I Am Her Revenge (8 page)

With Arabella as
my new enemy, my life at Madigan changes considerably over the next week, just as Mother wanted. Girls I don’t know glare at me. Boys look at me more curiously, trying to make sense of the girl whom the queen bee suddenly hates so much. They don’t understand girl drama, but it intrigues them.

I hope it intrigues Ben, too. I get glimpses of him in the hallway, and he catches my eye once when I perfectly match my walk across the courtyard with his return from rugby practice with his friends. But it’s still impossible to get him alone.

It’ll be easiest to do on a weekend, when everyone is more scattered, with time and more room to roam. On the last Saturday of October, I wake up early and watch for him in the dining hall. I sit over my desiccated grapefruit half for two hours before he shows up, bleary-eyed and disheveled. He greets his friends with a rueful smile and a high five. A reference to some female conquest, maybe? Or simply a wild night?

I wait for him to finish breakfast, then I slip out of the dining hall before he can, making sure he doesn’t notice me. I’m supposed to be the hunted, not the hunter.

There’s a hint of chill in the air, and the morning mist has only just begun clearing. I position myself on a bench outside the boys’ house and already have my copy of Tennyson in hand when he comes outside. I pretend to be absorbed in the pages, but I watch him. He stops when he sees me, considering me. Then he continues sauntering toward me.

“I thought you’d already read Tennyson’s poetry,” he says without preamble.

I look up, feigning confusion. As if he has plucked me out of the world I was immersed in and pulled me back into this one. “Sorry?”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other before answering. “In class, you said, uh, that, you know, you’d read his poetry already.” He was paying attention. Good.

“I have,” I say. “But I reread it every chance I get. Because every time I do, it makes me mad all over again.”

“You read a poem because it makes you
mad
?” he asks with his eyebrows raised and a hint of a smile.

“Yeah,” I answer with a small smile of my own. I look back down at my book. “It’s just that the story it’s based on, Elaine of Astolat, is so infuriating.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s . . . romantic.”

I snort, genuinely amused. “You would.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks. He takes my little jab as an invitation and settles down next to me, stretching his long legs into my personal space. I let him. It’s the first time I’ve really allowed myself to examine his face, his expressions. His hazel eyes with flecks of green and brown glance at me warmly. His smile, which he turns to me now, is wide and inviting. “Why’s that?”

I shift, turning to face him. He responds, leaning in a little closer. “Because you’re the nice guy. The good guy. The type who likes damsels in distress.”

His lips quirk up even more. “What makes you think that?” he asks.

I shrug. “Just a hunch.”

“I like it because the girl can’t help falling in love.”

“Yeah, and it destroys her. She sacrifices her life for some guy who hardly has any idea she exists. Who’s so wrapped up in his own drama that he can’t be bothered with her. It’s pathetic.”

I stop, remembering suddenly why I read this poem and learned the story behind it so long ago. It was Arthur’s recommendation. He loved Tennyson and spent hours trying to convince me to love his poetry, too. He thought I would be inspired by the intense imagery in it. And I was, but this poem unsettled me so much that I threw the book at the wall in disgust the first time I read it.

I grit my teeth, refocusing my attention back on Ben. “Have you seen the John William Waterhouse painting of ‘The Lady of Shalott’?”

“No,” he answers, shaking his head. But there’s a look of fascination and curiosity on his face. He’s hanging on my every word.

“It’s insulting. It shows this stereotypical damsel in distress. She’s in her boat, looking down toward Camelot, her mouth open in desperation. Waiting for some man to come rescue her. She just sits there, inviting the male gaze.”

“The male gaze?” he asks.

“Yeah, you know, the film and art concept? That women in portraits aren’t looking out at the viewer; they’re there to be looked
at
. They’re objects of beauty, put on display for the male viewer. Ridiculous.”

Ben smiles, looking at me as if he’s never seen me before. As if he doesn’t know what to do with me. My cheeks are flushed from my vehemence, I know. My wide blue eyes are sparking, catching the fire from my cheeks. I’m beautiful, in my own strange way.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just that I don’t like weak women who let men destroy them and don’t even protest.”

“Lancelot does destroy Elaine,” Ben says finally. “But she’s not, you know, she’s not weak. She’s in despair. To think that your true love is unrequited—it has to hurt.”

“She should have hurt him the way he hurt her,” I counter.

He shakes his head. “No, she loves him. She could never hurt him, no matter what he’s done to her. You can never hurt someone you once loved.” He’s looking deep into my eyes, like he’s searching for a sign that I understand him. Like he
needs
me to understand him.

I think of Mother and Ben’s father, how her love for him turned into anger and hatred. What would Ben think of that? I stand up, suddenly unsettled.

“Look up Waterhouse’s painting. You’ll understand what I’m talking about.”

Before he can say anything, I walk away, leaving him in the morning mist.

It’s best to leave him wanting more, anyway, I tell myself. I’m not running away.

I never felt unsettled seducing Ethan, the public school boy Mother had designated as a practice target and the whole reason I went to school at all last year. Like Ben, he was the king of the class, with floppy hair and a braying laugh. But he was conceited, full of himself, obsessed with his image. He fell for the slightly edgy, confident girl gambit and sought me out, pulling me into janitor’s closets and empty classrooms as if I was his to steal away. To make him feel more than lust for me, I began a complex maneuver of avoiding him and then drawing him in, showing him a vulnerable side. He vowed that we were meant to be together, that he loved me. When I laughed off his confession and told him that I’d only been playing a game, he mooned around my locker for months, trying to get me to talk to him. His status fell dramatically when people found out he was heartsick over a girl who thought she was too cool for him.

Ben isn’t like Ethan, that much is clear. But my new persona will draw him in just the same. It will be easy.

I keep repeating that to myself as I hurry away from him.

No one seems to have heard about my strange conversation with Ben. I have no doubt that if they had, that bit of news about Arabella’s new enemy cozying up to the golden boy would be flinging itself around the school. I refuse to look at anyone as I walk down the halls. I know they don’t know what to think of me, and I’ll have to do something further to ignite their curiosity. Keeping myself in their conversations will help keep me in Ben’s thoughts, too.

At my old school, I let everyone assume I was into drugs, which gave me a certain helpful notoriety. But it wasn’t enough, because there were plenty of druggies. And considering the number of pills, joints, and packets of powder I saw G-Man distributing during the nighttime escape, that wouldn’t be enough here, either.

I become more inventive. On Monday evening, I use the footholds in the stone walls surrounding the campus and climb up to the top, nearly twice my height above the ground. The top of the wall is only about a foot wide, the surface of the stones smooth and slippery, but I saunter along it confidently, a book in my hand, seemingly too absorbed in it to notice the stares of all the students streaming out of the dining hall after dinner. Over the next two weeks, as October fades into November, I bring my sketchbook with me everywhere and for the first time start drawing in public. I draw in the dining hall, in the courtyard, in the student lounge. I even join the popular crowd in a few late-night sneak-outs, and after giving the barest of shy smiles to Ben, I slip away, climbing a nearby tree and sketching by flashlight until it’s time to sneak back in.

All of what I do is intriguing and confident, with only the slightest show of a vulnerable side to Ben. I make no more moves to encounter him alone. He’ll have to seek me out himself.

One Friday afternoon,
nearly two weeks since I spoke to Ben, I’m sneaking behind the residence halls to head off to my cottage as the late fall wind grows icier and angrier. Suddenly, there’s a heavy footstep behind me. I whirl to find Arthur, covered in mud and dirt and holding a shovel, his eyes almost amused as he looks at me. It’s a cold amusement, though. Everything about him now is cold.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “Are you running off to get caught in the rain again?”

“It’s not going to rain today.” I try to sound confident, but I look up at the sky. The clouds are white and unthreatening.

“Weather here is unpredictable. Don’t expect me to come after you if you get lost again.” He leans on the shovel, the corded muscles in his arms supporting his weight.

I flick my eyes back up to his and laugh, and the brittleness of it reminds me of Mother. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say dryly. “You’ve made it very clear that you hate me now.” I move to step around him, longing to be safe in my cottage, hidden from this world. From him.

He puts a hand on my arm, stops me. “Do you remember?” he whispers.

I shiver at the pressure of his breath in my ear and close my eyes. I stay still. His hand still grazes my arm, I’m so close to him. I can smell him, his scent of grass and soil, a scent that calms me and electrifies me all in one thrilling moment. And I remember.

When I was fourteen and Arthur was seventeen, something changed between us. It was subtle at first: We would hold each other’s gazes just a touch too long, or our hands would brush against one another and skitter away. Soon, though, the change became all-consuming, choking the air between us.

We spent more and more time together, seizing any moment that we could escape our parents. One day, Arthur pulled me to our spot, out of sight behind the little house he and his father shared. It was dusk, just before dinner, and the fading light left us in shadow as we hid between the brick walls of his house and the prickly hedge. He placed a gentle hand on my cheek, and I looked up at him with an emotion I still can’t name.

Slowly, he bent toward me, his eyes locked on mine, making sure I was okay. I closed my eyes, and soon I felt his lips brush over mine, whisper-soft. It was my first kiss, and it felt like the sparks of a fire, setting me aflame. When I opened my eyes, I saw the stunned expression on his face, the one that must have mirrored my own.

He held my hand until we were back in sight of the main house, and I felt as if I was floating up with the clouds, even as I bid him goodbye. I looked up at the door of the house, dreading going inside. I tried my best to compose my features and get through dinner with Mother without revealing the excitement bubbling inside me. I could hardly look at her, but she didn’t notice.

Arthur and I spent the next few weeks in a golden fog, secreting ourselves away in the spot behind his house whenever we could and kissing each other like we could make the whole world disappear.

One afternoon, instead of taking me into his arms and kissing me, he looked at me with the most serious and hopeful expression I had ever seen on anyone before. “I have to tell you,” he began, looking down at the ground and then back up at me. “I have to tell that I love you.”

I closed my eyes, absorbing his declaration. And then I opened them and smiled the most brilliant, shining smile. “I love you, too,” I whispered, the truest words I’d ever spoken. I loved him. I stood there and offered him my entire heart.

I couldn’t sleep at all that night, too afraid that the moment I closed my eyes, that afternoon would become nothing more than a dream. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind, committing to memory the look in his eyes as he gazed into mine. The way he brushed the dirt off his hands before he touched me. The press of his lips on mine.

That next morning I tripped down to breakfast, hoping to hurry through the meal with Mother so that I could find Arthur and kiss him again.

Mother was waiting for me in the breakfast room, buttering a piece of toast. “No prepared breakfast this morning,” she told me. “Boy ran away. Helper says he packed up all his things and left in the middle of the night.” Her voice didn’t hold her usual amount of ice. It confused me so much that I had trouble processing her words.

“He’s . . . gone?” I asked.

She nodded, still focused on her piece of toast.

“But, he can’t—he can’t be gone,” I sputtered out before clamping down on my words. I wasn’t supposed to care, I reminded myself. I was supposed to think of Boy as less than human, the way Mother treated him.

It was too late, though. Her gaze snapped to mine, and then the strangest thing happened. Those gray eyes looked at me not with wrath, but with something more like pity, maybe even empathy. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t deny it. And I couldn’t admit to it either. I said nothing, but I couldn’t hide the misery on my face.

He had left me. He’d run away, just like he’d always planned, but he hadn’t taken me with him. He didn’t care about me at all.

“I told you what would happen if you let love overpower you,” Mother said softly, rising from the table. “He didn’t
care
about you. He ran away to escape you.”

I didn’t know if it was the softness of her tone or my lack of sleep, but suddenly I was crying. I hadn’t cried in front of her in years, but now I couldn’t stop.

Through the blur of my tears, I saw her step toward me, and then she enveloped me in her arms. “I am so sorry,” she murmured. “I never wanted you to go through what I went through.”

I clung to her for what felt like hours, until the very last tear had dried on my cheek. I could count on one hand the number of times Mother had hugged me, and all had been because we were in public. This time, though, she hugged me because she cared. Because she knew the blinding pain that I felt.

“Take your time,” she cooed softly, pushing me back so she could look in my eyes. “Get over this heartbreak. And when you’re ready, I will teach you how to be strong.”

I hid in my room and cried for days. How could he have left me? Had he been lying when he told me he loved me? He must have. It must have all been a joke to him. Or at least not enough to keep him here.

When I emerged, I promised myself I would never fall in love. I would never care about anyone ever again. Mother needed me to be a weapon, and I would not fail her.

Back on the moors, I pull myself out of that memory, realizing I’ve lingered too long. I’m standing too close to him. I open my eyes and step away, out of the reach of his arms. I face him and let fire fill my expression. “I hate you.” I’m desperate for the words to be true, but their sharp edges cut my tongue as I spit them out.

“Stop acting,” he orders, his voice low.

I blink, and he steps forward again, and suddenly we are engaged in a complicated dance.

“You don’t hate me.” He hesitates, then brings his hand to my face, smoothing a wisp of hair behind my ear. Steps closer again.

“What are you doing?” I ask, stiffening. The feel of his skin on mine makes me shiver. I don’t know what he wants with me.

Something in my eyes makes him step back, and finally I can breathe again. “Why are you really here? At Madigan?” I ask.

“Because of you,” he answers, his eyes still locked on mine. It’s the same answer he gave before, but it feels different now. It means something different.

“To stop me?” I ask.

He shakes his head slowly. “Because of you,” he repeats. He’s opening his mouth to say something else when something catches his eye behind me, and before I can stop him and beg him to give me more answers, he turns and walks away.

I look over my shoulder and find Arabella spying on me from the back door of the boys’ house. I’m too far away to read her expression, but I know it can’t be good. My mind scrambles back over the last few minutes, trying to see them as she would. I was talking to the gardener. No, I was too close to be just talking. And that moment, when his hand brushed against my cheek . . . something flutters in my stomach.

She’s still watching me as I lift my chin and head back toward Faraday as if it was my destination all along. I wait until the coast is clear before I climb the wall and disappear down the hill.

I spend the next several hours at the cottage drawing Ben’s face and charcoal sketches of the house I saw in Loworth, trying not to think about what I have to do when I get back to campus. I need a strategy. But I can’t think about that yet. Not here. This is a place of escape, not somewhere to sharpen my weapons.

Still, the dark thoughts creep in. I begin sketching a shadowy figure across a wide space of dead earth, imbuing the picture with the alarm and the shock I felt when I saw Arabella watching me. The figure stares out at the viewer. It’s the viewer’s enemy.

I throw my sketchbook and pencils into my bag and head back. Better to face the problem head-on, I decide. I can manage it easily enough. But I hate the thought of Arthur becoming a part of this. I want him to be separate. Untouched. Unbloodied.

Because he was right. I don’t hate him, no matter how badly I want to.

I start running. Dinner will be over soon, and I have to gauge how dire the Arabella situation is before I respond to it.

I slow down to catch my breath as I approach the dining hall. I have to look confident and calm to
be
confident and calm.

When I open the heavy wooden doors, people look at me and then turn to their neighbors to whisper, and I know that my fears are confirmed. They think I’m dating the gardener. That I’ve been sleeping with him, too—that’s how Arabella will spin it. I hunt the room for Ben, and when I see him, he meets my gaze with one of curiosity. He doesn’t smile. He just looks back down at his food and chuckles half-heartedly at something a boy next to him says. Maybe he’s laughing about me. In any case, he thinks he has a rival now.

I wait until Ben deposits his tray and leaves before I walk steadily toward Arabella’s table. “Why, exactly, is everyone staring at me?” I ask her.

She looks up at me and smirks. “Because you’re shagging the gardener, of course,” she answers matter-of-factly.

I like the girls who are direct. They’re easier to dismantle.

“I’m not shagging him, actually,” I say nonchalantly. I step closer to her and lower my voice so that only she and the two curious girls next to her can hear me. “But it sounds like you want to be.”

“What?” she scoffs. In the unforgiving light of the room, she looks pale, her blush two incongruous rosy spots on her cheeks. Her pink lipstick has smudged and strayed from the line of her lips. She’s just a girl.

I laugh. “He was telling me how you left that pair of underwear with a note on his doorstep last week,” I whisper. “A bit kinky, if you ask me. Sorry he wasn’t interested.”

She stares at me, her mouth open in shock, as I smile. I’m walking out of the dining hall before she can think of a response.

Ben finds me the next afternoon sitting at a study carrel in the library, far inside the stacks where no one can hear us. Most students study in the main reading room: a two-story cavern with bookcases lining the walls and paintings of Greek gods on the ceiling. It’s a place covered with an awed hush, where the only sounds are the squeaks of chairs being dragged and the crisp flicks of pages being turned. Everyone is on display there, and even on Saturday afternoons like this one, it’s always crowded. In the stacks, though, I’m surrounded by only clothbound history books, and the scent of worn pages permeates the air. When Ben turns a corner and spots me, I shove my sketchbook under a textbook so that he won’t see the drawings I’m working on. I didn’t expect anyone to discover me here.

“So what, you’re a bitch now?” Ben asks, standing over me.

I widen my eyes as if I’m surprised, then widen them even more as if hurt. “Is that what they’re calling me?”

He nods, his eyes serious as they examine me.

“Because Arabella told them I was shagging the gardener?” I ask, my tone incredulous.

“No, because you accused her to her face, and in front of the whole school, of, you know, trying to shove her knickers on him.”

“What?” I say. “God, the rumor mill at this school is ridiculous. All I did was tell her that
I’m
not dating the gardener. And then I apologized, because it seemed like she was upset about it. I thought she had a crush on him or something.”

His forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Why would everyone be spreading this other story, then?”

I shrug. “Maybe because they’re not her biggest fans? I don’t know.”

He considers this for a moment. Then his forehead clears, and his easy smile is back. “So you’re not dating the gardener?”

I look down at my desk, then back up at him. “No,” I say. My softness wipes the smile from his face. “Did you find the portrait of the Lady of Shalott that I told you about?” I ask.

He relaxes again. “Yeah.”

“And?”

He half smiles. “I don’t know. I don’t really ‘get’ art, you know? But I can see what you mean about the male gaze.”

I nod with an encouraging smile.