A Lesson in Vengeance(5)

I don’t know why she’s here early. I don’t know why she won’t tell me her name. I don’t know why she never speaks to me, or who she is.

But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug.

I want to unravel her.





Everyone returns two days later, the Saturday before classes commence. Not in a trickle, but in hordes: the front lot is a hive of cars, the quad flooded with new and returning students and their families—often dragging younger siblings to gaze through the looking glass at their own potential future. Four hundred girls: a small school by most standards, all of us students divvied up into even smaller living communities. Even so, I can’t quite bring myself to go downstairs while the new residents of Godwin House are moving in. But I do leave my door open. From my position on my bed, curled up with a book, I watch the figures crossing back and forth in the third-floor hall.

Godwin House is the smallest on campus—only large enough to fit five students in addition to Housemistress MacDonald, who sleeps on the first floor, and reserved exclusively for upperclassmen. Expanding Godwin to fit more students was another cause we fought against. Just imagine this place with its rickety stairs and slanted floors appended to a modernized glass-and-concrete parasite of an extension, wood and marble giving way to carpet and formica, Godwin no longer the home of Dickinson and witches but a monstrous chimera designed to maximize residential density.

No. We’ve been able to keep Godwin the way it is, the way it was three hundred years ago, when this school was founded. You can still feel history in these halls. At any moment you might turn the corner and find yourself face to face with a ghost from the past.

There are two others assigned to this floor with me: a brown-skinned girl with long black hair, wearing an expression of perpetual boredom, and a pallid, pinch-faced redhead, whom I glimpse from time to time half-hidden behind a worn paperback of The Enchanted April. If they notice me in my room, perched on my bed with my laptop on my knees, they don’t say anything. I watch them direct hired help to carry boxes and suitcases up the stairs, sipping iced coffees while other people sweat for them.

The first time I spot the redhead, a flash of hair vanishing around a corner like sudden flame, I almost think she’s Alex.

She isn’t Alex.

If my mother were here, she would urge me up off this bed and force me into a common space. I’d be shepherded from girl to girl until I’d introduced myself to them all. I’d offer to make tea, a gesture calculated to endear myself to them. I wouldn’t be late for supper, a chance to congregate with the rest of the Godwin girls in the house dining room, to trade summer anecdotes and pass the salt.

I accomplish none of those things, and I do not go to supper at all.

I feel as if the next year has just opened up in front of me, a great and yawning void that consumes all light. What will emerge from that darkness? What ghosts will reach from the shadows to close their fingers around my neck?

A year ago, Alex and I let something evil into this house. What if it never left?

I shut myself in my room and pace from the window to the door and back again, twisting my hands in front of my stomach. Magic isn’t real, I tell myself once again. Ghosts aren’t real.

And if ghosts and magic aren’t real, curses aren’t real, either.

But the tap-tap of the oak tree branches against my window reminds me of bony fingertips on glass, and I can’t get Alex’s voice out of my head.

Tarot isn’t magic, I decide. It’s fortune-telling. It’s a historical practice. It’s…it’s essentially a card game. Therefore, there’s no risk courting old habits when I crouch in the closet and peel the baseboard away from the wall, reaching past herbs and candles and old stones to find the familiar metal tin that holds my Smith-Waite deck.

I shove the rest of those dark materials back in place and scuttle out of the closet on my hands, breath coming sharp and shallow.

Magic isn’t real. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I carry the box to my bed, shuffle the cards, and ask my questions: Will I fit in with these girls? Will I make friends here?

Will Godwin House be anything like what I remember?

I lay out three cards: past, present, future.

Past: the Six of Cups, which represents freedom, happiness. It’s the card of childhood and innocence. Which, I suppose, is why it falls in my past.

Present: the Nine of Wands, reversed. Hesitation. Paranoia. That sounds about right.

And my future: the Devil.

I frown down at my cards, then sweep them back into the deck. I never know what to make of the major arcana. Besides, tarot doesn’t predict the future, or so said Dr. Ortega, anyway. Tarot only means as much as your interpretation tells you about yourself.

There’s no point in agonizing over the cards right now. Instead I check my reflection in the mirror, tying my hair back and applying a fresh coat of lipstick, then go downstairs to meet the rest of them.

I find the new students in the common room. They’re all gathered around the coffee table, seemingly fixated on a chess game being played between Ellis and the redhead. A rose-scented candle burns, classical music playing on vinyl.

Even though I know nothing about chess, I can tell Ellis is winning. The center of the board is controlled by her pawns, the other girl’s pieces pushed off to the flanks and battling to regain lost ground.