“Come on,” she says, grabbing my elbow and steering me toward the door. “I’m done practicing anyway.”
I wait outside the locker room while she showers and changes out of her lamé. It’s a cold walk back to Godwin House, Ellis’s wet hair frosting over as we tramp across the quad, then melting all over the floor as soon as we’re inside. I go straight to the fireplace in the common room, my hand shaking as I strike a match three, four times before it lights.
“Shit,” Ellis murmurs, breathing into her cupped palms. She’s still trembling as she comes to sit down on the floor with me, both of us huddled together and waiting for the flames to catch. Her hair drips onto my shoulder; I feel the ice all the way down in my bones.
“It’s only October twenty-ninth,” I say. “It’s going to get worse.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
We sit there for a while without speaking, the silence punctuated only by the crackle of wood as it alights. Ellis’s fingertips are whiter than the rest of her hands, as if that part of her body has died.
I wonder how long it took Alex’s body to turn that color. I imagine the cold winter preserving her flesh, her corpse broken but beautiful as a winter doll.
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Ellis asks eventually.
I shake my head. “My mother’s in Paris until the new year. I think she forgot there’s a holiday.”
“I’m not, either,” Ellis says. “I already have to go back for winter break. That’s quite long enough for me.”
I’m dying to ask Ellis about her family. She never mentions them, and I have no idea if her parents are still together, if she had a happy childhood, whether her family supported her dream of being a writer. Maybe a normal person would ask. But only people with loving families like talking about them; when people ask about my mother, I always lie.
“There’s nothing back in Savannah for me, anyway,” Ellis says, and I glance over, not entirely able to hide my surprise.
“What do you mean?”
She sighs and shifts back onto her elbows, reclining against the rugs and stretching her feet toward the hearth. “We lived out in the middle of nowhere—not really the city proper. My moms have an estate on hundreds of acres; the nearest neighbor is miles away.”
“Don’t you have school friends?”
“I didn’t go to school,” she says. “My parents were the kind of rich people who felt that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a small army of private tutors was a better investment than Emma Willard. Of course, that meant Quinn was my only friend—and they started at Yale when I was eight. That left the tutors. And the dogs, naturally.”
I assume Quinn is Ellis’s sibling; clearly the Haley parents have a fondness for surnames as first names.
After a moment I lie back as well, settling in close enough that I can feel Ellis’s chest rising and falling with every breath, my head nestled in the crook of her shoulder. “Is that why you started writing? Because you were bored?”
“Maybe. Probably.” She drapes a hand over her eyes. “Yes.”
I turn my face toward her and inhale; her hair’s still wet, but it smells like lemon.
“My mother’s crazy,” I confess. It’s easier to say when Ellis can’t see me. “Better now, perhaps; or perhaps she’s traveling so often I don’t notice anymore. But when I was younger…you never knew which version of her you would get. Maybe today she thinks you’re the best person in the world, or maybe not. Maybe her life is falling apart and it’s all your fault.”
Or maybe she’s drowned herself in another bottle of vintage Clicquot and needs you to rescue her again.
Ellis doesn’t say anything. I’m grateful for that—I don’t know that there’s anything shecouldsay that would be better than silence. Her hand falls from her face to drape across my knee instead, the two of us like twin corpses side by side. Her eyes are still shut.
“She never saw herself as the problem, though,” I go on. “First it was my anxiety that was the culprit. Then, after Alex, it was that. She was so humiliated by the idea that she’d produced me. Like it was the worst sin in society, to parent a child who…who had to be institutionalized. All I want is to be better than her.”
The confession falls out of me like a stone. And once the words are spoken, I can’t take them back.
I half expect Ellis to laugh and tell me how I’ve failed, that my mother was right to be ashamed.
But instead Ellis lets out a heavy breath. “Well. My parents were never around, but I have to admit…maybe I lucked out on that front.” She looks at me now, turning her head so that our noses all but brush. Her breath is warm against my lips, her face so close I can see every delicate pore.
All of a sudden my heart beats a little faster. I can’t stop thinking about the way Ellis moved with that sword in her hand, sweat-slick and intentional.
I sit up too abruptly, digging my nails into the rug beneath us. “I have to go,” I say. “I just remembered I owe Wyatt revisions by Monday.”
Ellis pushes herself up more slowly, but she doesn’t get off the floor when I stand. “All right. Will we be seeing you for dinner?”
