A Lesson in Vengeance(19)

I’d never wanted to touch someone so much in my life.

“I still can’t believe you failed the geography test,” Alex said, both of us leaning against the iron railing with sparkling wines in hand. It was the fourth time she had brought it up that weekend, ever since I made the mistake of telling her about my dismal score on our drive down from Dalloway.

She was gazing out across the city, her hair shining scarlet. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

I sipped my wine so I wouldn’t speak. That was my third glass already; the alcohol had started to make me feel unpleasantly weightless, light-headed. Half the girls I knew at Dalloway drank, but all I could think about was my mother. I knew this feeling could be dangerous. I wondered what Alex would say if I poured the rest of my drink off the edge of the roof.

At last, I managed a response. “An off day, I suppose.”

Alex looked over. “We studied,” she said, half an accusation.

My glass was cold and sweaty in my hand; I twisted the stem between my fingers. “I know.”

“What happened? You knew that material. You were quizzing me on it.”

I chewed my lower lip until it hurt. I didn’t know how to lie to Alex, even then. At last I sighed and tipped my head back, staring up at the stars. Or where the stars would have been if the sky weren’t obscured by all that light pollution.

“I failed the test on purpose.”

“You what?”

Alex grabbed my arm and tugged until I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if the expression on her face was more repulsed or amused.

“I know,” I said. “But…Well, you know Marie, from our class?”

Alex nodded.

“She loves geography. I was actually talking to her at a dinner thing the other day, and she said she’s going to major in it in college. She wants to go to grad school and get her PhD. And I suppose I thought…”

Alex was staring at me like she’d never quite seen me before.

I shrugged. “I have the top score in that class right now. And I figured maybe I should let that be hers. Only I guess I overcorrected, and I…ended up failing the test.”

It took a moment, but finally a small smile pulled at the corners of Alex’s lips. “You’re a good person, Felicity Morrow.”

I didn’t know what to say to that then. Now I know exactly what I would say.

I’m not good. I’m the furthest thing from good.

There on that rooftop, with the city alive around us, Alex slid her fingers along my cheek and stepped closer and kissed me. A breeze was picking up and my wineglass was shaking in my hand, but Alex was kissing me. Her lips tasted like chocolate.

But I can’t think about her anymore. I can’t remember that kiss now.

I don’t want to.



* * *



—

I’d decided that for my elective this year, I would take Art History.

It was a choice I made on impulse that I came to regret after the final two weeks of summer, watching my mother entertain a dozen art curators in our living room, giving them tours of our gallery—the walls repainted and hung with fresh art, no evidence of violence, even though it hadn’t yet been a month since my mother took a knife to her collection of priceless paintings and pushed over sculptures, shattering them on the marble floor.

I’d hidden in my room while she shouted and raged and broke things, and when I had finally ventured downstairs again I’d found her crouched in the middle of the wreckage, sweeping porcelain shards into a dustpan like they were nothing but spilled sugar.

“Come help me, darling,” she’d said, her words still angled and blurry from all the wine she’d had after dinner, and I didn’t have a choice.

I’m not interested in art anymore, but it’s too late to change my schedule. The first two classes, we went over the syllabus, and the prospect of all those looming projects and essays made me want to put my head in my arms and go to sleep.

Before last summer, I had vaguely anticipated all of us traipsing down the halls of an art museum in Kingston talking about patterns of brushstrokes and pigments mixed from arsenic. Now all I envision is endless hours of slides and falling asleep in a dim room to the click-click of an overhead projector.

I dread this class more than the rest, primarily because the syllabus says we will discuss our project assignments today. The word group isn’t explicitly appended before the word project, but it’s there nonetheless.

I slip into the room minutes before the bell, past our instructor, an emaciated woman with bird’s-nest hair and a fringed shawl, standing at the head. I remember thinking on the first day that the instructor looked like she might have emerged from between time, a relic of Dalloway’s witchiest years: the reincarnation of Beatrix Walker or Cordelia Darling.

Even now I wonder if I’d be able to tell. If she’d been possessed by the spirit of one of those dead girls, if she’d performed her own rituals in the dark, calling up spirits she didn’t understand, spirits that would never leave her alone, would I scent it in the air like fine perfume?

I claim a seat near the windows, sufficiently far from the center of the room that I hope to go unnoticed if this is one of those group projects that lets students pick their own partners. I’ll happily accept the dregs of who’s left after all the rich coven girls have been claimed.