A Lesson in Vengeance(21)

“It looks good,” I say again, but Kajal vanishes back into the dressing room without responding. I’m left standing in front of the mirror alone.

I avoid my own gaze and look at the clothes instead. The skirt hits past my knees, its dark-blue color drawing out the blue threads in my herringbone tweed blazer. I look like a university professor. I’m thinner than Kajal, but that has nothing to do with dieting and everything to do with the fact I couldn’t keep food down for weeks toward the end of summer. It was as if something in my gut had rebelled against the idea of coming back here, rejecting everything I fed it like it hoped to wither away and die before I had the chance to face Dalloway again.

The way Kajal’s always looked at me takes on new meaning now. Does she think I’m like her? Does she think we’re in silent competition with one another, that my reassurances carry with them the smug satisfaction of victory?

Clara’s in the common room when we return, bags slung over elbows. I try to hide my flinch—before she turned around to look at us, I’d only seen the glint of red hair in late afternoon sunlight and the book perched on her knee. My heart was still trapped between my teeth, Alex’s name pressing against the backs of my lips. I could have sworn it was her.

“Have a good time?” Clara asks, ice frosting her words. I frown on reflex.

“Yes,” Kajal says. “The weather was nice.”

“You might have thought to invite me. I need new winter clothes, too, you know.”

Kajal shrugs. “Sorry.”

She sweeps away toward the stairs without another word. My bags are heavy, and I can’t think of anything worse than staying down here with Clara when she’s in this mood, so I follow.

“What’s her problem?” I murmur to Kajal as we round the steps to the next landing.

“Clara’s new,” Kajal says, and waves a dismissive hand. “Ellis says she’s insecure. She doesn’t think she belongs with the rest of us because we already knew each other from before, and she just…”

Kajal trails off as she reaches her room, tilting her head in a voiceless farewell as she vanishes within.

Clara’s new. But so was Ellis, and these rules didn’t seem to apply to her.

But maybe that’s precisely the problem: maybe Ellis is the one who ensures that you never really fit in.

Not that I fit here, either. My first attempt at a senior year, I’d been living in Godwin for a year already—had stitched myself into the fabric of Godwin with knotted threads. I remember I’d wanted so badly to be accepted to the house. I had applied to Boleyn and Eliot as well, but Godwin was the ground on which the Dalloway Five had stood, the land on which they’d lived—and died. I had read in the library about Tamsyn Penhaligon’s death, her body found swinging from the oak tree behind Godwin eleven months after Flora Grayfriar’s murder. Although Tamsyn had been ruled a suicide, one of the records in the occult library said her face had been painted with blood: unfamiliar sigils traced over her cheeks and brow.

That same tree stands right outside my bedroom. The first night I spent in Godwin, I’d pushed open the window and leaned out to press my palm against its bark. I’d imagined I could feel Tamsyn’s heart beating inside it, an echo to my own. The oak didn’t frighten me until later.

The moment I open my bedroom door, a curse escapes my lips. It looks like an autumn storm has swept through, the trash bin tipped over and its contents spilled across the rug, Alex’s postcard torn from the wall and lying on the floor as if someone had read it and then, indifferent, discarded it.

Her ghost.

Only that can’t be true, I tell myself, sucking in a series of shallow breaths and willing my pulse to slow. There’s a more rational explanation: my window’s cracked open, the gauzy drapes shivering and the air cold as night. The oak stands silent and watchful, branches like black fingers against the sky.

Ghosts don’t exist. I have to keep my head on my shoulders; I have to stay sane. I have to prove I deserve to be back here. I need to prove returning wasn’t a mistake.

I curse again and cross the room to shut the window, twisting the latch shut. I could have sworn I’d closed the window before I left.

I collect the detritus and put it all back in place. Some of Alex’s old letters have fallen from their homes, tucked between books on my shelves. That’s more than a coincidence, I think. It has to be. It has to be.

I retrieve her letters, carefully separating them from the wastebasket contents and putting them in my desk drawer this time. I find all except one, the card Alex sent me from her family’s winter trip to Vermont. And no matter where I search—under the bed, behind my desk, even out on the lawn of Godwin House—I can’t find it anywhere.





Here is the truth.

What happened to Alex was no accident. Not just because she fell, because we’d fought, or because I cut the rope—but because of what happened last October.

I’d recently decided on my thesis project: “I caution you against this,” Wyatt had said when I told her I wanted to study representations of witchcraft in literature. “You will struggle to get a thesis on witchcraft approved by the administration, no matter how good your scholarship. Dalloway is a respectable school—this isn’t the Scholomance.”

“I don’t see the problem,” I’d said. “I’m not claiming the Dalloway witches were real. Just that conceptualizations of witchcraft existed in the eighteenth century, and that those were influenced by perceptions of female agency and mental illness at the time. I want to connect the reality of their lives to the fantasy of how women were presented on the page.”