I haven’t been in the athletic complex yet this year. Before, I used to go all the time: tennis, treadmill, the climbing wall with Alex. Now I’m an interloper in foreign territory.
The building where the gym is located used to be a hospital—Saint Agatha’s Sanitarium—or so I’d read once, from an old property record buried deep in the Dalloway library archives. The interior still bears relics of that history. The training room used to be a morgue; the drain on the floor would have carried away blood and fluids during autopsies. The erstwhile surgery is now the locker room, but the observation balcony still circles overhead, empty seats gathering dust, ghosts watching us undress from above.
Patients at Saint Agatha’s used to have to pay a fee when they were admitted. The money was intended to cover burial costs.
The fencing practice suites are on the fourth floor. I let myself in and stand against the wall, watching identical women in masks jab and slash at each other. There’s something elegant about it—something that reminds me of dance. The swords are slim steel cutting through space, long limbs that move to a rhythm only the dancers hear.
Even though all the fencers are in the same white uniform, wearing the same mesh masks, I spot Ellis almost immediately. No one else is so tall, so slim-shouldered and narrow-hipped; no one else would move so decisively.
If the rest of them dance, Ellis preys.
She spots me a few seconds in, falling into a backstep as her faceless mask turns toward me; her opponent lunges, and the blade snaps against Ellis’s chest.
I smile.
Ellis tugs off her helmet and stalks across the floor toward me. Her hair has frayed free from her bun, wisps plastered to her sweaty forehead, and her cheeks have gone red. “You distracted me.”
“You ignored me last night.”
She braces the tip of her épée against the tile, a conquistadora. “Is this supposed to make us even?”
It’s the same game we’d played before the start of the semester. This time, I won’t lose.
“Why didn’t you answer your door when I knocked?”
“I was writing, Felicity. I didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Really. Because I’d assumed you were done writing for the night, considering you came to the party after all.”
She stares at me for a long moment, one bead of sweat cutting a path down past the bridge of her nose. Her mouth is a flat line. “Perhaps I found myself reinspired.”
My lips quirk up. And, at last, Ellis is the first to look away.
“Come on,” she says, grabbing my elbow and steering me toward the door. “I’m done practicing anyway.”
I wait outside the locker room while she showers and changes out of her lamé. It’s a cold walk back to Godwin House, Ellis’s wet hair frosting over as we tramp across the quad, then melting all over the floor as soon as we’re inside. I go straight to the fireplace in the common room, my hand shaking as I strike a match three, four times before it lights.
“Shit,” Ellis murmurs, breathing into her cupped palms. She’s still trembling as she comes to sit down on the floor with me, both of us huddled together and waiting for the flames to catch. Her hair drips onto my shoulder; I feel the ice all the way down in my bones.
“It’s only October twenty-ninth,” I say. “It’s going to get worse.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
We sit there for a while without speaking, the silence punctuated only by the crackle of wood as it alights. Ellis’s fingertips are whiter than the rest of her hands, as if that part of her body has died.
I wonder how long it took Alex’s body to turn that color. I imagine the cold winter preserving her flesh, her corpse broken but beautiful as a winter doll.
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Ellis asks eventually.
I shake my head. “My mother’s in Paris until the new year. I think she forgot there’s a holiday.”
“I’m not, either,” Ellis says. “I already have to go back for winter break. That’s quite long enough for me.”
I’m dying to ask Ellis about her family. She never mentions them, and I have no idea if her parents are still together, if she had a happy childhood, whether her family supported her dream of being a writer. Maybe a normal person would ask. But only people with loving families like talking about them; when people ask about my mother, I always lie.
“There’s nothing back in Savannah for me, anyway,” Ellis says, and I glance over, not entirely able to hide my surprise.