“Was it burning?” Luna wonders.
I keep thinking shit like, He won’t touch me again, ghosts have boundaries, but that’s utterly wishful, delusional, my trauma brain trying to cope by pretending he’s some Casper who plays by the rules. The truth is, he raped me once. There’s nothing stopping him from doing it again. And now that no one can see him, there can’t be any evidence.
I go to the bathroom, throw up, then ask if I can sleep in Charlotte’s room—“Bad nightmares,” I offer as an excuse—because I know Gabi will flip if I try to stay with Luna. Charlotte and I go back to Hubbard and I take her roommate’s bed. He leaves me alone until three-ish, when he starts going through Charlotte’s books and whistling, some midcentury racist elevator anthem, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and I keep trying to do dream things like grow a third arm and breathe fire, asking, Am I dreaming, is this real life?, but of course it’s real life, the dickless ghost of my rapist is five feet away, flipping through yuri manga and tapping his reanimated foot to a tempo-less beat.
Eventually I grab Charlotte’s econ textbook off her nightstand and fling it at his head.
Charlotte stirs; he doesn’t flinch.
I grab the grimoire from my backpack. Hubbard, famously, is one of the only Smith houses with a bathtub, in this single bathroom on the fourth floor. I take the grimoire, a set of matches, a bundle of sage, Charlotte’s towel (still damp, with a mysterious stain, but whatever) and my scissors, and pray no one is taking a bath at four A.M. The bathroom is empty—and, like all Smith facilities, remarkably clean, Clorox-scented, quaint old woodwork and a broad window open to the waning moonlight.
I spread the towel on the floor and start to draw the bath. I open the grimoire, read the spell (How to Banish an Unwelcome Guest), read it again, then light the sage, take the scissors and cut a lock of my hair.
“Come and get it,” I say as I drop the hair into the steaming bath, watch the individual strands separate, bob and float.
It works, all right. He’s waist-deep in the bath, tinting the water pink, blood spiraling out in tornado tendrils. He grins; his teeth are black and rotting. Other parts of him start to spoil. His skin adopts a yellow, jaundiced glow, and his hair starts to thin, shedding over the uneasy surface of the water.
I stick my hand into the water, pulling out the drain.
He seizes my wrist.
I struggle, try to pry his fingers off. The water drains, but he doesn’t. I reach again for the drain—if I can keep him in the bath, I can get Charlotte, grab reinforcements—but he seizes my other hand, climbs out of the bath, pins me to the floor. I’m screaming, I don’t care who hears, he has my arms and he’s holding me down, he’s on top of me, dripping and bleeding, his face too close to mine, his smile, the scent of mud and disintegrating flesh.
He lets go of me, dries himself off with the towel, opens the grimoire. “You sure you don’t want to take a bath together?”
“Fuck you,” I’m able to say.
He leaves the bathroom. I hear his steps creaking down the stairs, then another set of feet approaching.
Charlotte bursts through the door. I realize my feet are wet—there’s this huge puddle leaking out from under the bathtub. Charlotte helps me clean up the water with magic. After, I break down crying. Charlotte holds me and doesn’t ask questions.
“I lost the grimoire,” I tell her. “It was taken from me.”
Charlotte doesn’t respond. She just strokes my hair, keeps me against her chest, doesn’t notice the blood splattering the white bathtub, the brown hairs sticking to the sides.
Chapter Eleven
Eel Donburi
TECHNICALLY, WE’RE ALL SUPPOSED TO be taking a one-credit medieval studies seminar over January term, but the entire coven skips the first day of class in favor of bingeing movies that make us feel nostalgic for eras we never experienced, like Prohibition and grunge. I feel guilty and go to the afternoon half of the lecture. When I get back to Luna’s room, the coven is topless and Luna has decided, officially, to major in history and do her thesis on the Avignon Papacy. Charlotte might major in religion; I suggest she consider a thesis on liturgical dance.
We succumb to denial, distractions, wasting the week on aborted experiments; we try to make cocktails, but no one likes the taste of gin except for Charlotte, and we try to host a party for the rest of Chapin, but we’re an odd entity, that group of three first-years all from different houses and a Chapin sophomore in Sienna Weiss’s witchcraft seminar. The only person who gives us something in exchange for our shitty lavender gimlets is that junior across the hall who’s majoring in Chinese, who brings a clunky wooden box filled with the decrepit remains of a board game called Cowgirls Ride the Trail of Truth. It’s basically Monopoly meets group therapy meets sorority hazing; you advance through the cardboard Wild West by confessing how many “stallions” you’ve ridden in your life.
“I’m more a pony girl myself,” says Luna, finishing the gin straight rather than forcing herself to endure our precarious mixture of alcohol, unblended Splenda, and lavender essential oil.
At night, back in my room, shaking, sweating, all the lights on, while Tripp sings, spins in midair, takes out my camcorder, lets me know that if I want the grimoire back, easy peasy, I just have to take off my clothes.
Early Friday evening Luna texts me about the new Greek restaurant opening in downtown Noho, and we decide to go, but don’t invite Gabi because she’s allergic and doesn’t like Greek food anyway. Getting ready in Luna’s room—Luna asking my opinion on which bra she should wear, and then whether or not she should wear a bra—I get a text from Charlotte about grabbing dinner at Cutter Ziskind, and I tell her we’re going to get Greek food, and Charlotte says she wants to come along. “Come On Eileen” blaring from Luna’s phone, jumbo bags of Cheetos splayed across the bed, Luna’s smile and toplessness and tall tales of the origins of her cranberry suede trench coat, I can almost ignore the persistent rap of ghost-Tripp’s fist on the wall, his humming, you know what song.
Charlotte arrives. We’re just about ready—Charlotte with her knitting bag and Luna with her thrift store ushanka and I, pea coat boring, but my hair gold and wild—when Gabi bursts into the room and demands to know why we didn’t invite her to dinner.
“Because you hate Greek food and are allergic,” I say.
Gabi says she’ll come anyway.
We get to the Greek restaurant and there aren’t any tables, a twenty-five-minute wait. Luna and I want to wait, because we’ve been dying for Greek food since the sign went up in November (we walked by the half-finished shopfront when we killed Tripp, the ghost reminds me), and Charlotte reveals that she’s high and has the munchies, so she’s cool with anything.
Gabi finagles Xanax from her coat pocket. “You know, I can’t eat Greek food anyway.”
Even Luna frowns.
“That’s why we didn’t invite you,” I say. “We’re not trying to exclude you or anything, but the whole point of this excursion was to eat spanakopita, not necessarily to have everyone along and have to compromise.”
“That’s really unfair and mean,” Gabi says. “I mean, I’m part of this coven, you think you’d consider me in more decisions—”
“We’re not not considering you, we just wanted to eat Greek food—”
“You know I’m allergic to olives—”
“I know, and that’s why we didn’t invite you because we literally just wanted to eat Greek food—”
“You know I don’t even like Greek food and you’re making me wait twenty-five minutes to eat something I can’t even eat—”
“Fuck, we weren’t going for you—”
“You know there’s two things I can’t do, I can’t eat olives and if I accidentally ate olives I would have to get a needle in my arm and I have trypanophobia so—”
“Not everything is about you!”
Gabi takes her phone out and calls her aunt. Luna puts her hand on Gabi’s arm; Gabi hangs up, folds into Luna, and
gazes out at me from the shelf of Luna’s shoulder.
“Fine, we can get Korean,” I say.
Gabi pushes for SooRa, and I say absolutely not, so we end up at the other Asian fusion restaurant instead (three and a half stars on Yelp as opposed to SooRa’s four). I’m walking slightly behind Gabi and Luna, texting Charlotte about how Gabi won’t stop playing the victim to get what she wants but I don’t send it, because I really want to have this conversation with Luna but I can’t because Gabi is Luna’s girlfriend.
Charlotte once said something about how Gabi and Luna are either going to break up or get married, and the thought of me in some kind of iridescent purple bridesperson suit, breast pocket stocked with safety pins and benzos, legs itchy from mosquito bites after several days of hiking because Gabi makes Luna have the wedding in Western Mass and not in Seattle, makes me feel defeated, like a punctured blow-up castle, but I guess at this point it’s inevitable, like death and taxes.
We sit at one of the hot pot tables in front, because Gabi wants hot pot, but then she decides she doesn’t really want hot pot, so we just have this giant stove in the middle of the table that’s completely purposeless, taking up arm and drink space.
Charlotte is getting cucumber maki. Luna wants bibimbap. Gabi isn’t sure yet, I need to stop rushing her, and I announce that I’m getting eel donburi.
Gabi makes a sickened face, and Luna frowns.
“Gabi doesn’t like fish,” Luna reminds me.
Tripp pulls up a chair directly beside me, muttering, “Who doesn’t like fish?”
“She doesn’t have to order it,” I say.
“I can’t sit next to fish,” says Gabi.
“Fine, switch places with Charlotte.”
Gabi sits diagonally from me, as far away as she can without leaving the table. When our food arrives, Gabi barely picks at her soppy udon, glaring at my dish, my chopsticks, my lips.
“Do you want to bring it home?” Luna asks Gabi, when the waitress comes to clear our dishes and notices that neither Charlotte nor Gabi has eaten anything. Charlotte immediately declines a doggy bag whereas Gabi just stares down at her winding collection of noodles, and Luna ultimately has to say yes, we’ll bring them home, maybe she’ll eat later, her arm around Gabi the entire time. The whole exchange makes me sick (sicker than Tripp’s hand on my shoulder as I’m signing the check).
Back at Chapin, we can’t unlock Luna’s door.
Luna fishes a crystal from her pocket. “I don’t remember locking it.”
We open the door with a simple incantation and step inside warily.
The room is the same—the unmade bed, the crooked moon chart—but there’s an oversize straw basket in the center of the rug, overflowing with large pink vibrators. Charlotte, the most daring, steps forward, picks up a single vibrator, and hardly has time to duck before the vibrators transfigure into steak knives with sharp, gleaming blades, spring into the air, and begin to spin in a tornado, expanding outward with every rotation.
We race from the room and slam the door. Gabi suggests calling Sienna, but Charlotte’s confident she can stop the knives.
“Frat boy warlocks have got some of the worst energy around,” she says, pulling a bundle of sage from her bag, and a lighter. “We’ll just smudge it away.”
“Sage,” Luna says. “Smudge is appropriating Native American ceremonial customs.”
“Do you really think a sage stick is going to be enough to stop a bunch of flying knives?” I ask.
Gabi, starting to panic, glances up at the fire alarm. “You can’t use a lighter in the hall,” she says.
“Um, this isn’t the first time,” says Charlotte, lighting up the sage and slipping into Luna’s room.
“It worked,” she calls, seconds later, and we crack open the door. The knives are scattered on the floor, innocuous as fallen leaves.
We start to pick them up. “How did the warlocks get into Chapin?” I wonder aloud, the answer pricking the back of my neck.
“The same way the pizza delivery always comes directly to the room?” Luna responds. “Nothing is ever locked at Smith. People have sex in Neilson in the middle of the night, like, every night.”
Or the ghost did it, I almost say, but I still value the perception that I am sane.
Gabi is sobbing, her back against Luna’s door.
“Gabi, what’s wrong?” says Luna.
“I don’t think you all understand how serious this is,” says Gabi, searching for a tissue in her backpack, slobbering mucus all over her sleeve. Her voice is soft: “We killed one of them. And they know.” She sinks to the floor, holding her knees, chest heaving. “This is really fucking serious. I don’t get why the rest of you don’t see this. This is so fucking serious, this is a really big deal, we killed one of them and they know—”
“Well, if their counterattack is going to be this unsophisticated,” Charlotte says, inspecting a knife, “then—”
“This is not their counterattack!” Gabi is screaming now, attracting the arms of Luna, who strokes her hair, tries to hush her, reminds her that other people live in Chapin. “This is only a warning, they’re going to come after us, they’re going to do the same thing to us, they know, they know and they want us dead—”
Charlotte and I finish picking up the knives and exchange a glance.
“Gabi isn’t wrong,” says Luna. “And I didn’t want to tell you this, but this morning—before you were awake, Lee—there was a police officer in Chapin’s common room, asking girls about the boy missing at Amherst. If anyone had seen him.”
“We destroyed the evidence,” I say, with so little confidence that Gabi cries louder.
“We did,” says Luna. “And the police were headed to a bunch of Smith houses, I saw them all over campus. But the last person who saw a boy fitting the description of Tripp—brunette kid, five foot nine, Amherst sweatshirt—told the police he was unconscious, with a couple of girls in downtown Noho. Being carried home drunk, or something.”
“Fuck,” Gabi repeats, head sunk into Luna’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Charlotte agrees.
I stand. “So we’re not going to do anything? We’re just going to sit here and talk about everything working against us?” I steeple my hands, hoping to gain a smidgen of authority. “There are thousands of relatively short boys with brown hair who wear Amherst sweatshirts in this part of Mass. There’s nothing pointing to us.”
Charlotte raises her hand. “We could go to New Zealand.”
“Fuck you,” Gabi says.
“We can cast a spell on the authorities, if it comes to that,” I say. “But it won’t. As far as they know, Tripp fell off a mountain while drunk skiing and got eaten, by wolves, or bears, or—”
Gabi sinks her face into Luna’s chest, Luna putting a finger to her lips.
“Charlotte,” says Luna. “You brought the grimoire back to your room, right?”
Charlotte purses her lips. “Well,” she says.
“Well what?” Gabi demands.
“Well, the grimoire—”
“The grimoire what?”
“It’s not Charlotte,” I say. I shut my eyes; it’s the only way I can make this confession. “I lost the grimoire. The warlocks stole it when I was asleep.”
I open my eyes.
Gabi’s mouth hangs open. Luna smacks her lips together, not meeting my gaze. Charlotte hangs her head.
“The grimoire was in my room,” Charlotte says. “Lee took it to the bathroom in Hubbard, and I found her sobbing around four in the morning. Without the grimoire.”
“So Lee lost it,” says Gabi. “And that’s how the warlocks attacked us tonight. We were safe, then Lee returned their only source of power. Fuck.”
I begin to stalk forward, raising my fist, knowing exactly what I’m going to do and not regretting it in the least—when Charlotte’s arms close around my chest, my waist, restraining me, her voice in my ear.
“Lee,” Charlotte says, quiet. “Come on.”
<
br /> We leave, taking the knives with us.
“Wait, we can’t carry a basket of knives through Chapin,” I say as we move down the hall.
“You ever heard of a glamour?” Charlotte says, reaching for her menstrual cup, and soon enough the knives glimmer and morph into a collection of used-up smoothie cups, complete with the rotting brown remains of green juice and bent, chewed-on straws.
“Why don’t you stay in Chapin tonight?” I suggest. “Rachel is still in Boston. You can sleep in her bed.”
“Sure,” says Charlotte. If she knows I’m asking for my own sake, she isn’t letting on.
Halfway down the stairs, the glamour suddenly lifts. Charlotte tries to cast the spell again—but the knives remain knives, and even my participation accomplishes nothing.
“So we used up all our magic for the month,” I say, stomach churning.
Charlotte tosses her sweatshirt over the basket, and says nothing.
At the edge of the woods, Charlotte—parting the icy ground with a shovel stolen from the boathouse—says: “Honestly, I wonder if we’re all better off transferring.”
I stare at her. “Transferring?”
“I’ve been missing Mexico anyway,” says Charlotte. “Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México—the application process is really easy, you just need a certain test score, and the tuition is really cheap.”
“Oh.” I frown. “You’re seriously going to transfer?”
“Well, I’ve been looking into it, at least,” she says.
We finish burying the knives and head back to my room.
“Hey, Charlotte,” I say as we approach the steps. “You know, if you need somewhere to come during Easter, I live two hours away.”
Consensual Hex Page 15
