Page 79 of Serpentine Valentine
“You had to come back to get revenge,” I surmised, feeling numb and robotic like my body didn’t even exist. “To get vengeance on everyone who let you down that day.”
Lex blinked at me, that slow, reptilian blink that freaked everyone out but me.
“Don’t you see?” I begged, desperate for her to see beyond the red-tinged glasses of her own hatred to the painful truth of my words. “You’re still letting him control you. I know he hurt you. I know what he did was…was inconceivably evil. But you cannot heal by causing him or others like him pain, Lex. That’s not how it works.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, not mean, just chewed up with her own anger and hurt and crazed bitterness. “The only time I feel peace is when they’re suffering.”
“Numbness isn’t peace.”
“It’s not numbness.” She snapped her teeth at me, once, twice, like a rabid wolf. “It’s fucking joy. It’s filling the emptiness in my chest with white-hot rage. It’s being drunk on the rightness of seeing them feel even a slim margin of the pain they’ve meted out. It’s being high on the fumes of their bewildered fear. Seeing how the mighty have fallen and atmyfeet, the feet of a victim, the feet of someone they held in so much contempt.”
She stepped forward, and I could see the whites around her eyes. “The man we exposed tonight put his girlfriend in the hospital, Luna. In the fucking hospital because he decided he needed to fuck her up to get his rocks off. You think that’s okay?”
“There are other ways,” I said, but at the moment, faced with her like this, a maenad drunk on the wine and revelry of revenge, I wasn’t sure what those would be. A part of me even felt that primal drumbeat luring me into the dark, into a place where women could revel naked andfearsome around a fire, powerful and free. Dionysus’ maenads had been coined “the raving ones,” but were they raving, or were they just unafraid? “What you’re doing…it’s illegal, Lex. Not to mention morally wrong.”
“There is a warrior lying dormant in every woman,” Lex argued, hands and spittle flying through the air, hair kicked back like writhing serpents. “A defense mechanism born over centuries of abuse and oppression. Triggered likethat.” She clapped an inch away from my face. “You can’t know what it’s like to shed the soft skin, that sheep’s cloth, and become your true self. Both a woman and a wolf. Something with teeth and more aggression than society allows women to have.
“You can’t know what it’s like!” She almost roared the words, pounding at her chest. “You have to pass through fire, be crumbled to ash, and if you survive, only then can you be reborn with the teeth and claws you need to move on. Do you deny me the right to my defenses after everything? Do you hold me in contempt for my rage when rage is the only thing that gets me up in the morning? Would you refuse my need for vengeance when I was not the only one to suffer his disgusting attentions?”
“The police,” I tried, but my voice was weak, warbling under the waterfall of tears falling down my face. “The university. The law.”
“They ignore us!” she screamed, the scream of a banshee, of a woman wailing for her lost soul. “Would you have us be alone and suffering? If we are wolves, should we not become a pack? Something to be feared by others, to give comfort to our own?”
“I don’t want you to be alone,” I whispered, anguished by her anguish.
It was then I knew how much I loved her. Because her pain, so acute, brutalized my own soul as if it were her own.
Because her heart had become more precious than mine.
I wanted to offer her salvation like some kind of priest, but the truthwas, she didn’t want it. So what was I supposed to do?
“Not this,” she hissed, and I realized I had asked that last question aloud.
“‘The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance,’” I quoted softly because other people’s words had always helped me before and no one was more eloquent than Shakespeare.
“So you want me to sit on my hands when your mother and this whole damn institution does nothing about the crimes going on beneath their very noses?”
“No, not that. But there are other ways. Start a support group, set up a chaperone system for girls who go out alone at night, submit an article to the paper. ‘An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.’” I quoted Gandhi because when in doubt, who wouldn’t listen to his wisdom?
Apparently, Lex.
Her entire body seemed coiled tight as a snake about to strike, the clack of her nails on the countertop akin to the rattle of a serpent.
“You want to quote to me? ‘Being against evil doesn’t make you good.’” She spat Hemingway’s words like venom. “You have to take action, Luna. It’s not enough to stand by and let these things happen. Willful ignorance is not bliss. It’s cowardice.”
I opened my mouth to say something, though I wasn’t sure what. I’d started out being on the right side of the issue, but I was increasingly feeling like the villain here.
“You want to know who’s a coward?” She sneered, and there was none of the Lex I knew in her face, only a predatory monster. She planted her hands on the desk and leaned close. “Your mother.”
I reared back. “I know she––”
“Why hasn’t any of this blown up larger thanThe Delphi, Luna?” she asked bitterly. “A group of vigilantes on a college campus exposingmen for their sins? That’s salacious stuff. Newsworthy. Why is Jerrod still enrolled here? Why wasIpunished when Professor Morgan was the one to take so much from me?”
“No,” I said because I knew where this was going, and I wanted to stop it.
Lex barreled on. “Your mother. She knows everything that happens on this campus. Everything. If you think she doesn’t hush this shit up, you’re a fucking idiot.”
I flinched at her words but tried to swallow the hurt. “And you think beating up young men will change that?”
