More or less, anyway; last year I saw one of the Boleyn initiates drinking tequila out of the Margery Skull’s eye socket like it was a particularly macabre sippy cup.
The Skull is supposed to be here, at the Boleyn House altar. I could drift down the hall with gin running hot in my veins, find the girl in red standing guard by the crypt door, and murmur the password:
Ex scientia ultio.
From knowledge comes vengeance.
I close my eyes, and for a moment I can see it: the single slim table draped in black cloth and bearing thirteen black candles. The thirteenth candle atop the Margery Skull, wax melting over its crown like a dark hand grasping bone.
But the Skull isn’t there anymore, of course. It’s been missing for almost a year.
None of the Boleyn girls seem concerned. Even the girls I recognize from previous visits to the Boleyn crypt are drunk and laughing, liquor sloshing over the rims of their cups. If they worry about a dead witch seeking revenge for her desecrated remains, it doesn’t show.
We’ve all heard the ghost stories. They’re told at Margery coven initiation rites, handed down from older sister to younger like a family heirloom: Tamsyn Penhaligon seen outside a window with her snapped neck, Cordelia Darling with her sodden clothes dripping water on the kitchen floor, Beatrix Walker murmuring arcane words in the darkness.
Tales meant to frighten and entertain—not meant to be believed. And I hadn’t believed. Not at first.
But I still remember the dark figure blooming from the shadows, the guttering candlelight, and Alex’s white, stricken face.
I turn and stalk down that hall toward the crypt. The girl in red is there, but she isn’t the somber, stoic figure she ought to be. She’s on her phone, tapping away at the screen, which lights her face in an eerie bluish glow, smirking at something she’s just read.
“Remember me?” I say.
She looks up. The grin drops from her face between one heartbeat and the next, a new expression stealing its place: something flat and guarded and hard to read. “Felicity Morrow.”
“That’s right. I’ve been enjoying the party.”
Her weight shifts to the other foot, and her arms rise to hug around her waist, fingertips pressing in against that red cardigan. “I heard you were back at school this year.”
She’s afraid of me.
I shouldn’t blame her for it, but I do. I hate her, all at once. I hate that she is the one standing in scarlet to guard the crypt, I hate the invisible threads that tie her to the other girls in our coven, the knots between her and Bridget Crenshaw and Fatima Alaoui and the rest of them, tethers I used to think were unbreakable.
I hate that I don’t even remember her name.
“I haven’t received a note yet,” I say.
She shakes her head very slightly. “You won’t be getting one. Not this year.”
I knew it. I guessed it when none of them wrote to me while I was gone, despite all those flowers they sent to Alex’s mother for the funeral, their figures like a murder of crows huddled at Alex’s grave site even though none of them knew her. None of them really knew her, not like I did.
Suddenly I’m coldly, brutally sober. I set my empty glass aside on the nearest table and look at this girl with her scarlet Isabel Marant sweater and expensive manicure, her lipsticked mouth that would have whispered about Alex when she thought Alex couldn’t hear: scholarship, rustic, aspirant.
“I see,” I say. “And why is that?”
She might be afraid of me, but now it’s for a different reason entirely. I know how to adopt my mother’s crisp consonants and Boston vowels to effect. It’s an introduction without ever having to repeat my name.
The girl’s cheeks flush as red as her cardigan. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It wasn’t my decision. It’s just…you took this all so seriously, you know.”
It’s a comment that demands a response, but I find myself voiceless. So seriously. As if the skull, the candles, the goat’s blood…as if that was all a joke to them.
Or maybe it was. Alex would have said that witchcraft was about aesthetics. She would tell me that this coven was created for sisterhood—for the Margery girl with a knowing smile at that corporate gala introducing you to the right person at the right time. Connections, not conjure.
My smile feels tight and false on my lips, but I smile all the same. That’s all we ever do at this school: insult each other, then smile.
“Thank you for the explanation,” I say. “I understand your position completely.”
Time for another drink.
I make my way back into the kitchen, where the gin has been replaced by an unfamiliar green drink that tastes bitter, like rotten herbs. I drink it anyway, because that’s what you do at parties, because my mother’s blood runs in my veins and, like Cecelia Morrow, it turns out I cannot face the real world without the taste of lies in my mouth and liquor in my blood.
I hate that it’s true. I hate them more.
My thoughts have finally tilted hazy, all blue lights and blurred shapes, when I see her. Ellis Haley has arrived, and she’s brought her new cult in tow: Clara and Kajal and Leonie. None of them dressed for the theme, but somehow they become the knot around which the rest of the party shifts and contorts. I’m no better. I’m staring, too.
Ellis is wearing lipstick for the occasion, a red so dark it’s almost black. It will leave a mark on everything her mouth touches.
Our eyes meet across the room. And for once I’m not even tempted to turn away. I lift my chin and hold her gaze, sharp beneath straight brows, somehow clear despite the empty absinthe glass she holds in hand. I want to crack open her chest and peer inside, see how she ticks.
Then Ellis tilts her head to the side, bending down slightly as Clara rises up to murmur something in her ear. That rope tethered between us draws taut; she doesn’t look away.
But I do, just in time to catch the twist to Clara’s pink lips, the brief and brutal gesture with two fingers: scissors snapping shut.
Something cold plunges into my stomach; even chasing it with the rest of my drink doesn’t thaw the ice. I abandon my empty glass on the table and push my way through the crowd, using elbows where words fail.
I make it all the way outside before lurching forward to spill my guts across the lawn. I’m still gasping, spitting out bile, as someone yells from the porch: “Go to rehab!”
Oh. Right. It’s only nine p.m.
I wipe my mouth on the back of a shaky hand, straighten up, and dart down the walkway toward the quad. I don’t look back. I don’t let them see my face.