Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  The whole conversation, I’m shifting my hips so I can feel the bottle of Ativan in the front pocket of my jeans, while my mom tells me how her friend’s son, the one who was homeschooled and is really into musical theater, has just come out as gay, and she’s going on about how it would break her heart to have a child like that, to think what he would go through. Yes, what he would go through. When your parents think about having a Gay Child they’re always thinking about a boy, whom they will accept with open arms after several years of bottling up their own homophobia and locking it into his bones. Lesbians—they basically don’t exist.

  When I bring them up—my friends at Smith—my mom frowns, not with hate but with low-key pity, the way you react to someone who complains of having battled seasonal allergies. Lesbians are surely nothing more than gnats on the hairy arm of humanity, apparitions who cling together and adopt Haitian children and eat spirulina-flavored tempeh and maybe make some far-flung contribution to higher culture in the form of flannel shirts and Birkenstocks.

  The bartender returns and pours me another glass. We order, bouillabaisse pour moi, s’il vous plaît, steak au poivre pour Maman.

  My mom asks me how my French final went.

  This is too much. I bump my fork against my wineglass, hard enough to make a clang, and ask the bartender for water.

  He wipes the sweat from his face with a dripping white hand towel. “Just a glass of water?”

  “Water,” I repeat.

  His face hits the deep end of shadow as he reaches for a clean glass and fills it with ice. When he twists to give me my drink, I see him, for the first time, it seems. Upturned nose neatly freckled, deep eyes, pointed chin, a sneer, lips sealed in terror. Blood streaming from the broad cut on his neck. Platform shoes between his fists, dangling from the strap.

  Of course I know him. Of course I know his face.

  The bartender blinks. His eyes turn blue, flush returning to his cheeks. “Water, ma’am?”

  He reaches for my empty glass, and I fish in my pocket.

  “I just need a stronger dose,” I mutter, and drop the second half of the Ativan down my throat, then another pill, whole.

  The food arrives. My mom eats her steak and I suck soup through my teeth like cough medicine, the red sticky kind you’re not supposed to enjoy but that you always looked forward to because it came with a mother’s pat on the back, a bowl of ice cream or ramen. The soup burns the top of my mouth, but I don’t care, because I’m drowning, and death is deep and reeks of shellfish.

  My mom pulls my face out of the soup and wipes me clean. I still feel an anchor pulling me under; I lean forward again, tipping toward the broth, but my mom catches my hair in her fist this time, keeps my head level, forces me to stare into the old face the bartender is wearing, the same freckles and scar and blood as before, the kind of shark face contained behind too-thin aquarium glass.

  I want to speak, I want to say: I’m not crazy, I saw what I saw, I’m right, I was right.

  But he’s reaching for the soda hose with one hand and peeling back his skin with the other, discarding his death on the newly mopped floor and smiling straight at me, fresh sunglass tan and bright eyes, alive.

  “Hello, Leisl,” says John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp.

  “Leisl.” My mom pulls me from the barstool. “We’re going.”

  She slings my arms around her neck and carries me out, unable to get my arms into my coat. Amherst slaps my sleeveless skin cold.

  Christmas Eve: We sit at the counter and mold dough into stars and deformed snowmen and my mom is going on about Christmas cards and implying I’m not a writer because my cards don’t glitter with cleverness. “You know who’s such a great writer?” she says of this acquaintance who does fundraising for the diocese and favors purple ink.

  Christmas morning, among slashed ribbons and butchered skins of reindeer-printed wrapping paper, I see blood transubstantiated from red velour, severed fingers ornamenting the plastic branches of the fake tree. My little cousin knocks into the piano after breakfast, and, reflected in cragged shards of snow globe, I see his parted mouth, his glassy eyes.

  In the bathroom, drunk, because that’s the only way I can tolerate my relatives, I’m washing my hands and there he is, in the mirror, where my own face should be. I raise a dripping finger—his finger—and tap the mirror, but he doesn’t go away.

  Instead, he winks.

  I make New Year’s resolutions I can’t keep and spend the frozen birth of January cocooned in the finished basement, nodding off to the intermittent roar of the new vacuum, the habitual creaking floorboards. In the deepest ditch of night, two A.M., I wake up to the wailing radiator and piercing, unmistakable laughter. The sleep timer’s gone off, it’s totally dark, but I know that laugh, that nasal pitch.

  When I say to him, “SHUT UP,” (stupid, stupid girl, the number one rule of séances and Ouija boards is you never invite the spirits to talk to you) he stops laughing and clears his throat.

  Has anyone ever told you you look like Taylor Swift?

  I turn on the lights. The basement is empty. I rub the goose bumps down, turn Netflix back on. The Wi-Fi’s broken, fuck, so I go back to cable. Of course, We’re having trouble connecting to the Xfinity platform, so I have to watch the local news channel that’s already on, coverage of AMHERST COLLEGE DISAPPEARANCE. His yearbook photo eats up the screen, and I cover my eyes, grapple for the remote, press the POWER button repeatedly, but it won’t turn off. I throw the remote across the room and scramble to the TV, yank the plug from the wall.

  On the couch—tossing the remote up and down—rests John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, fresh as a crimson bouquet, his only injury the gaping wound where his penis used to be, blood wetting the cushions.

  “We could have been a real power couple,” he says, approaching me, closer, closer, and I can’t move, I can’t do anything. “Still can.” He scratches his neck. A thick wound opens up, his head shifting from side to side on top of his shoulders like a detached cake layer, a rogue cup of tea skirting perilously close to the edge of its saucer. “Just to offer up some constructive criticism—you didn’t do it very well, when you beheaded me. Sorry, when Luna beheaded me, because you turned out to be a wimp in what could have been your finest hour. You’re supposed to hit the jugular. You made the cut a bit too low. Right through the vocal cords. Real unpleasant.”

  “We wanted it to be unpleasant,” I say under my breath, legs frozen, arms frozen, all of me packed up in ice.

  Then I realize I’m talking back to a vision, and I shut my eyes, willing him to disappear.

  I blink. He’s closer, dripping blood in a trail from the couch to my feet.

  “Not to mention this,” he says, indicating his lower wound. “A bit gratuitous, don’t you think? Insisting on genital mutilation when you could have gotten away with a bullet through the chest?” He scratches his shoulder. His arm detaches from its socket, hangs from a stringy tendon. “And cutting off my limbs? Tearing my fingers off? Was all of that strictly necessary?”

  I can’t breathe. “You’re here to haunt me, aren’t you?”

  All he does is laugh.

  I race up the stairs, go to my room, unlock the window, survey the twenty-foot drop to the dead backyard rosebush, winter’s bed. Rash, perhaps, but right now this seems like the only option, the only way to make it stop, to just end everything if he’s going to be back in my life again. It’s not like I didn’t try to save myself. We fucking murdered the kid, slashed his throat and sliced off his dick, watched the life bleed out of him while I waited for my own nightmare to die with him.

  The door creaks open, and there he is, a trail of blood following him down the hall.

  He enters, grinning, sits down on my bed. I can see his lashes, his opaque sweating-glass skin. “Lucid decapitation—that shit’s real. You really hurt me, Leisl. There was a good thirteen seconds when I was totally aware. I could see all of you. Luna with her knife, th
e rest of you going at my body like a flock of vultures. Actually, did you know a group of vultures is called a wake?” Tripp laughs. “Watching your neck stump, seeing everything inside of you, all the bones and yellow and red and green that’s inside a human body—it’s not a good way to die.”

  “You’re lying,” I say. “You’re a fucking figment of my imagination. You’re lying and I want you to stop. I command you to stop. I command you to not exist anymore.”

  I shut my eyes tight.

  When I open them, his hands are around my neck.

  Tripp opens his mouth. “I’m sure you know this, but there’s this whole genre of beheading porn—”

  “How would I fucking know that—”

  “I mean, most of it’s animated, but if you know where to go on the dark web…” He rubs his thumb over my collarbones. “First law of the Internet, right? There’s porn for everything. What if there was porn for us? That would be a first. A human girl—sorry, a witch—and a ghost. Don’t you want to try? Don’t you want to see if I’ll turn up on your camera?”

  “Take your hands off me,” I say in a small voice, knowing it’s futile. “Now.”

  He squeezes, my breath going short. I push against him, get my nails under the window, wonder how I’ll look dead. Tripp didn’t look good, but we cut him up. Will the thorns cut me up? Will the fall break my neck? In the last moment, flying, will I feel alive? Free?

  “Why would you give up so soon? There is help, you know.” Tripp reaches into my pocket, takes out my cell phone. “Do you want me to dial for you?”

  I force the window open. The wind slaps my face, I remember I should leave a note, but I don’t have time. I have to get out, escape, make it end, any way I can. Ugly corpse or otherwise.

  I feel my scissors knocking into my hip, inside my sweatpants pocket—a promise, a temptation dangling over the split-apart leaking red corpse of me that is about to exist twenty seconds from now.

  I close the window, take the scissors from my pocket and fold them between my hands—I don’t know what I’m going to do but I have to do something—

  “Leisl?”

  My mom’s voice, her slippered feet ambling down the hall.

  I tell her my room was too stuffy. She suggests I sleep in the basement.

  The rest of break, I hang out with high school friends I don’t really like, go for midnight rides down 3A, the road flanked by coarse woods where everyone swears they shot Blair Witch Project, autumn’s last seagulls cawing in sweeping ellipses above the Honda and pines. When I have to go home, I either take extra NyQuil or Skype with Luna, who always offers to stay online when we go to sleep, so all our conversations clock in at fourteen hours.

  He’s still with me. When I’m eating stale cereal, in the shower, in my bed. And I never get used to him.

  The week after Christmas—when he splays across the back seat of Beth’s dad’s Range Rover while Beth confides to me that she was raped at college—I come to my senses, the cold water of motivation slapping me back to reality, a reality in which I have magic and three witch-sisters to help me banish his ghost to nothingness for good. I’m sure this is totally normal, in witch terms. I’m sure Sienna could help us, in an utmost emergency (of course, she would definitely take our magic away if she found out we killed someone, even my rapist).

  When Beth stops short over a patch of ice in the Starbucks parking lot, his fingers slip under my sweater, clamber down my collarbones, chest, breasts.

  The next day, I text the coven, Come back to campus before J-term actually starts. Witch business. The day after, I pull my mom aside and tell her I can’t be here anymore, I have to go back to Smith.

  She puts down the spatula, sets the stove to simmer. “What?”

  I start to cry, and repeat myself.

  “It’s normal to want to be with your friends,” she says, smiling, like I’m five years old and a lollipop is sticking out the corner of my mouth.

  My mom slips on a pair of oven mitts. “Now, your friend Beth—do you think she’s really bisexual?”

  When I get back to campus, Luna’s room is empty, because the coven has gone out to shoplift crystals—which actually really hurts crystal sellers and witch store owners, it’s kind of an epidemic. Gabi brings back a tiny shard of smoky quartz for me, which she places in my hand and tells me is good for depression and anxiety. The holidays have turned the coven from blood to blankets; we sit around Luna’s bed, swathed in Charlotte’s knits, footie pajamas, Twilight Snuggies, chrysanthemum tea in our fists, speaking softly over the lull of Adventure Time, murder an impossibility, aside from Luna still wearing Tripp’s ring, on her thumb because her other fingers are too small. We deliberately keep the conversation in cats-and–Joann Fabrics, mac-and-cheese comfort-lesbian territory; Charlotte, who stayed on campus during Christmas, says she redid her wardrobe, which Luna describes as “if Laura Ingalls were a queer girl who did drag sometimes.”

  The only magic issue we bring up is who’s going to keep the grimoire in her room. (Over break, Luna had it in Seattle, but we need a location at Smith that Sienna will never discover, which seriously limits our options.) We draw straws; Charlotte agrees to take the grimoire for the night.

  I think I feel better, but the sight of the ring, gleaming on Luna’s thumb, inspires me to tighten my scarf to the point where I can’t breathe. Part of me, the Pollyanna snippet of little-girl soul that’s never aligned with the truth in my gut, believes Tripp is specifically haunting my house, and he won’t find me here at Smith. Then I remember the bistro in Amherst, the bartender, blood sweating down my glass, and realize it’s hopeless, but I’m not going to kill myself just because I’m exhausted and he should already be dead. What if I too became a ghost, cursed to haunt alongside him for eternity? I can’t afford to die. I have to live, prove him wrong, destroy his afterlife as I cut out his life, seize him by the balls and introduce him to my own weapon, my rage, the blades of my scissors, ready to slice.

  Besides, I have my sisters with me under the covers, the chosen family who love me, affirm me, believe me, who would do anything for me, who already have.

  I reach for Luna’s hand, under the blanket.

  “What if I told you something crazy?” I say, mostly to Luna. “Like, the reason I wanted you to stay on Skype with me for fourteen hours last week.”

  Gabi shifts to get a better view of the screen, and spills half her tea on her chest, soaking the blanket.

  “Gabi, are you okay?” Luna’s focus abandons me.

  We hang the sopping blanket over Luna’s closet door, give Gabi a change of clothes. While she’s cramming herself into one of Luna’s vintage mohair sweaters, I try to tell them, again. “So the reason I needed you to Skype with me for so long—”

  “This is so fucking itchy,” says Gabi. “I can’t wear this.”

  “I didn’t do laundry yet, babe,” says Luna. “That’s the only other shirt I have.”

  Gabi frowns. Luna sighs and takes off her own shirt, exchanging it for the sweater.

  I clear my throat. “Anyway, over break, what happened was—”

  “I have a headache,” says Gabi. “Do you have Advil?”

  “Luna.” I clap my hands together. “This is really important.”

  Luna tears her gaze from Gabi. “What’s important?”

  I look from Luna to Gabi and, like an alligator surfacing from water you thought was benign, lily pads and minnow fish and the perfect setting for a picnic, the coven appears suddenly to be not on my side, in my camp, on my team of fellow believers. At once, I realize I can’t trust them, not with what I’m about to say. I must stay sharp, gleaming. If I break myself before their eyes I will have nothing. If they don’t respect me, they’ll discard me, it was fucking crazy (that’s what I am: fucking crazy) to imagine otherwise. I know now, staring into Luna’s pair of firefly eyes, that if I tell them the truth, they’ll never respect me again.

  I’ll be worse than dead.

  “It’s just—�
�� I gulp. “I just want to tell you—”

  Gabi shuts her laptop, slams her empty cup on Luna’s desk, and runs to the bathroom.

  Luna rushes after her. “Gabi!”

  Of course, because my life is a cheap horror movie now, this is the moment Tripp chooses to reappear, well rested, clean-shaven, clothes pressed. The only thing missing is, again, the thing between his legs.

  I wait for Charlotte to notice.

  “I thought Luna locked her door,” I say, as he goes to sit at Luna’s desk, blood leaking onto her notebook.

  “Weird, yeah,” says Charlotte, disinterested.

  “A poltergeist,” I say.

  Charlotte frowns. He stares straight at me, grinning.

  “Lee, do you seriously need some help?” says Charlotte.

  I shut my eyes. “I think we all do.”

  “I was on Prozac for a while,” the ghost is saying. “After my parents got divorced. And—would you believe it—I almost went back on Prozac my freshman year. After my girlfriend accused me, you know, of assaulting her. It was really hard for me. Being accused of something criminal.” He reaches into his pocket. “You do know sex is a fantastic method of stress relief?” In his hand is his phone, which he starts tossing up and down. “Your friends might believe I’m here, if you filmed us.”

  “How did you get your phone? We buried it with you.”

  “What?” Charlotte frowns. “Lee, are you seriously okay?”

  I shake my head. “I’m fine. Ignore me.”

  At one point, I actually have to pee, and I take the risk of going to the second-floor bathroom, assuming Luna and Gabi will be talking in an empty shower—instead, they’re in the stall right next to me. Over the flush, I hear Gabi, entangled in Luna on the floor, sobbing, and when they finally come back to the room, nothing helps, not Thai takeout, nor Charlotte’s confession of having stuck incense up her vag on New Year’s.