A Lesson in Vengeance(31)

Alex’s temper was something vicious and vibrant, flaring up bright as lit magnesium—although it never burned out nearly so quickly. It didn’t matter if Alex’s tormentor deserved it, if this assault was the period at the end of a very long sentence—if Alex, like anyone sick and tired of being treated as less-than because they can’t afford the best equipment or the newest shoes, finally snapped.

Alex had attacked that girl, and she’d ruined her career over it.

“Yes,” I say quietly. “Everyone wouldn’t stop talking about it, even once we got back to school. Alex hated that. She…she hated the way people looked at her. So maybe that’s why.”

I’d wanted to give her a better ending. A happier one. One that was less violent, one where Alex hadn’t been angry.

I sniffle and wipe my cheeks again, then finally look back at Ellis. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make a scene. I’m…fine.”

“Are you sure?” Ellis says, and I nod. She presses her mouth into a thin line and turns away, pretending interest in the ancient, wilting books that line the shelves behind her.

A part of me doesn’t ever want to leave this shop, doesn’t want to step out that door and go back to campus, to the place where Alex died. I don’t want to leave the reality I wrote for Dr. Ortega.

But I have no choice, of course. I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.

I try to remember being on that mountain again, but this time the memory feels muddy and distant, like one of the framed sepia photographs atop the store’s antique piano. I can’t remember how the snow tasted on my tongue anymore. I can’t remember the texture of the rope.

We spend another half hour or so in that shop without speaking. Ellis buys the hat and I leave with a beautiful vintage copy of Rebecca that has a forget-me-not pressed between the pages.

We don’t talk on the ride back to campus. But Ellis reaches over and touches my shoulder before we get out of the car. It’s just for a moment, but I feel the heat of her hand there for hours before it fades.



* * *



—

I don’t know how I fall asleep that night, but I do—only to lurch awake in the dark with my heart on my tongue and Alex’s screams in my ears. I swear her voice still echoes off the walls of my constricted bedroom as if the scream has penetrated my dream from the real world and not the other way around. I look at my alarm clock with one hand cupped around my brow, squinting against the glowing red numbers: it’s three in the morning.

My stomach is uneasy, pitching like a sea at storm. I get up and turn on the lights, both arms hugged around my neck and my back to the door as I stare at my empty room. No one is here. No shrouded spirit emerges from hell to haunt me.

Then my gaze lands on the window. It’s like getting shot in the throat, air cut off, ears ringing.

Fog had risen overnight, clouding the window behind my desk. And in that mist a perfect handprint presses against the glass from the outside, little rivulets of water dripping down the chilly palm.

In the light of day—on the other end of hours curled up under my covers, sweating and sick to my gut, in and out of the bathroom until I’ve vomited so much it feels like I’ve expelled my spleen along with my stomach contents—I try to entertain mundane explanations for what I saw. But I couldn’t recall ever pressing my own hand to my bedroom window, and it’s too high up off the ground for a passerby to have touched it from the other side. I imagine some sinister creature slipping out from the forest, tall and faceless as the tree trunks, peering through the glass and watching me sleep. I imagine Tamsyn Penhaligon swinging from the oak tree.

I would have preferred the wildwood explanation, but I suspect the spirit who left this mark lives closer to home.



* * *



—

“Are you sick?”

I lift my head from my book. I’ve been reading in the main library since it opened at eight, escaping the dark shadows and slanted floors of Godwin for the comforting glow of fluorescent light. I couldn’t stay there. Everything reminded me of how sick I’d been overnight, from the water glass to my toothbrush on the bathroom sink. And every corner felt like it shrouded secrets, Alex watching me from the shadows. Since coming to the library, I’ve finished The Haunting of Hill House and moved on to Rebecca, which, although a favorite of mine, is nevertheless consistent with the whole theme of eerie mansions haunted by the ghosts of dead women. My nausea throbs below my breastbone, insatiable.

It’s been hours now, or it must have been; the campus, outside the library windows, has taken on the golden hue of late afternoon.

Ellis stands with her hip tilted against the wall of my carrel, long legs crossed at the ankles. She looks relaxed enough to have been there for a good while, myself too absorbed in du Maurier’s words to notice.

“What?” I say, too belatedly.

“You look pale,” she says, taps beneath one eye. “Dark circles. Are you sick?”

I don’t know why she’s asking, after yesterday. She knows why I’m upset. Maybe this is Ellis’s way of showing concern without letting that concern bleed into pity.

But I don’t need her concern. I slept last night, sort of. I got out of the house this morning. I’m far from Alex now; I just need time.

“I’m fine. Are you following me?”