands, crawling until my spine hits my bookshelf. I need a weapon. I need…something, anything.
One of my running shoes has fallen under the bed. I lunge for it and untie the knotted laces, yank them loose. My hands are shaking as I rise slowly to my feet, twisting the slim lace around my knuckles as I edge closer to the door.
I press myself against the wall. The latch clicks open.
My pulse pounds in my temples, fierce and bloody. I brace the makeshift garrote between my hands and hold my breath.
Ellis pushes the door open a half inch, and it catches on my desk chair. The chair legs squeak against the hardwood floor and then go still.
Can Ellis see my empty bed from where she stands? Does she know I’m waiting for her on the other side of this door, fingers blanched white as the shoelace cuts off circulation?
After a long and terrible silence, the door shifts again, rattling against the desk chair. I catch the sharp intake of breath from out in the hall. I squeeze my eyes shut and clench both fists. But then, at last, the door closes.
She’s gone.
I plot my own Night Migration.
The note is written in Clara’s hand, copied from the passive-aggressive note she left me earlier in the year about leaving my dishes in the sink. I pick Ellis’s bedroom lock while she’s in class and leave it on her pillow, then escape to the library stacks.
The hours filter by in silent agony, punctuated by the pilgrimage of Dalloway students from carrel to shelf. I have hidden myself in the mathematics section, the last place Ellis would look. My hand grips the angelica root in my pocket, a charm against evil.
I wait until the sun dips low in the horizon and stains the sky in shades of gold and poppy. Then I take the stairs to the roof.
I haven’t been this high up since Alex died. I creep toward the edge, my blood hot in my veins. It would be so easy to fall. No, not to fall—to jump.
I hear the air whistling in my ears, watch the ground surge up to meet me. I blink as the world plunges into darkness.
And then I’m here again. Poised on the edge, the wind catching my skirt and whipping it taut against my thighs.
The sun sinks lower, the fringe of the forest consuming the last of its light. I sit down on unsteady legs and turn my face toward the pewter clouds. I told her to meet me at 6:04—astronomical twilight, when the last light has gone.
She appears two minutes early, the stairwell door opening and falling shut loud enough that I can hear it all the way across the roof.
I don’t turn around, even when Ellis’s footsteps are right behind me. My spine is straight and still; my eyes are shut. My feet dangle so far above the earth.
But death doesn’t come.
“Felicity?”
I look.
Ellis stands at my shoulder, clothed in mourner’s black. She extends a gloved hand, and I take it, let her pull me up. I’m not wearing heels; she’s several inches taller like this, free hand curling into a loose fist at her side.
“I thought you were afraid of heights,” she says.
“I am.”
Even now I can’t look down. The world exists too far below us.
Then again, that’s always been true.
“I never would have turned you in,” Ellis says. Her gaze focuses past me, out over the darkening sky. I wonder if she is even speaking to me, really, or if she means these words just for herself. A private justification—a confession. “I only said that because I was afraid. I never collected evidence against you. I never wanted to hurt you.”
I don’t speak. My words are brittle ash in my mouth. Live coals that burn.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Ellis says. She still has my hand, her fingers laced together with mine. She squeezes lightly now, and I swallow.
The darkness is almost complete. The safety lamps have turned on down below, a field of little lights glimmering across campus and vanishing toward the woods. But their glow doesn’t reach as far as we stand.
I’m too aware of all the little things keeping me alive: my quickening heartbeat, air cold at the back of my throat, the aching tension in my muscles holding me upright.
Ellis looks like one of the works we analyzed in Art History, a painting in chiaroscuro. Perfect at first glance, but lean closer and you’ll see the brushstrokes.
“Me too,” I say. “You made me who I am. You made me who I was always supposed to be.”
Night hangs over us like a guillotine blade. Ellis lets go of my hand, and I count the seconds as they pass. One…two. We’re alone at the top of the world.
She takes a shallow breath—I watch her shoulders shift as the air comes in—and I move forward.
This isn’t like pushing Alex. That was an accident. This time I push hard enough to make it mean something, hard enough to hear Ellis gasp, hard enough that even when she reaches for me it’s too late.
If I had all the words in the English language, I could not string them together adequately to describe the expression on Ellis’s face when she falls.
Surprise, perhaps. But also a grim, inevitable recognition.
Ellis doesn’t scream on the way down. I hear the crunch of her body hitting pavement, but I don’t see the impact. I’ve already turned away.
The night is too silent now.
I return through the same door, descend the library stairs, and exit through the back. I don’t want to see her.
I never want to see her again.
I leave the letter on Ellis’s pillow, a confession in Ellis’s own hand. They find her body, and an hour later they find the note.
Three days, I wait for the blade to fall. It never does. The police sweep in and out of the house, and I lurk in corners, waiting for someone’s gaze to cut past the shell of Felicity Morrow and see what I really am. But they can’t: No one sees past skin. No one senses the bones under this house like I do.
Ellis knew. Ellis saw me in a way no one else could; she saw the black and twisted heart of me. She took my hand and guided me into that darkness. She opened the door, and truth entered, and nothing can undo that now.
I’m surprised by the sympathy. Instructors I’ve never met stop me in the hall with well wishes. The dean herself invites me over for tea and hugs me before I leave, tells me to call her anytime. Even Kajal and Leonie orbit around me like they’re afraid I’ll break, appearing at my room with trays of coffee and cookies and books to borrow. They don’t expect me to go to class. No one expects me to leave my room at all.
They think I’m mourning.
When Alex died, people could barely look at me. Everyone believed I’d killed her. Or at the very least, they believed there was something I could have done differently. Some way I could have saved her, or died in her place.
I murdered Ellis Haley in cold blood, and at last they lend me their pity.
The morning before I leave for Georgia, for Ellis’s funeral, I venture out onto the grounds and go to sit by the lake, the Margery Skull in my lap and my feet stretched out toward the water. The sunlight is warm on my face, the birds chirping in trees and the lake water glittering at dawn. All last evening I had this feeling in my chest, a shivering sort of sensation; it started off as a low hum and has since crescendoed to glorious heights.
I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five
Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I’m not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.
I glance down at the skull, smoothing my palm over its cold and bony brow. I’ve kept the skull hidden in my bedroom, in that secret compartment in my closet, ever since I stole it from Boleyn for my séance last year with Alex. A bit of my blood is still dried there, brownish and crumbling easily when I rub it with my thumb.
The skull’s eye sockets gaze blankly back at me, empty, lifeless. If Margery’s spirit still clings to her bones, this will break the tie between us.
“I’m closing the ritual,” I tell the skull. “I’m putting you to rest.”
The clove and anise, when I burn it atop a flat stone, smells like Christmas.
Margery Lemont might have been buried alive, but I won’t return her skull to the earth. Or to Godwin, for that matter. Instead I wade into the frigid lake, deep enough that the water ripples around my hips. I lower the skull in cupped hands beneath the surface. A few air bubbles escape, and for a moment I can imagine it’s a last breath—a last goodbye.
Then I let go.
The skull sinks quickly, a weight falling out of sight, obscured by the shifting silt.
“Thank you,” I tell her—Margery. Alex. Both of them. “For everything.”
I emerge from the water shivering, mourning-black skirt sodden and clinging to my legs. I gaze back over the lake one last time, half expecting to see Alex’s ghost rising from the waves, but the water is smooth as mirror glass.
It’s a beautiful morning.
* * *
—
Ellis’s funeral in Georgia, two days later, is a procession of figures in crepe and taffeta, the Godwin House girls as devoted to historical accuracy in Ellis’s death as we were in life. Our clothing makes a centerpiece of us juxtaposed with the other mourners’ Savile Row suits and sheath dresses; when these strangers look at me, I hold their gazes. I never look away first.
The whole thing is a subdued affair, Ellis’s casket plain and unadorned, not a spot of whiskey to be found (except in Leonie’s hip flask, which she passes down our pew while the preacher lectures on about innocence and forgiveness through faith). Ellis would have loathed it. I can imagine her sitting next to me even now, a birdcage veil tugged over her eyes and her fingers tapping together in her lap. A murmur in my ear: Meet me in the bathroom. I want to fuck you.
“Excuse me,” I whisper to Kajal, and I edge my way out of the row, escaping down the aisle.
Alone in the church restroom, I lock the door behind me and pull out Ellis’s silver cigarette tin from my pocket. She would have wanted you to have it, Quinn had said when they gave it to me this morning. I pick out one of Ellis’s joints and light it with a struck match, inhale, exhale slow.
I never really liked to smoke all that much, but this feels right. It’s appropriate, a final fuck you.
I catch sight of my reflection after, as I’m straightening myself up. My hair is still perfectly neat, lightly curled and drawn away from my face with a ribbon. My lipstick isn’t smudged. I spritz fresh perfume on my neck, then I adjust my collar and practice a smile.
I look good in black.
After the service, the pallbearers take the casket outside and we all watch as Ellis is lowered into the dirt. I still remember her in herringbone, one hand braced against the handle of a shovel, standing atop Alex’s grave. I wonder if that’s always how I’ll remember her: fierce, independent, alive. I think I prefer that to the alternative. I liked her better when she couldn’t be caught off guard. I prefer to remember an Ellis who never would have let herself fall.
She isn’t the girl in that casket, the same way Alex isn’t the girl I buried under Godwin House a year ago. They both exist outside of time, fragments of memory and imagination—like Ellis’s characters, in a way. They exist only insofar as I allow them to exist.
Beside me, Leonie shivers.
“What?” I whisper.
She shakes her head. Her lower lip blanches where she catches it between her teeth. “I don’t know. I just…What if it’s all true? The story about the Dalloway girls. What if this is history repeating itself? First Alex, then Clara, and now…”
I reach for Leonie’s hand and squeeze it tight, and tell her: “Magic isn’t real.”
Quinn catches my eye from across the graveyard. In Ellis’s absence they are a shadow of themselves, all their colors subdued without Ellis’s light to brighten them.
Or perhaps that’s how everyone looks to me now—everyone who knew her.
“Felicity,” someone says, once the ceremony is over and I’m heading back to the car, flanked by Kajal and Leonie.
I turn. Two women have approached, each with a white lily pinned to her lapel. Ellis’s mothers. I recognize them from the service.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
Leonie’s hand presses against the back of my elbow, but I wave her and Kajal away, offering Ellis’s parents my best bathroom-mirror-approved smile. I try not to actively think about the fact these are the women who left Ellis alone that winter with her grandmother. Who didn’t come back until their small daughter had been forced to do abhorrent things to survive.
One of them, the older one, steps forward and digs around in her satchel until she finds a stack of papers. She presses the pages into my hands, and I take them on reflex.
“This is for you,” Ellis’s mother says. “She would have wanted you to have it.”
I glance down. The first page, typewritten in a familiar font, reads:
AVOCET
A novel
by Ellis Haley
“No.” I try to shove the manuscript back at the woman who gave it to me, but she steps out of reach, both arms folding across her middle. “No. I don’t want it.”
“You have to take it,” the other woman insists. “Please. It’s the last thing Ellis ever wrote. She—”
I know what it is. I know, and I don’t ever want to read it, don’t ever want to crack open those pages and see what kind of mockery Ellis made of us.
“I don’t care. I don’t want to read it. I can’t. Take it.”
The two women exchange glances, but I don’t wait for them to speak again. I bend over, set the stack of pages down in the damp grass, and dart away, chasing the distant figures of Kajal and Leonie, the mourners milling like ravens in the church parking lot.
When I glance back, Ellis’s mothers are flitting around, chasing pages that have caught the wind, snapping desperately after paper and ink—the last that remains of their daughter.
London is not where I thought I’d live, at the end of it all.
I always thought I’d want mountains towering overhead, a wide-open sky and seasons as fickle as the sea. And yet here I am, with a flat in Mayfair, and a little dog, and a favorite bakery where they know me by name.
I’ve decided I like the city. I like the anonymity of the crowd, the way it feels as if possibility explodes around me in all directions. I like knowing I’ll never go everywhere in this city, eat at every restaurant, meet every person who calls London home. There is always something and someone new. There is always a mystery I haven’t solved yet.
I step out of the English building at Imperial College and head away from the Thames, into the bustle of the city proper. My phone buzzes in my pocket—my girlfriend texting me, probably, checking in again about dinner plans. Now that I’m almost done with my degree, I’m thinking about breaking up with her. I want to move on, opening up a new doorway in my life. Maybe I’ll go to Paris. I’ll meet a French girl with blond hair and a quick smile, one who will stay up all night naked in my bed. Perhaps she’ll have a fixation with classic
films—just to add character.
I don’t want to go home yet and be confronted with Talia’s demands in person, so I dip into a nearby bookshop and wander between the shelves, picking up books, only to set them down again. I’m so busy with assignments that it feels like I barely read for pleasure anymore.
I’m on my way out when I spot the display in the window: a full fifteen-book spread, complete with a photo of the author blown up to massive size. The poster announces the release of the posthumous masterpiece by Ellis Haley: Avocet.
My feet have grown roots that stretch deep into the floor. I stare at Ellis’s photo and Ellis stares back, her gray eyes steady and alive, somehow, despite being printed by pixel. It’s not the same portrait that was printed in her first novel. I know, because I spent hours staring at that original photograph back when we were still at Dalloway, fantasizing about what Ellis’s mouth could do to me.
This photo was taken more recently. Ellis has the same hairstyle she wore when we were at school together, a few stray strands tumbling over her brow and her lips set in a flat line.
“Have you read it?”
I whip around. The bookseller stands over my shoulder, with both hands clasped in front of her lap, a hopeful expression painted over her face, an expression that says I make commission.
“No.”
“Oh, well, you should.” She chooses one of the books off the display and presses it into my hands. I glance down at the front cover: spare, minimalist, emblazoned with the gold medal of the National Book Award.
“I don’t know if this is quite my genre.”
“Literary fiction? That should be everyone’s genre, I hope,” the woman says with a little laugh. I want to hit her in the face. “But if it’s any consolation, this particular book crosses over into the territory of mystery and thriller. It’s about a female psychopath who falls in love with a beautiful woman who appears innocent at first glance but who”—she glances down at the marketing copy printed on the poster—“harbors deadly secrets of her own.”