“Who are you with?” Leonie asks, meeting my gaze and offering a tentative smile. And although I still suspect she’s sympathetic only on Ellis’s orders, I smile back.
“Wyatt.”
“Kajal’s with Wyatt, too,” Leonie says, gesturing toward Kajal herself, who crushes another garlic clove under the flat blade of her knife and doesn’t look up.
I’m not used to feeling uncertain in social situations. My junior year at Dalloway—the year before everything fell apart with Alex, before that climbing trip and its aftermath, my subsequent withdrawal from classes—I was popular. Or if not popular, then at least envied; my mother sent large allowances every month and had little interest in how I spent it, so I wasted all that money on tailored dresses and hair appointments and weekend trips to the city for my Godwin friends. And although I was far from the richest girl at Dalloway, the way I chose to spend my money bought me a certain immunity from social faux pas. Everyone has awkward moments; I was forgiven mine.
At least I didn’t have to buy my friends, Alex had said the night she died, cheeks blotchy with rage; and even then I’d known she was right.
But I don’t have any interest in buying the friendship of Ellis Haley or her cabal. I find it hard to care about social hierarchies these days.
Alex would have been proud.
“What is your thesis on?” I ask Kajal, because I no longer think feigning indifference proves superiority, and she looks up—surprised, I suspect, that I’m still talking to her.
“Female thinkers and philosophers of the Enlightenment,” Kajal says. “Work from the salons. Macaulay, d’Épinay, de Gouges, Wollstonecraft…”
“Mary Astell? A Serious Proposal?”
“Of course.” Kajal’s posture has eased; she chops up the garlic with quick, smooth motions of her hands. “She was a little too religious for my preference, but I suppose that was unavoidable at the time.”
“Although that relatively Cartesian approach produced her concept of virtuous friendship,” I say, “so one can’t fault her too much.”
Kajal shrugs, probably preparing the same old argument: whether Astell’s conceptualization of friendship was truly virtuous or, as Broad argues, merely reciprocal.
“Just so,” Ellis interjects. “As Astell said herself: ‘It were well if we could look into the very Soul of the beloved Person, to discover what resemblance it bears to our own.’ ”
When I look, a slight smile has taken up at the corners of Ellis’s mouth—there only for a moment, her gaze flicking over to meet mine before she turns back to the dough.
“I like Lady Mary Chudleigh,” Clara supplies from the corner, a smudge of ink on her cheek.
“Hmm,” says Ellis. “I’ve always found Chudleigh rather derivative.”
Clara’s pale face goes scarlet, and she says, “Oh. Well, I mean…yes, she was clearly influenced by Astell, so…”
Ellis has nothing to say to that, which only makes Clara flush worse. I don’t completely understand why she’s so upset by the prospect of disagreeing with Ellis, but then again, I don’t pretend to understand the cult of personality the new members of Godwin House have constructed around Ellis, either.
“I think Chudleigh even admitted as much,” I say, folding another ravioli and tossing it into the bowl. “Clara, maybe you could look it up on your phone.”
The derisive look Clara shoots my way could burn through steel. “I don’t have a phone.”
“None of us do,” Leonie adds. “Technology is so distracting. I heard people’s attention spans are actually getting shorter because they read everything online these days.”
I glance toward Ellis, but she’s moved to the sink to start washing up. No doubt she started this fad.
I finish the last ravioli and dust my flour-covered hands against my apron. It’s not that I’m so very attached to my phone, but…still, I can’t imagine eschewing it entirely. I’m not incredibly active on social media, but I do like to listen to music when I run. Me and Alex used to text each other constantly, our phones hidden under desks and behind books: This class is interminable and Climbing this weekend? and Brush your hair—you look like a hedgehog.
Maybe life’s easier without all that.
* * *
—
We eat in the dining room, a white cloth spread over the mahogany table and candles burning between the array of cracked ceramic dishes. I don’t talk much this time, either, but unlike the first night in the common room, I don’t feel excluded. I’m here at the table with the rest of them, my chair between Leonie’s and Clara’s, my water poured from the same glass bottle as theirs. Ellis’s slate gaze catches mine when Kajal mentions how quickly Ellis left the Boleyn party, a sharp cut of a smile before she looks away.
MacDonald doesn’t join us. She would have, last year. I wonder if that’s more to do with Ellis or with me.
“Shall we?” Ellis says when the last of us puts down her fork.
She leads us into the common room, where Kajal draws a slim green leather-bound book of poetry off the shelf and Ellis unearths a crystal decanter of bourbon concealed in a low cabinet, setting it down on the coffee table with a clink of glass on wood.
Leonie’s brows lift. “What is that?”
“Bourbon. Castle and Key,” Ellis says, lining a row of five glasses along the table’s edge. “The very first barrel. My sibling got it for me when they went to the distillery last winter; the work the new owners have done on the Old Taylor restoration is really fantastic.”
I have no idea how to interpret any of the words that just came out of Ellis’s mouth. But Ellis discusses bourbon like she knows things, her slow southern drawl as calm and confident as if she were as much an expert with whiskeys as she is with literature.
She glances up. “Do you like old-fashioneds, Felicity?” Ellis has a little brown bottle in hand, squeezing a dark liquid from an eyedropper into each glass.
“What’s an old-fashioned? It sounds…old-fashioned.”
Ellis laughs. “Oh, you’ll love this. Sit down.”
“Ellis is on a whiskey kick,” Kajal informs me, arching her perfect brows. She says it as if she’s spent enough time with Ellis now to know everything there is to know about Ellis and her kicks. “Apparently the character in her new book likes whiskey. So of course that means Ellis has to like whiskey.”
“How can you understand a character’s mind without sharing their experiences?” Ellis says archly. She has a knife in one hand and an orange in the other, a twist of peel curling from under the blade. “If your writing isn’t authentic—if you’re just making it up—the reader will know.”