A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  Ellis Haley stands behind me, both hands tucked into her trouser pockets and her attention fixed past me at the grandmother clock. She’s still wearing that red lipstick, the lines of it too crisp and perfect to have just come from a party. After a moment her gaze slips down to meet mine.

  “You left early,” she comments.

  “I felt sick.”

  “They didn’t sweeten the absinthe enough,” she says, and shakes her head.

  For a second we both stand there staring at each other. I remember Clara’s pale hands in the darkness: snip, snip.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I ask.

  “Still at Boleyn, as far as I know. I came back alone.”

  I struggle to imagine any of those girls letting Ellis Haley go anywhere by herself. You must’ve had to peel them off like tiny well-dressed leeches.

  I realize I’ve said that out loud, a beat after my mouth falls shut again.

  Ellis laughs. It’s a sudden bright sound that breaks the silence like an egg, that fills the room. “I did tell them I was just going to freshen up,” she admits. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles. “Clara tried to come with me.”

  “How fortunate you managed to escape.”

  “By a hair,” Ellis says, pinching her fingers. “I made coffee, by the way. Would you like some?”

  “It’s late for coffee, isn’t it?”

  “It’s never too late for coffee.”

  This whole night already feels bizarre, like the world viewed through a kaleidoscope. “Why not,” I say, and Ellis goes to retrieve a tray from the kitchen: the coffee in a silver pot that appears vaguely Moroccan, our own chipped teacups a little forlorn when adjacent.

  Ellis pours two cups, sitting on the floor with both legs tucked beneath her. She hasn’t brought cream or sugar; apparently we’re both meant to drink our coffee black.

  “Why were you here so early?” I ask her after she’s picked up her cup and taken her first sip. It’s a brash question—not the kind of conversation starter my mother would approve of—but it seems all my restraint was expelled with my vomit. “Most people aren’t so desperate to get back to school.”

  “Only two weeks early, really,” Ellis says. “I needed a retreat. Time away from the world to work on my book. It’s peaceful here when everyone else is gone.”

  I’m surprised the administration let her stay.

  Or, actually, maybe I’m not. The publicity—Ellis Haley’s sophomore novel, written in seclusion on the campus of Dalloway School—would be worth the extra cost of sustaining a single student for two weeks. Dalloway can align itself with the Villa Diodati, with Walden.

  I’m not sure what my mother had to do to convince Dalloway to let me arrive four days early, but I imagine it required more than mere asking.

  “What are you writing now?”

  Ellis lowers her cup, gazing down at the black surface of her coffee for a moment as if she’ll find inspiration there. “It’s a character study,” she says. “I want to explore the gradations of human morality: how indifference can slide into evil, what drives a person toward murder. And I want to interrogate the concept of the psychopath: whether villainy exists in that truest form or if it’s simply a manifestation of some human drive that lurks in all of us.”

  It’s chilly in this room; I hold my coffee between both hands, trying to borrow its warmth. “And what will you conclude?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Ellis traces her finger along the circumference of her cup. “Although I suppose in some ways I don’t need to speculate. The deaths in the story are inspired by the Dalloway Five.”

  The Dalloway Five, again. No matter what I do, it seems like I can’t escape them. I left for almost an entire year—I spent nearly a year away from this place, in my own brand of seclusion, but as soon as I come back, there are ghosts at my heels and stories of dead witches on everyone’s tongue.

  I don’t recall people being nearly so interested in Dalloway’s history last year. If anything, I felt self-conscious of my thesis subject; discussing it always earned me scrunched noses and twisted mouths.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m writing about them,” Ellis says. “Well, about Margery Lemont specifically. The story is from multiple perspectives, but ultimately questions whether Margery was really a witch, as her accusers claimed, or whether accusations of witchcraft merely reflected a pathologization of female anger.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that. My mouth is dry; my tongue sticks to my palate like old gum.

  “So of course I had to transfer here, to Dalloway. There’s nowhere else to write this kind of story, is there?”

  I suppose there isn’t. Even so, a part of me wants to warn her not to get too close. Margery Lemont has a way of sucking you in and refusing to let go. I wonder if Alex’s ghost is watching us right now, her dead gaze drinking in this scene. Judging.

  “Well, good luck,” I offer.

  Ellis smiles at me, right as her lips close around the rim of her cup, is still smiling as she takes another sip. “And you? What’s your senior thesis?”

  For a moment, last year’s answer perches on my lips. Ellis waits in patient silence while I struggle to swallow it down.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I can barely stand to exist in this place anymore. Dalloway might be in my blood and bones, but as much as I was unable to stay away, Dalloway’s history—and mine—hangs over the campus like a heavy fog. I wonder if Ellis feels it. If Ellis is scared of it, or if she hopes a shadow of that evil will seep up from the ground and infect her, the way it infected Margery Lemont.

  At last, I bite the inside of my cheek and admit: “I thought I wanted to study the witches, as well. But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea anymore.”

  Ellis’s brow arches at a perfect angle. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she says.

  Her amusement hangs on the words like antique lace.

  Does she know? Can she tell that, for me, the study was never academic?

  Maybe she’s been warned, Wyatt or MacDonald drawing Ellis into her office: Be careful with such stories, Miss Haley. Take care you don’t start to believe they’re true.

  “How so?” It comes out a little more aggressively than I expect. “It’s a good story. Clearly you agree, or you wouldn’t be writing about it.”

  “A perfect story,” Ellis corrects. “Dalloway School: founded to teach the arcane arts to young witches under the guise of an expensive finishing school. Dalloway’s first headmistress: daughter of a witch. And of course the Dalloway Five, who murdered one of their own in a satanic ritual. Reality only aspires to such perversity.”

  “It’s not all untrue. We know the founder came from Salem, after all. And don’t forget the occult collection in the main library.” A collection donated by an alumna of Dalloway, a now-famous historian of seventeenth-century religious practices. A collection I had hoped to get my hands on, as soon as I was a third-year and had a faculty member willing to sign the permission slip. I wanted to breathe the dust off those scrolls, trace my gloved fingers along ancient spines. The administration—and Wyatt—had tried to talk me out of my thesis a hundred times. Maybe they’d known what would become of me if I flirted too well with old magic. “How many finishing schools do you know with rare book rooms crammed full of pentacles and pages made out of human skin?”

  Ellis waves a hand as if to say Fair enough.

  “But of course, you’re right,” I add. “They weren’t really witches. They were just girls.”

  Just girls. Just clever, bright young women. Too clever and bright for their time.

  And they were killed for it.

  “One other fact was real,” Ellis says after a long moment. Her gaze is as cool as silver lake water, and as steady. “Th
e death of Flora Grayfriar.”

  She’s right. I’d almost not come to Dalloway for that precise reason; I’d found the idea of attending a school where a girl was ritually murdered, even if three hundred years ago, to be horribly gauche. All I’d really cared about was Godwin House. Yes, all five of the Dalloway witches had been found dead on Godwin’s grounds—killed by each other, or by small-minded townsfolk, depending who you believe—but Emily Dickinson. How could I resist?

  It wasn’t until I came here and learned more about the history of the school, about the witches, that I fell in love with the dark.

  The front door bangs open, and the murmur of voices in the foyer heralds the return of the other Godwin girls. Ellis sets her empty coffee cup aside and stands, offering me her hand. After a moment, I take it, and she pulls me to my feet.

  “Ellis,” Kajal says once she appears in the common room entryway. “You should have told us you were coming back here.”

  Ellis glances toward me, the corner of her mouth curling up; and for once, I smile back.

  The spell is broken now. The other girls eat up all the oxygen in the room, circling around Ellis like asteroids around a black hole. I escape upstairs to wash off my makeup and scrub the scent of cigarette smoke out of my hair. I’m exhausted, but even once I’ve curled up under my duvet with my pillow slowly going damp against my cheek from the shower water, it takes me a long time to fall asleep.

  Flora Grayfriar haunts the late-night silence of Godwin House. My skin holds the sense memory of the Margery Skull, cool bone and warm wax dripping over my fingers. And I can’t forget what Ellis wondered: whether the drive to murder sleeps quiet in all of us, if we’re all two steps away from the ledge, waiting for an excuse to throw out both hands and push.

  I think about the moment the rope snapped and the world went quiet and still, my body weightless without Alex dragging it down, the snow in my eyes and the emptiness on the mountain. The hollow feeling that carved its way into my chest.

  And the relief.

  Dalloway semesters never begin slowly.

  Unlike other prep schools, Dalloway allows its students remarkable leeway in terms of what we study. We have a general education requirement, taught with the Harkness method—all discussion-based. And after our second year, students are encouraged to adopt a concentration: a passion project to pursue that will eventually become our senior thesis. There are Dalloway students who spend most of their year enmeshed in internships at the nearby aerospace laboratory, students who sleep in the classics building and only speak in ancient Greek. And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.

  I had thought I might get away with an unannounced thesis for a few weeks at least, that the administration’s sympathy over Alex, or at least their repulsion over my former subject, would translate into a long leash and emails saying things like Take your time. I should have known better. But as it turns out, I’m a slow learner.

  Wyatt calls me into her office the first day of classes and passes me a can of store-brand soda; she keeps it in a minifridge under her mahogany desk, and the aesthetic of the chilly aluminum can juxtaposed with that desk and Wyatt’s antique rug makes me oddly uneasy.

  “So,” she says, perching her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. “As I told you over email, I think it’s best we find a new subject for your senior thesis. Yes?”

  “Yes.” I got used to responding as people wanted to hear while I was at Silver Lake. Yes is what Wyatt wants to hear. “I don’t want to waste the research I did before, so I was thinking I’d stay in a similar genre. Horror.”

  Wyatt nods slowly. “Is that a good idea? Horror can be…very gruesome.”

  “I’m better now,” I reassure her. “I can handle reading Helen Oyeyemi. I promise.”

  Wyatt’s pen taps a quick rhythm against the edge of her desk. I crack open the drink she gave me and take a small sip; the tropical-flavored soda bursts on my tongue with an eruption of fizz and synthetic citrus. It tastes like formaldehyde.

  “Very well,” Wyatt says at last.

  I didn’t realize how tense I’d been until she says that—and now I feel my body sinking back into the chair, shoulders retreating from where they’d scrunched up toward my ears.

  I was never small and frightened before. I didn’t used to be afraid of anything.

  “Your thesis will need to be more specific than that, of course. What question will you be trying to answer with this work?”

  “The same question.” It’s easier now. My prepared speech falls from my lips cool as a lie. “Misogyny and characterizations of female emotionality in horror literature. It’ll be written through an intellectual history lens: How were these works in conversation with the social norms and mores of their time? How were they influenced by catalytic historical events and literature? And how did they influence history and literature in turn?”

  “How did perceptions of women’s emotions change throughout history,” Wyatt translates.

  “As viewed through the gaze of contemporaneous horror writers.”

  This earns me one of Wyatt’s rare smiles. She uncaps her pen and signs her name on my thesis application form, then passes it back over her desk and says, “I very much look forward to reading this, Miss Morrow.”

  By the time I leave Wyatt’s building, though, I already wonder if I’ve made a mistake. If reading about witches was foolish, reading about ghosts is surely more so. Ever since I came back here, I’ve felt Alex’s presence like an unfinished sentence—waiting. And no matter how many times I tell myself ghosts don’t exist, that doesn’t dilute my fear.

  I feel dizzy in the sunlight, heat prickling over my skin and fermenting there, spreading like a quick fever. Before I can lose my balance, I catch myself on the handrail and stand at the foot of the stairs, students flowing around me like water around a rock, oblivious.

  I’d known it would be hard coming back to Dalloway after Alex died. But I didn’t expect the way I’d smell her perfume lingering on an armchair in Godwin House, or the chill that rolls up my spine when I pass near her old room.

  I didn’t expect to feel so…unmoored.

  I can practically hear Dr. Ortega’s voice in my head, insisting that I should never have stopped my medication. That I’m not ready, that I’m fundamentally and biologically not well. She’d tell me all this would go away if only I was good and obedient and swallowed what they gave me.

  All those old ghosts would wither and die in the light of day—if only I did as I was told.

  But I am tired of being a good girl. I’m tired of obeying.

  I don’t need a babysitter. I certainly don’t need a woman whose medical degree bought her a cushy job at a pricey private clinic telling me It must be difficult and It wasn’t your fault.

  Not that anyone else agrees on that point. Wyatt handles me with kid gloves, as they all do.

  Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just stopped cooperating.

  Leonie is in the Godwin House foyer when I return. She jumps a little when I kick the door shut; she was waiting for me. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.”

  “How was your first day of classes?”

  “Fine.” I don’t know why she’s talking to me. Not knowing makes me suspicious.

  “We’re making dinner in the kitchen. If you wanted to…” She doesn’t seem to know what word she’s looking for to finish the sentence, just stares at me with these big brown eyes.

  I think about letting her hang there, awkward and off balance. It would be a nice kind of social vengeance—repayment for that horrible night in the common room, for the invisible walls the four of them constructed to keep me out.

  But I can’t let them make me that person, so I relent. “Sure, I’ll help.”

  I kn
ow this isn’t Leonie’s idea, of course. Ellis sent her. It’s the only explanation, the only reason any of them would tolerate my presence for longer than absolutely necessary. But when I get into the kitchen, they’re all there—sharp elbows and broth-splattered cookbooks and wooden spoons rapping against countertops—and Kajal passes me a gingham apron, and somehow it’s easy to slip in among them.

  “We’re making balsamic mushroom ravioli,” Clara says, tipping her head toward the wooden basket of shiitakes at her side. She’s sliced what looks like half a pound already, soil ground into the cutting board.

  “I’m not a very good cook,” I admit.

  Ellis glances up from where she’s set up shop at the end of the island, a steel pasta-maker affixed to the side of the counter. She has a bit of flour swiped across her cheek. “None of us are. But we need someone to fold the ravioli, if you think you can manage that.”

  I can manage it.

  Their conversation resumes around me, effortless as placing the needle back on a vinyl record and continuing where the melody left off.

  “I can’t believe I’m with Lindquist this year,” Clara moans from her spot in the corner. There are too many girls in the kitchen and too few tasks, so after she finished with the mushrooms, she set up with her books open in her lap and a fountain pen fiddling between her fingers. “She hates me.”

  “You were with Yang last year?” asks Kajal.

  “Yes. And now I’ve been cruelly abandoned.”

  “Yang only advises first- and second-years,” I comment, pinching the edge of a ravioli. “It’s Lindquist, MacDonald, and Wyatt for juniors and seniors.”

  “I know,” Clara sighs, “but I’d hoped she might make an exception.”

  It’s so like the conversations we used to have in Godwin House before I left. Although perhaps ours were more vicious; we’d created the definitive ranking of Dalloway English faculty, an algorithm including points for toughness, intelligence, susceptibility to various late-work excuses, and probability of dying of old age before the semester ended. Lindquist was at the top of our list, MacDonald at the bottom (although the algorithm, to be fair, didn’t favor an instructor who lived in Godwin House and could know for sure that our essays were late because we were up all night partying, not because our third grandmother died).