I Am Her Revenge (4 page)

I must have
fallen asleep, because the next thing I know, I’m startled by some kind of rustling noise, followed by a decisive bang.

“Claire?” I ask, pushing my way out from under the covers. “What’s going on?”

“Come on!” she calls. “Put your coat on. You’re going to miss it!”

I sit up to find her throwing on a pink coat and rubber boots, her eyes shining in the moonlight.

“Just trust me,” she says.

I nearly laugh at that but keep my lips pursed tightly together. I throw the covers off, intrigued, and follow her example, pulling a thin black coat over my white cotton top and black pajama pants. I add a slash of red lipstick, just in case, before Claire ushers me out of the room, a finger to her lips. We tiptoe down the hall to the top of the worn wooden staircase, where a group of seven girls have gathered, crouching and cautious in the moonlight streaming in from the windows. Their faces are pale and shadowed, almost ghoulish, and I swallow a lump in my throat before Claire pushes me forward into them.

“What are we doing?” I whisper. My knee presses against the molding of the wall, painfully, as Claire shoves me back before I can peer down to the bottom of the stairs. Someone steps on my foot, but I can’t turn my head to see who did it.

“Jenkins guards the halls at night,” a girl I don’t know says into my ear. “But she goes out for a smoke break every night at midnight and again at three. So we have a window.”

I give her a slight nod to show that I understand.

There’s a creaking below, and everyone tenses. Then footsteps. A woman, stocky and short, materializes. I can see only her back. She heads for the front door, twisting the knob. Then she’s outside, and the door is closing softly behind her.

At once, everything is motion. We all patter down the stairs, taking a sharp right at the bottom and heading for a door in the back. Then we’re outside and scurrying to the stone wall. The girls line up in front of me, each of them placing their hands and feet in the same well-worn spots as they climb up and over the wall. Claire points the footholds out to me, and I’m soon sitting on the top, staring out at the wide expanse of the moors beyond. The other girls have already clambered gingerly down the other side, but I leap down, landing in a crouch in the mud at the bottom.

We all sprint down the hill. The moon flickers in and out of the clouds, creating vanishing pools of light. The tall wet grass lashes against my ankles, left vulnerable by my tennis shoes. I’ll have to buy rubber boots like Claire’s. The valley below is bare, open to the eyes of the school, but up another hill and into another valley, we are hidden. And we nearly run over a group of a dozen guys.

“You made it!” one calls as we catch our breath.

I look around me, at the girls whose group I’ve somehow joined. We’re a coterie of pajamas and coats and broad smiles. Electric lanterns, the kind used for storms, light the scene, and the light they give off is harsh and white. Many of the girls drop onto the towels the boys have laid out, and I turn to find Ben standing next to me. I nearly recoil.

“Hallo, Viv.”

I do flinch at that. Only one person has ever called me Viv. Only one person is allowed to. I resist the urge to correct him, and glance down to the ground, hoping to look flustered. When I look back up at him, I make myself stare at him like he’s a puzzle I’m trying to figure out. He reflects that same look back at me, and for a moment, we stand there staring at each other. “Hi,” I say, hardly more than a whisper, settling down on the nearest swath of towel. The wet ground seeps through it unpleasantly, but I remain still, my head now bent away from his.

I can feel him stand next to me for a moment, the air around him swirling in confusion, before he moves to sit with his friends across from me.

I learn from snippets of conversation around me that, for some of these kids, this is an almost nightly ritual. They sneak out here to gather for gossip and alcohol and other illicit activities when the boys’ house guard goes out to meet Jenkins at midnight for a nightly smoke break.

“And then he’s always checking the bathroom from three to four,” a friendly, dark-haired boy tells me with a snort, leaning much too far into my personal space. There’s some thread of a joke that I can’t quite catch, and I don’t bother to. I just glance at him, as if I don’t understand why he’s talking to me.

The girl next to me, who would be pretty if not for her over-pronounced nose, introduces herself as Arabella. She has shucked off her coat and sits in nothing but pink silk shorts and a tank top, her freckled skin rising in goose bumps in the cool air. Someone should have told her that redheads shouldn’t wear pink—her face is washed out by the bright color contrast. But by the way the boys and girls buzz around her, I know she’s important. Maybe even the queen bee. “I need to paint my nails neon. Something noticeable, yeah? My Ava recommended it.” This is met with a chorus of nodding heads. As is “Meggie is such a slag. Right? She’ll flirt with anything that walks past her.”

Then, later into the night, she turns to me and says, “New girl.” Her words meld together as if her tongue has grown too large for her mouth. “I don’t know you, but I think I could make a project out of you. If you looked not so—like,
severe
, you would be . . . brilliant, you know?”

I just nod and roll my eyes. She somehow takes this as encouragement and hugs me close to her with one arm.

I stiffen and pull away as soon as I can.

The whole night, as a cloud settles over us—a mixture of fog and cigarette smoke—I pretend to take long pulls from the bottle of rum being passed around and let the boredom show on my face. I’d inadvertently joined a three-hour session of sitting on damp ground, getting drunk, and flirting.

I keep my eyes firmly pointed away from Ben but still try to keep track of his every move. He smokes a joint with his friends but declines the pills being passed around. I listen to his laughter and to the unsubtle attempts of several girls trying to flirt with him.

There’s one girl, though, who plays it a bit smarter than the others, and I’m soon watching her closely. She has long reams of golden hair cascading down her back, which she tosses and twirls in elegant coils with her fingers. She smiles knowing smiles at Ben whenever anyone around them makes a joke, and she keeps making a point of passing him the joint she’s just taken a hit from.

Her efforts pay off toward the end of the night, when she rises and totters to him a touch unsteadily. Then she falls, gracefully, landing neatly in his lap with her arm slung around his shoulders. He looks amused but not surprised to see her there, and when she lifts her lips to his, he complies. But only for a moment. He pulls away with a friendly smile and pats her on the back. Then he looks up. He looks for me. I let him catch me staring.

The coat Mother sent me here with is too thin, and without the warmth of alcohol, I’m shivering. I hug my knees closer to my chest and bury my face in them, breaking my eye contact with Ben. I open my mouth a touch to keep my teeth from chattering and take a few warming breaths.

Suddenly, something heavy is covering my shoulders, settling around me. I twist my neck up to see that Ben has covered me with his coat. He looks down at me, his hazel eyes pale in the moonlight, with nothing but a long-sleeved gray tee and navy pajama bottoms on. The tee is molded to a chest that has more muscles than I would have predicted. I snap my eyes back to his.

“Thank you,” I say softly.

The expression in his eyes is full of something so soft that it takes my breath away.

Our gazes stay locked for a long moment, until finally he nods and steps back. Without a word, he returns to his friends. Everyone is watching us, some more openly than others. Arabella stares at me with an undisguised look of confusion and distrust, and the girl who has been deposed from Ben’s lap is glaring at me with such intense hatred that I half expect my skin will start boiling.

I pull Ben’s coat closer to me. It smells of the sticky sweetness of his joint, but also something spicy, like cologne or shampoo. I have to stifle a sneeze.

Then the pointless conversation of a wasted night resumes around me.

After a while, when I’m sure it must be time to go back to the dorms, the dark-haired boy from earlier nudges my shoulder. “Pretty boring, huh?” he whispers into my ear, his breath reeking of alcohol.

I shrug at him. I haven’t talked to this boy much tonight, but I’ve learned that the others call him G-Man and slap him on the back, laughing heartily at his frequent jokes. He seems pretty popular, though his face is too tiny for his head and his ears stick out.

“I’ve got something that will make it more fun for you, if you’d like.” He opens his hand beneath my gaze, revealing two small white pills on his palm. And suddenly his popularity makes sense.

I snap my eyes to his. “What are they?” I ask, breathless and feminine, as if I don’t know.

“Molly.”

The version of Ecstasy that’s so popular at ritzy boarding schools. Perfect. I open my hand for him to drop those little illicit pills into. “I think I’ll save them for a rainy day,” I murmur, letting my arm brush against his. I lean even closer to him, my breath caressing his ear as I whisper, “Can I come to you for more?”

He looks into my eyes, suspicion touching his gaze. But I give him my most innocent, admiring expression and watch as the suspicion fades. “I’m your guy,” he says, his voice artificially low. “I’ve got anything you could need: Adderall, Oxy, name it. Everything to make boarding school in the middle of fucking nowhere bearable.”

I beam at him and settle back. Across the circle, Ben is watching me. I wonder what he thinks of me, though it’s easy enough to read the curiosity in his eyes.

Finally, everyone checks their watches and stands up, gathering the soaked towels and laughing their last laughs. It’s time for the next covert operation.

I walk slowly to Ben, shrugging his coat off of my shoulders and holding it out to him. I say nothing as he takes it, but I meet his eyes, letting my gaze linger there. He nods, pulling the coat on over his snug T-shirt, and I bite my lip as I turn away and follow the crowd.

The boys turn the storm lanterns off, so we are shrouded once more in darkness, the moon now secreted away behind a cloud. The fog has grown thicker than I thought, and I stumble forward, trying to keep up with the group of whispering girls in front of me. I feel as if I would disappear if I lost them and become swallowed up by this strange place.

As we climb the hill to the back of the school, our figures cutting through the fog, a tall, dark figure begins to take shape above us. It’s not until we can almost touch it that I realize it’s a person. A few girls squeak as they catch sight of the shadow, until a young guy steps out into a sudden patch of moonlight. Then everyone around me relaxes.

He stands in front of me. Broad shoulders and tousled dark hair. I can make out the chiseled cheekbones and square jaw in the pale moonlight. Something about him—there is something . . . .

Arabella pulls me past him just as I’m opening my mouth to say something to him. I swivel my head to keep my eyes on his, and his follow me. Those eyes. They are the darkest and deepest ones, the ones that know how to see the insides of my soul.

“We don’t speak to the help, silly,” Arabella tells me while we’re still in earshot. I wince for him.

The fog has now cloaked him behind us, as if he were never there at all. “Who is he?” I ask, when breath returns to my body. Though I know. I already know.

“Just Tom, the gardener. He’s fit, yeah, but not socially acceptable. It’d be death to your reputation if you dated him.”

It can’t be. It can’t be him.

But it is. I saw it in his eyes.

We make it over the wall and into the building just as Jenkins steps out for her second nightly vice and creep into our rooms.

“Wasn’t that brilliant?” Claire asks, her eyes shining brightly. She stumbles a bit as she crashes toward her bed.

I nod. Nothing will come out of my throat.

As soon as Claire stops babbling and snaps her light off, I burrow into the covers, my eyes wide open. All I can see is him. Boy. The only person allowed to call me Viv. The one who used to be my only friend in the world.

I don’t fall
asleep until just before dawn, but my dreams swirl with him.

I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen. But now he’s here. He found me in the dark corners of the night and stared into my soul with those eyes. How can he be here?

I can’t focus on anything all day. I drift through my classes, enduring people’s stares and attempts at friendliness.

I tell Claire I’ll meet her for lunch in the dining hall, but as soon as the midday bell rings, I hurry out into the open air. I see the gardener’s shed just behind Rawlings: a shack made of wide wood planks with one smudged window, which must be where he lives. I find him standing outside it, just as I knew I would. He’s waiting for me.

My eyes catch his as soon as I have him in sight.

As I walk hesitantly toward him, I let myself examine his face: so strange and so familiar, all in one stroke. The high cheekbones, the warm skin, the sinfully long lashes—all features he inherited from a Native American mother who left him with his father when he was four years old.

Now he’s beautiful and terrifying all at once. And he’s older, of course. Bigger, stronger, and more world-weary, somehow. He wears jeans and a black jacket that matches the raven black of his hair, even darker than my own. He stands with his feet planted firmly, waiting for me to come to him. Like I’m prey that he’s luring.

“Why are you here?” I ask once I stand before him.

At the sound of my voice, there’s a flash of something in his eyes. Something like pain. “I knew that your mother would send you here to find him. I got this job a couple of years ago.” He’s watching me so closely. “I was waiting for you.”

It takes a worrisome amount of strength for me to turn my face away, but once I manage to, I scan the windows of Rawlings Hall, making sure no one is looking out at us. “You’ve come to stop me?” I ask softly.

“Yes.” His voice is lower than the last time I heard it. And more powerful. He must be twenty now, and a man.

I bite my lip. “You can’t. I’m a weapon.” He knows this. He knows everything about me. Just as I thought I knew everything about him. I’m the one who gave him his name, after all.

Boy, or so Mother called him, was the son of the man who always helped Mother. Helper, as I named him in my head, had been attached to Mother since as long as I could remember. I used to think he was my father, actually, but when I called him that, Mother laughed her winter chill laugh and declared me an idiot.

Boy and his father lived in the guesthouse in our backyard. Boy was three years older than me but never went to school. I taught him how to read and write as I learned it, but we had to do it secretly. Mother had forbidden it. Boy was her servant, was made to cook meals and take care of the house and the yard.

Helper was used for other things that I never quite comprehended. He would often be gone for weeks at a time, coming home to enclose himself in a room with Mother and have whispered conversations.

Eventually I came to understand that Helper was part of Mother’s plan and was the only man she ever trusted. Their relationship was a strange one, filled with silent glances and mystifying words. It was as if they spoke a different language, one I had no hope of deciphering. Helper never smiled. I took that as a warning.

When we were young, maybe around nine and twelve, Boy and I changed his name to Arthur. But it was a secret, something to whisper and guard. We decided on it when I told him the origin of my own name.

“Vivian is one of the names of the Lady of the Lake in the stories about King Arthur,” I recited as Mother had taught me. “But it’s also sometimes what they called the enchantress who destroyed the greatest sorcerer of all, Merlin. That’s the Vivian I’m named for. Merlin fell in love with her and told her all of his secrets, revealed all of his magic. She used it to weaken him and trap him in a tree.”

“She sounds cruel,” Boy said. We were in our usual hiding spot behind his guesthouse. Boy leaned against the fence, crossing his arms as he watched me. I remember the smell of the soil and the first buds of the gardenias that Mother loved, their perfumed scent waxing and waning with the breeze.

“She’s as cruel as I’m meant to be,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Mother always says that all’s fair in love and war.” She would say it with perfect bitterness, spitting the words out with a vehemence I didn’t understand.

Boy’s deep brown eyes watched me. “I have no name,” he pointed out. “I have no example to follow.”

“Whose example do you want to follow?”

He stopped, considering that. He looked down at his hands, the lines in his palms caked with dirt, then looked back up, his face bright and hopeful. “Someone strong. And brave. And nice.”

“You should be a leader,” I told him. “You should be Arthur.” Arthur, I explained, was the king of Britain and the flower of chivalry. He represented everything that was good and true.

All men were evil if you didn’t control them completely, as Mother controlled Helper. I knew that, even then.

But I couldn’t quite put Boy in that category. Boy wasn’t the enemy. The enemy wouldn’t sneak flowers from the garden into my room because he knew I liked the way they lit up the gloom. The enemy wouldn’t smile with such pure joy when he finally read a paragraph out loud without stumbling over the words. The enemy wouldn’t be the one bright bolt of light in my world.

“Arthur,” Boy repeated, savoring it.

And from then on, the name was his.

Now, at Madigan, he crouches down a bit to look me in the eye. He’s searching for something, but I don’t know if he can find it anymore. “What has she told you about any of this? Has she told you
why
you’re supposed to ruin his life?”

“I told you everything. You know everything I know.” I snap my lips back together to stop the stream of words that threaten to come pouring out.

“I want to hear you explain it now that you’ve met him. I want you to say it out loud.”

I shouldn’t play along with his game. But he’s the boy who always understood me. I want to make him understand me now. So I begin at the beginning. “Ben’s father, William Collingsworth, broke Mother’s heart. He was her first love, and he used her. He drew her into his world when they were teenagers and then just pushed her out of it when he found some other girl. Mother went back to New York, to the city. She was heartbroken and desperate, so she tried to lose herself in the crowds, in whatever made her feel less alone. When she got pregnant from some worthless one-night stand, I was the only thing she had. Her father had died when she was little, and then her mother died in a car accident, leaving her the house upstate but almost nothing else.”

He bites the inside of his lip as if he wants to say something, but decides not to, taking a deep breath. Instead, he asks, “But why
couldn’t
she have been happy? Why couldn’t she have found a job, raised you, lived a normal life?”

I stare at him, at his furrowed brow and piercing brown eyes. He doesn’t understand at all.

“Don’t you see how twisted she is?” he continues, his voice wavering somewhere between desperation and amusement. “How insane?”

I step back from him. “She deserves her revenge. He broke her heart, so now she’ll break his.”

He steps forward, destroying the space I’d put between us. Those brown eyes are cold and serious again. “By using you. By controlling your life.”

“She’s given me everything. I owe her
everything
.” I’ve leaned too close to him, and I pull back, straightening my shoulders. I remember what I am.

I am seventeen and enchanting and poised to destroy.

Soon after Mother had me, she learned that William and his wife, the girl he left her for, had had a son named Ben. So she came up with a way to rip apart the seams of time and relive the past. This time, though, she would be the victor.

Like a Siren from the Greek myths Mother made me read, I will seduce Ben to my side. I will make him fall in love with me, and then I’ll wrap him around my finger and snap his heart in two, until he is broken completely. And his father will know my mother’s wrath.

Mother has become a mere fragment of a person because Collingsworth broke her. Countless nights I would hear her keening wail behind the locked door of her bedroom. I would stand at the door, helpless. She needs revenge, craves it with an intensity that only destructive love can muster. I have to do this for her.

Starting when I was very young, she taught me how to flirt. How to captivate. A boy was an easy target, she taught me. A being swayed by desires that she understood completely. If I learned how to manipulate those desires, I could make any boy my slave.

And I must never become a victim of love. Love dismantles you. I’ll never let it break me apart.

Not again, at least.

Arthur knows all of this, because I told him. Back when we were friends. And then something more.

The way he examines me now, though, it’s like he doesn’t even know me. “What changed you?” he asks.

“I haven’t changed.”

For a moment—just a moment—there is a flicker of inexpressible sadness in his eyes. Of grief. I blink, and it’s gone.

Arthur puts his hands in his pockets, his old tell. He always used to do that when he had something to say but was thinking of just the right way to say it. He wasn’t allowed to speak in front of Helper or Mother, so when he was allowed to talk, with me, he would take time with his words. Make them count.

“You can control yourself.”

I shake my head. “I can’t disappoint her.”

“I won’t let you hurt him, then.”

There’s a sudden rustling behind me, and I turn, my hand encircling my throat. But it’s only a black bird hurtling into the air from the ground. When I turn back to Arthur, he raises his eyebrows at me. I’m not usually so skittish. I’m not afraid of anything.

“Have you met him?” I ask, taking a deep breath and making sure my face is wiped of emotion.

He knows who I mean. “I’ve seen him.”

I pause, trying to find a way to frame my question.

But he answers it before I can ask. “He doesn’t deserve to be destroyed.” His cold voice is an admonition.

“You can’t know that.” I look him right in the eye when I say it, but I see no doubt on his face. His deep brown eyes bore into mine.

“I can. His dad may be an asshole, but Ben doesn’t deserve the things you’re capable of.”

I flinch at his harsh words, at the way he growls them. This warrior in front of me is part of the new, unfamiliar side of him. “Why do you call yourself Tom here?”

“Because it’s common. No one takes notice of a gardener named Tom.” He pauses, watching me. “And because I’m not Arthur anymore.” He steps closer to me, suffocatingly close. So close that the world around us fades into dull brown murmurs.

“Who are you?” I ask in a choked whisper. I feel myself leaning forward, closer to him, until I feel the warmth radiating from him. I crane my neck further so that I can keep my eyes on him. He is so tall now. It thrills me.

He shakes his head slightly. “Viv, don’t you see what she’s turned you into? You have to get rid of her.”

I step back, and the spell is broken. The world is back. “She’s all I have.” I make the words cold, hard, unyielding.

That stops him, makes him look down at the ground.

My mouth opens before I can help it. “You left me.” My voice has morphed into something wild, broken. I’ve never heard it this way. I stumble back, creating even more distance between us. “You left me,” I repeat.

He doesn’t look back up at me. “I had to.”

I turn, walk away a few steps, turn back. “I need to accomplish my task. You can either help me, or you can stay out of my way.”

The determination in my tone makes his neck jerk up, his eyes meeting mine again. I see then that I am unfamiliar to him, too, and that gives me strength. I lift my head high and walk back to the dining hall. By the time I reach it, I’m trembling.