I turn on every light between there and my bedroom, pulse stammering as I keep climbing the stairs past the second floor—Don’t look, don’t look—and up to the third.
In my room I shut the door and crouch down on the rug. If this were last year I might have cast a spell, a circle of light my protection against the dark. Tonight my hands shake so badly I break three matches before I manage to strike a flame. I don’t make a circle. Magic doesn’t exist. I don’t cast a spell. I just light three candles and hunch forward over their heat.
Practice mindfulness, Dr. Ortega would say. Focus on the flame. Focus on something real.
If anything supernatural wanders these halls, it doesn’t answer; the candle flames flicker in the dim light and cast shifting shadows against the wall.
“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?” I answer, but the heat burning in my cheeks betrays me; I’m humiliated. I want to kick the rest of the candles over and burn the whole house down so no one knows I got caught like this.
One of the girl’s brows 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.
I expect a witty comeback, something sharp and bladed and befitting this strange girl with all her unexpected edges. But she just says, “You left all the lights on.”
“I’ll turn them off.”
“Thank you.” She turns to go, presumably to vanish back downstairs and from my life for another few days.
“Wait,” I say, and she glances back, the candlelight flickering across her face and casting odd shadows beneath her cheekbones. I step gingerly over the remaining flames, but I still feel the heat as my legs cross over. I hold out my hand. “I’m Felicity. Felicity Morrow.”
She eyes my hand for a moment before she finally reaches out and shakes it. Her palm is cool, her grasp strong. “Ellis.”
“Is that a first or a last name?”
She laughs and drops my hand and doesn’t answer. I stand there in the doorway, watching her head back down the hall. Her hips don’t sway when she walks. She just goes, hands in her trouser pockets and the motion of her body straight and sure.
I don’t know why she’s here early. I don’t know why she won’t tell me her name. I don’t know why she never speaks to me, or who she is.
But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug.
I want to unravel her.
Everyone returns two days later, the Saturday before classes commence. Not in a trickle, but in hordes: the front lot is a hive of cars, the quad flooded with new and returning students and their families—often dragging younger siblings to gaze through the looking glass at their own potential future. Four hundred girls: a small school by most standards, all of us students divvied up into even smaller living communities. Even so, I can’t quite bring myself to go downstairs while the new residents of Godwin House are moving in. But I do leave my door open. From my position on my bed, curled up with a book, I watch the figures crossing back and forth in the third-floor hall.
Godwin House is the smallest on campus—only large enough to fit five students in addition to Housemistress MacDonald, who sleeps on the first floor, and reserved exclusively for upperclassmen. Expanding Godwin to fit more students was another cause we fought against. Just imagine this place with its rickety stairs and slanted floors appended to a modernized glass-and-concrete parasite of an extension, wood and marble giving way to carpet and formica, Godwin no longer the home of Dickinson and witches but a monstrous chimera designed to maximize residential density.
No. We’ve been able to keep Godwin the way it is, the way it was three hundred years ago, when this school was founded. You can still feel history in these halls. At any moment you might turn the corner and find yourself face to face with a ghost from the past.
There are two others assigned to this floor with me: a brown-skinned girl with long black hair, wearing an expression of perpetual boredom, and a pallid, pinch-faced redhead, whom I glimpse from time to time half-hidden behind a worn paperback of The Enchanted April. If they notice me in my room, perched on my bed with my laptop on my knees, they don’t say anything. I watch them direct hired help to carry boxes and suitcases up the stairs, sipping iced coffees while other people sweat for them.