A Lesson in Vengeance(76)

But once breakfast is finished and Ellis has absconded back to her room and her typewriter, I don’t read. Instead I search the titles on my bedroom bookshelf for The Secret Garden (absent) and position a row of candles and dried dandelion along my windowsill. The lit wicks flutter against the glass, a feeble barricade against whatever moves out there in the woods, drawing ever closer.

Margery’s curse still waits for me. I might have killed Ellis’s coyote, and she might have proven their deaths could happen without magic, but that doesn’t make me free.

I don’t want to bother Ellis—I don’t even know if we’re together. Even if we are, I don’t want to be the kind of girlfriend who hangs around constantly, present to the point of frustration. So I stay upstairs until I hear the front door open and shut again, Leonie and Kajal’s voices carrying up the stairs as they stomp in from the snow sometime near dusk.

I meet them in the kitchen. Leonie, for one, seems especially pleased to see me; she grins and throws her arms around me, squeezing tight enough that I can’t help but laugh.

“You came back!” she exclaims when she finally lets go.

“Of course I came back,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I come back?”

Some of the delight dims on Leonie’s face now and she falls onto her heels, Kajal quickly busying herself with the teapot. “No reason,” Leonie says unconvincingly. “How was Colorado?”

“I didn’t go,” I say. “I stayed here with Ellis, at Dalloway.”

Leonie and Kajal exchange looks. I wonder if they’ve been talking about me on the ride back from the airport, if they were taking bets on whether I’d be readmitted to the mental hospital before the end of term.

The silence hangs heavy between us. We all try not to look at one another, Leonie grinding the edge of her nail into the groove of the wood counter, Kajal waiting for the water to boil.

“I like your new hair,” I end up saying eventually, gesturing toward Leonie, whose braids have been replaced with loose waves that reach her waist.

“Thanks. I just called in for the appointment yesterday. Your sweater looks nice, too.”

“Oh,” I say. “Thank you. It’s vintage.”

“What’s for dinner?”

Ellis has appeared in the doorway, one hand on either side of the frame: a saving grace wearing houndstooth. Her gaze lingers on me a half second longer than it does anyone else.

“Clara said she’d go by the grocery store on her way back,” Kajal says. “I don’t remember what she said she was going to get, but it seemed like she had a plan.”

The plan, it turns out, involves tacos. Somehow that’s the absolute last thing I ever expected to see the Godwin girls consume. But consume them we did, sitting around the dining room table dripping hot sauce and sour cream. Kajal picks at hers, but Ellis sucks the salsa from her fingertip, a sight that makes heat bloom low in my stomach.

I help Clara clean up after dinner, once Leonie and Kajal have retreated to the common room and Ellis is upstairs—no doubt pounding away at her typewriter, creating the world’s next literary masterpiece. If Clara had expected me to disappear over break like the others had, she doesn’t show it.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” I ask, feeling suddenly congenial. Clara is too focused on herself to notice anybody else.

“It was good,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me as she scrubs down the stove top. “I went back to Connecticut and spent some time with my family. My little sister just turned four. She was running all over the house, getting into things—she tried to start herself a bath and ended up flooding the whole third floor. I mean, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t that stupid when I was four, right?”

I didn’t know her when she was four, obviously. “I’m sure you weren’t.”

“Well, at least she didn’t drown herself,” Clara says charitably. “Although not for lack of trying. Good thing it was too cold for beach trips.”

“It snowed almost the whole time we were here,” I say. I’m at the sink washing dishes, done with the cast iron and moving on to the cutlery.

“Oh, I know. Ellis told me. That sucks. Actually, I think I might skip classes for a few days and go somewhere. Like, apparently there’s this spa closer to the city, and it’s like…rustic? Only not really. You stay in a tent, but it has heating, and a bed, and a phone line. And it isn’t dirty.”

So, glamping. If Alex were here, she’d have quite a few choice things to say about that. Clara might look like Alex—at least from behind—but the two of them have nothing in common.

All of a sudden, I miss Alex more than anything. I miss the way she laughed. I miss how she always wanted to be outside, constantly wandering under the sun and trees. Leaves stuck in her hair, always with a book in her bag.

And somehow thinking about Alex now…it doesn’t hurt. Or at least not the way it did. Maybe there’s still a chance to repair things with her spirit, to make amends.

Maybe, at last, Alex can rest.

“I hope you have a great time,” I tell Clara, surprising myself with my own sincerity. “It sounds wonderful.”

When I do go back to my room, the shadows don’t seem as dark as they once did. The air is easier to breathe, despite the pitch dark outside. I gaze out my window for a while, waiting, but no figure emerges from between the trees. No chill creeps up my spine.