A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Ellis presses her bared hand to my sternum, right above my heart. I wonder if she can feel it beating against her palm—too fast now. “You’re brave, Felicity,” she says. “You’re the bravest person I know.” And then she kisses me.

When you read about sex in books, it’s always described like a magical event, something sacred enacted through the profane: two souls joining on the metaphysical plane while two bodies entwine below. I had never understood that before now. But with Ellis it’s different than it was with the girls I’ve been with before—even Alex. Ellis is something new, and it feels like she creates and unravels me in the same moment, a sentence she writes and erases and rewrites, a product of her wants and imagination. I feel like she invented me.

And there on the title page, in Alex’s handwriting, an inscription: I never told you that I love you, but it’s true. It was always true.

Enough. I can’t live like this. It’s time to face Alex. It’s time to pay for my crimes.

“But they’ll figure you out soon enough, Miss Morrow. You can’t hide it anymore, can you? You’re fucking broken. You’re batshit, just like your mother.” And I pushed her. I didn’t mean for her to fall. She wasn’t even that close to the edge. But she was drunk, and when she lost her balance, she stumbled. For a split second I thought she was going to recover and lunge for me— Instead she pitched, and dropped, and vanished, screaming the whole way down. Alex died. Alex was dead. I killed her myself.

The shock of seeing that body in the grave sends me reeling back toward the crumbling wall of the pit I dug. Only there’s nowhere to go, the space too cramped to allow for anything but this: Me, half tumbling into the open casket, staring down at Alex’s beautiful red hair tangled against the satin pillow, her pale cheeks and limp hands, the scarlet bloom of blood staining her white shirt. No. No, no— That isn’t Alex’s mouth, nor Alex’s nose. Her cheeks have too many freckles, her body isn’t decayed. Not Alex’s body. Clara’s.

The body in Alex’s grave has a bullet in her stomach. Her throat is slit. Wormwood leaves wreathe her hair, and hellebore flowers bloom where her eyes should be.

For Ellis, this was never a game. I feel as if I’m falling—a hundred miles through an endless pit, into water, cold and black and closing overhead, filling my lungs and flooding my veins. Ellis killed her. She really killed her.

She’d manipulated me this whole time. There’s no better explanation for the book in my room, or for the grave dirt that fell from its pages. Even the inscription in The Secret Garden was a forgery; all those hours we’d spent copying each other’s handwriting. Ellis had brought the book there. She’d brought it there to mess with me, to make me think I was crazy. She—

But—no—but…what if she didn’t? What if I did? What if I killed Clara, then forgot about it, the same way I forgot I’d pushed Alex until Ellis made me remember?

“Clara’s dead.” Ellis shoots me a sharp glance, something almost disapproving to the set of her mouth as she shuts my bedroom door. “I know. You don’t have to say it so loudly.”

“You killed her. You…You…” Ellis sighs, and at last she moves to set the stack of pages down on the corner of my desk. “Okay. I suppose if we must have this conversation…yes. I killed her. And it worked, Felicity. It worked! I’d spent months trying to push through this scene. You don’t even know how many sleepless nights I wasted trying to eke out just one more word, to find the perfect phrase or image.”

“You killed her,” I say again. Ellis drops my wrists. Her arms fold over her chest, and she shifts onto her back foot, her attention suddenly gone clinical. “Yes. I shot her, in fact. Twice, in the gut. And then I slit her throat.”

“I used Quinn’s hunting rifle,” Ellis goes on. “The same gun you used to shoot that coyote. It has your prints all over it.”

“Why?” I croak. “You…Why?” “Because I had to be sure,” Ellis says evenly. “It’s the same reason I had you go to Kingston and dig up her grave: to place you at the scene of the crime. I can’t have you running off to the police and telling them what I did, can I? I’m sorry, Felicity. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I don’t want to betray you. Please don’t make me.”

And then the wooden handle of the shovel was against my palms, splinters catching under skin. I’d stolen the shovel from the janitor’s shed. I couldn’t dig six feet deep—only three, but it was enough. Her body had looked pale and broken on the dirt when I dragged her out of the lake, less than human, waterlogged and cold. I had been relieved to cover it up—first with soil and then with stones.

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.

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.

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

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.