A Lesson in Vengeance(56)

But Kajal wasn’t there, so I find myself spending time with her instead. She’s also a Wyatt student, and it’s easy to commiserate over Wyatt’s ridiculous standards and share French pressed coffee as we read through our assignments. “First she wanted me to talk more about the rhetoric of silence in late Victorian literature, and now she wants me to delete everything,” Kajal bemoans.

The next night I find Kajal in her bedroom with a bottle of pills, neatly swallowing one tablet with a glass of water. Our eyes meet and she immediately frowns.

“Can I help you, Morrow?”

“No,” I say quickly. Only, then: “Well—no. But…I take those too.” They’re antidepressants. I would recognize this particular med’s shape and color anywhere. I attempt a smile. “I hate how they make me feel. Like I’m underwater.”

But if I expected some kind of commiseration, all Kajal gives me is a thin grimace. “Yes, well, not all of us can afford to quit taking our medication on a whim, Felicity.”

My hands clench in fists. “I didn’t,” I say. “I don’t— It wasn’t a whim.”

“Regardless, we aren’t going to talk about it.” Kajal neatly screws the top back onto her medication bottle and drops it into her desk drawer. The sound of the drawer sliding shut feels like punctuation at the end of a sentence: a dismissal.

Two nights after that terrible Night Migration, I lurch awake with sweat plastering my shirt to my spine, my nightmare still sour in my mouth. When I shut my eyes, I see bodies in the water with white fingers and cold lips. It’s Tamsyn Penhaligon, it’s Cordelia Darling, it’s Flora Grayfriar with blood on her throat.

And as if to make things worse, my laptop crashed the night of the last Night Migration. I’m forced to borrow a Godwin House typewriter while my computer is sent off for repairs, but now, after two days without it, I discover I prefer the analog method. I like how it’s difficult to depress the keys of a Remington, that I can’t lounge with my hands sprawled over a keyboard with the words flowing unedited from my fingertips; I have to be deliberate in my choices. I must pick each key in sequence. I must think about what I want to say before I say it, or risk having to retype whole pages’ worth of argument.

There’s something so freeing about cutting myself loose from technology in some small way. No more stressing over profile pictures or whether my social media feeds reflect the kind of golden, idealized life I want everyone to think I have. No more virus scans or junk mail or counting likes. If I want to look something up, I go to the library. If I want to talk to someone, I talk to them. And everyone I’d talk to is in this house.

I decide that once I do get my laptop back, I won’t use it. I’ll hide it under my bed to collect dust. I need the physical anchor that my typewriter provides; I need that stability.

“We should practice,” Ellis says, three days after the ill-fated Night Migration, after I’ve finally recovered from some of my chagrin—or, rather, was forced to recover when Ellis refused to leave me alone. I watch her from my place, curled up on her bed with a Christie mystery, as she tips her desk chair back farther and farther, as if testing how far she can go before she loses balance and cracks her head open.

“Practice what?”

Ellis’s chair clatters back into place. “A murder. What else?” A grin cuts across her mouth, and she opens her desk drawer, pulling out a length of twine. “The garrote.”

“I don’t need to practice that,” I inform her. “I’m not the one writing about psycho witches.”

And there’s a difference between talking about how something might have been done and physically re-creating it. Especially something this brutal.

“But you are the one who’s convinced she’s being haunted by the ghost of her dead ex-girlfriend. If anything, you should go first.”

Ellis holds out the twine, shaking it in midair until I sigh and snatch it out of her grasp.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Do what comes naturally. Put it around my neck and act like you’re trying to strangle me.” Ellis pushes back her chair and rises to her feet, drawing her hair up into a messy bun to expose her throat. “You should come at me from behind.”

Of course. Naturally. How else would one attack a murder victim?

I wrap the twine around the palms of both hands and position myself to Ellis’s back. She’s taller than I am; I’ll have to drag her back to reach. If anything, that should help my cause: Her own height will put pressure on her larynx—the garrote will be harder to escape.

I step closer, holding the cord taut. The nape of Ellis’s neck is long and slender, fair-skinned with a tiny freckle positioned off-center from her vertebrae. I can see her pulse beating in her carotid artery, just below her ear.

“What are you waiting for?”

Nothing. I’m waiting for nothing.

I rise up on the balls of my feet and wrap the cord around Ellis’s throat, tugging her back a sharp half step—she makes a soft, surprised sound and grasps at the twine. She arches and ducks free, kicking her heel against my ankle so that I stumble and swear.

There’s a thin impression on Ellis’s neck when she turns to face me again, the flesh gone slightly reddish but otherwise unmarked. “What was that?” she says, laughing. “You couldn’t have killed a child with that effort.”