A Lesson in Vengeance(14)

I glance toward Ellis, but she’s moved to the sink to start washing up. No doubt she started this fad.

I finish the last ravioli and dust my flour-covered hands against my apron. It’s not that I’m so very attached to my phone, but…still, I can’t imagine eschewing it entirely. I’m not incredibly active on social media, but I do like to listen to music when I run. Me and Alex used to text each other constantly, our phones hidden under desks and behind books: This class is interminable and Climbing this weekend? and Brush your hair—you look like a hedgehog.

Maybe life’s easier without all that.



* * *



—

We eat in the dining room, a white cloth spread over the mahogany table and candles burning between the array of cracked ceramic dishes. I don’t talk much this time, either, but unlike the first night in the common room, I don’t feel excluded. I’m here at the table with the rest of them, my chair between Leonie’s and Clara’s, my water poured from the same glass bottle as theirs. Ellis’s slate gaze catches mine when Kajal mentions how quickly Ellis left the Boleyn party, a sharp cut of a smile before she looks away.

MacDonald doesn’t join us. She would have, last year. I wonder if that’s more to do with Ellis or with me.

“Shall we?” Ellis says when the last of us puts down her fork.

She leads us into the common room, where Kajal draws a slim green leather-bound book of poetry off the shelf and Ellis unearths a crystal decanter of bourbon concealed in a low cabinet, setting it down on the coffee table with a clink of glass on wood.

Leonie’s brows lift. “What is that?”

“Bourbon. Castle and Key,” Ellis says, lining a row of five glasses along the table’s edge. “The very first barrel. My sibling got it for me when they went to the distillery last winter; the work the new owners have done on the Old Taylor restoration is really fantastic.”

I have no idea how to interpret any of the words that just came out of Ellis’s mouth. But Ellis discusses bourbon like she knows things, her slow southern drawl as calm and confident as if she were as much an expert with whiskeys as she is with literature.

She glances up. “Do you like old-fashioneds, Felicity?” Ellis has a little brown bottle in hand, squeezing a dark liquid from an eyedropper into each glass.

“What’s an old-fashioned? It sounds…old-fashioned.”

Ellis laughs. “Oh, you’ll love this. Sit down.”

“Ellis is on a whiskey kick,” Kajal informs me, arching her perfect brows. She says it as if she’s spent enough time with Ellis now to know everything there is to know about Ellis and her kicks. “Apparently the character in her new book likes whiskey. So of course that means Ellis has to like whiskey.”

“How can you understand a character’s mind without sharing their experiences?” Ellis says archly. She has a knife in one hand and an orange in the other, a twist of peel curling from under the blade. “If your writing isn’t authentic—if you’re just making it up—the reader will know.”

“So, method acting,” I say.

It earns me a sharp grin. “Precisely. Method writing.” Ellis squeezes the peel over the nearest drink; a fine mist sprays the glass.

“Once, Ellis slept outside in the Canadian winter for two weeks and bought heroin off a truck driver in an arcade bathroom,” Clara says.

I find that incredibly hard to believe. It’s the kind of Ellis Haley trivia you’d read in a literary magazine—hyperbolic and dramatized for effect, nothing whatsoever like the kind of behavior any parent would let their high-school-aged child get away with.

But Ellis doesn’t deny it, either.

Because it didn’t happen?

Or because it did?

Ellis finishes the cocktails and passes one to each of us. The fine crystal is heavy in my palm. Ellis, perched on the arm of the sofa, opens the little book of poetry and starts to read from St. Vincent Millay: “Death, I say, my heart is bowed / Unto thine, O mother!…”

I lift the glass and take a sip. The old-fashioned is surprisingly bitter, the heat of whiskey cut with something low and smoky. The sweetness, when it comes, is an afterthought. I’m not sure I like it.

Judging by the grimaces on the other girls’ faces, I’m not the only one.

“This red gown will make a shroud / Good as any other.”

Ellis passes the book to Leonie, who pages through with her free hand and chooses a new poem. We go around the room, each of us reading something; when it’s my turn I choose Dickinson. From the glance Ellis shoots my way, shadowed under the fringe of her dark lashes, I wonder if she finds me as uninventive as Mary Chudleigh.

We take six rounds of the book, and after we’ve tired of poetry, Ellis makes coffee and ropes us all into a lively debate about the recursive feminine nature of birth and death; Leonie and Clara share a cigarette by the open window, the night breeze playing in Clara’s russet hair and Leonie’s sock feet tucked under Clara’s thigh. Kajal falls asleep on the sofa with Dear Life draped over her face. Ellis reads in an armchair, teeth catching her lower lip and chewing till the skin flushes red. I go back upstairs, to the silent gray of my bedroom. But for once the shadowed corners don’t hold threats.

I draw a card: the Page of Cups. My room smells like Alex’s perfume.