I make a cup of tea instead, stand at the kitchen counter sipping it until some of that dizzy drunk feeling fades. That gets me to nine-thirty, and then I have to put the dishes away and figure out something else. I draw a three-card tarot reading: all swords. I glimpse a light on, through the crack beneath Housemistress MacDonald’s door, but I’m not quite so pathetic yet as to seek her company.
As usual I end up in the common room.
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.
I make a fine literature student, don’t I?
This house seems too quiet now. The silence bears down on me like a weight.
No, it is too quiet—it’s unnaturally quiet—and when I glance back I see why.
The grandmother clock that sits between the fiction and poetry shelves has gone silent. Its hands are stuck at 3:03.
The same time I had the nightmare.
I draw closer, steps slow. The floorboards creak under my weight. I stare at the white face of that clock, at those black blades pointing nearly at a right angle to each other, mocking me. The silence thickens. I can’t breathe; I’m suffocating in thin, depressurized air—
“I suppose we’ll have to get it repaired,” someone says, and I spin around.
Ellis Haley stands behind me, both hands tucked into her trouser pockets and her attention fixed past me at the grandmother clock. She’s still wearing that red lipstick, the lines of it too crisp and perfect to have just come from a party. After a moment her gaze slips down to meet mine.
“You left early,” she comments.
“I felt sick.”
“They didn’t sweeten the absinthe enough,” she says, and shakes her head.
For a second we both stand there staring at each other. I remember Clara’s pale hands in the darkness: snip, snip.
“Where’s everyone else?” I ask.
“Still at Boleyn, as far as I know. I came back alone.”
I struggle to imagine any of those girls letting Ellis Haley go anywhere by herself. You must’ve had to peel them off like tiny well-dressed leeches.
I realize I’ve said that out loud, a beat after my mouth falls shut again.
Ellis laughs. It’s a sudden bright sound that breaks the silence like an egg, that fills the room. “I did tell them I was just going to freshen up,” she admits. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles. “Clara tried to come with me.”
“How fortunate you managed to escape.”
“By a hair,” Ellis says, pinching her fingers. “I made coffee, by the way. Would you like some?”
“It’s late for coffee, isn’t it?”
“It’s never too late for coffee.”
This whole night already feels bizarre, like the world viewed through a kaleidoscope. “Why not,” I say, and Ellis goes to retrieve a tray from the kitchen: the coffee in a silver pot that appears vaguely Moroccan, our own chipped teacups a little forlorn when adjacent.
Ellis pours two cups, sitting on the floor with both legs tucked beneath her. She hasn’t brought cream or sugar; apparently we’re both meant to drink our coffee black.
“Why were you here so early?” I ask her after she’s picked up her cup and taken her first sip. It’s a brash question—not the kind of conversation starter my mother would approve of—but it seems all my restraint was expelled with my vomit. “Most people aren’t so desperate to get back to school.”
“Only two weeks early, really,” Ellis says. “I needed a retreat. Time away from the world to work on my book. It’s peaceful here when everyone else is gone.”
I’m surprised the administration let her stay.
Or, actually, maybe I’m not. The publicity—Ellis Haley’s sophomore novel, written in seclusion on the campus of Dalloway School—would be worth the extra cost of sustaining a single student for two weeks. Dalloway can align itself with the Villa Diodati, with Walden.
I’m not sure what my mother had to do to convince Dalloway to let me arrive four days early, but I imagine it required more than mere asking.
“What are you writing now?”
Ellis lowers her cup, gazing down at the black surface of her coffee for a moment as if she’ll find inspiration there. “It’s a character study,” she says. “I want to explore the gradations of human morality: how indifference can slide into evil, what drives a person toward murder. And I want to interrogate the concept of the psychopath: whether villainy exists in that truest form or if it’s simply a manifestation of some human drive that lurks in all of us.”