“She said you were great,” I hedge.
“And?” Emily prompts with an embarrassed smile.
“And that you got kicked out for sleeping with your chemistry teacher for a good grade.” I make sure to leave any sense of judgment out of my tone.
“The story that never dies,” she says ruefully.
“Did you?” I ask, though I know the answer.
She raises an eyebrow at my bluntness, but laughs. “Please,” she answers, rolling her eyes. “Mr. Park is, like, in his thirties. Disgusting. Someone forged those letters to make it look like my handwriting and sent them to the headmaster. I just don’t know who would have done it.”
Claire walks through the door I’ve left open, nearly tripping over her own feet when she sees the girl I’m talking to.
“Emily!” she cries out. Emily jumps up again from the bed and pulls my much-shorter roommate into a hug.
“I snuck in to see you,” Emily announces, holding up a backpack. “I brought sandwiches, so you have to skip dinner and catch up with me.”
I grab my own backpack so that I can escape to the library. “I’ll leave you two to it.” I walk out the door as the squeals and exclamations of “It’s been sooo long” continue.
I wait until two hours after dinner before I head back to the dorm, ducking my head and running as rain sputters down from the sky. I want Emily to be gone, to have my sanctuary back.
But when I enter the room, she’s still there, and Claire is even bubblier than usual. They sit on the floor, a mound of bright foil candy wrappers between them. Their laughter fills up the room, pushing off the gloom of the evening outside.
“Vivian!” Claire cries out, as if it’s been years since she’s seen me. “We’re breaking into my candy bar stash. Do you want any?”
They both beam up at me. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, wondering if I should head back to the library. But the prospect of going back into the cold, spitting rain holds even less appeal than submitting to a night of girl bonding.
“Sure,” I say finally, settling down on my bed.
“One for you,” Claire declares, handing me a chocolate bar with a flourish. “And one for you.” She hands another to Emily. “Don’t worry. There aren’t any peanuts in it,” she says with a smile.
Emily laughs, tucking her long legs underneath her, completely at home in this room that used to be hers. “I have a severe peanut allergy,” she explains, looking up at me. “If I have a peanut, the doctors say I might die, so I have to have an EpiPen with me at all times.”
I nod, trying to seem concerned.
“Hey, did you ever find your EpiPen?” Claire asks, tearing open a new candy bar for herself.
“Nope. Had to get a new one,” Emily answers. She looks back at me, and I meet her eyes. “I lost it a few weeks before they kicked me out.”
Her words have set off a subtle alarm in my head, quiet but insistent.
Claire asks Emily about her new school, and I pretend like I’m fascinated, but really my mind is racing.
Is it strange that Emily lost her EpiPen around the same time Mother was targeting her and trying to get her out the way so I could enroll in Madigan? Could there have been some plan to kill Emily and make it look like an accident? Would Mother and Helper have gone that far to ensure that I got a spot? The thought makes bile rise in the back of my throat, and I take a shaky breath.
When the lights flicker for lights-out, we all hurry to find our pajamas and get ready for bed.
“Aren’t you going to say goodnight to Victoria?” Emily asks Claire as she pulls a toothbrush out of her bag. I have no idea who she’s talking about until Claire, biting her lip, glances at her laptop. Only then do I remember that Claire’s Ava is named Victoria. It’s been at least a month since I’ve seen her interacting with it.
“I think I’ve outgrown her,” Claire says with a weak attempt at rolling her eyes. “I don’t need some digital doll telling me how cool and posh I am anymore.”
Emily frowns but says nothing, studying her former roommate with curious eyes.
She sleeps on the floor that night, her breathing slow and untroubled, and I spend the long, dark hours staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think.
Emily sneaks off campus the next morning, and life returns to normal.
But “normal” is beginning to feel claustrophobic. All of my free time must be spent doing homework or kissing Ben or kissing Ben while doing homework. And we’re all crowded together on this hill, living on top of each other. I can’t avoid Arabella’s glowering looks in the hall, though the cautious looks her friends show me are definitely amusing. I’ve even had to give up my cottage, the one place I thought I could be alone. And I’m suffocating.
I drag Ben out to the cottage more and more over the next two weeks as December falls over us, pulling him away from school on weeknights and weekends, any time we can get away. Even if I have to act around him, at least there’s only one person in the space around me.
“What’s your family like?” he asks one night when the wind is howling so loudly outside the cottage that we almost have to shout to hear each other. We’re standing next to the fire he’s just built, rubbing our hands together and trying desperately to warm up. The world outside has grown colder and more unpredictable, the wind and rain heavier, wilder.
Mother has prepared me for this question. “I never knew my father. He abandoned my mother when he found out she was pregnant. He didn’t want anything to do with me, so I didn’t want anything to do with him.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I shrug, a little gesture to suggest that I’m trying to act like it’s not a big deal, even though on the inside it is a big deal. I stare unblinking into the flames.
“So your mum raised you?”
I bite the inside of my lip. “She brought me up in her image. She controls every little thing I do. Everything. That’s why I was homeschooled for so long. She wanted to mold me herself. I’m not allowed to make any of my own decisions. And if I disobey her . . .” I stop and shudder delicately.
I can feel him watching me, and he shifts closer now. “What did she do to you?”
This isn’t part of the story Mother devised, but for some reason I can’t stop myself from telling him. “One time,” I say slowly, “she got so mad at me that she took the fireplace poker and branded me. Here,” I say, lifting up my shirt and showing him the inch-long burn mark on my hipbone. “She said I was hers.” I had walked in on her yelling at the portrait of her mother over the fireplace, and I can still see the wild roll of her eyes and feel the poker singeing into my skin.
He breathes out one long, sad sigh. He reaches his hand out, trailing the back of a finger along the raised skin, and I shiver. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I resist the urge to shift uncomfortably. I don’t know what to say to that.
Luckily, he speaks first. “My father’s not as bad, not nearly,” he tells me. “But he’s still an asshole.”
I hold my breath, waiting for him to continue.
“He’s planned out my whole future for me. I’m going here, just like he did.”
My eyebrows knit together. “Your father went to Madigan?”
He nods. “Both my parents did. It’s where they met.”
Mother never mentioned this, and that makes it feel even more significant. I shouldn’t be surprised, because I’ve always known she and Collingsworth met at a school in Britain, but she always made it seem as if she’d researched Madigan from afar. I try to mask the confusion tumbling through me and focus on Ben.
“After I graduate,” he continues, “I’m supposed to go to Oxford, because it’s so prestigious. Never mind that he didn’t, you know, even bother to apply to university. Then I’ll work at his company and, when he thinks I’m ready, take over
the business. He started a major tech company a year after high school, even though he knows absolutely nothing about computers. You know Avas?”
“Of course,” I say, my eyes growing wide as I feign surprise, even though Claire told me about Collingsworth and Ava my first night here. “That’s his company?”
Ben nods glumly. “It’s all he bloody cares about. Money and power. He’s about to start a line of girlfriend Avas. He says they’re for boys who want more practice talking to girls, but it’s basically porn. He’s turning everyone’s childhood best friend into a digital porn doll because that’s where the profits are. He always says, ‘All’s fair in love and war.’ He’s too lazy to even come up with his own damn catchphrase.” I press my lips together and try not to show my surprise. That’s the phrase Mother always spat out at me, as if the taste of the words was too bitter. Of course. They’d been bitter because she’d been repeating his favorite saying.
Ben takes a deep breath. “He certainly never gave a flying fuck about me.” He stops, blinking hard.
There’s nothing I can say. He doesn’t want my pity, I know that much. He just wants me there. So I move closer to him, wrapping my arms around his middle and resting my head in the crook of his shoulder, where it fits so well. He wraps his arms around me and touches his lips to the top of my head, a strong seal of a kiss. It’s not like our other kisses, which are born out of desire and need. This one is more powerful.
I interrupt the moment to ask the question Mother instructed me to in her last email. “What about your mother?”
“She died when I was eleven,” he says, almost in a whisper. “My dad shoved me off to boarding school not long after. He couldn’t deal with me.”
“I’m so sorry. What was she like?”
Ben thinks a long moment before answering. “She was . . . soft. Gentle. She had this way of sort of, um, sort of floating around the house and making everything brighter. She was very light, so light that she often didn’t make any noise while she walked. Dad used to call her the ghost of the house, because she would always appear out of nowhere.” He pauses, stepping out of my hug and looking down at his hands. “My dad killed her.”
The statement hangs in the air, and it takes my breath away. “What do you mean?” I croak out finally.
“She had the biggest heart, and he broke it. She hardly had any family, just an aunt who sent her to boarding school when she was eight. When she got pregnant with me, she was about to start university, and he made her withdraw. He was all she had, besides me. And he cheated on her constantly, with women who could never hope to be as beautiful as she was.” His voice grows sharper, and I know when he looks into the fire that he’s picturing all of the things he’d like to do to his father to punish him. “He didn’t even notice when she got sick. He didn’t even care when she was too weak to come down for dinner or get out of bed in the morning. By the time she finally got to a doctor, the cancer had spread too far to be treated.”
He presses his hands against the wall, pushing it with all his strength. “I promised my mum before she died that when I fell in love with a girl, I’d treat her right. She didn’t want me to be afraid of marriage, so I promised her that when I found the girl I loved so much that I couldn’t stand to be without her, I’d marry her. And that I’d, you know, I’d keep loving her.” He stops pushing the wall, his arms falling to his sides and his chin dropping to his chest, but he doesn’t turn back to me.
I step toward him cautiously and put my hand on his arm. “We can’t rely on our parents,” I tell him, making my voice soft and wistful. “We have to make our own destinies.”
He looks at me for one long, hard moment, and then sweeps me into his arms. That night he takes two pills and clings to me as if I’m the only thing keeping him attached to this earth.
I’ve been going to art tutorials more and more, drawn in by the silent space Ms. Elling and the other students offer in the studio. The next day after dinner, I’m trying to sketch the tree near my cottage, the one so bent over that its branches bump along the ground. But I still can’t translate the feeling of it onto the page.
Ms. Elling peers over my shoulder. “Still interested in the trees, I see,” she murmurs.
I toss my charcoal down. “It’s not working.”
She purses her lips off to one side, thinking. “I wish I had one of her drawings to show you. But it was so long ago.”
“Whose drawings?” I ask.
“Hmm? Oh, Rose. Rose Travers. Or Rose Hampden, as she was back then. The student I told you about before, the one you remind me of. She did the most exquisitely emotional drawing of a tree a bit like this one here. But that was so long ago.”
“How did she do it?” I ask.
Ms. Elling shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know if I can describe it. She said the moors inspired her, and she would spend hours crossing them. Sometimes even getting into trouble for it. But she knew she had an ally in me.” Her eyes drop down to the table, and I see the glint of tears gathering at the edges of them.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, since the question seems to hang in the air between us.
Ms. Elling sighs. “Just talking about Rose . . . I’m reminded of what happened to her. It was tragic, actually. The year after graduation, her house was robbed. The burglars killed her husband when he tried to stop them. Shot him point-blank in the head. And then not one month afterward—well, she’s had a few horrible experiences, let’s just say that. I’ve tried to visit her since then, but she doesn’t see people anymore. She stays locked up in that old house.” Ms. Elling looks out the classroom window, caught in some memory.
I stay silent and wait for her to remember that I’m here, turning back to my paper and picking up my charcoal.
Ms. Elling snaps her fingers in my ear, and the charcoal nearly falls back out of my hand. “The yearbooks!” she exclaims.
“What?”
“Rose won an art prize in her final year. What was that, twenty years ago? Let’s see, when did I go to that awards ceremony?” She looks down at her fingers, the pad of her thumb traversing from pinky to index finger as she counts.
“Rose’s drawing is in the yearbook?” I ask when the silence has stretched on too long.
“Yes! You can see it for yourself. There have to be old yearbooks around this campus somewhere.”
“The student lounge,” I offer, remembering seeing the row of them there my first day at Madigan.
“Brilliant,” she says, brushing me up from my chair. “Go look. See if you find inspiration, and come back tomorrow to show me.”
I gather up my things as quickly as possible before she shoos me out of the room.
The yearbooks stand proud and neglected on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the lounge, just as I remembered. I settle down on the floor in front of them, ignoring the curious stares of the three girls at a table behind me.
I start with the book from twenty years ago, riffling through it until I find the extracurricular section. Nothing. I go through a couple more, until, finally, I turn a page to find a charcoal study of a tree.
Half the page is taken up by a photograph of a girl clutching a trophy in front of a large oil painting of a tree on the moors. Her hair is thick and dark, and her eyes are big and thoughtful. I can tell even from the grainy photograph that Rose Hampden, as the caption identifies her, has much more talent than I do. She’s captured the tree so particular to this land as I’ve been trying to capture it; its tenacity dominates the canvas.
I study the drawing for a couple of minutes, trying to find the inspiration Ms. Elling told me to look for. I trace my fingers along the rendered curve of the trunk, its intricately detailed scattering of bumps and knots along the bark. The image is technically perfect, but it’s so much more than that, too. I just have no idea how to infuse my work with that much emotional power.
I put the yearboo
k back in its long, steady line and sigh. But I don’t get up. I stay staring at those big leather-bound volumes. Those capsules of history. History, I realize, that might have something to do with me.
The books focus on year-thirteen students only, the year I’m in. I don’t know how old Mother is, so I flip through several of the books, looking for Collingsworth’s name and picture. Finally, I discover him in the same yearbook as Rose. He’s a slightly warped version of Ben, with the same cocky smile and glinting eyes. But his nose is bigger, and his hair doesn’t curl at the ends.
This is the man who broke Mother’s heart. He’s the one who set everything in motion, who ensured that I would grow up as a weapon to take him down. He’s evil and manipulative and everything I hate. I don’t want his smile and his eyes to look like Ben’s.
The thought unsettles me. I’m supposed to hate Ben, too, I remind myself.
I have to focus. I hurry through the rest of the pages, looking for Mother. I nearly pass her picture by, because she’s changed so much from the hesitant-looking girl with the drapes of brown hair nearly covering her face. She peers out at the camera as if she were a deer examining the barrel of a gun, unsure if it’s going to hurt her.
But there’s that heart-shaped mole on her cheek. And the night-dark eyes and thin lips. Her hair seems to be light brown in this black-and-white photo, but if I imagine it as prematurely gray, I can see Mother.
Morgana Whitfield. That’s her name.
Names have power, Mother taught me. They can shape a person, or reveal things they don’t wish to be revealed. I know she didn’t tell me she went to Madigan because she didn’t want me to know her name, and I can’t believe my discovery.
The name fits her. Morgana is another Arthurian name, King Arthur’s sister and, by some accounts, his rival. Sometimes known as Morgan le Fay, she was an enchantress. Another Vivian.
I don’t know what to do with this information, but having it makes me feel somehow powerful. I shove the yearbook into my bag and sneak it out of the lounge.
I Am Her Revenge Page 12
