Ellis kicks the door shut with her heel.
I linger by the bed, my own arms folded now and my chest a cage for my heart as it throws itself against my ribs. “ ‘It’s personal’?”
“It is,” Ellis says. She moves in, sitting down in my desk chair and crossing her long legs at the knees. She sits as if she owns the place.
“I don’t want to talk about what happened in the graveyard.”
“We’re going to have to talk about it,” Ellis says. “You were very upset.”
“Sometimes people are upset, Ellis. Let it go.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t. You know that.” She digs a thumbnail into the wood groove of my desk, tracing it toward one corner. “I don’t like this tension between us. I want you to trust me.”
“I trust you. There—are you happy?”
Ellis fixes me with a narrowed gaze. “I mean it. You’re right, I shouldn’t have pressured you the other night. It was a strange request. I know that now.”
A strange request.It’s as if Ellis thinks we all live in books. At least then it would be easy enough to delete what happened in the cemetery, make me forget, and start over.
I sigh and drop down onto the side of my bed, the box of nonsense bouncing with my weight.
“I’m not angry,” I tell her. “Not really, anyway. Not for long. I know you were only trying to do the right thing.”
“Iwas,” she insists, and releases the desk to lean forward and grasp my knee instead. Her fingers curve all the way around my kneecap, swallowing the entire joint. “I…God help me, Felicity, but I care about you. I want you to be happy again.”
Again?She’s never seen me happy. She doesn’t even know what that looks like.
“All right,” I say. And when she turns her hand palm-up on my knee, I take it, lacing our fingers together. “All right.”
It’s a lie, of course. I have no intention of being happy, for Ellis or otherwise.
But what else am I going to say? Ellis sees me.
I need to be seen.
—
Things ease between me and Ellis the week following that conversation. I’m grateful for it; with the end of the semester approaching in a flurry of final papers and projects, I don’t think I could have sustained my resentment without unraveling in some other way.
Although it might already be too late for that. I dream about Alex almost every night now, even when I’m not having nightmares. She’s the girl at the café in my dream about Paris; she’s the woman with soft fingers touching my lips; she’s falling and falling and falling into an endless dark.
I’m not the only one worried about final exams looming at us from the other side of break. Godwin House is consumed in a constant fog of low-grade panic. Kajal has realized she’s on the cusp of an A and a B in AP European History, and her score on the final essay will determine whether she makes dean’s list this semester. Meanwhile, Clara, whose record is in somewhat more dire straits than Kajal’s, refuses to emerge from her room. Leonie spends half her time in the library—and I have started to regret my decision to eschew laptops. It’s much more difficult to write a fifty-page essay on a typewriter than one would think. I don’t want to find myself rushing to get it finished in the few weeks after Thanksgiving.
Wyatt calls me into her office midweek to check up on thesis progress. She wants to see pages—pages that, of course, I don’t have, because I’m not writing about the topic we agreed upon. I escape by telling her the truth, or part of it at least: I’m writing on a typewriter, so I only have one copy. I’ll show her after break.
That buys me a few weeks to invent an excuse for why I’m writing about witches again.
Ellis is the only one of us who seems relatively at peace. “My main concern right now is finishing the book,” she tells me, both of us sitting on the common room floor with the materials for our Art History project arranged on the rug in front of us. “Everything else is secondary.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Even if you fail out of Dalloway, you still have a writing career.”
She shakes her head. “I only have a writingcareerif I publish another book. And to publish this book, I need to finish it first.”
I sip my coffee. The taste is strong and bitter, the way Ellis likes it.
Ellis highlights a line on another page then finally sits upright, fixing me in her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asks in that characteristically blunt way of hers.
“What? Yes, of course. Why? Don’t I look all right?”
