A Lesson in Vengeance(77)

I can still hear my mother’s voice echoing in my head, condescending, faux concerned: Have you been taking your medication? But it helps. I’m getting better. So I call the pharmacy and head out to pick up my order. As soon as I get back to Godwin, I swallow a pill with a glass of tap water and close my eyes.

It’s surrender, in a way, but it’s not something to be ashamed of.

That night, I take down the letters Alex sent me. I tie them in a neat stack with a length of ivory ribbon and slide them into my desk drawer. I leave the photo of us, pinned next to a postcard Alex sent me one summer.

I fall asleep easily, and I sleep well.

Perhaps too well.





I oversleep.

By the time I make it downstairs the next morning, everyone’s already had breakfast. The others have left for early-morning extracurriculars, and Ellis is curled up fully dressed on the common room sofa, dead to the world.

I stand there for a little while, watching. I’ve seen Ellis sleep before, of course, but this feels different somehow. Maybe there’s a vulnerability in sleeping out in the open, without a blanket. Or maybe it’s that Ellis has never seemed the type to drowse in libraries.

She’s wearing a point-collared dress shirt, still tucked into her trousers. One of the shirt buttons is undone; I glimpse the slightest swell of bare skin past white fabric, rising and falling in slow rhythm with her breath.

I grip the back of the sofa so I won’t give in to the urge to reach down and brush back the hair that has fallen across her eyes. I don’t want to wake her—not if she was up writing all night.

Robbed of my usual spot, I take my book back upstairs to the little reading nook nestled under the window at the far end of the third-floor hallway. Classes are barely back in session—a good excuse not to read horror and mystery. But I find myself choosing Strong Poison anyway. It’s not fascination with the macabre. It’s not that perverse need to terrify myself, a twisted penance for my crimes. I want to read Sayers. I want her elegant Oxonian prose, the fierce wittiness of Harriet Vane, the thrill of a chase.

Wyatt told me the mark of a true scholar was passion for the subject above all else—passion that resumed despite obstacles, the academic circling back to her true love again and again.

I think of the college applications I submitted before break, little missives darting off to Princeton, to Duke, to Brown. None of them were sent with much hope. The future had felt like a distant and abstract construct, a life that belonged to another Felicity—a mirror image of myself existing in some parallel world, a girl who stood a chance at living past the end of the year.

When I was a child, I found it so hard to imagine ever turning sixteen. Sixteen. The age was laden with implication: sweet sixteen celebrations, cars, makeup, drinking at parties, and kissing lips I’d never remember. Only then I turned sixteen, and the impossible age became eighteen.

And once I was eighteen, I hadn’t been able to see ahead past May. Alex’s ghost was a rising fog that obscured possibility, swallowing up every line that led into June, to July, to nineteen. None of the Dalloway Five had lived past eighteen; why should I?

I sent those applications because it was what I was expected to do.

Today, for the first time, it finally feels real.

Maybe Ellis will come with me. We’ll share a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I’ll attend classes at Columbia during the day; at night I’ll return home to find Ellis still tilted toward her typewriter, notes and half-read books scattered over her desk like fallen leaves.

When I wander down to the common room for lunch and a break from my thesis, Ellis has vanished from the sofa. Leonie is back, though, perched at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee, scribbling away in a notebook.

“What are you working on?” I ask, and she immediately slaps the notebook shut, like she doesn’t want me to see.

I lift my brows, and after a long beat she wipes a hand over her eyes and shakes her head. “Sorry. I…well, I’ve been writing my grandmother’s story. A novelization of it, anyway. Don’t tell Ellis?”

“Why would Ellis care?”

Leonie shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t. But…well, writing is kind of her thing.”

“Ellis doesn’t own writing. If you want to write about your grandmother, you should.”

Leonie twists one of her waves around her forefinger and looks like she doesn’t believe me. I know Ellis better than anyone now, and I’d like to think Ellis would be pleased to hear that someone else has discovered a passion for writing and creation.

I also know what it is to have a secret you’ve held close to your chest for so long it starts to poison you—to fear that if you show it to anyone else, it might poison them, too. But when I finally told Ellis about my mother, she hadn’t been poisoned.

She’d understood.

“I wanted to ask you about something,” I say once I’ve mustered the courage.

Leonie nods slowly. “Okay,” she says. “Go for it.”

“You were in the Margery coven. Weren’t you?”

Leonie releases her hair. I can’t define the expression that settles on her face, her typically serene features twisting for a moment—almost as if in disgust. But the look is gone so quickly I might have imagined it. “Yes. I suppose I still am.”

Well, I’m not, I almost say, but I swallow the words. Instead, I take a breath, one that shakes in my chest.