A Lesson in Vengeance(94)

Ellis knew. Ellis saw me in a way no one else could; she saw the black and twisted heart of me. She took my hand and guided me into that darkness. She opened the door, and truth entered, and nothing can undo that now.

I’m surprised by the sympathy. Instructors I’ve never met stop me in the hall with well wishes. The dean herself invites me over for tea and hugs me before I leave, tells me to call her anytime. Even Kajal and Leonie orbit around me like they’re afraid I’ll break, appearing at my room with trays of coffee and cookies and books to borrow. They don’t expect me to go to class. No one expects me to leave my room at all.

They think I’m mourning.

When Alex died, people could barely look at me. Everyone believed I’d killed her. Or at the very least, they believed there was something I could have done differently. Some way I could have saved her, or died in her place.

I murdered Ellis Haley in cold blood, and at last they lend me their pity.

The morning before I leave for Georgia, for Ellis’s funeral, I venture out onto the grounds and go to sit by the lake, the Margery Skull in my lap and my feet stretched out toward the water. The sunlight is warm on my face, the birds chirping in trees and the lake water glittering at dawn. All last evening I had this feeling in my chest, a shivering sort of sensation; it started off as a low hum and has since crescendoed to glorious heights.

I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I’m not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.

I glance down at the skull, smoothing my palm over its cold and bony brow. I’ve kept the skull hidden in my bedroom, in that secret compartment in my closet, ever since I stole it from Boleyn for my séance last year with Alex. A bit of my blood is still dried there, brownish and crumbling easily when I rub it with my thumb.

The skull’s eye sockets gaze blankly back at me, empty, lifeless. If Margery’s spirit still clings to her bones, this will break the tie between us.

“I’m closing the ritual,” I tell the skull. “I’m putting you to rest.”

The clove and anise, when I burn it atop a flat stone, smells like Christmas.

Margery Lemont might have been buried alive, but I won’t return her skull to the earth. Or to Godwin, for that matter. Instead I wade into the frigid lake, deep enough that the water ripples around my hips. I lower the skull in cupped hands beneath the surface. A few air bubbles escape, and for a moment I can imagine it’s a last breath—a last goodbye.

Then I let go.

The skull sinks quickly, a weight falling out of sight, obscured by the shifting silt.

“Thank you,” I tell her—Margery. Alex. Both of them. “For everything.”

I emerge from the water shivering, mourning-black skirt sodden and clinging to my legs. I gaze back over the lake one last time, half expecting to see Alex’s ghost rising from the waves, but the water is smooth as mirror glass.

It’s a beautiful morning.



* * *



—

Ellis’s funeral in Georgia, two days later, is a procession of figures in crepe and taffeta, the Godwin House girls as devoted to historical accuracy in Ellis’s death as we were in life. Our clothing makes a centerpiece of us juxtaposed with the other mourners’ Savile Row suits and sheath dresses; when these strangers look at me, I hold their gazes. I never look away first.

The whole thing is a subdued affair, Ellis’s casket plain and unadorned, not a spot of whiskey to be found (except in Leonie’s hip flask, which she passes down our pew while the preacher lectures on about innocence and forgiveness through faith). Ellis would have loathed it. I can imagine her sitting next to me even now, a birdcage veil tugged over her eyes and her fingers tapping together in her lap. A murmur in my ear: Meet me in the bathroom. I want to fuck you.

“Excuse me,” I whisper to Kajal, and I edge my way out of the row, escaping down the aisle.

Alone in the church restroom, I lock the door behind me and pull out Ellis’s silver cigarette tin from my pocket. She would have wanted you to have it, Quinn had said when they gave it to me this morning. I pick out one of Ellis’s joints and light it with a struck match, inhale, exhale slow.

I never really liked to smoke all that much, but this feels right. It’s appropriate, a final fuck you.

I catch sight of my reflection after, as I’m straightening myself up. My hair is still perfectly neat, lightly curled and drawn away from my face with a ribbon. My lipstick isn’t smudged. I spritz fresh perfume on my neck, then I adjust my collar and practice a smile.

I look good in black.

After the service, the pallbearers take the casket outside and we all watch as Ellis is lowered into the dirt. I still remember her in herringbone, one hand braced against the handle of a shovel, standing atop Alex’s grave. I wonder if that’s always how I’ll remember her: fierce, independent, alive. I think I prefer that to the alternative. I liked her better when she couldn’t be caught off guard. I prefer to remember an Ellis who never would have let herself fall.

She isn’t the girl in that casket, the same way Alex isn’t the girl I buried under Godwin House a year ago. They both exist outside of time, fragments of memory and imagination—like Ellis’s characters, in a way. They exist only insofar as I allow them to exist.