Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  It’s a cliché, but, as a typical young queer girl—or whatever you call it when you’re in love with another girl but memories of the suspect lesbians on the eighth grade bus having the one-inch hairs plucked from their just-cropped heads, thirteen-year-old boys passing them notes about scissoring, keeps you repeating the same-old-same-old I’m totally straight—it’s not that I slept with someone, it’s that I Slept with Someone. Sex with Luna wasn’t a one-time, brush-lint-off-my-jacket event, but an invitation for my mind to ponder how we would choose grad schools in the same city, get an apartment together, get engaged, get married, if we would both wear dresses or both wear suits, which of us would have our child, if we would even bother with pregnancy or just adopt instead. It sounds crazy, it sounds like too much, but once you meet this girl and she Transforms Your World, grabs your hand and pulls you down her rabbit hole, you can’t let go, you can’t cross her out like a failed experiment.

  I glance out the door, catch the faint three-headed outline of the coven waiting at the end of the road for the bus. I turn to the youngish history professor, complain of a sudden headache, and burst through the door before I can get my coat on, silently bemoaning the Western Mass frost of April and how it really should be fucking spring by my almost-birthday.

  “Luna!”

  They’re getting on the PVTA: I get on the bus just as the doors are about to close and scramble to the back, where the coven, seated, stare up at me, dumbfounded.

  “We have to find the hourglass,” I blurt out, realizing how out of shape I am, panting from a sprint of a few hundred feet. “I’m going to Sienna’s office. Who’s coming with me?”

  I stare at Luna’s blank bobblehead expression, her pretty eyes blinking, unfocused, refusing to see me, almost.

  “I’ll go,” says Charlotte. “Lee’s right, for once.” I bristle. “We really can’t let the magic run out. Not with Sigma still active, with them having the grimoire back.”

  Luna and Gabi reluctantly agree; we get off at the Smith stop, walk to Neilson in fighting silence, use three precious spells to unlock the doors, ascend in the elevator to Sienna’s office, and open her locked door.

  The search begins at once. Luna flicks the lights on, Gabi dusts Sienna’s desk with a tissue and a squirt of hand sanitizer, Charlotte climbs the spiral stairs and explores the upper level (the cats are gone), and I kneel to the lowest reach of Sienna’s file cabinet.

  “Sienna has a shit ton of stuff,” Charlotte shouts from up top. “What color is the hourglass again?”

  “Do you think she hid it with magic? So we couldn’t break into her office and find it?” says Luna.

  “Shit, you’re probably right,” I say, heart sinking. “Wait, let me try something.”

  I reach into my pocket, grip my scissors; at once, darkness cramps the space. Success; I’m grinning wildly, out of my mind, power back in my fingers. Teeth clenched, I hold the intention, and the light returns—this time with a meow. Sienna’s young cat paws the broken remains of the hourglass, a stormy assortment of previously obscured papers flooding her desk.

  All my relief vanishes, invisible, never there, when I fully process what is arranged in meat-market symmetry on Sienna’s back table.

  Luna screams. Gabi clings to Sienna’s desk. Charlotte chimes in with a single “Fuck!”

  Sienna even retrieved his head, severed from his blood-splotched, half-skinned five-month-old corpse, his dead fingers hanging precariously close to the table’s edge.

  I sink to my knees. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  “Thanks for using up even more of our magic,” Gabi says pointedly to me.

  “I had to use magic to find the hourglass. And you were the one who used magic to light up back at the funeral home—”

  “Shut up, both of you,” says Luna, descending into Sienna’s oversize desk chair. “Come over here. Look at this.”

  Luna scoots over to let Gabi share the chair; Gabi smirks at me as she secures her arms around Luna’s neck.

  “You’re going to look through her papers, not at Tripp’s dead fucking body?” I say.

  “Maybe she left behind something to let us know why she kept him. Research notes, I don’t know,” says Luna, gaze diagonal to the ground, calm as total denial.

  I turn my back on the corpse and go to the desk. A Moleskine notebook, the big expensive leather variety, lies open. Beside it, an old syllabus is torn up.

  HIST 313

  GENDER, POWER, AND WITCHCRAFT

  PROFESSOR SIENNA WEISS

  AMHERST COLLEGE

  FALL 2012

  Next to the heading is the name Clara Dale, scribbled in anachronistically perfect parochial cursive.

  “Sienna did teach at Amherst,” Luna says, refreshingly ignoring her girlfriend’s cloying kisses on her cheek.

  I seize the Moleskine. “New Year 2013,” I read. “He’s following me, but it’s not him. I got rid of the platforms, took them off campus and buried them, but he’s still here—his apparition. I hate to say I’m haunted, and I’m fairly sure I’m not hallucinating. I have no history of mental disturbance. I’m a psychology major, I should know.”

  Across the room, the ghost cartwheels down the stairs, cackling, laughing so hard he drools blood. “April twenty-seventh,” he calls, almost inaudible through his laughter.

  “I know my birthday,” I shout back.

  “Lee?” Luna raises an eyebrow.

  I cough. “Sorry, I was reading from the diary. I think this is a diary—April twenty-seventh. Today, Professor Weiss was found dead at the scene of a hit-and-run accident on the highway between Northampton and Hadley.” I turn back a few pages, looking for a year; my search takes me back to the cover, inscribed with the same lush cursive, Clara Dale, 2012.

  “Fuck, did Sienna’s former students hate her so much they wrote fanfiction about her dying?” Charlotte asks.

  Luna and I exchange a long glance.

  I start from the first page. “August twenty-fifth. The special group all moved back to campus early, and we all had to take the PVTA to Smith to meet our professor. There’s this cute guy who sat next to me on the bus. His name is Tripp.”

  My voice breaks. I toss the Moleskine at Luna like it’s a tissue containing a hornet.

  “November eighth,” says Luna. “The coven doesn’t believe me. Professor Weiss believes me, but she can’t do anything until we get the grimoire back. Today I finally understood—she’s scared of Tripp, too. She thought because Tripp and the other guys would be the first men to use magic, ever, that they would be weaker. It’s his confidence, she told me, that’s the root of his power. But then she started going on about the “magic IRS” and how she had to quit the course and install Professor Higgs as a replacement. How exposing men to magic, much less giving them a grimoire, is expressly forbidden. I wonder if she’s just afraid of punishment. If she really intends to help. I won’t tell her about the ghost, not until I know her intentions are pure.”

  “The ghost?” Charlotte leans over Luna’s shoulder; they don’t notice me shaking.

  “Sienna literally gave the warlocks the grimoire,” says Luna, color drained from her face. “For some kind of Amherst coed coven experiment.”

  “She needed us to retrieve the grimoire to avoid punishment from the magical authorities,” says Charlotte. “We were her lackeys. We were used. Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” Luna and I agree.

  “Luna, can we go get ramen? The place downtown is still open,” says Gabi.

  I clench my fists. “Gabi, we’re literally in the middle of discovering the truth about Sienna and the grimoire. And Tripp’s dead fucking body is on the table over there. You have Cup Noodles in your room to eat later if you’re hungry.”

  “I have to pee,” says Gabi. “Luna, come with me.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Don’t speak for me,” says Luna, rising out of her chair. “Gabi, come on.”

  “What the fuck?” I bloc
k the door. “What the actual fuck?”

  “I have to go to the fucking bathroom. Let me through,” says Gabi.

  I step aside. “So I’m on my own, as always. I’m going to have to figure out how to get the grimoire from Sigma all by myself.”

  “You’re so fucking full of yourself,” Gabi shouts from the hall.

  “Shit, you just want to leave the body and the notebook?” I reach for my scissors, throw a light glamour over our discoveries, seize my backpack—“Lee,” Charlotte pleads—and take the next elevator down after Gabi and Luna.

  I realize, despite my criticism of Gabi, that I’m starving, head pounding, so I run past Chapin and the Campus Center, hit the convenience store for Pringles and Advil. It takes the cashier an unusually long time to check out due to an issue with the register, so I end up eating the entire sleeve of chips while hunched over the front stoop.

  Once I finally pay for my devoured chips and ibuprofen, it’s almost an hour later. I stumble back in the direction of Neilson—Tripp behind me, shouting out various dates to look up in the Moleskine—reaching Main Street without my headache resolved.

  I cross the deserted street, even though it’s a red light. The moon guides me, a bright porthole under a misty film of clouds.

  I’m about to reach the sidewalk when a vigorous gust of wind strikes my back, and I lose my footing. My knees hit the pavement, but, instead of reopening the wound still bandaged on my knee, the wind lifts me, my squirming legs parting the air like water, and I’m floating, up up up until my eyes are level with the top of a streetlamp.

  I rip out my headphones, glance down to see a red-faced, out-of-breath Charlotte, arms outstretched, menstrual cup in hand.

  “Lee!” Charlotte shouts. “Stay calm!”

  She starts to lower me, in sharp, rickety motions.

  “Just drop me already!” I insist.

  A black Escalade zooming toward downtown Noho stops in the middle of the road, makes an illegal U-turn, and speeds down the wrong side of the street, curving toward the curb.

  “Charlotte!” I cry as I hit the concrete on my ass.

  “Sorry, you had your headphones in and—” Charlotte starts to explain, before the Cadillac leaps over the curb and knocks her square in the back.

  I swerve into the fence, Charlotte slides under the hood, and the car brakes.

  “Charlotte!” I scream as the passenger door swings open, and two reedy warlocks hustle out of the vehicle, each holding a cheap plastic broom. The shorter of the two is wearing the yellow platforms. They mount the brooms, lift into the air, and fly up over the fence, over Neilson and Seelye, fading to black like rolling credits.

  I get under the car and pull Charlotte out. Her arms are scratched, she’s delirious, and I don’t know about internal injuries, but she’s breathing, her heart is beating, and for the time being, that’s enough.

  I call 911, hold her tight, taste tears and exhaust. Luckily, the Cadillac has a license plate. I briefly relay to the police that two Amherst boys were responsible, it was a hit-and-run, I was too shocked to follow them.

  I go with Charlotte in the ambulance and, once I’m waiting in a flimsy plastic chair in the hospital, open the group text.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kamakhya Devi (The Bleeding Goddess)

  AT THE HOSPITAL, LUNA TELLS me that Charlotte was originally coming after me because the warlocks sent her this horrible message on OkCupid, about how they were going to run me over with the Cadillac as soon as I left the convenience store—a warlock buying Marlboros had seen me.

  I’m surprised the coven went out of their way to save me.

  “Of course we saved you,” says Luna, wrapping her arms around me.

  In the absence of Charlotte’s family, the doctors tell us Charlotte has two broken ribs and some internal bleeding. In typical nonalarmist MD fashion, the suave young resident proclaims her injuries “mild,” considering she got hit by an Escalade—Charlotte credits the quartz point she keeps in her bra.

  Charlotte will obviously be staying the night.

  “Why don’t you girls go back to campus and get some rest,” the resident suggests.

  We refuse, and he calls the nurse to bring us blankets and a couple of pillows.

  “At least my dad will come to see Smith,” Charlotte says once we’re all in her hospital room—just like old times, aside from the blinking monitors, the stark white fluorescence, the IV sunk into Charlotte’s elbow. “Maybe he’ll take us all out to dinner. And if he brings Jean-Paul, you’ll all really get along.”

  Gabi and I, as far away from each other as possible, considering the tight dimensions of the room, exchange a rare glance. We may all be together, but the old times are dead, never to be resurrected.

  Sometime around four thirty A.M., when Charlotte is going on about her mom’s eighth-house stellium (“That’s why she’s obsessed with watching her own surgery on video, and why she had a frank discussion with me about the location and purpose of the clitoris when I was in the seventh grade”), Luna and I tuck Gabi up in Luna’s mohair pea coat (my whole face grimacing, shriveling, when Luna dips forward to lay a kiss on Gabi’s cheek, but at this hour, there’s nothing to hide) and go to get some peanut M&M’s at the vending machine in the lobby, because peanuts have some nutritional value. I watch Luna withdraw a dollar bill and three rusty quarters from her wallet, lovely pale-dawn brightness gripping her face and the bit of neck peeking out from the top of her scarf, and think about how, because I’m always in pain, I can never love another person the way she deserves; that’s the truth, I’ll never love or be loved, I’m always giving from an empty pot of dead roses and dehydrated soil.

  “Lee,” says Luna, after I relate this to her, chocolate-saliva uncharacteristically leaking out the corners of her mouth, “we already had this discussion. It’s not that I don’t care about you. I have a girlfriend.”

  “A girlfriend hell-bent on wasting the remainder of our magic every time she lights a cigarette or summons her phone from across the room because she’s too damn lazy to get off her ass.”

  Luna swallows her last M&M and fishes in her wallet for more change.

  We grab a couple of waters and go back to Charlotte’s room, passing a row of long gallery windows trimmed in tabernacle bronze, gift of the millionaire namesake of the maternity ward. Outside, blue police lights flash and burn through the dewy fog; the part of me that’s attracted to emergencies wants to stop, investigate, find out what’s going on, but ahead of me is the ghost, shadow cast off his hovering body, the crisis that’s always dominating my attention, stealing me away from the outside world.

  We walk in on Gabi taking down a shopping list for Charlotte on her phone: peach Snapple iced tea, her iPad from her room, Pocky, nail polish.

  “Char, I have a confession to make,” says Gabi. “When I first met you, when you had the acrylic nails, I thought you were super straight.”

  “Nah, just super single,” says Charlotte, noticing us at the door. “How’s the vending machine?”

  “Fine. We got some waters,” says Luna, settling onto the foot of Charlotte’s bed, hanging her head over the side.

  After Charlotte and Gabi are asleep, Luna and I devise a plan in whispers, even send out a message on OkCupid, inviting the warlocks to attend Smith’s Take Back the Night event next week, where we hope to settle our dispute once and for all.

  “You really think the warlocks will trade the grimoire for the body—or, at least, agree to meet us to do so?” Luna asks me, over Gabi’s snores.

  I gulp. The ghost sniggers at me. “If they still have the grimoire.” The ghost is silent for once.

  The warlocks message her back—no mention of the grimoire, but they’ll meet us at Take Back the Night.

  “And we’ll be able to use the body for the spell you have in mind—to take the warlocks’ magic away and wipe their memories permanently?” I listen to my voice peak at the end, worry she’ll hear my lie—but Luna doesn’t catch i
t.

  “If we can defeat the warlocks before they actually take the body,” says Luna.

  “We need to get rid of the platforms too,” I mention. “They’re a talisman. One of the warlocks is always wearing them.”

  “Should we cut off his feet?”

  “Surely there are other means of taking his shoes off.”

  The next day, a short-haired nurse with an octopus tattoo and septum ring comes to express suspicion over Charlotte’s refusal to eat even Jell-O, coupled with her reportedly low BMI, and Charlotte somehow manages to flirt with said nurse effectively enough to earn a higher dose of morphine. Charlotte won’t be leaving the hospital for at least two nights, and will require a long, strict period of rest.

  We tell her about our plans while Gabi is at class. “Shame I can’t be there,” says Charlotte, indicating her hospital bed. “Bigger shame we have so little magic left. What can we really do in the meantime? Can I help batch potion ingredients? Make a really good sign for the march?”

  The preparations: Luna and I dirty our fingers with playground chalk, inscribing sigils around Chapin House. Charlotte organizes dragon’s blood and calendula and tiny locks of our hair into small plastic bags, telling the nurses she’s an aspiring herbalist. Luna gently informs Gabi of our scheduled showdown, and Gabi stays out of my way, so I don’t really know what she’s doing, but the few times Luna brings her up, it has to do with combat magic and Gabi’s alleged black belt.

  As the protest draws closer, Luna and I see each other almost every night, but she manages to keep the conversation away from sex, intimacy, and the precise details of the passing of John Digby Whitaker III, a real accomplishment, considering there’s hardly ever anything else on my mind. All she talks about is Gabi, Gabi’s exams, Gabi’s new haircut, Gabi’s new medication, Gabi’s favorite ramen shop, and then she wonders why I’ve got resting sad face all of a sudden, why I always seem to be on the verge of tears.