A Lesson in Vengeance

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

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.

For coffee-stained girls in libraries.

She wouldn't understand that magic can be a metaphor, like Ellis said. That magic doesn't have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it's the only way you can heal.

I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I'm not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.

But bitch felt like a harsh word to apply to a girl who was fighting so hard to make space for herself in a world that didn’t want her.

The poems circle the same question: how one’s soul could possibly endure when life’s beauty vanishes from reach.

Is this what it feels like to be a ghost? To haunt the same halls over and over, waiting for someone to see you, to speak to you, to call for you or send you away again?

But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug. I want to unravel her.

I’m fine,” I interrupt. “Sorry. I just…” Why am I apologizing? Of course I didn’t want to exhume my ex-girlfriends grave.

For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky is clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.

The problem is, I don’t have anything I want to read. I peruse the shelves, but nothing jumps out at me. 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.

The future had felt like a distant and abstract construct, like a life that belonged to another Felicity—a mirror image of myself existing in some parallel world, a girl who stood a chance…

This whole night already feels bizarre, like the world viewed through a kaleidoscope.

A story told again and again is never the same story as the original.

No. I won’t let you ruin my life for entertainment. I’m not Melpomene, to inspire your next great and tragic art. You don’t have the right.

I feel like my head is full of marbles, all of them rolling over each other, bumping against the walls of my skull, too many to count. I can’t think straight…

Don’t you ever wish you could go back?” Ellis murmurs, gaze turned up toward the chandeliers; their light glitters off of the lenses of her glasses. My gaze snaps away from the kettle, back to her. “To some other time,” she says, “when things were a little wilder. When the rules were a little less clear.

One of the girl’s brow lifts. I’ve never been able to do that. Even after ages staring at myself in the mirror, I’ve only ever been able to muster a constipated sort of grimace.

No one’s there,” I whisper, and no sooner have the words left my lips than someone knocks. I startle violently enough that I knock over a candle. The silk rug catches almost instantly, yellow fire eating a quick path across the antique pattern. I’m still stamping out sparks when someone says, “What are you doing?” I look up. Alex’s replacement stands in my doorway. And although it’s past three in the morning, she’s dressed as if she’s about to walk into a law school interview. She’s even wearing collar studs. “Summoning the devil. What does it look like?

When classes start, Godwin will be home to a brand new crop of students: third- and fourth-years with bright eyes and souls they sold to literature. Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic.

Ellis quivers too—a very slight tremor to her hands, detectable only because I notice everything about her.

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

I still feel her fingers tangled up in the threads of my fate.

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. No more virus scans or junk mail or counting likes. If I want to look something up, I go to the library. If I want to talk to someone, I talk to them.

My world reduces to sensation. The lights are too bright, sounds overloud. People speak to me, and although I hear them and respond, two minutes later I can’t remember what they said or what it meant.