A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

I want to crack open her chest and peer inside, see how she ticks.

Mc is being. …. Creepy

But I do, just in time to catch the twist to Clara’s pink lips, the brief and brutal gesture with two fingers: scissors snapping shut. Something cold plunges into my stomach; even chasing it with the rest of my drink doesn’t thaw the ice.

Soooo are we supposed to think Clara’s evil?

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.

I was forgiven mine.

This makes no sense

From the glance Ellis shoots my way, shadowed under the fringe of her dark lashes, I wonder if she finds me as uninventive as Mary Chudleigh.

I get the obsession but I also cringe at the thought of being so desperate for the approval of a stranger while simultaneously speaking ill of those who are experiencing and doing the same thing

So I do a lot of my reading outside, during the day, a crocheted blanket tossed onto the quad grass and a thermos of tea at my elbow, devouring the dark and the macabre with white sunlight burning the nape of my neck.

But all at once I feel as if she has knotted her fingers in the threads that hold me together, pulling them taut and close to breaking. “I suppose you could read memoirs.”

Gives Dom vibes but in the most toxic of ways

“Unless you’d rather wait for the witching hour.” The choice of words makes me flinch. Even so, a part of me wants to say yes, just for the aesthetics. Another part of me wants to refuse entirely—because this feels like a play, like a move on a chessboard, a game for which I don’t know the rules.

Is Ellis making fun of MC

When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted. I could imagine other realities. I envisioned the tales so clearly that it was as if I lived them.

This is me.

The fact that I’d been gone last semester was no secret. I’d spent four months at a private residential facility tucked away near the Cascades, listening to people with rows of degree certificates on their walls explain to me that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d had no choice, that just because I took my knife and sawed through that rope and killed my best friend, that didn’t make me a psychopath. As if I didn’t know that already.

This irks me now that I know what happened to alex

“Oh, but can you blame them? You are a witch. I don’t doubt you would have poisoned the village crops, salted their fields, and led their daughters into temptation.”

Ellis is just straight up calling her a witch?

“Just their daughters?” Ellis glances back. She’s taken off the pince-nez; the frames dangle from one idle hand. “It takes one to know one.” It isn’t an accusation. It isn’t anything. It’s…a statement. Of fact.

I am realizing now we never know what MC does with the pince-nez after buying them for Ellis and subsequently finding out… things