A Lesson in Vengeance(62)

“What’s in it?” Hannah asks.

I eye the box, which is plastered with fragile stickers and has my own home address scrawled in one corner. “It’s everything I didn’t bring with me when I came back to school.” My mother had said she’d send it at the start of the semester. I’d almost forgotten.

“Oh! Cool! You should open it.”

I look at her, long enough that anyone else would have gotten the message. But Hannah Stratford stays precisely where she is, beaming at me patiently with her hands clasped in front of her.

I wonder if I ever looked like that. I wonder if I ever smiled so easily.

I dig out a knife from my desk drawer and slice open the tape, unfolding the cardboard flaps to expose the box’s contents. Hannah watches on, fascinated, as I sift through all the artifacts of a life lived so long ago it feels like it happened to someone else. There’s a handheld video-game system—that can go in the trash, obviously—some art prints I bought two years ago in Granada, hiking books filled with glossy photos of trails in Albania and Greece and Turkey from trips me and Alex will never take. It’s a box of useless things.

Hannah dives in the moment I withdraw, pulling out my tennis racquet. “I didn’t know you played,” she says, delighted. “We should go down to the courts sometime.”

I used to do intramurals at Dalloway. I didn’t even bother signing up this year.

“This is a really nice racquet,” Hannah says, rubbing her thumb over the brand name engraved into the handle.

“You can keep it.”

“What? No, I couldn’t….” Of course, she’s already smiling.

I dump the hiking books back into the box and close the flaps. “I’m not going to play, so it might as well get put to good use. Take it.”

Hannah’s grip tightens around the racquet, and even though she opens her mouth to protest more, I can tell she’s already made her decision.

“What are you two troublemakers up to?”

Hannah spins around so quickly she drops the racquet, then swears and snatches it back off the floor. Ellis leans against my open doorway, arms crossed over her chest and a crooked smile curving its way up her mouth. She’d climbed the stairs so quietly I never heard her coming.

“Ellis! Hi!” Hannah lurches forward, saving me from having to respond.

Ellis draws her gaze away from where it’s fixed on my face, but belatedly, just in time to let Hannah grasp her hand. “Hello. Have we met?”

“Sort of. I mean, I’m friends with Felicity.”

Ellis makes eye contact with me over Hannah’s head, and I shake mine, very slightly.

Hannah barrels on: “And we were both at the Lemont House party last month! Do you remember? You left so quickly…”

“What do you want, Ellis?” I say.

Hannah’s mouth snaps shut, and Ellis takes the opportunity to extract her hand from Hannah’s grip, pushing off the doorframe and taking a step into my room. “It’s personal.”

At last, Hannah seems to catch the hint. She clutches the tennis racquet to her chest and backs out into the hall, her gaze flitting back to Ellis even as she says, “Okay. I’ll see you later, Felicity. Thanks for the racquet.”

Ellis kicks the door shut with her heel.

I linger by the bed, my own arms folded now and my chest a cage for my heart as it throws itself against my ribs. “?‘It’s personal’?”

“It is,” Ellis says. She moves in, sitting down in my desk chair and crossing her long legs at the knees. She sits as if she owns the place.

“I don’t want to talk about what happened in the graveyard.”

“We’re going to have to talk about it,” Ellis says. “You were very upset.”

“Sometimes people are upset, Ellis. Let it go.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t. You know that.” She digs a thumbnail into the wood groove of my desk, tracing it toward one corner. “I don’t like this tension between us. I want you to trust me.”

“I trust you. There—are you happy?”

Ellis fixes me with a narrowed gaze. “I mean it. You’re right, I shouldn’t have pressured you the other night. It was a strange request. I know that now.”

A strange request. It’s as if Ellis thinks we all live in books. At least then it would be easy enough to delete what happened in the cemetery, make me forget, and start over.

I sigh and drop down onto the side of my bed, the box of nonsense bouncing with my weight.

“I’m not angry,” I tell her. “Not really, anyway. Not for long. I know you were only trying to do the right thing.”

“I was,” she insists, and releases the desk to lean forward and grasp my knee instead. Her fingers curve all the way around my kneecap, swallowing the entire joint. “I…God help me, Felicity, but I care about you. I want you to be happy again.”

Again? She’s never seen me happy. She doesn’t even know what that looks like.

“All right,” I say. And when she turns her hand palm-up on my knee, I take it, lacing our fingers together. “All right.”

It’s a lie, of course. I have no intention of being happy, for Ellis or otherwise.

But what else am I going to say? Ellis sees me.