“So, method acting,” I say.
It earns me a sharp grin. “Precisely. Method writing.” Ellis squeezes the peel over the nearest drink; a fine mist sprays the glass.
“Once, Ellis slept outside in the Canadian winter for two weeks and bought heroin off a truck driver in an arcade bathroom,” Clara says.
I find that incredibly hard to believe. It’s the kind of Ellis Haley trivia you’d read in a literary magazine—hyperbolic and dramatized for effect, nothing whatsoever like the kind of behavior any parent would let their high-school-aged child get away with.
But Ellis doesn’t deny it, either.
Because it didn’t happen?
Or because it did?
Ellis finishes the cocktails and passes one to each of us. The fine crystal is heavy in my palm. Ellis, perched on the arm of the sofa, opens the little book of poetry and starts to read from St. Vincent Millay: “Death, I say, my heart is bowed / Unto thine, O mother!…”
I lift the glass and take a sip. The old-fashioned is surprisingly bitter, the heat of whiskey cut with something low and smoky. The sweetness, when it comes, is an afterthought. I’m not sure I like it.
Judging by the grimaces on the other girls’ faces, I’m not the only one.
“This red gown will make a shroud / Good as any other.”
Ellis passes the book to Leonie, who pages through with her free hand and chooses a new poem. We go around the room, each of us reading something; when it’s my turn I choose Dickinson. From the glance Ellis shoots my way, shadowed under the fringe of her dark lashes, I wonder if she finds me as uninventive as Mary Chudleigh.
We take six rounds of the book, and after we’ve tired of poetry, Ellis makes coffee and ropes us all into a lively debate about the recursive feminine nature of birth and death; Leonie and Clara share a cigarette by the open window, the night breeze playing in Clara’s russet hair and Leonie’s sock feet tucked under Clara’s thigh. Kajal falls asleep on the sofa with Dear Life draped over her face. Ellis reads in an armchair, teeth catching her lower lip and chewing till the skin flushes red. I go back upstairs, to the silent gray of my bedroom. But for once the shadowed corners don’t hold threats.
I draw a card: the Page of Cups. My room smells like Alex’s perfume.
Closed inside the books on my shelf are all the letters she ever sent me: notes passed in class, postcards mailed from those unbearable camping trips she used to take with her mother. I pin one of the postcards to the wall next to the mirror. Her signature—the big looping A, the spiky consonants—gazes back at me.
Alex is dead. And maybe her spirit is still here, maybe she still haunts the crooked halls of Godwin House. But I turn to face the empty room and say it anyway:
“I’m not afraid of you.”
When classes fall into full swing, it’s easier to forget I’m haunted.
The Godwin House poetry-and-existentialism sessions retreat from nightly to weekend occurrences over the next two weeks as attention turns away from dead poets and lyricism and toward homework and deadlines. More than once I catch Leonie sitting on the kitchen floor reading an assignment while dinner boils over, forgotten, on the stove behind her. My own reading list has gotten longer and longer; there’s no shortage of female horror to consume, and not nearly enough time in the semester to read it all.
I find a first edition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at a used bookstore in town and quickly discover it’s impossible to read that book inside Godwin. There’s nowhere to sit that doesn’t position my back to either a window or door; I can’t make it half a page without lurching around to look over my shoulder, half expecting to find a grotesque faceless figure gazing back at me from the dark corners. So I do a lot of my reading outside, during the day, a crocheted blanket tossed onto the quad grass and a thermos of tea at my elbow, devouring the dark and the macabre with white sunlight burning the nape of my neck.
The quad serves as the perfect vantage point to observe the full life cycle of a day’s activities at Dalloway School. I watch the engineering interns dart down the sidewalks with ducked heads and arms full of blueprints; the artists meander over grass, trailing the scent of patchouli; instructors glare at wristwatches they can’t afford as they hurry to the next meeting. I even spot Clara once, crossing from the library back toward Dalloway with a book held aloft. She doesn’t seem to notice the way other students have to weave around her, her mind floating in a world very far away.
Ellis emerges from Godwin House just once, even though it’s a Friday afternoon. Maybe Ellis Haley isn’t required to attend classes. I watch her go across the yard, chin level with the ground and wearing a pantsuit, into the administrative building. She stays there about twenty minutes before I spy her again. This time she’s holding an armful of paperwork. I raise my voice and call her name; she looks over and our gazes meet. But then she turns away and keeps walking, as if I’m not there at all.
It doesn’t matter. I’m not an Ellis groupie. I must have done something to offend her—still using a cell phone would probably be sufficient crime to find myself permanently exiled from the clique.
But when I return to Godwin at dusk Ellis is there, cross-legged on the floor with the grandmother clock facedown on the rug and its insides strewn around her like war shrapnel.
“This is harder than it looks,” she says, gesturing to the clock with a screwdriver.
“I’m sure we could call a professional.”
She shrugs. “I was bored. And I found this in the library, so…” She has a book open by her knee, all clockwork diagrams. “Maybe I can write this into a novel, if I figure it out.”
This seems like a lot of work for a scene that may or may not ever materialize. Then again, I suppose procrastination is universal. Not even the great Ellis Haley is immune.
I leave her there and retreat upstairs. I have an essay for Wyatt due tomorrow; I’m so absorbed in it that I ignore MacDonald’s call for dinner, flicking on my desk lamp when the sun finally slips the rest of the way below the horizon. I’ve just written page seven and shut my laptop to push against the wall with my toes, arching my back and stretching both arms over my head, when someone knocks.
I expect MacDonald with a plate of leftovers, but when I call for her to come in, the door swings open and it’s Ellis instead, coffee mug in hand.
“I thought you might need sustenance,” she says.
More black coffee is the last thing I need at eleven p.m. when I have an early class the next day. I’m about to tell her that when she slides the mug onto my desk and I glance down.
“This isn’t coffee,” I say.
“It’s chamomile,” Ellis says. “One squeeze of lemon and a half teaspoon of honey. That is how you take it, right?”