Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  “You know, I read once that bi girls are assaulted at this ridiculously high rate,” she says while we’re on her bed, her black camisole barely covering her nipples, and I don’t correct her assumption, don’t assure her that I’m totally straight.

  She clutches me as I cry; her shoulder is perfectly smooth, with only a faint citrus soap scent, clean and inoffensive, yet nostalgic and welcoming, like your grandmother’s downstairs bathroom or that ancient little breakfast place just off the highway with the lace curtains and strawberry butter.

  “I get it,” she assures me, “I get it. I used to dream, you know, about some kind of magic potion that could make me forget him—some sci-fi dystopian innovation that could get inside my mind and get rid of him forever, but—I promise, it gets better—I promise.”

  Chapter Four

  Parsley, Sage,

  Rosemary, and Columbine

  THE NEXT WEEK, LUNA INTRODUCES me to her friends. We get bubble tea on Monday with Charlotte Hwang, the tall girl from Gender, Power, and Witchcraft. Charlotte grew up in Mexico City with her Korean American expat parents, and worries she won’t have anywhere to go for Christmas break now that her parents are divorced, her mother busy circling the globe for her wine import business and the lease on her father and his French boyfriend’s Paris apartment up in November and she doesn’t know if they'll renew it or just travel and live out of hotels. She doesn’t use a phone case, she dresses in hiking boots and fairy-gauze ponchos that overwhelm and suffocate her elongated, Mannerist limbs, and her bulky iPod Classic is stuffed with the sort of Scandinavian pop that undoubtably will be featured on next year’s H&M playlist, and Françoise Hardy.

  “You should come visit Hubbard sometime,” Charlotte tells me, slurping up the last of her taro tea and boba. “I can save us a table for pasta night.”

  I see Charlotte the next day, on the way to Professor Weiss’s witchcraft seminar. We walk to class together, and Charlotte asks if I get stoned. I tell her not really.

  “Super nervous for this first paper, right?” Charlotte says. “I don’t know what else I’m going to take if I don’t make the course. I think I’d rather graduate late than take a nine A.M.”

  Class is brief: Professor Weiss waxes for a bit about how the twenty-first century hasn’t had any good, real protests where you’re not quite sure what you’re protesting but everyone is singing Bob Seger and you can feel, smell, taste the community around you and you feel unindividual and human for the first time in your life. Then she says she’s not going to lecture because she wants to get going on grading our papers, so we turn them in and pack our bags.

  On Thursday, Luna texts me and asks if I want to go vibrator shopping with her, Charlotte, and their other friend, Gabi, who apparently sat across from me the first day of Sienna’s class. I’m skeptical, but considering the time I’ve spent with Luna has been the only time I haven’t had to think about him, or wanting to kill myself, I accept her invitation.

  I meet them on Chapin’s lawn. They’re laughing, Charlotte is smoking, and a head of abundantly thick russet curls rests on Luna’s shoulder, Luna clutching the other girl like a raft. I’m considering putting my head down and scrambling by, removing myself from a friend group that probably never wanted anything to do with me to begin with, when Luna shouts: “LEISL ANN DAVIS!”

  Luna hugs me, Charlotte and I fist-bump, and Gabi Avery—red curls reaching all the way down past her waist, a decidedly bulbous forehead, and more boob than her sports bra can contain—squeezes a cloudy dollop of hand sanitizer into her palm and says it’s nice to meet me. Then Luna puts her arm around Gabi again, Luna meets Gabi’s cornflower blue, Kewpie doll eyes, and I learn two things:

  Gabi is a person who refuses to touch money (it’s dirty).

  Gabi and Luna have hung out alone.

  We set out for Oh My Sensuality, the sex shop next to the taco place. It’s hot as fuck and I’m wishing I’d been less vain and worn shorts instead of vintage jeans, but I didn’t bring shorts to college because I hate my legs and there’s no point in baring your flaws to every person who sees you on the street. I ask if we can stop for some water, so we go to Starbucks and I use up my birthday gift card on two bottles of Fiji water and “Helena” is playing, so Charlotte and I naturally start to challenge each other to name an emo band the other person hasn’t heard of.

  “Blood on the Dance Floor,” I begin.

  “Weatherbox.”

  “The Medic Droid.”

  “Cute Is What We Aim For.”

  “Forgive Durden.”

  “If you think the nether regions of the Fueled by Ramen roster are obscure—” Gabi starts, and we respond by singing “The Church of Hot Addiction” and don’t stop until we’re halfway down the stairs leading to the basement-level entrance of the sex shop.

  Oh My Sensuality has a red velvet interior and reeks of cheap musk and roses. Round, square, cylindrical, and hexagonal vibrators dominate the shelving; corsets and a sheer curtained fitting room are in the back. The shopgirl is a limber blonde who floats on a pair of swanky little combat boots. She plays with her phone and blows blue bubblegum while we shop.

  Luna, the most experienced of the group, starts showing Charlotte different kinds of vibrators, while Gabi gravitates toward the dildos and I glance at corsets.

  Gabi comes up behind me, pointing to a purple corset. “Should I try this on?”

  “How about the red one?” I suggest.

  I’m looking at the books in the Tantra section when Luna comes into earshot.

  Luna: “That’s the thing, if your girlfriend buys you the wrong cereal it’s over.”

  Charlotte compares two vibrators, a long skinny one and one shaped like an Easter bunny. “But you’ve never had an orgasm?”

  Luna shrugs. “No.”

  I come up behind Luna and Charlotte. “Never?”

  Luna shakes her head. Charlotte and I exchange a glance, incredulous.

  Gabi bursts out of the fitting room. The corset is gapping at the back and the cranberry pleather covers her hipbones. “Do you like it?”

  Luna drops the vibrator and circles Gabi. “Babe, you don’t have it on right.” She starts to tighten the cords; Gabi shudders, and I feel like I’m watching someone else’s acceptance speech get cut off by a commercial break while I’m on my couch, unnominated, with sweet-and-salty popcorn and a flat bottle of cherry-flavor Sprite.

  “You can’t, even with a vibrator?” I say to Luna.

  “I can’t orgasm because of Prozac,” says Gabi. “And I went on Prozac when I was fourteen, so I’ve never had one either.”

  “I had an orgasm before fourteen,” Charlotte says low.

  Luna frowns. “It’s not uncommon for women to struggle to reach climax, you know.”

  My jaw drops. “Luna! The female orgasm is not some mythical entity! That women struggle to climax is a fundamentally patriarchal idea.”

  “Yeah, it’s really not that hard,” Charlotte concurs. “I don’t mean to suggest this, but like…are you not doing it right?”

  I whip out my phone. “Here, I’ll message you on Tumblr right now.”

  Gabi opens her ask box. “Touch your clit?”

  “That’s how you do it!” I shout from the register, where Charlotte is checking out. She opted for the long skinny one. (“A great first vibrator,” the shopgirl says.)

  “I already know to touch my clit!” says Gabi.

  Someone else emerges from the fitting room, swathed in a black hoodie and cork-sole clogs. (Why anyone ashamed to buy a vibrator in the twenty-first century wouldn’t just do so on Amazon is beyond me.)

  Charlotte is pointing to an egg-shaped rosy stone on the back shelf.

  “It’s a yoni egg,” says the shopgirl, gum smacking her lips. “You put it inside your vagina for, like, pelvic floor Kegels or something.”

  “I’m getting it,” Charlotte says, sprinting back to the register.

  Luna poses a question: “Who would you fuck
if you could fuck anyone?”

  “Frigg,” says Gabi. “The wife of Odin.”

  “Adèle Exarchopoulos,” Charlotte shouts.

  “Alexander Hamilton,” I say.

  “Professor Weiss?”

  My eyes snap to Luna, and I see that she was not confessing any latent attraction to our professor but greeting Professor Sienna Weiss in the flesh. Hood down, hair out, Professor Weiss’s steely brown gaze flits from yoni egg to me to Gabi, then back to Luna.

  “Good afternoon,” says Professor Weiss, and I think I’m the first to realize she isn’t going to offer a comfortable excuse for why she’s visiting Oh My Sensuality.

  “So nice to see you,” Luna continues as Charlotte desperately pockets her change and Gabi starts unthreading the corset. “We were just going. See you in class.”

  “Yes, see you in class,” says Professor Weiss, and again her eyes round the circle of Charlotte to Gabi to Luna to me, and I think she’s making a mistake looking at me because I obviously did not make her class.

  As soon as we’re back on the street Luna breaks down.

  “Holy fuck,” she starts, and we all mimic her, a flock of fake-septum parrots going “Holy fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

  “I feel like Sienna’s had a lot of sex in her life,” Charlotte says as we pass the town hall. “I know you probably don’t want that image, but just saying.”

  “Sienna was totally hot in her youth, I can tell,” says Gabi.

  “Professor Weiss is still hot,” Luna offers. “I need Midol. Can we run back to CVS?”

  “I’ll come with you,” says Gabi.

  “How soon do you think we’re going to be synced up, seriously,” I say, and the collective laugh and estimate of next cycle, tops is as much confirmation of our status as a solid, impenetrable Friend Group as the experience of meeting our professor while vibrator shopping.

  All I need from CVS is some floss, so I give Luna five dollars and she says she’ll get it for me. Charlotte and I keep moving toward campus, reaching the lone stretch of sidewalk and plowed grounds between town’s commercial lights and Smith’s neoclassical huddle of classrooms and administrative buildings. Somehow, Charlotte and I get on the topic of birth and infancy and how we were born at the same hospital (Mount Sinai), in the same year, and how we both had surgery when we were babies. I was born with my skull sutures closed and had to get them torn apart so my brain could grow when I was six months old, and Charlotte was born with six toes and had to have one removed when she was six months old.

  The horizon reveals an almost Western emptiness, with only the steeple of the bright teal Catholic church between us and the rusted gates that precede campus. I spot a lone biker, thirty or so feet behind us, far enough away to ignore.

  “Do you think Sienna—sorry, Professor Weiss—was going to buy a yoni egg?” Charlotte asks.

  “Not sure,” I say, and, having exhausted everything clever I had rehearsed, ask: “So what are you majoring in?”

  “Art, with a glassblowing concentration, and women’s studies, probably.”

  “I’m going to major in history or government,” I say, before realizing she didn’t ask me.

  “That’s cool,” says Charlotte, and I spend the next minute listening to the crack of her heels on the sidewalk and honing my memory for any hint of sarcasm in her cool. But Charlotte, despite her invitations to smoke pot at their friend’s room, is sweet as rainbow sprinkles and fresh boxes of Crayola, and almost as young.

  Rain begins to fall, clouding my sunglasses in an Impressionist haze and tickling my shoulders like an itchy moth-eaten Christmas sweater.

  “Leisl.” Charlotte swigs my name around her mouth. “Are you German?”

  “Distantly, but my mom just really likes The Sound of Music,” I say as Charlotte twists and rams her chest into my shoulder.

  “Watch out!” she shouts.

  Wheels in my peripheral vision, handlebars knocking into the small of my back—my body pivots to the side and I’m clinging to Charlotte’s fringed vest, then my hand is slipping and whacking the concrete, and my knee strikes the ground, skids long enough to rip the softened cotton of my jeans and cut my skin on grimy road.

  Charlotte leans over me; I broke her fall. She gathers me up under the arms, her bony limbs shuddering from the effort, and rolls me back onto the sidewalk.

  We watch as a pair of boys in Nantucket-red whale pants glide away from us on vintage handlebar bikes, buzz cuts and boat shoes, collars popped. Amherst kids, most likely frat. I squint, inspect them: Both are blondish redheads, big hulking football types.

  The rear biker turns his stubbly large head and fixes me with a gleeful, yacht-on-the-Cape, Episcopalian-unguilty stare, as if I’m a ladybug he squashed to death under his toe.

  I notice then that his basket is detached from his bike. It floats in the air, shuddering under the weight of an eighteen-pack of Bud Light.

  “What dicks,” says Charlotte. She helps me to stand. “Are you hurt?” She eyes my knee, frowning.

  “I’m fine.” I’m bleeding, but not in pain.

  Another voice: “Charlotte? And, I’m sorry, your name is—Leisl?”

  Sienna Weiss approaches us, forearms slung with groceries and a discreet brown paper bag from Oh My Sensuality.

  “We’re fine,” Charlotte and I say in unison.

  Professor Weiss frowns. “Leisl, are you injured? Do you need help?” She stares at my leg, squinting, as if she knows on some level that she should help me, but her offer to assist comes from hypothetical ethics, not emotion.

  “I’m helping her,” says Charlotte.

  “Please do,” says Professor Weiss, swerving around us with a nod.

  “See you in class,” I shout after her, but she doesn’t hear me (or just doesn’t answer, because she’s one of those people who doesn’t believe all talk merits a response).

  Charlotte and I stay together until Gabi and Luna get back from CVS. Luna helps me put some disinfectant and a bandage on my knee, and once we’re sure I’m okay, Gabi suggests we do a sacrifice to Freya, the Norse goddess, in the woods. I don’t want to be alone, especially if Luna isn’t going to be in her room down the hall, so I take some Advil and agree to come along.

  We go to the wine store across the street from the most remote, far-flung of the Smith houses, where a gaggle of Smithies and dreadlocked white people huddle together, speaking in hushed tones like they just saw a friendly ghost.

  Charlotte finds out what’s going on. “Rachel Maddow just walked out with a nice Malbec and took selfies with people.”

  “Oh, she lives in Amherst,” says Gabi.

  Luna pulls out her fake and goes inside. Charlotte goes with her because she has strong opinions on wine.

  Gabi and I sit on the bench across the street. She tells me that her Aunt Kristin (early forties but retired, some kind of finance guru, Gabi lived with her throughout high school, is paying Gabi’s tuition, her parents aren’t mentioned and I don’t dare ask about them) has a house in South Hadley where she lives in the summer and fall. Gabi’s sure her aunt will take us all out to dinner sometime. Have I tried Amanouz, the Moroccan place? Good, we have the same favorite restaurant.

  “I love their sardine sandwich,” I say. “It’s on a baguette with red onions.”

  Gabi’s frown is on fire. “I hate fish.”

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath, wonder if she was like this with Luna when they first met, if you acquire a taste for Gabi over time.

  “We should totally get Indian food to take to the sacrifice,” I say, pointing to the Indian restaurant next door.

  “To sacrifice to Freya?”

  “No, to eat—” I gulp. “Well, to eat and to sacrifice to Freya. Both, if that’s allowed.”

  I almost ask Gabi if she’s really a Norse pagan and if I should be solemn and respectful at the sacrifice because it’s her religion.

  “So how did you meet Luna?” I ask.

  “I kissed Luna,�
�� Gabi says, perhaps accidentally, lips and fingertips blooming pink with love at first sight. Her hands twist and bend, crisscross applesauce in her lap. “Just as friends, of course. It would be cool if you wanted to kiss sometime, too. As friends.”

  “Yeah, that would be cool,” I say, not really processing what she said until after, when her chin is bent into her neck and she stares down, silent, cheeks still pinched.

  Luna and Charlotte come back with three bottles of wine. We walk through campus, crickets alive, phone screens masquerading as fireflies, empty beer cans and broken eggs and a decapitated garden snake splitting the lane.

  Charlotte: “We’re going to the woods, right?”

  Gabi starts talking about how it’s so great that Smith has a ton of nature where you can do sacrifices to the gods. If she had gone to Columbia, where she would have gone if she had gotten in, it would have been super hard to worship.

  We move down the hilly road behind Chapin, lake and woods in sight. I’m not really listening and all of a sudden they’re rattling off dates—“2009,” “sophomore year,” “when I met Grace,” and then I’m being included.

  “When was it for you?” says Luna.

  “When was what?”

  “When you came out?”

  “Oh,” I say, hands up, caught in the headlights. “I’m not out—” Their mouths are shut. “I’m not out yet.”

  Charlotte pats my shoulder. “My parents didn’t believe me until they found lesbian porn on my iPad, and even then, my mom referenced some study about how straight women get sexually aroused from watching other women too.”

  “Wait, where are we?” Gabi asks.

  Luna, the only sophomore, pretends to know. “We’re still on the main trail. Does anyone have a flashlight?”

  Charlotte has a new-enough (even though it’s case-less) iPhone that has a flashlight. She lights up the young blue night and we plow deeper into the woods, our feet disrupting beds of newly fallen leaves.

  “Converse have no soles,” Gabi complains.

  “Have you tried Birkenstocks?” Luna suggests.