Page 15 of Serpentine Valentine
It was three weeks ago, at the very start of my first term back since theincident. I was on campus to speak with my academic advisor about my course schedule following my return and to meet with President Pallas. The first meeting went as well as could be expected. The courses I’d taken for half a semester before Halloween were incomplete, so I would have to retake them if I wanted the credits. I reenrolled for everything except forthat man’s Classics course.
The latter, well, it also went as to be expected.
Mina had a lawyer with her to cover her bony ass because I’d threatened to sue the university if they didn’t reinstate my standing at Acheron this year. They had absolutelyzeroreason to suspend me, let alone kick me out, and she knew she didn’t have a leg to stand on. But she hadn’t been happy. Oh no, she’d been furious sitting across from me, white-knuckled, hard-hearted, hating me because I’d had the misfortune to tarnish her school’s reputation.
It made me laugh in the hall afterward, a mean chuckle that hurt my throat. If she thought she was angry and hateful, it was nothing to the furious monster I’d become.
Oh, I’d gotten very good at concealing it. Hiding in sheep’s clothing, though I was a very rabid wolf. But people could still scent it on me, the heat-baked, metallic smell of rage leaking from my pores like sulfur dioxide from a volcano. They cringed away from me in the halls and couldn’t hold my gaze when I caught them staring.
They were afraid of me, of the violence that swelled against the barrier of my skin, dying to get out.
The only thing that kept me vaguely human and barely restrainedwas the crystal-clear idea of revenge.
Oh, it sounded sweet.
I spoke it like an incantation when I stared at myself in the mirror every morning and hated my reflection for the way it had betrayed me. I muttered it under my breath when I hit the gym every night, when I was so tired I could hardly breathe, but I still uttered it.
Revenge, revenge, revenge.
I’d have it, too.
I was smart enough to craft it and patient enough to see it through.
This would be my last year at Acheron U and the end of life as they knew it for Professor Morgan and President Mina Pallas.
They didn’t know it yet, but that made it all the sweeter.
They thought they’d crushed me, obliterated the threat of me, and turned me into some weak girl subjugated by the shame they meant me to feel over inciting that animal into taking me against my will.
Well, I was not weak.
However, I harbored no small amount of shame, because no survivor I’d spoken to at my meetings ever spoke of moving beyond that hot coal of humiliation burning low in their gut. That idea society or history or our own female biology instilled in us that said we had to take the blame for others’ actions, even if they acted against ourselves. I used that shame as fuel for my fury.
How dare they make me feel responsible?
How dare they take sleep from me, dreams from me, and leave me only with waking nightmares?
I thought about and plotted their downfall every single day for ten months. It got me through the healing of my body and started me on my way to healing around the chasm in my chest where he’d wrenched out my soul.
I was going to end them.
I had a plan for Professor Morgan, one I’d already set into motion. But what to do about Mina Pallas confounded me until the moment in Mathieson Library when I spotted Luna Pallas and truly saw her for the first time.
It was late, the windows made into mirrors by the blackness outside. It was the reflection of her in the glass that caught me. She had her eyes closed, leather headphones over her ears, her strawberry-blond hair tangled around the collar of her tennis sweater.
She was dancing, right there in her seat past midnight on a Monday deep in the abandoned edge of the library’s quiet second story. Her body swayed, hands lifted, her blue ballpoint pen a conductor’s baton arching through the air along with whichever melody played in her ears.
It was oddly lovely, catching that little moment. She was mussed from a long day, a coffee stain on the wrist of the cream sweater, an ink blot at the edge of her wide mouth from chewing on the end of a pen. It felt intimate, a window into a side of Miss Popular most people didn’t get to see.
Fifteen minutes later, when I returned from retrieving the books I needed for my Epic Tradition Classics course, she was getting out of her chair. I pressed close to the books, hidden in the shadows, and watched as she toed off her patent leather loafers, wiggling her toes in frilly white socks. A moment later, she was moving, sliding across the polished wood floors, arms wiggling, hips shaking, hair flying like sunset gold streamers.
I wondered what she was listening to.
She looked so free, so without worries. It hurt my stomach because I knew I’d never be that way again. My memories were too heavy in my blood, weighing me down, taking me too close to the floor to leap or dance or be transformed by the simple magic of a song.
I hadn’t felt it in so long, it took me a moment to realize what I felt was yearning. Not for Luna, exactly, but for that levity. I wanted to steal itfrom her or steal her for it, to watch it, be near it at least, even if I couldn’t feel it myself. Joy by proximity, or something like it.
After a few long minutes of watching her, I was about to escape when she sagged suddenly, a marionette with her strings cut. One moment, she was dancing like a child, carefree and filled with light, and the next, she was slumped in her chair, forehead pressed to her folded arms on the table. Her shoulders trembled like a warning before they started to shake seismically, and I realized she was crying.
