The tarot cards are still on my bed. I grab the deck and shove it back into the hole it came from, push the baseboard into place.
Ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. I should never have used them again. Tarot isn’t magic, but it’s close enough; I can practically hear Dr. Ortega’s voice in my head, murmuring about fixed delusions and grief. But magic isn’t real, I’m not crazy, and I’m not grieving.
Not anymore.
I debated attending the party at all. The inhabitants of Boleyn House throw the same soiree at the start and finish of every semester—Moulin Rouge themed, girls with long cigarette holders sipping absinthe and checking glued-on lashes in the bathroom mirror—and I’d always attended before. But that was when I had all of Godwin House with me. Alex and I used to dress monochrome: me in red, her in midnight blue. She’d have a hip flask tucked into her beaded clutch. I’d lean out the fourth-story window and chain-smoke cigarettes—the only time I ever smoked.
This time it’s just me. No dark mirror-self. And the red dress I wore last year hangs off me now, my collarbone jutting like blades from shoulder to shoulder and my hip bones visible through the thin silk.
I recognize some of the faces, students who had been first-years and sophomores during my first attempt at a senior year; they wave at me as they drift past, on to more promising prospects.
“Felicity Morrow?”
I glance around. A short, bob-haired girl stands at my elbow, all big eyes and wearing a dress that has clearly never seen an iron in its life. It takes a second for the realization to sink in.
“Oh—hi. It’s Hannah, right?”
“Hannah Stratford,” she says, beaming still wider. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me!”
I do, although only as a vague recollection of the little first-year who’d tagged along after Alex like Alex was the very embodiment of sophistication and not a messy girl who always slept too late and cheated a passing grade out of French class. No, outside of Godwin House, Alex was seamless, refined, the model of effortless perfection, who managed to wear her parvenu surname like a goddamn halo.
My stomach cramps. I press a hand against my ribs and suck in a shallow breath. “Of course I remember,” I say, drawing a smile onto my lips. “It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m so glad you decided to come back this year,” Hannah says, solemn as a priest. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
All at once, that smile takes effort. “I’m feeling fine.”
It comes out sharply enough that Hannah flinches. “Right. Of course,” she says hurriedly. “Sorry. I just mean…sorry.”
She doesn’t know about my time at Silver Lake. She can’t possibly know.
Another breath, my hand rising and falling with my diaphragm. “We all miss her.”
I wonder if it sounds disingenuous coming from my mouth. I wonder if Hannah hates me for it, a little.
Hannah chews her lower lip for a moment, but whatever she’d thought of saying she abandons in favor of another bright grin. “Well, at least you’re still in Godwin House! I applied this year, but no go, unfortunately. But then again, everyone applied. I mean, obviously.”
Obviously?
I don’t even have to ask the question. Hannah rises up on the balls of her feet, leans in, and whispers it like a secret: “Ellis Haley.”
Oh. Oh. Mismatched puzzle pieces slide, at last, into place. Ellis is Ellis Haley. Ellis is Ellis Haley, novelist: bestselling author of Night Bird, which won the Pulitzer last year. I’d heard about it on NPR; Ellis Haley, only seventeen and “the voice of our generation.”
Ellis Haley, a prodigy.
I manage to say, “Isn’t she homeschooled?”
“That’s right. You wouldn’t know, I guess. She transferred here this semester, for her senior year. I suppose she wanted to get out of Georgia.”
Hannah is still talking, but I don’t really hear her. I’m too busy combing through my memories of the past week, trying to remember if I did anything humiliating.
Everything I’d done was humiliating.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I tell Hannah, and escape before she can announce she’ll join me. The only thing worse than listening to Hannah tell me how sorry she is about what happened would be listening to her wax rhapsodic about Ellis Haley.
The Boleyn girls have set up a makeshift bar in their kitchen, their faculty adviser conveniently absent—as all our faculty go conveniently absent whenever we throw parties; our parents don’t pay this school to discipline us after all—and there are more varieties of expensive gin than I know how to parse. I pour myself a glass of what’s closest, then a second glass when that one’s gone.
I don’t even like gin. I doubt that any of the twenty girls who live in Boleyn House like gin; they just like how much this particular gin costs.
No one talks to me. For once, I’m glad. Instead I get to watch them talk to each other, their sidelong glances skirting past me like they’re trying not to be caught looking, conversation dropping low when they realize I’m there.
Everyone knows, then.
I don’t know how they figured it out—or, well, maybe I do. Gossip travels fast in our circles. Even with Ellis Haley at Dalloway School, I am the most interesting person here.
I tip back the rest of my drink. They’ll get over it. Once classes start, someone will invent a worse story to tell around the fireplace than Felicity Morrow, the girl who…
Even in my mind, I can’t say it.
I pour myself another glass.
Every house at Dalloway has its secrets, a relic of the school’s history. As Leonie had so astutely pointed out, Dalloway was founded by Deliverance Lemont, the daughter of a Salem witch and allegedly a practitioner herself. Some secrets are easier: a secret passageway from the kitchen to the common room, a collection of old exam papers. Boleyn’s, like Godwin’s, is darker.
Boleyn’s secret is an old ritual, a nod from the present day to a time when bad women were witches and passed their magic down to their daughters, generation to generation. And if the magic has died by now, diluted by technology and cynicism and too many years, students of certain Dalloway houses still honor our bloody inheritance.
Boleyn House. Befana House. Godwin.
When I was initiated into the Margery coven, I pledged my blood and loyalty to the bones of Deliverance’s daughter, the dead witch Margery Lemont. I might not be part of Boleyn House, but the initiation ritual bound me to five girls each year from these three houses, chosen to carry Margery’s legacy.