So, glamping. If Alex were here, she’d have quite a few choice things to say about that. Clara might look like Alex—at least from behind—but the two of them have nothing in common.
All of a sudden, I miss Alex more than anything. I miss the way she laughed. I miss how she always wanted to be outside, constantly wandering under the sun and trees. Leaves stuck in her hair, always with a book in her bag.
And somehow thinking about Alex now…it doesn’t hurt. Or at least not the way it did. Maybe there’s still a chance to repair things with her spirit, to make amends.
Maybe, at last, Alex can rest.
“I hope you have a great time,” I tell Clara, surprising myself with my own sincerity. “It sounds wonderful.”
When I do go back to my room, the shadows don’t seem as dark as they once did. The air is easier to breathe, despite the pitch dark outside. I gaze out my window for a while, waiting, but no figure emerges from between the trees. No chill creeps up my spine.
I can still hear my mother’s voice echoing in my head, condescending, faux concerned: Have you been taking your medication? But it helps. I’m getting better. So I call the pharmacy and head out to pick up my order. As soon as I get back to Godwin, I swallow a pill with a glass of tap water and close my eyes.
It’s surrender, in a way, but it’s not something to be ashamed of.
That night, I take down the letters Alex sent me. I tie them in a neat stack with a length of ivory ribbon and slide them into my desk drawer. I leave the photo of us, pinned next to a postcard Alex sent me one summer.
I fall asleep easily, and I sleep well.
Perhaps too well.
I oversleep.
By the time I make it downstairs the next morning, everyone’s already had breakfast. The others have left for early-morning extracurriculars, and Ellis is curled up fully dressed on the common room sofa, dead to the world.
I stand there for a little while, watching. I’ve seen Ellis sleep before, of course, but this feels different somehow. Maybe there’s a vulnerability in sleeping out in the open, without a blanket. Or maybe it’s that Ellis has never seemed the type to drowse in libraries.
She’s wearing a point-collared dress shirt, still tucked into her trousers. One of the shirt buttons is undone; I glimpse the slightest swell of bare skin past white fabric, rising and falling in slow rhythm with her breath.
I grip the back of the sofa so I won’t give in to the urge to reach down and brush back the hair that has fallen across her eyes. I don’t want to wake her—not if she was up writing all night.
Robbed of my usual spot, I take my book back upstairs to the little reading nook nestled under the window at the far end of the third-floor hallway. Classes are barely back in session—a good excuse not to read horror and mystery. But I find myself choosing Strong Poison anyway. It’s not fascination with the macabre. It’s not that perverse need to terrify myself, a twisted penance for my crimes. I want to read Sayers. I want her elegant Oxonian prose, the fierce wittiness of Harriet Vane, the thrill of a chase.
Wyatt told me the mark of a true scholar was passion for the subject above all else—passion that resumed despite obstacles, the academic circling back to her true love again and again.
I think of the college applications I submitted before break, little missives darting off to Princeton, to Duke, to Brown. None of them were sent with much hope. The future had felt like a distant and abstract construct, a life that belonged to another Felicity—a mirror image of myself existing in some parallel world, a girl who stood a chance at living past the end of the year.
When I was a child, I found it so hard to imagine ever turning sixteen. Sixteen. The age was laden with implication: sweet sixteen celebrations, cars, makeup, drinking at parties, and kissing lips I’d never remember. Only then I turned sixteen, and the impossible age became eighteen.
And once I was eighteen, I hadn’t been able to see ahead past May. Alex’s ghost was a rising fog that obscured possibility, swallowing up every line that led into June, to July, to nineteen. None of the Dalloway Five had lived past eighteen; why should I?
I sent those applications because it was what I was expected to do.
Today, for the first time, it finally feels real.
Maybe Ellis will come with me. We’ll share a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I’ll attend classes at Columbia during the day; at night I’ll return home to find Ellis still tilted toward her typewriter, notes and half-read books scattered over her desk like fallen leaves.
When I wander down to the common room for lunch and a break from my thesis, Ellis has vanished from the sofa. Leonie is back, though, perched at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee, scribbling away in a notebook.