A Lesson in Vengeance(13)

Ellis glances up from where she’s set up shop at the end of the island, a steel pasta-maker affixed to the side of the counter. She has a bit of flour swiped across her cheek. “None of us are. But we need someone to fold the ravioli, if you think you can manage that.”

I can manage it.

Their conversation resumes around me, effortless as placing the needle back on a vinyl record and continuing where the melody left off.

“I can’t believe I’m with Lindquist this year,” Clara moans from her spot in the corner. There are too many girls in the kitchen and too few tasks, so after she finished with the mushrooms, she set up with her books open in her lap and a fountain pen fiddling between her fingers. “She hates me.”

“You were with Yang last year?” asks Kajal.

“Yes. And now I’ve been cruelly abandoned.”

“Yang only advises first-and second-years,” I comment, pinching the edge of a ravioli. “It’s Lindquist, MacDonald, and Wyatt for juniors and seniors.”

“I know,” Clara sighs, “but I’d hoped she might make an exception.”

It’s so like the conversations we used to have in Godwin House before I left. Although perhaps ours were more vicious; we’d created the definitive ranking of Dalloway English faculty, an algorithm including points for toughness, intelligence, susceptibility to various late-work excuses, and probability of dying of old age before the semester ended. Lindquist was at the top of our list, MacDonald at the bottom (although the algorithm, to be fair, didn’t favor an instructor who lived in Godwin House and could know for sure that our essays were late because we were up all night partying, not because our third grandmother died).

“Who are you with?” Leonie asks, meeting my gaze and offering a tentative smile. And although I still suspect she’s sympathetic only on Ellis’s orders, I smile back.

“Wyatt.”

“Kajal’s with Wyatt, too,” Leonie says, gesturing toward Kajal herself, who crushes another garlic clove under the flat blade of her knife and doesn’t look up.

I’m not used to feeling uncertain in social situations. My junior year at Dalloway—the year before everything fell apart with Alex, before that climbing trip and its aftermath, my subsequent withdrawal from classes—I was popular. Or if not popular, then at least envied; my mother sent large allowances every month and had little interest in how I spent it, so I wasted all that money on tailored dresses and hair appointments and weekend trips to the city for my Godwin friends. And although I was far from the richest girl at Dalloway, the way I chose to spend my money bought me a certain immunity from social faux pas. Everyone has awkward moments; I was forgiven mine.

At least I didn’t have to buy my friends, Alex had said the night she died, cheeks blotchy with rage; and even then I’d known she was right.

But I don’t have any interest in buying the friendship of Ellis Haley or her cabal. I find it hard to care about social hierarchies these days.

Alex would have been proud.

“What is your thesis on?” I ask Kajal, because I no longer think feigning indifference proves superiority, and she looks up—surprised, I suspect, that I’m still talking to her.

“Female thinkers and philosophers of the Enlightenment,” Kajal says. “Work from the salons. Macaulay, d’épinay, de Gouges, Wollstonecraft…”

“Mary Astell? A Serious Proposal?”

“Of course.” Kajal’s posture has eased; she chops up the garlic with quick, smooth motions of her hands. “She was a little too religious for my preference, but I suppose that was unavoidable at the time.”

“Although that relatively Cartesian approach produced her concept of virtuous friendship,” I say, “so one can’t fault her too much.”

Kajal shrugs, probably preparing the same old argument: whether Astell’s conceptualization of friendship was truly virtuous or, as Broad argues, merely reciprocal.

“Just so,” Ellis interjects. “As Astell said herself: ‘It were well if we could look into the very Soul of the beloved Person, to discover what resemblance it bears to our own.’?”

When I look, a slight smile has taken up at the corners of Ellis’s mouth—there only for a moment, her gaze flicking over to meet mine before she turns back to the dough.

“I like Lady Mary Chudleigh,” Clara supplies from the corner, a smudge of ink on her cheek.

“Hmm,” says Ellis. “I’ve always found Chudleigh rather derivative.”

Clara’s pale face goes scarlet, and she says, “Oh. Well, I mean…yes, she was clearly influenced by Astell, so…”

Ellis has nothing to say to that, which only makes Clara flush worse. I don’t completely understand why she’s so upset by the prospect of disagreeing with Ellis, but then again, I don’t pretend to understand the cult of personality the new members of Godwin House have constructed around Ellis, either.

“I think Chudleigh even admitted as much,” I say, folding another ravioli and tossing it into the bowl. “Clara, maybe you could look it up on your phone.”

The derisive look Clara shoots my way could burn through steel. “I don’t have a phone.”

“None of us do,” Leonie adds. “Technology is so distracting. I heard people’s attention spans are actually getting shorter because they read everything online these days.”