I Am Her Revenge (2 page)

I push past him without a word. I hope I’ve made him curious, because if he’s curious, he’ll talk about me.

I make it to 211 just as the bell rings and the hallways empty out. I stand for a moment in the doorway as everyone stares. Dr. Thompson, a grizzled man in his late sixties, nods at me. “Vivian Foster, everyone. Introduce yourselves individually later. Vivian, sit down in the front here next to Claire.”

The blonde girl from earlier, my new roommate, waves at me, smiling hopefully as I slide into the wrought-iron desk next to hers, its wooden surface polished and shiny. I learned last year that only overachievers sit in the front row. It looks like I pegged Claire in the right slot.

The class is studying the Italian Renaissance, something I know plenty about. Lucrezia Borgia is one of Mother’s role models, and I learned everything about her world as a consequence. She was the illegitimate daughter of a pope, and it’s rumored that she poisoned those who got in her powerful family’s way.

I remember Mother telling me about her and all of the terrible things that she supposedly did. “She did what she could for her family. Nothing is more important than family,” Mother said, concluding the lesson. She rested a hand lightly on my shoulder, and there was almost something like a smile on her face as she looked into my eyes. I find myself nodding at the memory. You have to do whatever you can for your family. It’s the only thing that matters in this world. It’s the only bond that lasts.

I zone out, and my eyelids grow heavy. I jab my pen into the palm of my hand every few minutes to stay awake until the bell finally rings and I can head to English literature.

Which is much more interesting. Because it’s there that I first see him.

I notice him
almost as soon as I walk into the room. He sits in the back of the classroom with the other confident kids, and his golden popularity shines through every pore. He wears the required boys’ uniform: gray slacks, white shirt, black blazer with the school crest on its lapel, and red and black plaid tie. His tie is loosened and his shirt is wrinkled, but somehow he looks more insouciant than sloppy. He leans back in his chair like a king on his throne with an easy, self-assured smile. As soon as I spot him, it’s as if the whole room starts spinning, revolving around him. Everyone’s waiting to see what he’ll do next. He is the center of everything.

I feel my breath stutter in my chest, and I know this is the beginning.

I only let myself glance at him, my eyes slithering over him in an open show of indifference as I sink into a chair in the middle of the room. I turn my back toward him coldly, hoping he notices.

My pulse races, ripping through my skin. My breathing grows shallower, and I take a few deep breaths to regulate it. I keep my spine straight and proud and focus my attention on the twenty-something woman at the front of the class.

“Who’s the new girl?” a boy—him?—asks behind me.

Another boy laughs. “No idea, mate. She’d look good in my bed, though.”

The first boy, the boy who has to be him, answers with a hefty dose of disgust. “Try not to be such a wanker all the time, Liam.”

I cling to that, the voice of the boy who has drawn me to him.

The teacher, Ms. Prisby, clears her throat. “All right, everyone, we’ve got a new student. Vivian Foster, yeah?”

I nod slightly.

“Well, good, then. I’m sure we’ll do our very best to welcome you to Madigan. We’ve been reading Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ Have you read it?”

“Yes.” Of course I have. Mother made sure I read everything on the syllabus before I got here. But I knew this poem long before that, and the story behind it. In the poem, the lady will be cursed if she looks down on Camelot, so she spends her days weaving a tapestry and watching a magic mirror that shows her events of the world outside. It’s only when she sees Lancelot in that mirror and hears his voice below her tower that she looks down, and in doing so, she has to sacrifice her own life, putting herself in a boat that carries her dead body down to Camelot. When she’s found, all Lancelot says about her is “She has a lovely face.”

The Arthurian legend the poem is probably based on is even more pathetic. Elaine of Astolat develops a crush on Lancelot, nursing him after he’s injured in a tournament. But his heart belongs to Guinevere, and he leaves Elaine, who is so distraught that she boards a boat and dies of a broken heart. The ending is much the same, with Lancelot simply paying for her funeral. Hardly caring about her at all.

Ms. Prisby’s voice calls me back to the present. “Then you can jump right in.” She offers me a smile briefly, before it falters under the weight of my disdain, the disdain that only she can see. She looks back at her book, suddenly unsure. She’s young, not much older than I am. She’s almost too easy a mark.

“Right, well, we’re looking at the theme of art in isolation versus art that confronts the real world,” she says, continuing on to point out that the lady creates a wonderful tapestry when alone, but once she looks down to Camelot, her loom breaks, and all of her artistic talent is forfeited.

I keep my head down, scribbling nonsense in my notebook and trying to sort out my first impressions of the boy and what his first impressions of me might be.

He has light blond hair that curls slightly at the ends, making him look boyish. His eyes are warm and brown-green and observant. His jaw is square and firm. He’s attractive, the kind of boy teenage girls hang posters of in their rooms.

And he’s noticed me. He’s maybe even already attracted to me, or maybe he just doesn’t like the way his friend speaks about women. I’m not yet different enough from the girls who must throw themselves at him daily.

As soon as the bell rings, the other kids jump out of their chairs and dive into the hall. It’s the last class before lunch, and everyone seems to be in a hurry to eat.

I take my time, gathering my notebook and stretching my long legs before standing up. The boy and his cronies are taking their time, too, watching me.

When he walks up beside me before I reach the door, I’m prepared.

“Hey,” he says, placing a strong hand on my shoulder to stop me. “I’m Ben.”

I turn to find him beaming a wide, confident smile at me. He’s a bit taller than I am and much broader, with the body of an athlete. His nose is crooked, as if it’s been broken before. Probably playing sports; he seems too affable and easygoing to get in a fistfight. There’s no coiled spring behind his eyes, the sure sign of a hothead.

I expect him to let those hazel eyes drift down and back up my body, but he doesn’t. He keeps them on mine. “I know it, uh, has to be difficult being the new girl, but I wanted to offer my help. You know, if you have questions or anything.”

I raise my eyebrows, trying not to show how my thoughts are scrambling. I thought he would be cocky, maybe give me a pickup line, something I could decline with derision to show how different I am. To make him want me even more.

I can’t reject him, not when he’s being kind and considerate. And I can’t fall all over him. So I take a gamble, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear in a show of self-consciousness. “Thanks,” I say, my voice small and shy, before turning and hurrying out the door.

I spend lunch exploring the main building, too tired to face a room full of my peers. The dining hall, a few lockers, and the administration offices that I visited earlier take up the first floor. The next four floors are made up of unending hallways of sameness: lockers and classroom doors and slightly scuffed floors.

I head for the top story, hoping for a view. For a new perspective on this place I’ve come to. And I’m not disappointed.

There are a few classrooms up here, but almost half of the floor is taken up by a room with a marble sign above the doorway, the words “Student Lounge” carved into it. I peek in and see only a couple of girls reading in armchairs in one corner, so I walk inside. I throw the girls polite but uninterested smiles and head for the wall of windows opposite.

I can see the whole of the hilltop below, with three large gray stone buildings that form a quadrangle with this one, a courtyard in the middle. The courtyard is cluttered with wrought-iron benches and gas lampposts and a few ornamental trees. They stand stubby and straight, but only because there are ropes on each side of them tying them to the ground. Otherwise, I’m sure they would be like the trees I saw on the way in: curved and bent, but not yet defeated by the force of the wind.

I can’t see much beyond the high stone wall that surrounds the campus, though the fog from this morning has dissipated a bit. Up here it feels as if I’m in a dome, as if I’m cut off from the world outside. I watch a few students meander along the courtyard paths, flickering in and out of sight beneath the branches of the trees below, but I’m too high up to recognize any of them from the bustling halls. I wish I had a pencil and paper so I could draw them, show them as they really are. They are mere ants, waiting to be stepped on.

A giggle from one of the girls behind me breaks me from my reverie, but when I look back, she’s pointing to something in her book, sharing a harmless joke with her friend.

The rest of the lounge is like an overgrown living room, muddled with brown leather couches, overstuffed armchairs, a few dark wooden tables, and tall brass lamps. The walls are lined with rich crimson wallpaper, and a thick golden-hued carpet covers the floor. A daunting stone fireplace takes up most of one wall, a fire crackling in its mouth. I examine the books in the low bookshelves that line one of the walls, dragging a finger along their cracked spines. There are beautiful volumes by Dickens and the Brontë sisters and Shakespeare and the like. Yearbooks dating back to 1947 rest on the bottom shelf.

I take one last look at the room before I have to head to psychology. If I had that pencil and paper, I would sketch the air here, the feeling of this place. It is warmth and ease and the sharp scent of money.

After I suffer through psychology, where the teacher drones on about human behavior experiments I already know, I go back to the administration office to find Claire waiting with my bags. “I was right,” she says brightly when she sees me. “You
are
my new roommate.”

I nod, forcing a smile onto my face.

Claire picks up one of my bags, the heavier one. “Come on,” she says, “I’ll show you our room, roomie.” She nudges my arm, inviting me to laugh along with her.

I follow her with the lighter bag through the wood-and-marble hallways to the back entrance of the school. We step out into the chilly early October air, and I look for the details that I missed from my vantage point in the lounge. The hilltop the school sits on is not very wide, and it’s covered in short brown grass and mud that squelches underneath our shoes. The sidewalks between the buildings are red cobblestone, with large gaps between the bricks and a healthy covering of mud. The gas lamps lining the walk are already lit, their flames dancing in glass cages.

“Boys’ house,” Claire says, pointing to the building on the left, which has the name Rawlings Hall etched over its small portico. “And our house.” She points to the one on the right, Faraday Hall. Both are built from the same rough-cut gray stone blocks that make up the main building, with ivy grasping onto their sides, reaching nearly up to the top floors. Ebony-trimmed windowpanes peek out through the ivy, several of them glowing with soft lamplight.

The building directly opposite us completes the quadrangle. It’s almost as large as the main building, with a set of wide stone steps leading up to a pair of wooden doors that seem much too large for one person to open by herself. Ornate Corinthian columns line the porch that spans the entire front of the building, and I realize that it’s the only structure on campus that is untouched by ivy. It’s too grand to be covered. “Canton Library,” Claire says, noticing my gaze. She stops in the middle of the courtyard, forcing everyone else to stream past us. “Madigan has one of the most extensive book collections of any secondary school in England. Canton is a good place to study.”

I nod and hitch the duffel bag from my hand to my shoulder.

Everything is clustered together on top of this hill. It doesn’t seem enough space for the hundreds of students and teachers who live and work here. When I remember that just beyond the rough gray stones of the ten-foot wall surrounding us there are brown moors stretching for miles, the tightness in my chest loosens.

“The playing fields are down at the bottom of the hill off the right side, closest to our house, out the back gate,” she tells me. “What sports do you play?”

“None,” I answer. Mother got me out of Madigan’s athletic requirement by telling the administrators something about a heart condition. “I’m not really a sporty person.”

“I play lacrosse in the summer term, but I work for the newspaper this term,” Claire offers, her voice rising at the end to make it more of a question, the way most of her sentences end. It’s like she wants to make sure what’s she saying is acceptable.

I nod as if I’m interested, but say nothing, and we remain silent as we cross the rest of the yard.

We enter Faraday, my new home. As soon as we set foot on the worn brown wood floors, I hear a symphony of girls’ laughs and shouts and conversations. The hallways are dim, their navy-wallpapered walls lit mostly by the lights shining from the open doors of the bedrooms. Girls tumble in and out of these rooms, everyone friendly and happy. Most have changed out of their uniforms now that the school day is over, and though some are in sweatshirts, most have covered themselves in skinny jeans and soft cashmere and wool sweaters or brightly colored silk tops. They dance by us like exotic birds, leaving us in clouds of their cloying perfumes, most of them smiling at Claire and offering me a tentative “Hi.”