Of course, he’s there, he’s always there, but for brief moments, when she’s touching you, you can ignore the spiders occupying the dusty corners of your room; sometimes an experience is so sweet that you don’t need to kill the ghosts; sometimes, her hair between your fingertips, she’s all there is. There’s nothing else, not even him.
Chapter Thirteen
Weehawken
TRIPP RUINS IT, AS ALWAYS. One aside about how “she’s ‘only slept with one other person’—silly little slut, acting like I don’t count, of course,” and I go back to sleeping in my own room. Luna doesn’t seem to know anything’s gone wrong; maybe after you sleep with someone who isn’t technically your girlfriend, you’re not supposed to immediately move in with her, spend twenty hours a day with her, show her your Pinterest board with potential engagement rings, try to get a sense of the cut of diamond she prefers.
The ghost, too, brings up the central question. “Are you a lesbian now? I don’t feel so offended. You just hate dick, I guess.”
I go back and forth, digging deep into erotic Tumblr and trying to precisely monitor my reaction to both hunky guys with nice butts and, incidentally, wispy Asian girls with choppy chin-length hair. Between the J-term class I’m supposed to be taking and Charlotte, a good sport, assisting me with stockpiling sage and potions for the tough semester ahead, every waking thought that isn’t consumed by the warlocks murdering me in my sleep, or the ghost acquiring such power (power he already possesses, he reminds me every morning when he dangles the grimoire in my swollen eyes), is thus: Am I gay, am I straight, or do I really just fucking hate Gabrielle Avery?
Charlotte gets wind of Luna and I having slept together when she discovers me throwing my phone across my room for the third time, shattering the already-broken screen into a lightning mosaic, sobbing about how she won’t fucking reply.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Charlotte urges.
I summarize my conundrum—gay, straight, or vindictive. “And, after we fucking did it, Luna’s suddenly become, like, a stone-cold bitch who takes two hours and forty-three minutes to respond to Tumblr memes I send her.”
“You know, there’s such a thing as bisexuality,” Charlotte points out.
I swipe my thumb across my cracked phone, pull up a picture of Luna I took when we went to play in the snow the morning after, and stare at her newly purple-tipped hair and the single rainbow feather earring brushing her scarf, her rosebud smirk and the sun in her eyes. I think about Luna visiting over the summer, next to me in a rocky compartment of the dilapidated Ferris wheel at the county fair, holding me as I start to get scared, how she’s smaller than me, how her arms are short and slim, how it doesn’t compute, us together, going for lobster once my stomach’s settled and getting invited to go on the neighbors’ boat. But, like salt and chocolate, Luna next to me, surrounding me, holding my neck and kissing me as we reach the top, hidden from view, works, and if she would just respond to the meme I sent her I could believe in us and preemptively invite her to join me in August, make plans to take the convertible down to Provincetown for a weekend and swallow clams and take pictures of sand sculptures, mermaids rising out of the dunes and shark-tipped Atlantic.
“No,” I tell Charlotte. “I think I’m totally straight.”
“And yet you’re calling Luna a stone-cold bitch because she took an hour to reply to your text?”
“Two hours and fifty minutes, and she still hasn’t responded.”
That night, after Charlotte leaves to get high, I think of calling Dr. Applebaum about getting more Ativan because I’ve set up a bunch of blankets and pillows in the walk-in closet because I think the warlocks are less likely to kill me if I sleep in there. But there’s a spider in the closet (and Tripp, of course), so I run, sobbing, into the hallway, and fish my phone from my bra to call Luna.
She says she’s coming over, five minutes.
Five minutes pass. I go back to my actual bed, lock the door, text Luna and tell her to text me before she knocks or else I’ll probably hex her.
I call her again. She doesn’t respond. I call twice more, then text her, then I watch Mamma Mia!, which strikes me as a musical interpretation of matriarchal prehistory, back in the good old days of no one knowing who their father was, when everyone had three or four Colin Firths for potential dads.
It’s midnight, Luna’s not here, and before I go to sleep I fling my phone across the room again, for emphasis.
Tripp catches it. “You need to make the call?”
I fling my pillow at him and slip under my covers.
The phone, vibrating under Rachel’s bed, jolts me awake the next morning, and I pick it up.
“Lee? Wassup.” Charlotte sounds not-too-delirious, and panic starts to pulse through my stomach. “Is there any way I could come over, like, right now?”
“What happened?” I demand. “Is anyone dead? Did they attack—”
“No, no, this isn’t about that. Seriously.” She coughs into the receiver. “I’m coming over, okay?”
“Okay.”
I scroll through my phone; no calls or texts from Luna, but multiple messages from Charlotte. can i come over? we need to talk.
Charlotte arrives. “Seriously?”
I put down the ceremonial dagger we ordered from Amazon before finals. “Just trying to remain cautious. Who knows, the warlocks could have brainwashed you.”
Charlotte shuts the door and slams herself and her new basket down on my bed. “Well, they did show up again. Outside Hubbard. But that’s not what I want to talk about,” she says, withdrawing another long pink vibrator from her basket.
“Give me that.” I zip the vibrator into my backpack. “So none of them showed up? Just another random vibrator?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think we should confront this immediately? Meet with the whole coven—like, tonight?”
“Yeah, but there’s something else I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“Luna slept over at Gabi’s last night.”
My hand inches toward the dagger. “Oh?” Instead, I get my phone and call Luna, and keep calling her until she actually answers.
“Hey,” says Luna, sounding remarkably detached and mildly condescending, or maybe that’s just because I know the truth.
“Hey,” I say back. “So you spent the night at Gabi’s?”
“I slept on her floor. She was having a panic attack.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I don’t need to tell you everything.”
I take a deep breath. “Are you in Chapin?”
“Yeah, I just took a shower.”
I hang up, toss my phone on my bed, and bolt for the bathroom, barefoot, gunk in my eyes, but ready.
She’s spitting out toothpaste. I wait by the shower caddies.
“What?” Luna says, cheeks full of water.
“You slept over at Gabi’s?”
“Holy shit—” Luna wipes her mouth, turns off the sink. “You and Charlotte are, like, kind of controlling everything I do.”
“Because we care about you.” In a smaller voice: “I care about you.”
Luna adjusts the towel at her chest. “I care about Gabi.”
“Gabi hit you,” I say. “Gabi is abusive. You need to stay away from her.”
Luna’s hands go to her hips. “I can do whatever I want.”
“Abused women often go back to their abusers,” I say. “Or seek out similar partners—”
“I’m not a fucking battered woman!” Luna shouts, seizing her shower caddy and throwing it back on the shelf.
I reach for her. “Luna—”
“Don’t touch me,” she says, holding her towel up as she runs.
“Luna!” I scream, sobs flooding my mouth, but she’s gone, and there’s only one thing left to do.
Incidentally, Gabi and I were both signed up to audition for this all-female production of Antigone with original songs by one of the dr
ama seniors, set during the Cold War, today at noon, so I go to the theater with a backpack full of malevolent herbs, hastily brewed fuck-you elixirs (the only magic available to me with Sienna’s limit on our powers), and Charlotte’s lighter, plus Tripp’s ring, which Luna left on my desk the morning after, when we came back to my room to grab additional chicken ramen packets because shrimp flavor is gross, and I was naive enough to fall in love.
On the way to the theater, Tripp won’t stop trailing me, tapping me on the shoulder, singing. Not wanting to waste any of my potions on a supernatural entity, I zip off my snow-covered boot and fling it at his head.
The boot passes through him like a plane’s nozzle breaking the clouds; I hobble through the snow on one foot to retrieve it.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” he says behind me as I jog toward the theater.
I find Gabi inside, at the center of a perky assortment of Tegan and Sara lookalikes, reciting her same old comments on mythology and exchanging numbers. That’s the thing about abusive exes you just can’t shake off, cult leaders, and Leo ascendants. If part of the message wasn’t totally spot-on, if there wasn’t a truly captivating element of the delivery, they’d just be lone raving hitters-of-girlfriends and dispensers of quasi-accurate Tumblr facts about underappreciated goddesses. Unfortunately, Gabi’s vocal-fry intellectualism, her insights on Norse goddesses and Autobiography of Red, are beaming and springtime enough to keep drawing frosh hordes and gullible professors and other people’s should-be girlfriends to her most-expensive-aisle-of-the-craft-store plastic bouquet, but you can cut your hands on roses, you can get stained black knuckles from wet gold.
The assistant director starts calling Gabi’s new disciples into the theater for their monologues, and Gabi goes to the bathroom. I follow her, find her leaning over the sink, massaging soap onto her squat, short-nailed hands, refusing to look at herself in the mirror.
I shut the door, cough into my elbow. Gabi’s head twists toward me. She wipes her hands, says nothing.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“Yeah. Maybe we do,” says Gabi, tossing the wet paper towel and remaining perched, static, several feet away from me, like a seagull that eats all your chips but won’t get closer.
I take out the vibrator. Gabi settles, her shoulders easing. “Charlotte found this outside Hubbard. I don’t know if the warlocks’ aim is to, like, disarm us by just throwing vibrators everywhere and making us think they don’t have any real offensive planned, but we need to talk as a group. Obviously something bad is coming when the warlocks are all back at Amherst next semester.”
“They put out an article in the local newspaper. Saying he disappeared, that it was probably a suicide,” Gabi says, so hushed I have to inch closer, so there’s only about the space of another person between us, not enough room for the Holy Ghost (or Tripp’s).
“The police aren’t my concern.” I look her up and down, the greenish veins peeking out from under her eyes, a couple of hives dotting her brows, the ramen-malnourished complexion, the dandruff. “If we don’t take them out—all of the warlocks—they’ll come for us, eventually.”
“I’m not doing that again,” Gabi snaps.
“That’s not what I meant. I think we need to expose them. Force them into a situation where other people realize they have magic—other people who aren’t drunk college kids, who actually care—so they have to stop using it. Make them think they’re crazy.” I pause. “And we need to get the grimoire back, anyway.” I purse my lips like I’m telling the truth.
“I think we should ask Sienna,” says Gabi.
I pause. “Did you tell Sienna?”
“I just think you’re clearly not qualified to deal with this,” Gabi continues. “I mean, I agree we’re in deep shit, but you’re the one who lost the grimoire in the first place. Maybe you gave it to the warlocks?”
“And you’re dealing with it better?” I set the vibrator down on the counter. “Right now I’m the only one in the entire coven who seems to think we need to do something instead of sitting on our asses and brewing crystal chrysanthemum tea.”
Gabi rubs her red eyes, sneezes. “You know what, Lee? This is your problem. I’m not careless, I’m not a fucking criminal, I didn’t participate in you-know-what—”
“Well, Tripp didn’t rape you, you don’t know what it’s like, and Goddess knows you don’t give a shit about your girlfriend’s psychological wellbeing, you don’t want to give her any peace of mind—”
“Luna never wanted to go after him—”
“And even though it made your girlfriend feel better, you didn’t give a fucking shit, you don’t give a shit about her and never did—”
“You fucking coerced me into something that literally every single person on the planet agrees is horrible and—”
“Luna doesn’t matter to you, you don’t care about her, you only care about yourself and putting on fucking shows with your panic attacks or trypanophobia or whatever—”
“Most people would have fought you, I’m a second-degree black belt—”
“I bet your own fucking family hates having to trail after you like a five-year-old because you can’t fucking function and you just go around hitting—”
“FUCK YOU, LEE!”
We stand apart, both crying—Gabi shaking, teeth chattering, my tears running down my neck and slipping through my collar.
“You need to stay away from Luna,” I say.
Gabi wipes her mouth. “It’s not like I was abusive or anything.”
I put my hand on the edge of the sink, otherwise I’d fall. “You need to stay away from her.”
“She can make her own choices,” says Gabi.
“I think she needs some time away from you. I mean, you didn’t break up for no reason.”
Gabi shakes her head, distorts her mouth into a shape I’d call a smirk if we weren’t both sobbing. “I don’t need relationship advice from straight girls.”
I look from Gabi, to the vibrator, to Gabi again.
“Gabi, there’s something I need to tell you,” I say.
I reach down, grab the vibrator, and fling it at her head.
She stumbles; I lunge for the vibrator, rolling on the bathroom tile, by the pipes. Gabi steps toward the door, but we’re not done. I seize her by the hoodie, take the vibrator, and smack her again, across the other cheek.
She screams. I hold her up against the stalls, cover her mouth, and strike her again—and keep bringing the vibrator to her face, keep my fingers over her mouth, even as she tries to bite my thumb, my nails digging under her chin, her jaw, the vibrator hitting all points of her skull, no aim, just rage, resentment, jealousy, every seventh deadly sin, poor impulse control and PTSD, even though that’s no excuse unless you’re a thirty-something photogenic war veteran who has “seen things,” but you know by now that I never take responsibility for anything.
There’s a moment when, anger still moving my hands, I look at Gabi, bleeding profusely from her nose, blood thinner and redder than menstrual blood but with the same sterling scent, and feel I should let go of her, confront the real problem here, take the vibrator and somehow, even though it’s not designed to be able to do this, jam it through my eye socket, reach my brain case, make it all stop, make Gabi and the memory and myself all go away, all take wing and descend to the Underworld, to black and cold and the empty vacuum, the forgotten territory of the collective’s dark imagination. Here lies the difference between hypothetical guilt and disease, between normalcy and the distorted set of eyes gifted by trauma. You want this, you feel the same rage I do, but your body obeys the tabernacle, you have control, you’re not going to stumble back from the stall and hit your bum on the sink and look down at Gabi, her blood, her gaping mouth, and wonder how bad it was, how much you did, because you can’t tell, all you can see is blood, and your own guilt, forever written into her eyes like paper cuts, scars that paper towels and a sore apology can’t erase.
W
hen I look at the mirror, Tripp’s head peers over my shoulder.
He says, his voice streaming from my mouth: “What is it about bathrooms?”
I touch my hair, make sure it belongs to me. There’s blood on my fingers that darkens the strands.
“Don’t call the police,” I say to Gabi, after I wash my hands and grab my bag. “I’ll tell them about Tripp. I’ll tell them you did it.”
I get her more paper towels. Once I’m outside, I go to a garbage bin surrounded by a pedestal of snow; I hold my hair up, wipe the tears from my grin, and vomit.
I get back to Chapin and I call my mom. “I’m transferring.”
He sits on Rachel’s bed the whole time. When my mom hangs up, says she can’t talk about this right now, I fling the phone at him. The screen cracks, again, on the windowsill.
Chapter Fourteen
Salt
GABI AND LUNA DON’T CONTACT me. Charlotte texts me some kind of tag-yourself astrology meme right after I leave the theater, but I don’t hear from her again. And Sienna, of course, wants us to die, or else she’d restore our magic to full capacity. All I hear, three weeks later, is that they were all naked in the woods under the moonlight—no surprises there—and that around two A.M. they ran across campus clutching their clothes across their butts and got into the library, went to the fourth floor, where they were all having an orgy until Campus Police busted them and forced them to leave.
I wonder if they really did have an orgy, or if they were just naked for witchcraft reasons and people can’t resist sexualizing the female body in any and all circumstances.
Not that it matters. Whatever they were doing, I wasn’t invited.
Dreams:
It happened like it happened.
It’s a curling iron, not a vibrator, peeling layers of skin from her face like the sanitary liners that come with swimsuit bottoms. Until Gabi is nothing but skull, muscle, and Venus Verticordia curls coiling past her rib cage, like the child mummy that made my half sister tear up when we passed by the Egypt wing of the MFA to get to the Goya exhibit, and I made fun of her and she claimed I was just like our mother, unsentimental as the plague that robbed that poor mummy child of puberty, regretful first sexual experiences, and the BCE equivalent of staring at your bottle of psych meds before you go to bed every night and wondering if you should take them all, how much that kind of death would hurt.
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