I Am Her Revenge Read online

  I remember Mother telling me about her and all of the terrible things that she supposedly did. “She did what she could for her family. Nothing is more important than family,” Mother said, concluding the lesson. She rested a hand lightly on my shoulder, and there was almost something like a smile on her face as she looked into my eyes. I find myself nodding at the memory. You have to do whatever you can for your family. It’s the only thing that matters in this world. It’s the only bond that lasts.

  I zone out, and my eyelids grow heavy. I jab my pen into the palm of my hand every few minutes to stay awake until the bell finally rings and I can head to English literature.

  Which is much more interesting. Because it’s there that I first see him.

  CHAPTER 2

  I notice him almost as soon as I walk into the room. He sits in the back of the classroom with the other confident kids, and his golden popularity shines through every pore. He wears the required boys’ uniform: gray slacks, white shirt, black blazer with the school crest on its lapel, and red and black plaid tie. His tie is loosened and his shirt is wrinkled, but somehow he looks more insouciant than sloppy. He leans back in his chair like a king on his throne with an easy, self-assured smile. As soon as I spot him, it’s as if the whole room starts spinning, revolving around him. Everyone’s waiting to see what he’ll do next. He is the center of everything.

  I feel my breath stutter in my chest, and I know this is the beginning.

  I only let myself glance at him, my eyes slithering over him in an open show of indifference as I sink into a chair in the middle of the room. I turn my back toward him coldly, hoping he notices.

  My pulse races, ripping through my skin. My breathing grows shallower, and I take a few deep breaths to regulate it. I keep my spine straight and proud and focus my attention on the twenty-something woman at the front of the class.

  “Who’s the new girl?” a boy—him?—asks behind me.

  Another boy laughs. “No idea, mate. She’d look good in my bed, though.”

  The first boy, the boy who has to be him, answers with a hefty dose of disgust. “Try not to be such a wanker all the time, Liam.”

  I cling to that, the voice of the boy who has drawn me to him.

  The teacher, Ms. Prisby, clears her throat. “All right, everyone, we’ve got a new student. Vivian Foster, yeah?”

  I nod slightly.

  “Well, good, then. I’m sure we’ll do our very best to welcome you to Madigan. We’ve been reading Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ Have you read it?”

  “Yes.” Of course I have. Mother made sure I read everything on the syllabus before I got here. But I knew this poem long before that, and the story behind it. In the poem, the lady will be cursed if she looks down on Camelot, so she spends her days weaving a tapestry and watching a magic mirror that shows her events of the world outside. It’s only when she sees Lancelot in that mirror and hears his voice below her tower that she looks down, and in doing so, she has to sacrifice her own life, putting herself in a boat that carries her dead body down to Camelot. When she’s found, all Lancelot says about her is “She has a lovely face.”

  The Arthurian legend the poem is probably based on is even more pathetic. Elaine of Astolat develops a crush on Lancelot, nursing him after he’s injured in a tournament. But his heart belongs to Guinevere, and he leaves Elaine, who is so distraught that she boards a boat and dies of a broken heart. The ending is much the same, with Lancelot simply paying for her funeral. Hardly caring about her at all.

  Ms. Prisby’s voice calls me back to the present. “Then you can jump right in.” She offers me a smile briefly, before it falters under the weight of my disdain, the disdain that only she can see. She looks back at her book, suddenly unsure. She’s young, not much older than I am. She’s almost too easy a mark.

  “Right, well, we’re looking at the theme of art in isolation versus art that confronts the real world,” she says, continuing on to point out that the lady creates a wonderful tapestry when alone, but once she looks down to Camelot, her loom breaks, and all of her artistic talent is forfeited.

  I keep my head down, scribbling nonsense in my notebook and trying to sort out my first impressions of the boy and what his first impressions of me might be.

  He has light blond hair that curls slightly at the ends, making him look boyish. His eyes are warm and brown-green and observant. His jaw is square and firm. He’s attractive, the kind of boy teenage girls hang posters of in their rooms.

  And he’s noticed me. He’s maybe even already attracted to me, or maybe he just doesn’t like the way his friend speaks about women. I’m not yet different enough from the girls who must throw themselves at him daily.

  As soon as the bell rings, the other kids jump out of their chairs and dive into the hall. It’s the last class before lunch, and everyone seems to be in a hurry to eat.

  I take my time, gathering my notebook and stretching my long legs before standing up. The boy and his cronies are taking their time, too, watching me.

  When he walks up beside me before I reach the door, I’m prepared.

  “Hey,” he says, placing a strong hand on my shoulder to stop me. “I’m Ben.”

  I turn to find him beaming a wide, confident smile at me. He’s a bit taller than I am and much broader, with the body of an athlete. His nose is crooked, as if it’s been broken before. Probably playing sports; he seems too affable and easygoing to get in a fistfight. There’s no coiled spring behind his eyes, the sure sign of a hothead.

  I expect him to let those hazel eyes drift down and back up my body, but he doesn’t. He keeps them on mine. “I know it, uh, has to be difficult being the new girl, but I wanted to offer my help. You know, if you have questions or anything.”

  I raise my eyebrows, trying not to show how my thoughts are scrambling. I thought he would be cocky, maybe give me a pickup line, something I could decline with derision to show how different I am. To make him want me even more.

  I can’t reject him, not when he’s being kind and considerate. And I can’t fall all over him. So I take a gamble, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear in a show of self-consciousness. “Thanks,” I say, my voice small and shy, before turning and hurrying out the door.

  I spend lunch exploring the main building, too tired to face a room full of my peers. The dining hall, a few lockers, and the administration offices that I visited earlier take up the first floor. The next four floors are made up of unending hallways of sameness: lockers and classroom doors and slightly scuffed floors.

  I head for the top story, hoping for a view. For a new perspective on this place I’ve come to. And I’m not disappointed.

  There are a few classrooms up here, but almost half of the floor is taken up by a room with a marble sign above the doorway, the words “Student Lounge” carved into it. I peek in and see only a couple of girls reading in armchairs in one corner, so I walk inside. I throw the girls polite but uninterested smiles and head for the wall of windows opposite.

  I can see the whole of the hilltop below, with three large gray stone buildings that form a quadrangle with this one, a courtyard in the middle. The courtyard is cluttered with wrought-iron benches and gas lampposts and a few ornamental trees. They stand stubby and straight, but only because there are ropes on each side of them tying them to the ground. Otherwise, I’m sure they would be like the trees I saw on the way in: curved and bent, but not yet defeated by the force of the wind.

  I can’t see much beyond the high stone wall that surrounds the campus, though the fog from this morning has dissipated a bit. Up here it feels as if I’m in a dome, as if I’m cut off from the world outside. I watch a few students meander along the courtyard paths, flickering in and out of sight beneath the branches of the trees below, but I’m too high up to recognize any of them from the bustling halls. I wish I had a pencil and paper so I could draw them, show them a
s they really are. They are mere ants, waiting to be stepped on.

  A giggle from one of the girls behind me breaks me from my reverie, but when I look back, she’s pointing to something in her book, sharing a harmless joke with her friend.

  The rest of the lounge is like an overgrown living room, muddled with brown leather couches, overstuffed armchairs, a few dark wooden tables, and tall brass lamps. The walls are lined with rich crimson wallpaper, and a thick golden-hued carpet covers the floor. A daunting stone fireplace takes up most of one wall, a fire crackling in its mouth. I examine the books in the low bookshelves that line one of the walls, dragging a finger along their cracked spines. There are beautiful volumes by Dickens and the Brontë sisters and Shakespeare and the like. Yearbooks dating back to 1947 rest on the bottom shelf.

  I take one last look at the room before I have to head to psychology. If I had that pencil and paper, I would sketch the air here, the feeling of this place. It is warmth and ease and the sharp scent of money.

  After I suffer through psychology, where the teacher drones on about human behavior experiments I already know, I go back to the administration office to find Claire waiting with my bags. “I was right,” she says brightly when she sees me. “You are my new roommate.”

  I nod, forcing a smile onto my face.

  Claire picks up one of my bags, the heavier one. “Come on,” she says, “I’ll show you our room, roomie.” She nudges my arm, inviting me to laugh along with her.

  I follow her with the lighter bag through the wood-and-marble hallways to the back entrance of the school. We step out into the chilly early October air, and I look for the details that I missed from my vantage point in the lounge. The hilltop the school sits on is not very wide, and it’s covered in short brown grass and mud that squelches underneath our shoes. The sidewalks between the buildings are red cobblestone, with large gaps between the bricks and a healthy covering of mud. The gas lamps lining the walk are already lit, their flames dancing in glass cages.

  “Boys’ house,” Claire says, pointing to the building on the left, which has the name Rawlings Hall etched over its small portico. “And our house.” She points to the one on the right, Faraday Hall. Both are built from the same rough-cut gray stone blocks that make up the main building, with ivy grasping onto their sides, reaching nearly up to the top floors. Ebony-trimmed windowpanes peek out through the ivy, several of them glowing with soft lamplight.

  The building directly opposite us completes the quadrangle. It’s almost as large as the main building, with a set of wide stone steps leading up to a pair of wooden doors that seem much too large for one person to open by herself. Ornate Corinthian columns line the porch that spans the entire front of the building, and I realize that it’s the only structure on campus that is untouched by ivy. It’s too grand to be covered. “Canton Library,” Claire says, noticing my gaze. She stops in the middle of the courtyard, forcing everyone else to stream past us. “Madigan has one of the most extensive book collections of any secondary school in England. Canton is a good place to study.”

  I nod and hitch the duffel bag from my hand to my shoulder.

  Everything is clustered together on top of this hill. It doesn’t seem enough space for the hundreds of students and teachers who live and work here. When I remember that just beyond the rough gray stones of the ten-foot wall surrounding us there are brown moors stretching for miles, the tightness in my chest loosens.

  “The playing fields are down at the bottom of the hill off the right side, closest to our house, out the back gate,” she tells me. “What sports do you play?”

  “None,” I answer. Mother got me out of Madigan’s athletic requirement by telling the administrators something about a heart condition. “I’m not really a sporty person.”

  “I play lacrosse in the summer term, but I work for the newspaper this term,” Claire offers, her voice rising at the end to make it more of a question, the way most of her sentences end. It’s like she wants to make sure what’s she saying is acceptable.

  I nod as if I’m interested, but say nothing, and we remain silent as we cross the rest of the yard.

  We enter Faraday, my new home. As soon as we set foot on the worn brown wood floors, I hear a symphony of girls’ laughs and shouts and conversations. The hallways are dim, their navy-wallpapered walls lit mostly by the lights shining from the open doors of the bedrooms. Girls tumble in and out of these rooms, everyone friendly and happy. Most have changed out of their uniforms now that the school day is over, and though some are in sweatshirts, most have covered themselves in skinny jeans and soft cashmere and wool sweaters or brightly colored silk tops. They dance by us like exotic birds, leaving us in clouds of their cloying perfumes, most of them smiling at Claire and offering me a tentative “Hi.”

  I take a deep breath and pretend this is all normal for me.

  Claire leads me to a room on the second floor. It’s small, more of a closet than a proper room, with two truncated beds shoved into it. One tiny desk faces the window, while the other faces a blank wall. I toss my bags on the bed that’s not covered by an explosion of pink. “I took the desk by the window?” Claire says behind me, her voice vibrating with nervousness. “It used to be Emily’s. If you want it . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “The other’s fine,” I chirp, putting my hands on my hips and looking around the room with a smile as if it pleases me. I don’t look at Claire. I don’t want to see the emotions passing across her face. She’s so open, so vulnerable. Ready to be eaten alive.

  “I’ll introduce you to Mrs. Hallie, then,” Claire says, her default brightness restored, walking out of the room before I can answer.

  Mrs. Hallie, the housemother, is a plump, gray-haired woman who wraps her arms around me as soon as I meet her, and I bite my lip and force myself not to push her away. I learned at public school last year that I’m not very good at enduring hugs. This embrace lasts an interminably long time, until she finally gives me one last squeeze and lets me go. “You’re just going to love it here!” she declares as she shows me the bedding and other necessities Mother shipped for me.

  Claire grins and heads back down the hallway, leaving me alone with Mrs. Hallie, who tells me the house rules, all of which I already know: No drinking, smoking, or boys, ever. Curfew at nine on weekdays, midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. The gates to the playing fields are locked every evening at seven, and all other gates to the outside are locked at all times unless a student is given special permission to leave by a faculty member. Internet is shut off promptly at ten o’clock each night. She explains that there’s no cell reception in this part of the country unless you’re very lucky, so there are landlines set up in each hallway. “With international plans, dear, so you can call your mother whenever you like,” she says.

  I keep smiling and pretending to care until this interview is over and I can retreat to my room with my boxes.

  Claire and the rest of the chattering girls have disappeared to their afternoon activities. After that they’ll go to dinner, and then the library to do homework, which the teachers pile high onto all of us. I shove the textbooks Mother bought me in the corner of the room and concentrate on unpacking and transforming myself. I find a box of cereal among Claire’s things and munch on that for dinner.

  I think about Ben, replaying the conversation we had after English class. And an image begins forming in my mind. I start by taking out my black eyeliner and defining my eyes even more, until their blueness is electric. I tear holes in my tights and rip stitches in my skirt to make the seams and hem even more jagged. My only school shoes are a pair of ballet flats, but I use red nail polish to scribble lines of poetry on their gold surface, the chemical scent eclipsing the faint floral perfume that permeates the air from Claire’s side of the room. When it’s dried, the lines of my favorite Catullus poem are scrawled around the sides of both shoes.

  Odi et amo. Quare id f
aciam, fortasse requiris?

  Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

  There. Everything about me reflects a passionate, tortured soul, in need of saving.

  I’m setting up my desk lamp when Claire comes back. Her ringlets seem deflated, as if the long hours in the library sapped some of her blonde energy.

  “Hey,” I say with a soft smile and an uncertain voice.

  Claire smiles at me, raising an eyebrow as she takes in my new black-rimmed eyes. She notices the open box of cereal on my side of the floor, too, but says nothing.

  “How much homework did you get done?” I ask, approximating a sincere tone.

  “Not nearly enough,” Claire says with a dramatic sigh, flopping onto her pink marshmallow bed. “I swear, they’re being bloody sadistic this year. Did you do that history reading? We’re supposed to learn about a hundred years in one night.”

  “Haven’t started,” I admit. “Is it that bad?”

  She nods, then smiles. “The teachers will probably give you a little leeway for a few days, since you’re a new student and all that? But they’re pretty demanding, just to warn you.”

  “I’ll get it done.” Mother taught me speed-reading almost as soon as I learned to read. My time is meant for more important things than homework.

  “Can I ask you something?” Claire says, tilting her head in that observant way she has, her eyes intently absorbing me.

  I steel myself. “Sure.”

  “Why did you come a month into the year? Wouldn’t it have been easier to finish it out back home?”

  I shrug, bending to plug in the lamp. “I’ve been on the waitlist for a long time. When this spot opened up, I couldn’t pass on it.”

  “What about university? Have you already applied?”

  “I’m applying to places in the States,” I lie. Mother told the administration that I would be using a college counselor in New York for all of my college applications. Hopefully no one here will notice that I won’t actually be applying anywhere. “I’m not really worried about it.”