I Am Her Revenge

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

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Copyright © 2015 Meredith Moore

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ISBN: 978-0-698-15774-3

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Mom, my best friend and my biggest cheerleader.
I miss you every day.
And for Dad, for being proud of me no matter what.
I love you.

This land is barren
. Windswept. A heavy mist hangs over the earth, shrinking the world to only a few yards of space. I feel as if I have entered an enchanted place. My home in upstate New York was filled with tall pines creaking up toward the sky, lush grass biding its time under blankets of winter snow, houses and concrete and people.

Here, short clumps of green-brown heather cover the ground. Every so often, a tree ekes its way out of the soil, its trunk having curved back toward the land under the pressure of the wind until it stuck that way. It reminds me of a person hanging on to the edge of a cliff, this stubborn clinging to life.

Madigan School, though, doesn’t look like it would bend to any force of wind. Its four buildings are clustered together in a square on top of a hill, surrounded by a high stone wall. The main school building stands tall and proud at the forefront, surveying the wild moors of Yorkshire, England, below it. It’s taller than it is wide, its windows piling on top of each other. The gray stone facade—Georgian, the catalogue called it—only grows larger and more intimidating as the cabdriver and I approach it. If I were to draw it in my secret sketchbook, it would tower over the viewer, immense and imposing.

We wind our way up the hill to campus, and something feels like it’s flipping around in my stomach. This is the scenery of my new life, but it appears to be just as foreboding as my old one. I can picture Mother looking down at me from one of the windows, waiting for me. Lying in wait for me.

The flipping in my stomach intensifies, and I close my eyes and picture myself hidden away in my bedroom at home, up in the attic where Mother rarely ventured. Breathe in, breathe out. I can do this. I have to do this for her. Mother relies on me.

The driver passes through the imposing wrought-iron gate, emblazoned with Madigan School in twisty cursive across its top, and stops the car in front of the main building. He turns in his seat to look at me. “You all right back there?” he asks, his Yorkshire accent so thick that I can barely understand him. But I can still recognize the uncertainty in his voice. He doesn’t know how to deal with a hyperventilating girl.

I calm my breath and put on a dazzling smile. “Just a bit nervous, that’s all,” I simper.

He smiles, relieved. His watery blue eyes stare at me for just a touch too long, and I know I have him. I have nothing in particular to do with him, but this is still reassuring.

There are people milling about the lawn, girls and boys about my age glancing at the car out of the corners of their eyes. As soon as I step out, all of the useless motion stops. People stare. I’ve engineered my appearance for this specific reaction, and Mother will be so pleased that it worked.

I wear the uniform I was required to buy, but I know it looks nothing like anyone else’s. I shortened the red and black plaid skirt and ripped the hem, making it jagged and frayed. I paired it with black tights and sparkly gold ballet flats, to soften the edginess of the skirt. My white shirtsleeves are rolled up to my elbows to show off arms cluttered with bangles: gold and red and black. I’ve bared my throat, having unbuttoned my shirt until you can see just a hint of cleavage, though there’s not much there to show. The pale skin of my neck and the vulnerable cut of my collarbones will be the focal points. I painted on a thin dash of black eyeliner, making my deep blue eyes pop. I skipped the blush and added dark red lipstick to contrast with my pale skin.

My hair, though, my best feature, I’ve left alone. It hangs long and black down to the middle of my back, a thick mass of glossy hair that tempts you to run your fingers through it.

I am irresistible.

And everyone notices it.

As I pass my eyes over the crowd, a slow smirk on my lips, the buzzing starts. Kids turn to each other and ask who I am. I grab my bags from the driver as the girls begin judging my outfit and the boys make bets on who will get me into bed first.

I’m used to it all. During my one year of public school, back home in upstate New York, I showed up as the sweet girl next door at first, the type who wore pale pink cardigans and pearl bracelets. This made some girls want to be my friend, but none of the boys seemed particularly interested. So Mother and I cooked up a new persona: the edgy confident girl. This girl was friendly enough and desirable, but unimpressed with boys who just assumed I would fall all over them. I wore clothes Mother could hardly afford along with my slash of red lipstick. And suddenly everyone was talking about me.

I’m not pretty. My eyes are too wide and my mouth too small. But I’ve learned ways to soften these traits and become something even better than pretty: fascinating. I am someone who earns double glances, someone whose eyes trap you, someone otherworldly. Once Mother had figured out how to alter my uniform to match that captivating quality, she pronounced me perfect.

I pay the driver without giving him a second glance, straighten my shoulders, and march toward the front door. Students move out of my way to let me pass, but no one speaks a word to me, despite the fact that there’s only a slight hint of condescension in my smile.

I open the massive wooden door and enter a foyer with a sumptuous marble floor—white shot through with tendrils of somber gray. A wide slate staircase rises in front of me with depressions in the center of each step, revealing how many thousands of students have traveled on it. The walls are paneled with dark wood, and, despite myself, I let my eyes drift up to the ceiling, several stories above. It has carvings I can’t make out on its white surface.

It’s an entrance designed to awe. I can relate to that.

“Sorry, do you want the admin office?” a small British voice asks.

I snap my eyes back down to find a girl as small as her voice looking at me like I might bite her.

“I just—you’re the new girl? From the States?” she asks, tilting her head to one side as she considers me.

She’s pretty, a blonde ringleted thing in a freshly ironed uniform. The kind who offers everyone genuine friendliness and is probably well liked. Someone I should engage with, not treat with disdain.

I focus on making my eyes light up as I smile widely at her and stick out my hand. “Yes, hi! I’m Vivian,” I say. “And I have no idea where the admin office is.”

She beams back at me, her smile of perfect white teeth stretching even wider than mine. “I’m Claire. Come on, I’ll show you.” She beckons for me to follow her. “I think you’re going to be my roommate?” she says as our footsteps echo down the hall. “Emily used to be, and since you’re replacing her, I guess I have to give up my single.”

Emily. So that’s the name of the girl Mother got rid of so that I could take her spot a month into senior year.

I laugh along with my new roommate at her weak joke, and we stop in front of another heavy wooden door. Its top half is nearly covered by a gold medallion bearing the school’s crest: a torch rising out of an open book. Above it, a marble plaque declares that this is the headmaster’s office.

“Thanks, Claire. See you soon, I guess,” I say before squaring my shoulders and pulling the door open by its oversized brass doorknob.

The room is bare except for a generic painting of a green hill on the back wall and a desk with an expensive laptop and carefully ordered piles of paper. The secretary, a woman with frizzy brown hair and bifocals, looks up sharply when I fling open the door. Her look only intensifies as she takes in my carefully disheveled appearance.

“Vivian Foster.”

I nod. My last name was stolen from the father I never knew so that my name would be different from Mother’s, though she’s never told me what her name is. My fate has been planned since before my birth.

“Your skirt is too short,” the secretary declares, looking me up and down again.

“Oh, is it?” I ask, feigning concern as I look down at my skirt. “I measured it to make sure it would comply with the dress code, two inches above the knee.” I look back at her with horrified pleading in my eyes, hoping she’s the forgiving type.

She purses her lips. Not so forgiving, then.

I straighten, examining her. “Should I get my schedule from you?” I ask, my voice a tiny, meek thing.

The meekness doesn’t seem to appease her. “The headmaster wants to meet you first.” She’s staring at me now like I’m a revolting bit of spoiled fish. I bite my lip, waiting until she finally sighs and presses something on her phone.

“Vivian Foster is here to see you.”

“Send her in,” a gruff voice orders.

The secretary cocks her head toward the headmaster’s office, and I sail past her. It’s time for the true performance.

I widen my eyes into those of a soft, uncertain little girl and walk into an office of dark carved wood and overflowing bookshelves. A bald man sits at a mahogany desk, hunched over a sheaf of papers. Mother drilled me over and over about him, so I know what to expect. George Harriford is forty-seven, divorced, no children. He dreams of being an author and has published a few insipid poems in journals no one has heard of. That sheaf of papers might even be his novel, the opus he’s been working on for more than two decades. The one he’s probably never going to finish. He loves Nabokov, red wine, and complaining about his ex-wife, though how Mother knows that, I have no idea.

“Sir?” I ask, my voice a whisper in this cold space.

He looks up, and his eyes take me in. I press my back against the door, sealing the room off from the prying ears of the secretary.

He gestures for me to sit in one of the red leather seats, and I sink into one, crossing my ankles primly and leaning forward to seem eager. My seat is rather low, and the desk and its occupant loom over me. A bronze bust of Nabokov, with his round face and piercing eyes, rests in one corner, and I feel as if I’m sitting in judgment.

“Miss Foster, I’m Headmaster Harriford. Welcome to Madigan School,” he begins, his squinty brown eyes still locked on me. He’s one of those men who is bald but shouldn’t be—the bulge on the back of his head makes him look somewhat alien, and his forehead towers above his scrunched face.

“Thank you,” I murmur, widening my smile. “It’s kind of intimidating, but I think I’m going to like it here.”

He rushes to assure me that I’ll love it here, that I’ll fit right in, that the students are ever so friendly. I smile at the appropriate moments and twist my hands together to show a nervousness that I no longer feel.

“I’m sure you’re tired after traveling all night, yes?” he asks.

Though my head feels heavy and my eyes threaten to close, I shake my head. “I’d actually love to get to class and meet everyone,” I say, filling my expression with hope and excitement. “I’ve missed a month already, and I don’t want to miss anything else.”

He laughs, utterly charmed. “That’s the kind of enthusiasm we’re looking for in students here at Madigan,” he declares. “If you want to go, I won’t stop you.”

“Thank you so much, Headmaster Harriford.” I bite my lip, as if my excitement is too much to contain. Really, I might be overdoing it. He seems to love it, though.

“Do you have any questions before you go?” he asks, folding his hands over the papers on his desk.

“Just one. Does Madigan have a creative writing club?”

He leans forward. “Are you a writer?” He imbues the word with a sense of reverence, and I smile inwardly.

I try my best to blush as I look down at my hands, but I don’t know if I’m successful. “I’d like to be,” I murmur. “Writing is one of my passions.”

I sneak a glance up through my eyelashes to find him beaming at me. “Well, we have a literary magazine, Open Doors, that’s very well respected. You can ask Ms. Prisby, your English teacher, about joining. They would love to have you.”

“Thank you, Headmaster Harriford.”

He glances at the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner, its face painted with the school crest. “You’d better hurry if you want to make your first class. Ask any of the students the way—we’re very friendly here at Madigan, as I told you. And if you ever have any questions or concerns, you’ll come speak to me, yes?”

I nod, smiling. “I will.”

He sends me back out to the prissy secretary, who sniffs as she hands me the schedule I requested earlier. “You only have a few minutes until the bell,” she declares. “You’d better hurry. Tardiness is not acceptable at Madigan.”

“What should I do with my bags?” I ask, gesturing at the duffels I left in the corner.

“Leave them be. I’ll watch over them until the end of the day, when your roommate will show you to your room.”

I do my best to smile politely at her sneer and head out into the hall. Wooden lockers line the walls, most of them covered with brightly colored signs proclaiming “Go #42!” or the like. Books and papers spill out of every crack, and the marble floor gleams in the bright golden light from the large crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the ornate sconces on the wall. I hold my head high and make my way through this swarming hive of red plaid and shouts and laughter, searching for room 211, where my first class will be: history with Dr. Thompson.

I needed to pick three or four subjects to study at Madigan, since I enter as a sixth former and have to take A-levels at the end of the year. Mother picked English literature for me first, then rounded it out with history and psychology, reasoning that those were the fields I had the most knowledge in and wouldn’t need to spend too much time on.

“You need help?” someone asks as I sidestep sharp elbows and overstuffed book bags. A boy, of course.

I look at him, taking him in with a brief glance. Dull brown eyes, cocky smile. Popular, clearly. It’s in the way he holds himself, feet planted apart as if he wants to take up as much space as possible.

“Where’s room 211?” I ask, my tone curt and unfriendly.

“You know, I don’t like giving directions to pretty girls whose names I don’t know.”

I refuse to play along. “Look, you can help me, or you can get out of my way.”

His cocky smile fades a bit, and he looks at me with even more interest. “One floor up, take a left, third room on the right.”