I can’t be here.
I shove back my chair and stand. “I think I’ll head to bed now. It was lovely meeting all of you.”
They’re staring at me, so I force a smile: polite, good girl, from a good family. Ellis exhales her smoke toward the ceiling.
By the time I make it upstairs to my dark room and its old familiar shapes, I’ve identified the feeling in my chest: defeat.
The tarot cards are still on my bed. I grab the deck and shove it back into the hole it came from, push the baseboard into place.
Ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. I should never have used them again. Tarot isn’t magic, but it’s close enough; I can practically hear Dr. Ortega’s voice in my head, murmuring about fixed delusions and grief. But magic isn’t real, I’m not crazy, and I’m not grieving.
Not anymore.
I debated attending the party at all. The inhabitants of Boleyn House throw the same soiree at the start and finish of every semester—Moulin Rouge themed, girls with long cigarette holders sipping absinthe and checking glued-on lashes in the bathroom mirror—and I’d always attended before. But that was when I had all of Godwin House with me. Alex and I used to dress monochrome: me in red, her in midnight blue. She’d have a hip flask tucked into her beaded clutch. I’d lean out the fourth-story window and chain-smoke cigarettes—the only time I ever smoked.
This time it’s just me. No dark mirror-self. And the red dress I wore last year hangs off me now, my collarbone jutting like blades from shoulder to shoulder and my hip bones visible through the thin silk.
I recognize some of the faces, students who had been first-years and sophomores during my first attempt at a senior year; they wave at me as they drift past, on to more promising prospects.
“Felicity Morrow?”
I glance around. A short, bob-haired girl stands at my elbow, all big eyes and wearing a dress that has clearly never seen an iron in its life. It takes a second for the realization to sink in.
“Oh—hi. It’s Hannah, right?”
“Hannah Stratford,” she says, beaming still wider. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me!”
I do, although only as a vague recollection of the little first-year who’d tagged along after Alex like Alex was the very embodiment of sophistication and not a messy girl who always slept too late and cheated a passing grade out of French class. No, outside of Godwin House, Alex was seamless, refined, the model of effortless perfection, who managed to wear her parvenu surname like a goddamn halo.
My stomach cramps. I press a hand against my ribs and suck in a shallow breath. “Of course I remember,” I say, drawing a smile onto my lips. “It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m so glad you decided to come back this year,” Hannah says, solemn as a priest. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
All at once, that smile takes effort. “I’m feeling fine.”
It comes out sharply enough that Hannah flinches. “Right. Of course,” she says hurriedly. “Sorry. I just mean…sorry.”
She doesn’t know about my time at Silver Lake. She can’t possibly know.
Another breath, my hand rising and falling with my diaphragm. “We all miss her.”
I wonder if it sounds disingenuous coming from my mouth. I wonder if Hannah hates me for it, a little.
Hannah chews her lower lip for a moment, but whatever she’d thought of saying she abandons in favor of another bright grin. “Well, at least you’re still in Godwin House! I applied this year, but no go, unfortunately. But then again, everyone applied. I mean, obviously.”
Obviously?
I don’t even have to ask the question. Hannah rises up on the balls of her feet, leans in, and whispers it like a secret: “Ellis Haley.”
Oh. Oh. Mismatched puzzle pieces slide, at last, into place. Ellis is Ellis Haley. Ellis is Ellis Haley, novelist: bestselling author of Night Bird, which won the Pulitzer last year. I’d heard about it on NPR; Ellis Haley, only seventeen and “the voice of our generation.”
Ellis Haley, a prodigy.
I manage to say, “Isn’t she homeschooled?”
“That’s right. You wouldn’t know, I guess. She transferred here this semester, for her senior year. I suppose she wanted to get out of Georgia.”
Hannah is still talking, but I don’t really hear her. I’m too busy combing through my memories of the past week, trying to remember if I did anything humiliating.
Everything I’d done was humiliating.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I tell Hannah, and escape before she can announce she’ll join me. The only thing worse than listening to Hannah tell me how sorry she is about what happened would be listening to her wax rhapsodic about Ellis Haley.