A Lesson in Vengeance(92)

“Fuck you.”

This, at last, garners a reaction, my mother’s mouth forming a tiny moue of shock and her hand immediately rising to cover it. “Felicity Elisabeth, that language is not appropriate—”

“Fuck,” I say again. “Fuck, fuck, shit, goddamn, fuck, shit!”

The flush that darkens her cheeks is lovelier than anything she could buy at Chanel. “You aren’t well,” she says. “It’s clear that Housemistress MacDonald was right about that. It’s perfectly understandable that losing your friend would have this effect on you, after what happened last year.”

Perfectly understandable. My mother has never understood a thing about me, not since the day I was born and she handed me off to the first in a string of nannies. “I’m not leaving,” I say.

“You are. I had to talk to the police for you. Did you know that? The dean told me that you were being interviewed. I had to call the police and tell them you were nothing but a sick girl, grieving her friend. I had to tell them you were fragile, that you—”

What she means is that she had to call one of her powerful East Coast friends and make them talk to the police.

Or that she had to pay.

“I’m eighteen,” I inform her. I grin, wild and sharp. “I’m eighteen. I’m an adult. You can’t make me do anything.”

My mother looks so small to me now, a stick-limbed figure closed in a shell of designer clothing and an old-money name. A single tap and she might break.

“I might not be able to force you to get help, but I can speak to the dean and have you withdrawn from school.”

I shake my head. “No. You never cared about being my mother before. Don’t you dare start now.”

Her shoulders quiver. For a moment I think she might cry. But then Cecelia Morrow lifts her chin and nods, just once. “I see.”

“I bet you do.”

I escort my mother to the door of Godwin House, stand in the foyer, and watch her figure retreat down the winding drive until she is nothing but a pink speck quickly obscured by the trees. She never belonged here. She never should have set foot on this unhallowed ground.

I close the door, and she is gone.

When I return to the kitchen, Ellis and Leonie are making dinner. Ellis catches my eye and stabs her knife into a hunk of meat. I imagine her cutting into my flesh the same way, carving it off bone. Blood on the floor.

At last I understand.

In this, as in all things, I am alone.



* * *



—

It snowed Friday night. Saturday, at an assembly, the school tells us that the police are no longer looking for a girl. They’re looking for a body.

Everyone stares at the Godwin House students as we drift home, draped in black. A lace veil flutters like a crown atop Kajal’s dark hair. Ellis, for once, has nothing to say. She catches my gaze past the other two, and for a moment it’s like we understand each other. We alone know what happened to Clara Kennedy. We alone understand the odd relief that seeps in now, our heartbeats in rhythm: If they haven’t found her by now, they won’t find her. Not with the new snow.

We got away with it.

That night I sit on my bedroom floor and pick at the place in the rug where I spilled wax, back when Ellis burst into my room and I knocked over the candles. Downstairs they’ve put Etta James on vinyl, the sultry notes of her voice broken occasionally by the unsteady, racking wave of someone’s sobs. Four floors below me I feel Margery Lemont’s bones reverberate in the earth, calling out to me. And some distance away—not far; it could never be far—Alex’s. Two mad girls buried under Godwin House.

There are two weeks left in the semester. Two weeks until winter break and I escape this place, escape Ellis’s eyes on me, the omnipresent threat of what she will do to me the moment we’re alone. Two weeks with her fingers round my throat. Can I survive for two weeks—fourteen days—in this place?

Eventually I fall into an uncomfortable sleep there on the floor, my cheek pressed atop an open book and my knees drawn in close to my chest. In my dream it’s me and Alex on top of a mountain, the wind catching Alex’s red hair and tangling it about her neck. I shout and reach for her, but she’s choking, she’s choking…And she isn’t Alex at all—she’s Margery Lemont, black blood staining her veins and turning her skin gray, her eyes the color of the night sky.

I lurch awake. For a second I’m disoriented, the ceiling curving wildly overhead and my vision blurry. That sound…

Then it happens again: a slow creak at my door, someone turning the knob.

My heart seizes, and I pitch upright, watching as the brass handle twists toward the latch and catches. Gently, someone releases it back into place.

I stare at the door, stare hard enough that I can practically see Ellis on the other side of it with her head tilted in close to the frame, her pale fingers curving over the knob.

Go away. Go away.

Silence, for a moment. Then a soft scraping noise like nails against glass.

She’s picking the lock.

I shove myself back on both hands, crawling until my spine hits my bookshelf. I need a weapon. I need…something, anything.

One of my running shoes has fallen under the bed. I lunge for it and untie the knotted laces, yank them loose. My hands are shaking as I rise slowly to my feet, twisting the slim lace around my knuckles as I edge closer to the door.