“What are you working on?” I ask, and she immediately slaps the notebook shut, like she doesn’t want me to see.
I lift my brows, and after a long beat she wipes a hand over her eyes and shakes her head. “Sorry. I…well, I’ve been writing my grandmother’s story. A novelization of it, anyway. Don’t tell Ellis?”
“Why would Ellis care?”
Leonie shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t. But…well, writing is kind of her thing.”
“Ellis doesn’t own writing. If you want to write about your grandmother, you should.”
Leonie twists one of her waves around her forefinger and looks like she doesn’t believe me. I know Ellis better than anyone now, and I’d like to think Ellis would be pleased to hear that someone else has discovered a passion for writing and creation.
I also know what it is to have a secret you’ve held close to your chest for so long it starts to poison you—to fear that if you show it to anyone else, it might poison them, too. But when I finally told Ellis about my mother, she hadn’t been poisoned.
She’d understood.
“I wanted to ask you about something,” I say once I’ve mustered the courage.
Leonie nods slowly. “Okay,” she says. “Go for it.”
“You were in the Margery coven. Weren’t you?”
Leonie releases her hair. I can’t define the expression that settles on her face, her typically serene features twisting for a moment—almost as if in disgust. But the look is gone so quickly I might have imagined it. “Yes. I suppose I still am.”
Well, I’m not, I almost say, but I swallow the words. Instead, I take a breath, one that shakes in my chest.
“What do you think of them?” I ask.
Leonie pats the seat next to her at the island, and after a beat, I take it. She crosses her arms over her shut notebook and meets my gaze straight-on.
“You really want to know?” she says.
“I really want to know.”
A smile cuts across Leonie’s red-lipsticked mouth. “I think they’re full of shit.”
I almost choke on my own laugh, startled, amazed—Leonie has to be the first person I’ve ever met to just come out and say it. But she’s right.
“They’re all bluster. They make it seem like the coven is the only path to success after Dalloway, but that’s just propaganda.”
“It’s not entirely propaganda. Margery girls always succeed.”
“Because they’re rich, not because they’re Margery. They’re rich and they’re white.”
My teeth catch my lower lip. There’s a bladed quality to Leonie’s voice; I’ve never seen her like this.
“Why did you join then?” I ask.
Leonie shrugs. “Why does anyone join? And I liked it, at first. They liked me, too. Only then last year I mentioned that one of their little bits of historical legend was technically inaccurate, and all of a sudden they started treating me differently. It was…let’s say illuminating.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Right? But that’s my point. They’re horrible.”
I sit with her words for a moment, turning them over in my mind like stones. She’s right, of course. She’s right, but I didn’t want to admit it before. The Margery coven was all about appearances—from their feeble gestures at “magic” to their rejection of Leonie. Their rejection of me when I got sick.
I wonder what part of the legend was inaccurate—if this is another piece of knowledge Leonie acquired during her research off-campus. I wonder how limited my own understanding of the Dalloway Five is, if by studying only what I found in the library, I’ve trapped myself in a certain view.
I only ever wanted the Five to have been witches. I only ever saw what I wanted to see.
Not like Leonie. For Leonie, it was never about what she wanted—it was about discovering the truth.
“I’m really sorry, Leonie,” I say at last. “I…That’s repulsive.”
Leonie rolls her eyes, but her smile is good-natured as she says, “See? Now you’re getting it.”
I head to the fridge and take out the cheese plate Clara and Kajal assembled last night after dinner, peeling off the plastic wrap and bringing it back to the island.
“Do you want to know something?” I say, impulsive, but suddenly I want her to know this about me. Leonie has confided in me about her dream of being a writer. I want to trade one secret for another.