A Lesson in Vengeance(63)

I need to be seen.



* * *



—

Things ease between me and Ellis the week following that conversation. I’m grateful for it; with the end of the semester approaching in a flurry of final papers and projects, I don’t think I could have sustained my resentment without unraveling in some other way.

Although it might already be too late for that. I dream about Alex almost every night now, even when I’m not having nightmares. She’s the girl at the café in my dream about Paris; she’s the woman with soft fingers touching my lips; she’s falling and falling and falling into an endless dark.

I’m not the only one worried about final exams looming at us from the other side of break. Godwin House is consumed in a constant fog of low-grade panic. Kajal has realized she’s on the cusp of an A and a B in AP European History, and her score on the final essay will determine whether she makes dean’s list this semester. Meanwhile, Clara, whose record is in somewhat more dire straits than Kajal’s, refuses to emerge from her room. Leonie spends half her time in the library—and I have started to regret my decision to eschew laptops. It’s much more difficult to write a fifty-page essay on a typewriter than one would think. I don’t want to find myself rushing to get it finished in the few weeks after Thanksgiving.

Wyatt calls me into her office midweek to check up on thesis progress. She wants to see pages—pages that, of course, I don’t have, because I’m not writing about the topic we agreed upon. I escape by telling her the truth, or part of it at least: I’m writing on a typewriter, so I only have one copy. I’ll show her after break.

That buys me a few weeks to invent an excuse for why I’m writing about witches again.

Ellis is the only one of us who seems relatively at peace. “My main concern right now is finishing the book,” she tells me, both of us sitting on the common room floor with the materials for our Art History project arranged on the rug in front of us. “Everything else is secondary.”

“That’s easy for you to say. Even if you fail out of Dalloway, you still have a writing career.”

She shakes her head. “I only have a writing career if I publish another book. And to publish this book, I need to finish it first.”

I sip my coffee. The taste is strong and bitter, the way Ellis likes it.

Ellis highlights a line on another page then finally sits upright, fixing me in her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asks in that characteristically blunt way of hers.

“What? Yes, of course. Why? Don’t I look all right?”

“You look exhausted,” she says. “Have you been sleeping?”

“No,” I admit. The truth is, I’ve been doing my best to stay awake; my nightmares have only gotten worse since our ritual at the church. “I can’t sleep.”

Ellis’s mouth tightens, but at least she doesn’t say anything more on the subject. Perhaps she knows how little I want her pity. Instead she shoves one of our new library books into my lap and says, “You’re in charge of chapters fourteen through eighteen.”

The reading is a slog, but we get through it. Then Ellis wants to dissect the Dalloway murders again; she’s stuck on the scene with Beatrix Walker’s death. She was found with all the bones in her body broken, as if she’d fallen from a great height, but she was discovered indoors, far from anywhere above ground level.

“Someone obviously moved the body, like with Cordelia,” Ellis says, sounding almost exasperated. “The simplest explanation is always the best. Why assume witchcraft?”

“But how did she fall? There’s nowhere on campus high enough—not in the eighteenth century, anyway.” Except for the cliffs where Alex died.

I grit my hands into fists.

“Maybe she didn’t fall at all. Someone could have broken her bones individually.” Ellis lies down on the common room rug, her limbs splayed out. She lifts one wrist in demonstration. “A hammer here.” She touches her ribs. “A kick to the chest.”

I shift over her, straddling her middle, and brace one hand against her sternum. My hair has fallen forward, long pale strands tickling the skin at Ellis’s throat. “But she’d be struggling,” I point out. I add pressure to my hand, holding Ellis in place. “And screaming.”

Ellis gazes up at me, eyes steady and unafraid. “Not if she was dead first.”

We finally call it a night around one, Ellis stretching her long arms toward the ceiling as I collect all our notes and other detritus.

“Again tomorrow?”

“Six sharp.” Her grin is quick; I want to memorize it.

My room feels dark and barren when I go upstairs. I’ve been spending more and more time in the library with Ellis, enough so that coming back here even to sleep feels foreign.

I should have brought more books when I came back to school, perhaps. More photos, maybe a few potted plants—something to bring life in wintertime. Something aside from the incense and crystals and candles I dug out of my closet hiding space, meager wards against the dark.

I trail my fingers along the spines on my bookshelf, tracing past Little Women and The Bluest Eye and Wide Sargasso Sea. I’ve read all these a dozen times, have loved them more at each iteration. But then my hand brushes an unfamiliar leather binding, and I stop, the air suddenly frozen.