Their Vicious Games(90)

CHAPTER 31





GRAHAM ISN’T EXACTLY BEAUTIFUL. NOT like his brother. But he does look softer, and even more so in sleep. I misjudged them, when they stood side by side, in the woods. Graham was more difficult and so I dismissed him. I mistook his acerbic nature for cruelty and was stupidly charmed by a low laugh and good bone structure. But I know better now. My fingers brush over his skin, and he turns in to the warmth of my touch, but he doesn’t wake. Not yet. Good.

I slip from the bed.

In the daylight, his room looks very much like him. It is messy, clothes strewn about. A knocked-over bottle of cologne lies on his dresser. A baggie of weed is next to it, haphazardly out for the world—and the maid—to see. There is a photo of him and his brother on the side table, but none of anyone else. That makes sense too.

I pad over to the first door that doesn’t lead out to the hallway. I expect to find the bathroom, but it’s a closet instead. I throw a glance backward, checking if he’s still asleep. Graham turns on his side toward the window, burrowing deeper, so I can’t help but snoop.

The closet is a walk-in, filled to the brim with oversized sweaters and expensive flannels. A rack full of different utility boots, each more expensive than the next, next to a pair of Aimé Leon Dore New Balances and another pair of sneakers, ratty Converses. And then toward the back are his suits, all dark except for one.

The last looks smaller than the rest. Gray plaid. I take it off the rack, pulling it in front of me and looking down. It’s too big for me, but I take it anyway. I slip out of the closet and walk back toward the bed. I press my hand lightly against his back, between his shoulder blades, just to feel his heartbeat one last time, to feel that he’s alive.

Graham, the un-favorite. Graham, who saved me, but also didn’t. Graham, who still bleeds blue.

This time, moving through the Remington Estate, I take it all in.

My room is hollow without Saint. But there are signs of her everywhere. Her trunks are still open. Her bed is unmade. Her toothbrush is still in the bathroom. I can even still smell her perfume. She’s everywhere.

Except, she’s not. It still doesn’t make sense. She’s dead, but it doesn’t feel real.

None of this feels real.

It doesn’t reconcile with the girl I saw when I first arrived. Saint seemed a cut above the rest, solid Teflon and completely in control. But she isn’t—wasn’t—any of those things.

There’s a dress laid out for me on my bed. It’s beautiful. Blue. Extravagant.

Fuck the dress.

I reach for the suit that I took from Graham’s room. Checkered and gray and just a little too large, but it’s going to be more me than the dress. I tear into Saint’s trunk, searching for something—anything—that will remind me of her—and then, there it is. A yellow silk tank top. She wore it at breakfast, the morning after Margaret died.

I take it and lay it out on the bed next to the suit.

I wash my hair again, stripping it of the oils and creams and the grimness of last night until I no longer smell the copper of Esme’s blood clinging to my coils.

I’m going to start all over again. I have always had my routine getting ready for the school day. It looked nothing like this, but I’m resetting. I feel the broken bits of me, the pieces that are gone, stolen. I replace them with pieces of others.

Graham’s suit. Saint’s silk. Toni’s eyeliner.

I feel Toni there as I apply it. She isn’t coming—I can’t afford to hope anyone will come to save me with only an hour until it’s time—but I feel her anyway, sitting next to me, the weight of her hand on my shoulder. A perfect line and a flick at the end.

I want to make myself look like me for the final game. I go into my bag, searching for my comb, and pause when I see what began it all—the invitation. I read it over again. This letter I once thought held the answer to my predicament. Each handwritten curlicue a promise. In pursuit of the furthering of women’s education and placement in society, my ass. These aren’t promises. They’re lies. Everything’s a lie.

If you choose to accept…

A lie… and a challenge.

My heart skips and I can’t help the way my lips twitch into a smile as I crush the letter in my fist and shove it into my pocket.

A challenge is just another word for a game, at least it is here. I’ve come to favor card games, in my time here, mostly because there are so many different sets of rules, the players can decide which ones to heed.

In a deck of cards, there are only three face cards, and I am none of them. If Third is the king and Leighton is the queen and Pierce is the jack, I would’ve once called myself an eight of clubs. Insignificant. Random.

But now I realize I’m the joker.

The joker is an unassuming card. In some games it has little function. In others, it’s the highest trump.

In this game, it will be the wild one. The card that will finish them all. It has to be.

I sit before the vanity with purpose now and begin to part my hair, sectioning it into four areas. I never wore braids once I started at Edgewater. I never even wore them in summers in Suburbia, too afraid of being too much.

I know how, though; it’s an ingrained practice that began at my mother’s feet as she tugged a bristle brush through the coarseness of my curls, the scent of Blue Magic stinging my nose. I don’t have any of that now, but I have gel and conditioner and my two good hands.