I Am Her Revenge

by Meredith Moore

  I beam at him and settle back. Across the circle, Ben is watching me. I wonder what he thinks of me, though it’s easy enough to read the curiosity in his eyes.

  Finally, everyone checks their watches and stands up, gathering the soaked towels and laughing their last laughs. It’s time for the next covert operation.

  I walk slowly to Ben, shrugging his coat off of my shoulders and holding it out to him. I say nothing as he takes it, but I meet his eyes, letting my gaze linger there. He nods, pulling the coat on over his snug T-shirt, and I bite my lip as I turn away and follow the crowd.

  The boys turn the storm lanterns off, so we are shrouded once more in darkness, the moon now secreted away behind a cloud. The fog has grown thicker than I thought, and I stumble forward, trying to keep up with the group of whispering girls in front of me. I feel as if I would disappear if I lost them and become swallowed up by this strange place.

  As we climb the hill to the back of the school, our figures cutting through the fog, a tall, dark figure begins to take shape above us. It’s not until we can almost touch it that I realize it’s a person. A few girls squeak as they catch sight of the shadow, until a young guy steps out into a sudden patch of moonlight. Then everyone around me relaxes.

  He stands in front of me. Broad shoulders and tousled dark hair. I can make out the chiseled cheekbones and square jaw in the pale moonlight. Something about him—there is something . . . .

  Arabella pulls me past him just as I’m opening my mouth to say something to him. I swivel my head to keep my eyes on his, and his follow me. Those eyes. They are the darkest and deepest ones, the ones that know how to see the insides of my soul.

  “We don’t speak to the help, silly,” Arabella tells me while we’re still in earshot. I wince for him.

  The fog has now cloaked him behind us, as if he were never there at all. “Who is he?” I ask, when breath returns to my body. Though I know. I already know.

  “Just Tom, the gardener. He’s fit, yeah, but not socially acceptable. It’d be death to your reputation if you dated him.”

  It can’t be. It can’t be him.

  But it is. I saw it in his eyes.

  We make it over the wall and into the building just as Jenkins steps out for her second nightly vice and creep into our rooms.

  “Wasn’t that brilliant?” Claire asks, her eyes shining brightly. She stumbles a bit as she crashes toward her bed.

  I nod. Nothing will come out of my throat.

  As soon as Claire stops babbling and snaps her light off, I burrow into the covers, my eyes wide open. All I can see is him. Boy. The only person allowed to call me Viv. The one who used to be my only friend in the world.

  CHAPTER 4

  I don’t fall asleep until just before dawn, but my dreams swirl with him.

  I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen. But now he’s here. He found me in the dark corners of the night and stared into my soul with those eyes. How can he be here?

  I can’t focus on anything all day. I drift through my classes, enduring people’s stares and attempts at friendliness.

  I tell Claire I’ll meet her for lunch in the dining hall, but as soon as the midday bell rings, I hurry out into the open air. I see the gardener’s shed just behind Rawlings: a shack made of wide wood planks with one smudged window, which must be where he lives. I find him standing outside it, just as I knew I would. He’s waiting for me.

  My eyes catch his as soon as I have him in sight.

  As I walk hesitantly toward him, I let myself examine his face: so strange and so familiar, all in one stroke. The high cheekbones, the warm skin, the sinfully long lashes—all features he inherited from a Native American mother who left him with his father when he was four years old.

  Now he’s beautiful and terrifying all at once. And he’s older, of course. Bigger, stronger, and more world-weary, somehow. He wears jeans and a black jacket that matches the raven black of his hair, even darker than my own. He stands with his feet planted firmly, waiting for me to come to him. Like I’m prey that he’s luring.

  “Why are you here?” I ask once I stand before him.

  At the sound of my voice, there’s a flash of something in his eyes. Something like pain. “I knew that your mother would send you here to find him. I got this job a couple of years ago.” He’s watching me so closely. “I was waiting for you.”

  It takes a worrisome amount of strength for me to turn my face away, but once I manage to, I scan the windows of Rawlings Hall, making sure no one is looking out at us. “You’ve come to stop me?” I ask softly.

  “Yes.” His voice is lower than the last time I heard it. And more powerful. He must be twenty now, and a man.

  I bite my lip. “You can’t. I’m a weapon.” He knows this. He knows everything about me. Just as I thought I knew everything about him. I’m the one who gave him his name, after all.

  Boy, or so Mother called him, was the son of the man who always helped Mother. Helper, as I named him in my head, had been attached to Mother since as long as I could remember. I used to think he was my father, actually, but when I called him that, Mother laughed her winter chill laugh and declared me an idiot.

  Boy and his father lived in the guesthouse in our backyard. Boy was three years older than me but never went to school. I taught him how to read and write as I learned it, but we had to do it secretly. Mother had forbidden it. Boy was her servant, was made to cook meals and take care of the house and the yard.

  Helper was used for other things that I never quite comprehended. He would often be gone for weeks at a time, coming home to enclose himself in a room with Mother and have whispered conversations.

  Eventually I came to understand that Helper was part of Mother’s plan and was the only man she ever trusted. Their relationship was a strange one, filled with silent glances and mystifying words. It was as if they spoke a different language, one I had no hope of deciphering. Helper never smiled. I took that as a warning.

  When we were young, maybe around nine and twelve, Boy and I changed his name to Arthur. But it was a secret, something to whisper and guard. We decided on it when I told him the origin of my own name.

  “Vivian is one of the names of the Lady of the Lake in the stories about King Arthur,” I recited as Mother had taught me. “But it’s also sometimes what they called the enchantress who destroyed the greatest sorcerer of all, Merlin. That’s the Vivian I’m named for. Merlin fell in love with her and told her all of his secrets, revealed all of his magic. She used it to weaken him and trap him in a tree.”

  “She sounds cruel,” Boy said. We were in our usual hiding spot behind his guesthouse. Boy leaned against the fence, crossing his arms as he watched me. I remember the smell of the soil and the first buds of the gardenias that Mother loved, their perfumed scent waxing and waning with the breeze.

  “She’s as cruel as I’m meant to be,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Mother always says that all’s fair in love and war.” She would say it with perfect bitterness, spitting the words out with a vehemence I didn’t understand.

  Boy’s deep brown eyes watched me. “I have no name,” he pointed out. “I have no example to follow.”

  “Whose example do you want to follow?”

  He stopped, considering that. He looked down at his hands, the lines in his palms caked with dirt, then looked back up, his face bright and hopeful. “Someone strong. And brave. And nice.”

  “You should be a leader,” I told him. “You should be Arthur.” Arthur, I explained, was the king of Britain and the flower of chivalry. He represented everything that was good and true.

  All men were evil if you didn’t control them completely, as Mother controlled Helper. I knew that, even then.

  But I couldn’t quite put Boy in that category. Boy wasn’t the enemy. The enemy wouldn’t sneak flowers from the garden into my room because he knew I
liked the way they lit up the gloom. The enemy wouldn’t smile with such pure joy when he finally read a paragraph out loud without stumbling over the words. The enemy wouldn’t be the one bright bolt of light in my world.

  “Arthur,” Boy repeated, savoring it.

  And from then on, the name was his.

  Now, at Madigan, he crouches down a bit to look me in the eye. He’s searching for something, but I don’t know if he can find it anymore. “What has she told you about any of this? Has she told you why you’re supposed to ruin his life?”

  “I told you everything. You know everything I know.” I snap my lips back together to stop the stream of words that threaten to come pouring out.

  “I want to hear you explain it now that you’ve met him. I want you to say it out loud.”

  I shouldn’t play along with his game. But he’s the boy who always understood me. I want to make him understand me now. So I begin at the beginning. “Ben’s father, William Collingsworth, broke Mother’s heart. He was her first love, and he used her. He drew her into his world when they were teenagers and then just pushed her out of it when he found some other girl. Mother went back to New York, to the city. She was heartbroken and desperate, so she tried to lose herself in the crowds, in whatever made her feel less alone. When she got pregnant from some worthless one-night stand, I was the only thing she had. Her father had died when she was little, and then her mother died in a car accident, leaving her the house upstate but almost nothing else.”

  He bites the inside of his lip as if he wants to say something, but decides not to, taking a deep breath. Instead, he asks, “But why couldn’t she have been happy? Why couldn’t she have found a job, raised you, lived a normal life?”

  I stare at him, at his furrowed brow and piercing brown eyes. He doesn’t understand at all.

  “Don’t you see how twisted she is?” he continues, his voice wavering somewhere between desperation and amusement. “How insane?”

  I step back from him. “She deserves her revenge. He broke her heart, so now she’ll break his.”

  He steps forward, destroying the space I’d put between us. Those brown eyes are cold and serious again. “By using you. By controlling your life.”

  “She’s given me everything. I owe her everything.” I’ve leaned too close to him, and I pull back, straightening my shoulders. I remember what I am.

  I am seventeen and enchanting and poised to destroy.

  Soon after Mother had me, she learned that William and his wife, the girl he left her for, had had a son named Ben. So she came up with a way to rip apart the seams of time and relive the past. This time, though, she would be the victor.

  Like a Siren from the Greek myths Mother made me read, I will seduce Ben to my side. I will make him fall in love with me, and then I’ll wrap him around my finger and snap his heart in two, until he is broken completely. And his father will know my mother’s wrath.

  Mother has become a mere fragment of a person because Collingsworth broke her. Countless nights I would hear her keening wail behind the locked door of her bedroom. I would stand at the door, helpless. She needs revenge, craves it with an intensity that only destructive love can muster. I have to do this for her.

  Starting when I was very young, she taught me how to flirt. How to captivate. A boy was an easy target, she taught me. A being swayed by desires that she understood completely. If I learned how to manipulate those desires, I could make any boy my slave.

  And I must never become a victim of love. Love dismantles you. I’ll never let it break me apart.

  Not again, at least.

  Arthur knows all of this, because I told him. Back when we were friends. And then something more.

  The way he examines me now, though, it’s like he doesn’t even know me. “What changed you?” he asks.

  “I haven’t changed.”

  For a moment—just a moment—there is a flicker of inexpressible sadness in his eyes. Of grief. I blink, and it’s gone.

  Arthur puts his hands in his pockets, his old tell. He always used to do that when he had something to say but was thinking of just the right way to say it. He wasn’t allowed to speak in front of Helper or Mother, so when he was allowed to talk, with me, he would take time with his words. Make them count.

  “You can control yourself.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t disappoint her.”

  “I won’t let you hurt him, then.”

  There’s a sudden rustling behind me, and I turn, my hand encircling my throat. But it’s only a black bird hurtling into the air from the ground. When I turn back to Arthur, he raises his eyebrows at me. I’m not usually so skittish. I’m not afraid of anything.

  “Have you met him?” I ask, taking a deep breath and making sure my face is wiped of emotion.

  He knows who I mean. “I’ve seen him.”

  I pause, trying to find a way to frame my question.

  But he answers it before I can ask. “He doesn’t deserve to be destroyed.” His cold voice is an admonition.

  “You can’t know that.” I look him right in the eye when I say it, but I see no doubt on his face. His deep brown eyes bore into mine.

  “I can. His dad may be an asshole, but Ben doesn’t deserve the things you’re capable of.”

  I flinch at his harsh words, at the way he growls them. This warrior in front of me is part of the new, unfamiliar side of him. “Why do you call yourself Tom here?”

  “Because it’s common. No one takes notice of a gardener named Tom.” He pauses, watching me. “And because I’m not Arthur anymore.” He steps closer to me, suffocatingly close. So close that the world around us fades into dull brown murmurs.

  “Who are you?” I ask in a choked whisper. I feel myself leaning forward, closer to him, until I feel the warmth radiating from him. I crane my neck further so that I can keep my eyes on him. He is so tall now. It thrills me.

  He shakes his head slightly. “Viv, don’t you see what she’s turned you into? You have to get rid of her.”

  I step back, and the spell is broken. The world is back. “She’s all I have.” I make the words cold, hard, unyielding.

  That stops him, makes him look down at the ground.

  My mouth opens before I can help it. “You left me.” My voice has morphed into something wild, broken. I’ve never heard it this way. I stumble back, creating even more distance between us. “You left me,” I repeat.

  He doesn’t look back up at me. “I had to.”

  I turn, walk away a few steps, turn back. “I need to accomplish my task. You can either help me, or you can stay out of my way.”

  The determination in my tone makes his neck jerk up, his eyes meeting mine again. I see then that I am unfamiliar to him, too, and that gives me strength. I lift my head high and walk back to the dining hall. By the time I reach it, I’m trembling.

  CHAPTER 5

  The rest of the day passes in a blur, until I find myself alone in my room before dinner in front of the laptop Mother sent with me. I need to give her an update. I can tell her about the outing last night, show her that I’m researching the school’s social spheres and have identified the girl who will become my enemy, as she requested. But I can’t tell her about Arthur, or Tom, or whatever he wants to call himself. And I can’t tell her how I’ve wasted my day, how I looked at Ben without seeing him when he teased me lightly in English class for staring out the window. Or, I can, but I’ll have to put a calculating spin on it.

  I continue to engage Ben’s interest, I write. He seems fascinated by me. I have adopted a damaged, shy-girl persona to keep his attention.

  Mother sends me a reply right away. Fine. But begin to bend. Let him in a bit, then push him away. Then he’ll be yours for the taking.

  I stare at her words for a long moment.

  When I was growing up, there was a girl about my ag
e who lived in another big house a few blocks away. Mother would take me for walks past her yard, and I would peer through the bars of the gate at her and her magical life. She spent her afternoons playing in the huge playhouse her parents had bought for her, one with real glass windows and lace curtains and flags fluttering at the top. From my vantage point, I could see that her world was one of big smiles and expensive toys.

  When I was six, she got a new doll. Even through the gate, I could tell how special that doll was, with its long, wavy black locks like mine and pretty pink silk dress. It would cry if you tipped it over, which the girl did often, cradling it in her arms afterward like it was a real baby.

  It was beautiful, and for weeks, I coveted that doll more than anything.

  One day, we walked by and the girl wasn’t in her yard. But there, right by the gate, was her precious doll. Mother stopped when she saw the expression on my face. “Take it. Quickly, while no one’s looking,” she told me.

  I remember looking up at her in confusion. “But it’s hers,” I said.

  “If you want it, it should be yours,” she hissed. “You want it more than she does, right? Take it.”

  I reached through the bars of the gate and grabbed the doll’s tiny hand with my own, pulling her through and hugging her to my chest. I remember the rush I felt, the elation.

  “Some people get whatever they want, without even trying,” Mother told me as we hurried back home. “But if you want something, you’re going to have to fight for it.”

  The next time we saw the girl, she was skipping around the yard with a new doll under her arm, smiling and carefree. Mother was right. I wanted her old doll more, so it was rightfully mine.

  When the batteries ran out and the doll could no longer cry, I put it in a dark corner in my tiny closet and forgot about it. But I didn’t forget the lesson Mother had taught me.

  Claire bounces into the room, and I shut my laptop quickly.

  “I . . . hate . . . homework,” she declares, throwing her book bag on the floor. “This year is going to kill me.”