The other officer seizes me from behind. I scream, kick, resist, try to punch the officer when he takes my phone, keep screaming, tell them I’m some kind of superhero, five feet eight inches of divine retribution, apostle of all the little girls who got anally fingered in the second grade and hereafter describe it as a “childhood sexual experience” because shit like that is totally normal, I’m that version of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke when he quits being all turn-the-other-cheek and he’s like I don’t bring peace, I split up families when only half of them believe, fuck the Pharisees, which I read as, You can love your enemies after they’re dead, so long as they don’t come back to haunt you, and I’m also going to raise a bunch of fucking fish from the lake but I’m not going to feed you, I’m going to smite you, I’m going to destroy you, I killed John Digby Whitaker III and I can kill you too, just watch me, just lie back and think of all the little girls like me and how you thought you trained them to play dead and nice but I’m not nice, the last thing I am is fucking nice.
Tripp’s voice in my ear: “This whole God complex—not as intriguing as you think it is.”
I’m about to light the fucking officers on fire, even if it takes the whole of my magic, when my hands go still and cold. Ahead of me, racing down the path, is Sienna. The dogs run to greet her, wagging their tails.
One of the officers, behind me: “Yes, I’d like to request an ambulance. Psychiatric emergency.”
Sienna offers to take me.
“I’m not lying,” I say to her shoulder. “I’m not lying, I killed him, I really killed him.”
She comes with me in the ambulance. All I can see, strapped to the gurney, is her rings, the black tourmaline encased in her palm, the EMT untwisting a series of corded IVs.
The next day, Sienna walks through the hulking gray psych-ward doors that shudder and open with a top-secret-passcode button, like a spaceship. She comes into my no-door sorry excuse for a room, sits on the edge of my bed, and asks me how I am—then immediately takes it back, asks me how I’m being treated, if I have everything I need.
I shrug, give a vague sort of. The hospital blankets are thin and flimsy, inadequate for Western Mass winter, and the staff won’t give me my phone back.
Sienna lays a small box of chocolates on the foot of my bed and snaps her fingers. The curtains draw closed, and the sound on the other side grows low and fuzzy.
“I made sure the police will only remember your breakdown, not your murder claim,” she says. “And, if you agree to cooperate, we can get you out of the hospital tonight.”
“Cooperate how?” I ask.
Sienna sighs. “Leisl, did you really kill him?”
“I should have,” I say. “I should have been the one to stab him.”
Sienna’s head collapses into her hands. “Why did you tell me that, Leisl?”
Maybe because I just don’t care anymore, I am so beyond caring and planning and strategizing and considering myself from another person’s brain-view that I decided to honor the shadow that I’m sure everyone hates, to be my worst self, to set fire to everything I’ve fixed.
I glance to her and have some idea of what she’s going to say. I gulp, reach into my pocket for my scissors, and eye Tripp’s ghost across the room.
I hurl my scissors at him, even though I know it won’t do jack shit, even though I know, as soon as I feel for the magic that the scissors will simply clatter to the floor a few inches away, mundane, dead, powerless.
“Can’t you give me back my magic?” I ask.
“Leisl,” says Sienna. “I need to know you’re mentally well enough to appreciate the responsibility we bear as witches. And, right now, I don’t know that. I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“What would make you trust me?”
“You used your powers to commit a murder.”
I’m crying. “He raped me.”
“The future and protection of the craft is more pertinent than your individual concerns.”
I wipe my face with my sleeve. “Everything that’s done to you, it makes you crazy, but when you act crazy, when you act like the circumstances, people say you’re the one at fault. They say you’re looking for attention. You’re overreacting. But it’s just like, you reach this breaking point. You get mad and you don’t want to take it anymore, you can’t take it, if you have to take more you’ll die, so you fight back. And, then, suddenly, you’re evil. You’re bad. You’re the problem.” My eyes sting with tears. “Sienna, don’t you realize, if you take my magic away, you condemn me to death?”
“The future of the craft is paramount,” says Sienna, impassive as a frozen bottle of Poland Spring left in your car during a blizzard.
I sink to the floor and wail.
Sienna rises but doesn’t lift the spell on the curtain. “I’m assuming you’ll want to keep the privacy.”
I point to the box of chocolates. “Is this actually crystals, or herb sachets—”
“No. Just chocolate.”
Sienna smiles and leaves.
My bed, basically a stretcher, inhibits my usual sleeping posture, how I typically sprawl my limbs across the mattress, frog-like. Instead I have to sleep on my back, which is better for your spine, skin, facial symmetry, but this enables the ghost, in the middle of the night, to seize me by the shoulders, open his mouth, but instead of his voice it’s LeAnn Rimes, needing me like a martyr, like air, like rain.
I start to scream. The nurse on call gives me an Ativan with not enough water to wash it down.
The hospital therapists tell me their conclusions: that I’m obsessed with him, that he was my boyfriend, that I’m having a maladaptive grief response, and that’s why I made the police go searching for his body. (Sienna’s spell works; no one remembers my claim that I murdered him.) When the counselor tries to force tears out of me and gets screams instead, Tripp is there, hanging from the pebbly hospital ceiling, still singing, still freezing my blood like an ice-cold hose washing away any first-spring buds of hope, serenity, healing.
The next day they bring in a psychopharmacologist. We talk a bit about my treatment, how Ativan was crap and Wellbutrin was even more crap and Zoloft, so far, isn’t worse, but isn’t especially better.
Her eyes flick from me to the clock, over and over, as I tell her how I feel like I should die because I cannot be bragged about, how I don’t need to be perfect (just more perfect than other people), how I don’t think there could be anything worse than being judged, which makes me want to die, and every few minutes she makes a sort of mm-hm noise in addition to nodding.
Tripp, the whole time, makes broad circles of the room in the therapist’s spinny desk chair, but she doesn’t seem to notice, even when he crashes into her bamboo plant.
“Odd,” the therapist says, noting the fallen plant limbs, the broken vase, the puddle, and not doing anything in response.
At the end, I mention that I was raped and she says we’ll talk about that next time.
When the staff therapist first suggests a day program at McLean Hospital, I ask, From the movies?, imagining myself the hospital roomie of young Winona, realizing upon encounters with the other patients that, in the scheme of serious mental illness, I’m not all that seriously mentally ill, I’m just fixated on destroying the body and reputation of this little girl named Leisl Davis, because maybe reincarnation is real and when I kill myself I’ll be gifted a more beautiful body with no trauma and a fighting chance. I wonder if they still have horseback riding at McLean, like in The Bell Jar, or if that’s something they suspended when the hospital stopped being a psychiatric vacation for the hysterical wives and daughters of the Boston Brahmin class.
“No, McLean SouthEast,” the therapist says, the new location that just opened, near Plymouth. They have a zen room, designed by a feng shui expert. Bigger windows, more light.
My parents come to see me. My mom brings an old SpongeBob blanket, energy bars, and silence. My father encourages me to paint or take up some kind of creative outl
et, didn’t I paint when I was younger? He thought I was very talented. The therapist finally arrives to tell them about McLean SouthEast, the zen room, the group therapy model she believes could solve me like a jigsaw puzzle—but the insurance company, back and forth with my dad over the shitty Western Mass reception, only wants to give me three days out of the recommended eight, and I can tell by the way my mother’s shoulders tense that it’s a nonstarter.
My parents agree to come get me the next day, and the staff, shrugging, say I’m no longer dangerous enough to occupy one of the few narrow beds. Dinner, rubber-chicken teriyaki and a Diet Coke, then lights off. I shiver beneath the SpongeBob blanket, bury my face in the rough cotton pillow, and try to escape the white walls in my dreams, but all I feel is his hands on my skin, my shoulder blades, his feet tangled in mine under the sheets.
I rip back the covers.
“Get the fuck out of my bed,” I demand.
“Ah.” Tripp clutches the sheets, stained with his blood like pink watercolor. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“No. I don’t understand.” I gulp. “Well, actually, I do understand. You’re a fucking monster. You’re beyond comprehension. You ruined my life, all these girls’ lives, and you just laughed it off. What you are is evil—”
“Don’t you want to know?” Tripp says. “Why? Why I did it? Why I chose you?”
“Don’t fucking pretend you chose me for any reason other than convenience.”
“Actually, I thought you were pretty, Leisl. Haven’t I told you you look like Taylor Swift? Same hair, eyes, lips. Bit of a stronger nose, but I like that you’ve got character.”
I toss my only weapon—an illustrated Shel Silverstein volume from the hospital’s tiny library of books—at his head. It sinks through his skull, bouncing up against the pillow. “I said get out of my bed.”
Tripp grins. “The truth is, Leisl, all those girls—they’ll remember me.” He wipes the blood dripping down his neck with the SpongeBob blanket. “Better to be famous than infamous, but better infamous than forgotten, amirite? So many women will never forget me, as long as they live. I was your first. We’ve shared so many firsts together, haven’t we? Sex. Magic. Murder. It sounds positively romantic, I think. We’re a bit star-crossed, aren’t we?”
“Shut up,” I say. “Shut up now.”
“I wanted you to remember me,” he repeats. “And you will. I’ll be with you until you die. And, judging by this arrangement”—he sticks a ghastly hand through his stomach and pulls it out again—“perhaps beyond.”
“You’re fucking sick,” I insist.
“And you aren’t? You’re a murderer, Leisl. You knocked me unconscious, kidnapped me, and killed me. You’re a murderer. That’s the truth.” He rises. I stagger back, hit the cold plaster wall.
“What do you want?” I demand. “What’s the purpose of continuing to do this to me? What does it accomplish? Do you want me to fucking kill myself? Do you want me to suffer until I work up the guts to overdose on my medication? Or do you want to keep me around—am I terribly entertaining to you?”
He laughs. “There’s a solution, you know.”
“What is it?”
“I know where my body is,” he says. “My brothers moved it shortly after I was buried. I could tell you where to find me.”
“Why?”
“So we can settle this.”
“You’re already dead,” I say.
Tripp continues toward me; I raise my hand.
“Don’t touch me,” I say.
Tripp laughs and starts to float. “You think I’ve come back because you killed me, but you didn’t kill me. Luna killed me.” He somersaults over to the corner-mounted TV, pings the screen with his pointer finger—the channels begin to shuffle, producing a kaleidoscope of sound that the night nurse will hear, no doubt. “What’s between us isn’t settled. I couldn’t come back to you if you had killed me. If I was truly dead to you. If you had moved on. If you had really won.”
“What are you saying?”
“Bring me back,” he says, face lit from below, shadows tugging at the nascent lines around his nose, below his eyes. “Bring me back so you can face me. So we can settle this like we were destined to. Don’t you want to kill me? Don’t you want to end this?”
“I don’t know how to resurrect a dead body. I don’t have a spell for that.”
He opens up his chest cavity, pulls out the grimoire, slick with a film of blood and plasma. “I do.”
The door shudders open.
“Miss Davis, there is no television past nine.” The nurse seizes the remote from my nightstand and brings the room back into oblivion.
By the next day, the Zoloft starts working, and the possibility of suicide isn’t so engine red, even if the ghost keeps up his nonsense about bringing his body back to life. (I don’t think you’d actually go away, I keep repeating to him, I don’t think you’re ever going to go away, you’re lying, you’ll be here forever.) My parents are late getting me, so I spend my lunch with Tripp as my companion, sitting in the empty seat across from me and repeating how the solution is where the magic is, and the magic is at Smith. “You need to go back to school, face my bones.”
I have no desire to return—to Smith, to life. But the sight of Tripp, detailing how his ghost eyes enable him to see “everything” beneath the black-bobbed psychiatric resident’s white coat and Theory trousers (“She’s a thong girl, can you believe it?”), how he can see every part of me too, how he can’t wait for me to get out of the hospital and take a real shower, makes me feel something, and feeling is not what I’m going to get in the McLean zen room, or in my little attic bedroom at home.
My parents arrive, finally. The staff give me back my clothes and belongings at discharge; it’s easy enough to duck into a bathroom at the highway rest stop, throw together a sachet with the random herbs I have sprinkled through my bag’s innermost pockets. I don’t know if it will work, if Sienna’s October lesson on “emergency talisman-free magic” applies to psych-ward witches on power probation, but I don’t have another option, so I strike a match and state my intention (that my parents will comply with whatever I tell them).
In the car, I tell my parents I’m going back to Smith.
“You want to be with your friends, of course,” says my mom, nodding understandingly and telling my dad to reroute the GPS.
Chapter Fifteen
Death of the Firstborn
MANY PEOPLE HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED Extreme Social Isolation, particularly not at college, which is supposed to be the Greatest Time of Your Life, but maybe there are more of us than I know, all huddled in our single or newly single rooms, speaking only to the smoothie girl at the Campus Center on nonclass days; the people who show up eagerly to every office hours just to have someone to talk to, even if all the professor does is answer a fake question about Habermas I came up with just so someone would look me in the eye and address me as Leisl.
I don’t know why I came back to Smith, if the problem just keeps drilling deeper, and there’s no solution in sight but the ghost’s nightly monologue in favor of my finding his body and bringing him back to life, so I can really kill him, so this can be over.
Luna and I still live on the same floor, so I see her at least a couple of times a week, even though I make a conscious effort to only leave my room when I know she has class, but Luna, of course, doesn’t often go to class. Chapin’s common room and basement are off-limits, as it would be totally like Luna to bring the whole coven onto the eighties brocade couches while I’m lying there, trying to do my homework in a setting in which social graces mandate I can’t randomly start sobbing and researching whether Wellbutrin kills you in a borderline-humane manner, not that I care.
In those weeks, into March, I keep up the habit of painting my nails red, every Sunday after my shower and before my weekly breakdown about not having written a good enough paper; my consistent string of As and praise cannot possibly last. I go through bot
tles of Essie’s Forever Yummy, Geranium, Scarlett O’Hara, even expanding the definition of red to Clambake, not finishing them, never satisfied with the color, vowing in a rare moment of optimism, if I survive this, to invent a really genuinely blood-red drugstore nail polish, because I, of all people, know the color of blood. It needs to match the hands that keep showing up in my dreams, my own hands, the sticky residue of Tripp’s blood always stuck under my nails, even though I spent valuable hot-water time that December night cutting my nails short enough to get rid of the caked-under blood, so half my fingers needed bandages, which was, in retrospect, highly suspicious, especially coupled with my brief fixation on wearing gloves inside, even when typing during lectures. Anemia, I offered, to anyone wondering why I was so cold.
“You could make me bleed again,” says the ghost. “Check the color. Make sure.”
Of course, only going to the bathroom when Luna has class is not sustainable, so eventually I start going up to the third floor to pee, but that’s when I see her, on the stairs, unable to put as much distance between us as I need, unless one of us leaps over the banister (which I consider). The first couple of times, I shuffle past, eyes down, earbuds in, pretending to be lost in a podcast, but she always waves and says hello, and I, easily startled, always get duped into staring her straight in the face.
She would appear, in the eyes of any objective onlooker, to be taking the high road by smiling and making eye contact, but I know her, and I know how condescending she can be. Everything Luna ever said or did seems colored with deceit, betrayal, and hatred, now that I think about it.
Sometimes, we’re both going upstairs at the same time, and she tries to let me go first through the door, but I step aside, and as she passes I feel the urge to slam the door on her fingers, shatter her nails and turn her stupid betrayer’s hands to clanging science-classroom bones, held together by tiny metal brackets, her face decaying into two hollow eye sockets that reveal the whole empty inside of her skull, every part of her that ever hated me and made me feel like killing myself because of shame and failure and opening up too much. All her flesh vanished, yet her memory still haunting, somehow, until I too am made of dust and memory, ashes and herstory.
Consensual Hex Page 19
