A Lesson in Vengeance(70)

Or maybe I’m afraid of losing control like she did—drunk in our gallery with a knife in hand, ripping all those priceless works of art to expensive shreds.

I drape my wrist over my eyes, but that only makes the spinning worse. “How often did you get to see Ellis?” I find myself asking. “After you went to Yale. I guess you didn’t come home much.”

A long silence passes in the wake of those words, long enough that I squint over at Quinn and start to wonder if I’ve said something wrong. But at last Quinn exhales and tilts their face toward me, says, “Not much, no. And god knows Karen and Jill weren’t home enough, either.”

It takes me a second to realize Karen and Jill must be Ellis’s mothers. Quinn’s, too, although perhaps not very good ones.

“That must have been hard,” I say.

“Depends who you ask, I suppose. I survived just fine. Ellis, though…”

I’m still trapped in the thick gauzy space of intoxication, but something about the way Quinn says it injects a shot of adrenaline into my blood. And suddenly I’m a little more awake, a little more alert.

“What do you mean?”

Quinn’s eyes are slivers of obsidian glittering beneath their half-lowered lashes. “I mean it fucked Ellis up. She was always a little insecure, but…”

Insecure? “Are we talking about the same Ellis here?”

“Same Ellis. I don’t know what kind of persona she puts on at school, but yeah. Because…well.”

Quinn blows out a heavy burst of air and pushes themselves upright, turning toward me properly, with one knee drawn up. Something about the way they’re sitting reminds me so keenly of Ellis: the body language, perhaps, or even just the clothes. And yesterday wasn’t a fluke; they dress exactly alike. I wonder if Ellis did that on purpose, modeling herself after her older sibling—if she hero-worships Quinn and can’t tell the difference between admiration and appropriation.

Maybe, in some small ways, Ellis is human after all.

“Fuck it. Look. Ellis was always a little weird growing up, you know? She was one of those gifted kids. I’m smart, but Ellis…she was on a whole ’nother level. The tutors almost couldn’t keep up with her. She’d get so bored, so damn pathologically bored. She needed constant stimulation or she’d throw these tantrums and give the whole house migraines.”

It’s not hard to imagine a young Ellis—in my mind, wearing a miniature version of the adult Ellis’s knife-crease slacks and glen check blazers—hungry for knowledge, for more, and bursting with fury when that need was denied.

“Anyway, when Ellis was ten our parents went abroad for the winter. They were supposed to be gone a couple months, so they left Ellis with our grandmother in Vermont. Only then there was this terrible storm…They got snowed in, and the power went out, and Nana died.”

“Oh god.” I don’t even want to think about what that was like: Ellis, solitary in that house with her grandmother dead, her parents gone. “What did she do? How—?”

Quinn arches a brow. “Ellis was alone for four weeks. It took three weeks for the snow to melt, but the power company was stretched so thin with all the outages that they didn’t get around to fixing our grandmother’s house that whole time.”

It would have been freezing cold, the snow pressing in against the windows and the grandmother’s body slowly rotting upstairs. And as it got warmer, the stench permeating the house inch by deadly inch. I imagine Ellis shutting doors to keep out the smell, barricading herself in smaller and smaller spaces until there was nowhere else to run.

“It was six miles to get to the nearest neighbor,” Quinn went on. “And with the snow…I mean, Ellis was ten. She decided it made sense to hole up and wait it out.”

As indifferent as my own mother might be, I can’t imagine her allowing something like this to happen. I have to keep reminding myself that Ellis’s parents had left her with her grandmother, that they had every reason to think she’d be safe.

Only she wasn’t safe. Clearly she wasn’t safe.

“But then your parents came back. So she…she was all right.” I stare at Quinn, half begging them to end it. Knowing Ellis is here, that she survived, isn’t enough. I need the story to be finished.

“They came back all right,” Quinn says grimly. “They came back early, in fact. But Ellis had already run out of food. Our moms weren’t supposed to return for another three weeks. Ellis didn’t have anything to eat….She ended up strangling her pet rabbit and eating him. Raw. You have to understand—she was desperate….She didn’t have a choice.”

Nausea lurches up my throat, the taste of bile and old gin flooding my mouth, convulsive and sickly; I swallow it down. Ellis…She—

“I did have a choice, actually,” a voice says from behind us. Quinn and I both lurch around so quickly it sends the room spinning all over again.

Ellis stands in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, resplendent in a tailored suit. Her expression is so neutral that I can’t tell if it’s an affectation or if she genuinely doesn’t care what we’ve said—what Quinn has said.

Her hand drops back to her side, and she arches a brow. “It was eat my rabbit or eat the dog. And I wasn’t going to shoot Muffin.”