A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

I doubt that any of the twenty girls who live in Boleyn House like gin; they just like how much this particular gin costs.

Ex scientia ultio. From knowledge comes vengeance.

I cannot face the real world without the taste of lies in my mouth and liquor in my blood.

I feel as if I’ve read everything—every book in the world. Every title seems like a reiteration of something that came before it, the same story regurgitated over and over.

“It’s late for coffee, isn’t it?” “It’s never too late for coffee.”

“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.”

Reality only aspires to such perversity.”

“I don’t have a phone.” “None of us do,” Leonie adds. “Technology is so distracting. I heard people’s attention spans are actually getting shorter because they read everything online these days.”

I find a first edition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

Ironic that i literally added that to my tbr list today

The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.

I wanted her from day one.

I’m not good. I’m the furthest thing from good.

“This is important to me,” I confessed to the planchette. I dipped a cloth into salt water and wiped it over the board itself, cleansing it for the summoning. “Not because I believe in it, necessarily, but because they did.”

When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted.

I started reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Stfu i literally added this too to my tbr list today

Ellis is leaning against my wall, arms folded over her chest and one heel tipped against the baseboard. She’s wearing trousers and a starched-collar dress shirt, the formality of her cuff links and suspenders somewhat undermined by the way her hair is pulled up in a messy knot, like she just woke up.

So what youre telling me is shes hot

Ellis doesn’t say anything. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but it works; now that I’ve started talking, I can’t stop.

know I’m not a murderer, but the difference between murderer and killer seems insubstantial sometimes.

“Alex begged me not to, and I cut the rope anyway.” Ellis takes in a shallow audible breath. Her hand is still on my arm, at least—she hasn’t recoiled in disgust. “I don’t understand,” she says. And neither do I. Neither do I. My breath shudders in my chest, and I turn away so she won’t see my tears. Ellis’s hand tightens on my arm, and she moves back into my line of sight until I have no choice but to look at her. “I don’t understand,” she says again. “Alex didn’t die on a mountain. She died here, at school. She drowned.”

ohhhhhh shiittttttt unreliable narrator time

I was vulnerable yesterday, and allegedly that’s a good and healthy thing to be, but I’m not terribly keen on a reprise.

“How academic of you.” “That’s me,” she says. “An intellectual.”

“Trust me.” “I don’t,”

I need to be able to touch the dark without being consumed by it.

We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.

I’m not going to be that girl. I’m not the kind of girl you ignore.

If the rest of them dance, Ellis preys.

Only then we’re moving again, reciting poems in shouts to the shadows and daring the ghosts to come out and play. I don’t know how long the high lasts. It could have been all night; it could have been an hour.

Giving me the secret history vibes rn

I turn the water as hot as it will go

Yessir thats how we do itttttt

There’s something so freeing about cutting myself loose from technology in some small way. No more stressing over profile pictures or whether my social media feeds reflect the kind of golden, idealized life I want everyone to think I have.

Bury my bones deep, that I might feel the flames of Hell.

All the terror of last night seeps up like groundwater—diluted now but still nauseating, still potent.

Her hand drops back to her side, and she arches a brow. “It was eat my rabbit or eat the dog. And I wasn’t going to shoot Muffin.”

I turn and show her. “The blood’s still warm.” “Less than ten hours, then,” she says. “Be careful. Wolves might still be in the area.”

I didnt know blood could stay warm for that long wtf

I need to kiss her again, but when I try she tilts away, then smiles. “I want to hear you say it.”

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.

I don’t even know if we’re together. Even if we are, I don’t want to be the kind of girlfriend who hangs around constantly, present to the point of frustration.

She holds the blade with her right hand. All those times I watched her practicing forgery…She isn’t left-handed. I could never have faked her handwriting, and she made sure of it.

She isn’t the girl in that casket, the same way Alex isn’t the girl I buried under Godwin House a year ago.

HELLO?!?!

I open the cover, flipping past the title page. For Felicity. I did it all for you.