The front door bangs open, and the murmur of voices in the foyer heralds the return of the other Godwin girls. 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.
“Ellis,” Kajal says once she appears in the common room entryway. “You should have told us you were coming back here.”
Ellis glances toward me, the corner of her mouth curling up; and for once, I smile back.
The spell is broken now. The other girls eat up all the oxygen in the room, circling around Ellis like asteroids around a black hole. I escape upstairs to wash off my makeup and scrub the scent of cigarette smoke out of my hair. I’m exhausted, but even once I’ve curled up under my duvet with my pillow slowly going damp against my cheek from the shower water, it takes me a long time to fall asleep.
Flora Grayfriar haunts the late-night silence of Godwin House. My skin holds the sense memory of the Margery Skull, cool bone and warm wax dripping over my fingers. And I can’t forget what Ellis wondered: whether the drive to murder sleeps quiet in all of us, if we’re all two steps away from the ledge, waiting for an excuse to throw out both hands andpush.
I think about the moment the rope snapped and the world went quiet and still, my body weightless without Alex dragging it down, the snow in my eyes and the emptiness on the mountain. The hollow feeling that carved its way into my chest.
And the relief.
Dalloway semesters never begin slowly.
Unlike other prep schools, Dalloway allows its students remarkable leeway in terms of what we study. We have a general education requirement, taught with the Harkness method—all discussion-based. And after our second year, students are encouraged to adopt a concentration: a passion project to pursue that will eventually become our senior thesis. There are Dalloway students who spend most of their year enmeshed in internships at the nearby aerospace laboratory, students who sleep in the classics building and only speak in ancient Greek. And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.
I had thought I might get away with an unannounced thesis for a few weeks at least, that the administration’s sympathy over Alex, or at least their repulsion over my former subject, would translate into a long leash and emails saying things likeTake your time.I should have known better. But as it turns out, I’m a slow learner.
Wyatt calls me into her office the first day of classes and passes me a can of store-brand soda; she keeps it in a minifridge under her mahogany desk, and the aesthetic of the chilly aluminum can juxtaposed with that desk and Wyatt’s antique rug makes me oddly uneasy.
“So,” she says, perching her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. “As I told you over email, I think it’s best we find a new subject for your senior thesis. Yes?”
“Yes.” I got used to responding as people wanted to hear while I was at Silver Lake.Yesis what Wyatt wants to hear. “I don’t want to waste the research I did before, so I was thinking I’d stay in a similar genre. Horror.”
Wyatt nods slowly. “Is that a good idea? Horror can be…very gruesome.”
“I’m better now,” I reassure her. “I can handle reading Helen Oyeyemi. I promise.”
Wyatt’s pen taps a quick rhythm against the edge of her desk. I crack open the drink she gave me and take a small sip; the tropical-flavored soda bursts on my tongue with an eruption of fizz and synthetic citrus. It tastes like formaldehyde.
“Very well,” Wyatt says at last.
I didn’t realize how tense I’d been until she says that—and now I feel my body sinking back into the chair, shoulders retreating from where they’d scrunched up toward my ears.
I was never small and frightened before. I didn’t used to be afraid of anything.
“Your thesis will need to be more specific than that, of course. What question will you be trying to answer with this work?”
“The same question.” It’s easier now. My prepared speech falls from my lips cool as a lie. “Misogyny and characterizations of female emotionality in horror literature. It’ll be written through an intellectual history lens: How were these works in conversation with the social norms and mores of their time? How were they influenced by catalytic historical events and literature? And how did they influence history and literature in turn?”
“How did perceptions of women’s emotions change throughout history,” Wyatt translates.
“As viewed through the gaze of contemporaneous horror writers.”
This earns me one of Wyatt’s rare smiles. She uncaps her pen and signs her name on my thesis application form, then passes it back over her desk and says, “I very much look forward to reading this, Miss Morrow.”
By the time I leave Wyatt’s building, though, I already wonder if I’ve made a mistake. If reading about witches was foolish, reading about ghosts is surely more so. Ever since I came back here, I’ve felt Alex’s presence like an unfinished sentence—waiting.And no matter how many times I tell myself ghosts don’t exist, that doesn’t dilute my fear.
I feel dizzy in the sunlight, heat prickling over my skin and fermenting there, spreading like a quick fever. Before I can lose my balance, I catch myself on the handrail and stand at the foot of the stairs, students flowing around me like water around a rock, oblivious.
I’d known it would be hard coming back to Dalloway after Alex died. But I didn’t expect the way I’d smell her perfume lingering on an armchair in Godwin House, or the chill that rolls up my spine when I pass near her old room.
I didn’t expect to feel so…unmoored.
I can practically hear Dr.Ortega’s voice in my head, insisting that I should never have stopped my medication. That I’m not ready, that I’m fundamentally and biologicallynot well.She’d tell me all this would go away if only I was good and obedient and swallowed what they gave me.
All those old ghosts would wither and die in the light of day—if only I did as I was told.
