A Lesson in Vengeance(93)

I press myself against the wall. The latch clicks open.

My pulse pounds in my temples, fierce and bloody. I brace the makeshift garrote between my hands and hold my breath.

Ellis pushes the door open a half inch, and it catches on my desk chair. The chair legs squeak against the hardwood floor and then go still.

Can Ellis see my empty bed from where she stands? Does she know I’m waiting for her on the other side of this door, fingers blanched white as the shoelace cuts off circulation?

After a long and terrible silence, the door shifts again, rattling against the desk chair. I catch the sharp intake of breath from out in the hall. I squeeze my eyes shut and clench both fists. But then, at last, the door closes.

She’s gone.





I plot my own Night Migration.

The note is written in Clara’s hand, copied from the passive-aggressive note she left me earlier in the year about leaving my dishes in the sink. I pick Ellis’s bedroom lock while she’s in class and leave it on her pillow, then escape to the library stacks.

The hours filter by in silent agony, punctuated by the pilgrimage of Dalloway students from carrel to shelf. I have hidden myself in the mathematics section, the last place Ellis would look. My hand grips the angelica root in my pocket, a charm against evil.

I wait until the sun dips low in the horizon and stains the sky in shades of gold and poppy. Then I take the stairs to the roof.

I haven’t been this high up since Alex died. I creep toward the edge, my blood hot in my veins. It would be so easy to fall. No, not to fall—to jump.

I hear the air whistling in my ears, watch the ground surge up to meet me. I blink as the world plunges into darkness.

And then I’m here again. Poised on the edge, the wind catching my skirt and whipping it taut against my thighs.

The sun sinks lower, the fringe of the forest consuming the last of its light. I sit down on unsteady legs and turn my face toward the pewter clouds. I told her to meet me at 6:04—astronomical twilight, when the last light has gone.

She appears two minutes early, the stairwell door opening and falling shut loud enough that I can hear it all the way across the roof.

I don’t turn around, even when Ellis’s footsteps are right behind me. My spine is straight and still; my eyes are shut. My feet dangle so far above the earth.

But death doesn’t come.

“Felicity?”

I look.

Ellis stands at my shoulder, clothed in mourner’s black. She extends a gloved hand, and I take it, let her pull me up. I’m not wearing heels; she’s several inches taller like this, free hand curling into a loose fist at her side.

“I thought you were afraid of heights,” she says.

“I am.”

Even now I can’t look down. The world exists too far below us.

Then again, that’s always been true.

“I never would have turned you in,” Ellis says. Her gaze focuses past me, out over the darkening sky. I wonder if she is even speaking to me, really, or if she means these words just for herself. A private justification—a confession. “I only said that because I was afraid. I never collected evidence against you. I never wanted to hurt you.”

I don’t speak. My words are brittle ash in my mouth. Live coals that burn.

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Ellis says. She still has my hand, her fingers laced together with mine. She squeezes lightly now, and I swallow.

The darkness is almost complete. The safety lamps have turned on down below, a field of little lights glimmering across campus and vanishing toward the woods. But their glow doesn’t reach as far as we stand.

I’m too aware of all the little things keeping me alive: my quickening heartbeat, air cold at the back of my throat, the aching tension in my muscles holding me upright.

Ellis looks like one of the works we analyzed in Art History, a painting in chiaroscuro. Perfect at first glance, but lean closer and you’ll see the brushstrokes.

“Me too,” I say. “You made me who I am. You made me who I was always supposed to be.”

Night hangs over us like a guillotine blade. Ellis lets go of my hand, and I count the seconds as they pass. One…two. We’re alone at the top of the world.

She takes a shallow breath—I watch her shoulders shift as the air comes in—and I move forward.

This isn’t like pushing Alex. That was an accident. This time I push hard enough to make it mean something, hard enough to hear Ellis gasp, hard enough that even when she reaches for me it’s too late.

If I had all the words in the English language, I could not string them together adequately to describe the expression on Ellis’s face when she falls.

Surprise, perhaps. But also a grim, inevitable recognition.

Ellis doesn’t scream on the way down. I hear the crunch of her body hitting pavement, but I don’t see the impact. I’ve already turned away.

The night is too silent now.

I return through the same door, descend the library stairs, and exit through the back. I don’t want to see her.

I never want to see her again.





I leave the letter on Ellis’s pillow, a confession in Ellis’s own hand. They find her body, and an hour later they find the note.

Three days, I wait for the blade to fall. It never does. The police sweep in and out of the house, and I lurk in corners, waiting for someone’s gaze to cut past the shell of Felicity Morrow and see what I really am. But they can’t: No one sees past skin. No one senses the bones under this house like I do.