A Lesson in Vengeance(27)

“My girlfriend wanted me to come out,” I say, standing there in the middle of a Persian rug as Ellis drops into an emerald-cushioned armchair. “I wasn’t ready. But she kept pushing.”

“She sounds like a bitch.”

I shrug. “She wasn’t. At least…not most of the time. Not to me.” I don’t want to say Alex wasn’t a bitch. That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. But bitch felt like a harsh word to apply to a girl who was fighting so hard to make space for herself in a world that didn’t want her. Alex was many things. She contained multitudes. And to say she was a bitch sometimes was to erase everything else she was: brave, stubborn, passionate, affectionate, a girl who would destroy empires to save someone she loved. “She was of the opinion I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was worried I wouldn’t be popular anymore if people knew.”

“I doubt that would have been the case.”

“No. It wouldn’t have. Alex was out, and no one cared. Everyone worshipped her.”

I realize I’ve said her name only after it’s already fallen from my lips. Ellis is unfazed, her knees crossed and the top leg swinging: a feudal marchioness presiding from her throne. Maybe she’d already figured out Alex and I were together, our relationship inevitable as any plot twist in Ellis’s book.

I shake my head, an odd smile twisting at my mouth. “I don’t know. I’d rather wait until after I’ve graduated. It seems like such a cliché, doesn’t it? Lesbians at a girls’ school.”

“Hey now. I happen to like that cliché.”

I laugh. “I bet you do.” All at once I’m giddy, as if buoyed up on champagne fizz. The chandeliers seem brighter; the brass seems brassier. The dust flickers like diamond shards in the window light. On impulse I steal Ellis’s hat, tipping down the brim to gaze at her from under its shadow with a cocked brow.

“I’d have smoldered at the stake right next to yours, no doubt.” Her smile is more subdued than mine, but it’s still there. It’s real, crinkling the edges of her eyes. She seems younger suddenly, just a girl wearing a ridiculous pair of glasses, sitting in the middle of a shop filled with everyone else’s castoffs, all the memories no one wanted to keep.

I offer her the hat back; she shakes her head and says, “It looks better on you.”

We move into the next room, which is full of books—everything from leather-bound tomes with gold foil lettering on the spines to frayed mass-market paperbacks. I pull out a particularly thick one and let it fall open to the middle page, bury my nose against the paper, and inhale.

“Tell me about her,” Ellis says. “Alex. What was she like?”

I open my eyes to look at Ellis over the edge of my book; she stands just a few feet away, ignoring the shelves entirely.

It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, of course. This is the moment when Ellis finally musters the nerve to ask me how it felt, to write for her the emotional arc of the Dalloway Five murders.

And so she wants to know about Alex’s murder.

I didn’t kill her.

I almost say it, but the words don’t come. Instead I lower the book, slowly, although I don’t put it down. It feels better to clutch the book to my chest, leather binding gripped in both hands.

Maybe I owe Alex this much, after what I did. Maybe if I put it to words…

They say knowing the name of a thing gives you power over it. And right now, I need power. As much of it as I can get.

Ellis can write whatever she wants.

“She was…very clever,” I say. I’m surprised by how even my voice sounds, almost like it doesn’t hurt. Almost like I don’t care at all. “She was in Godwin House, too. She read satirists, mostly.”

Ellis doesn’t say anything. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but it works; now that I’ve started talking, I can’t stop.

“She was funny. Sometimes that was a bad thing—if you got on her bad side, she could be…not cruel, not necessarily, but…”

I don’t want to disparage her. Not to Ellis Haley. Not to anyone, actually.

And because if Alex was cruel, then some might say that’s motive for murder.

I press my thumbs in harder against the book’s spine. “She liked dogs. You couldn’t take her anywhere—she’d have to stop every time she saw a dog. Had to say hello. She’d run into traffic if it meant she could pet a Labrador on the other side of the street. She was terribly allergic, but that didn’t seem to make a difference.”

“That’s sweet,” Ellis says.

“It was. She was.”

God. I hadn’t ever talked about her this much. Not even to Dr. Ortega, in therapy: Talking will help, Dr. Ortega had said. Remembering her how she was….

“She was outdoorsy,” I say. “She liked climbing, hiking, that sort of thing. I mean, she was a professional—or gonna be. She qualified for the very first Olympic sport-climbing team. She summitted Everest. Twice.”

All at once it’s harder to breathe, as if the air in here has become heavier. I can see dust motes sparkling in the air, dead skin particles from a hundred patrons, possibly even from the former owners of all the trinkets for sale in this place. I imagine that dust draping over us like blankets, suffocating us.

“I know this must be hard to talk about,” Ellis says softly. She has one hand on the surface of a nearby table. She doesn’t move, just says: “Because of the way she died.”