A Lesson in Vengeance(10)

For a second we both stand there staring at each other. I remember Clara’s pale hands in the darkness: snip, snip.

“Where’s everyone else?” I ask.

“Still at Boleyn, as far as I know. I came back alone.”

I struggle to imagine any of those girls letting Ellis Haley go anywhere by herself. You must’ve had to peel them off like tiny well-dressed leeches.

I realize I’ve said that out loud, a beat after my mouth falls shut again.

Ellis laughs. It’s a sudden bright sound that breaks the silence like an egg, that fills the room. “I did tell them I was just going to freshen up,” she admits. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles. “Clara tried to come with me.”

“How fortunate you managed to escape.”

“By a hair,” Ellis says, pinching her fingers. “I made coffee, by the way. Would you like some?”

“It’s late for coffee, isn’t it?”

“It’s never too late for coffee.”

This whole night already feels bizarre, like the world viewed through a kaleidoscope. “Why not,” I say, and Ellis goes to retrieve a tray from the kitchen: the coffee in a silver pot that appears vaguely Moroccan, our own chipped teacups a little forlorn when adjacent.

Ellis pours two cups, sitting on the floor with both legs tucked beneath her. She hasn’t brought cream or sugar; apparently we’re both meant to drink our coffee black.

“Why were you here so early?” I ask her after she’s picked up her cup and taken her first sip. It’s a brash question—not the kind of conversation starter my mother would approve of—but it seems all my restraint was expelled with my vomit. “Most people aren’t so desperate to get back to school.”

“Only two weeks early, really,” Ellis says. “I needed a retreat. Time away from the world to work on my book. It’s peaceful here when everyone else is gone.”

I’m surprised the administration let her stay.

Or, actually, maybe I’m not. The publicity—Ellis Haley’s sophomore novel, written in seclusion on the campus of Dalloway School—would be worth the extra cost of sustaining a single student for two weeks. Dalloway can align itself with the Villa Diodati, with Walden.

I’m not sure what my mother had to do to convince Dalloway to let me arrive four days early, but I imagine it required more than mere asking.

“What are you writing now?”

Ellis lowers her cup, gazing down at the black surface of her coffee for a moment as if she’ll find inspiration there. “It’s a character study,” she says. “I want to explore the gradations of human morality: how indifference can slide into evil, what drives a person toward murder. And I want to interrogate the concept of the psychopath: whether villainy exists in that truest form or if it’s simply a manifestation of some human drive that lurks in all of us.”

It’s chilly in this room; I hold my coffee between both hands, trying to borrow its warmth. “And what will you conclude?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Ellis traces her finger along the circumference of her cup. “Although I suppose in some ways I don’t need to speculate. The deaths in the story are inspired by the Dalloway Five.”

The Dalloway Five, again. No matter what I do, it seems like I can’t escape them. I left for almost an entire year—I spent nearly a year away from this place, in my own brand of seclusion, but as soon as I come back, there are ghosts at my heels and stories of dead witches on everyone’s tongue.

I don’t recall people being nearly so interested in Dalloway’s history last year. If anything, I felt self-conscious of my thesis subject; discussing it always earned me scrunched noses and twisted mouths.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m writing about them,” Ellis says. “Well, about Margery Lemont specifically. The story is from multiple perspectives, but ultimately questions whether Margery was really a witch, as her accusers claimed, or whether accusations of witchcraft merely reflected a pathologization of female anger.”

I don’t know how to respond to that. My mouth is dry; my tongue sticks to my palate like old gum.

“So of course I had to transfer here, to Dalloway. There’s nowhere else to write this kind of story, is there?”

I suppose there isn’t. Even so, a part of me wants to warn her not to get too close. Margery Lemont has a way of sucking you in and refusing to let go. I wonder if Alex’s ghost is watching us right now, her dead gaze drinking in this scene. Judging.

“Well, good luck,” I offer.

Ellis smiles at me, right as her lips close around the rim of her cup, is still smiling as she takes another sip. “And you? What’s your senior thesis?”

For a moment, last year’s answer perches on my lips. Ellis waits in patient silence while I struggle to swallow it down.

“I don’t know yet.”

I can barely stand to exist in this place anymore. Dalloway might be in my blood and bones, but as much as I was unable to stay away, Dalloway’s history—and mine—hangs over the campus like a heavy fog. I wonder if Ellis feels it. If Ellis is scared of it, or if she hopes a shadow of that evil will seep up from the ground and infect her, the way it infected Margery Lemont.