“I don’t want to break in new sandals in the fall,” Gabi says.
Luna puts her arm around Gabi again. “It’s really important, you know, to try new things. I started using a menstrual cup two months ago and thought I would hate it, but I absolutely love it.”
“I’m satisfied with pads,” says Charlotte.
“Not a fan of anything up my vag,” I add.
We reach the edge of the lake, where the seniors say you can go skating when it freezes, though they warn that high skating is stupid as fuck, you could fall through the thin film of ice and drown. Which happened to a girl about five years ago and she survived, the police showed up with ropes and dogs and sirens and stretchers, but you might not.
Gabi is combing the shore. Charlotte argues with Luna about which wine to sacrifice and which to drink.
“Is this good?” I shout to Gabi. “Is this good enough for Freya?”
Then, like God decided to scrap his drawing and turn over a new page, we fall into the dark and the only indications that we’re still flesh and blood are the untainted rural stars above.
“Shit, guys, I don’t have any battery,” says Charlotte.
Luna grumbles: “Wait, I’ve got it.”
The world flicks back, bathing the lakeside in a harsh celluloid glow.
Charlotte’s toes edge the lake, her arms stretched out in front of her for balance. “Luna, come check this out.”
“Can I open the pinot?” Luna asks.
Charlotte frowns. “Come over here, there’s something in the lake.”
Luna goes to the lake, shines her phone flashlight across the surface.
Charlotte: “Is that—”
Luna: “OH MY FUCKING GOD—”
Charlotte drops her backpack, the laptop inside crunching like crackling flames.
Gabi starts hurtling down the trail, back toward Chapin—probably because whatever she saw at the lake was really unsanitary—and Luna rushes after her. I’m trying to get close enough to the lake to see what’s going on, and Charlotte is running toward me, but both of us sidestep in the same direction and she slams into me.
“Watch the fuck out!” I cry, stumbling forward. It’s pitch-black without Luna’s phone and my legs aren’t holding up and I’m falling. My knees hit the ground; it’s wet, the shore of the lake. I stretch my arms out for balance, try to stand, but I can’t see anything and the water is really fucking cold and again I’m falling, deeper, seized by the lake, my head is underwater and it’s cold, cold and deep and I fear no one’s coming to get me.
I surface, gobbling down a large mouthful of air.
Charlotte’s voice: “Lee!”
“Charlotte?” I splash around, planting my feet in the gelatinous mud of the lake floor. “Charlotte, are you in the water?”
“Lee!” Charlotte again.
I stretch my arms out and my right hand brushes a set of fingers.
“Charlotte?” I scream.
I grab the hand, keeping my feet firmly on the bottom of the lake.
“Charlotte?” I squeeze the hand.
Her voice echoes from the opposite direction. “Lee!”
I let go of the hand. The arm thuds back into the water.
I start to scream. “Charlotte?”
Feet shaking the water.
“Lee?” Charlotte’s voice. “Lee, that’s you, right?”
Two arms, moving, warm, surround me, bring me out of the water.
“One of them is in the water,” I tell Charlotte’s chest. “Gabi or Luna.”
“Gabi and Luna are back on the path already,” says Charlotte in the dark.
Luna’s flashlight appears in a blaze.
“Leisl!” She’s shrieking, cat-eye leaking down her face, but her eyes aren’t on mine. “Were you in the water? Oh God.”
“Where’s Gabi?” I ask.
“She’s out of the woods by now,” says Luna.
“That’s impossible. There’s someone in the water,” I say.
Luna, gulping, points her flashlight at the lake.
Charlotte leaps back. “Fuck!”
I’ve never seen a dead person before. And it takes me a moment to distinguish between a beating red-blood victim of an accident whose lungs need a tank, and the lost cause on the water: sucked-dry-by-a-vampire pores, toothy gape framed by Gatorade-blue lips, willowy halo of mermaid hair floating just under the surface.
The body is wearing an Amherst sweatshirt. One knee bobs up from the depths, swaddled in blue k-tape.
Luna puts her arm around me and Charlotte. “Gabi? Gabi?”
We keep shouting, until we see the white face of Chapin in the paper-lantern moonlight, advancing toward us like a lighthouse.
Chapter Five
Seven Sisters
WE FIND GABI AT THE boathouse, knees to chest, fetal position, inside one of the kayaks you can rent on nice days if you get on the wait list early enough in August. Even though we’re coming up from the woods as sirens are rounding the drive and German shepherds are sticking their damp noses in the pine needles, the police don’t notice us.
We wind our way back to Chapin. Everyone is sprawled over the couches in the common room, screaming.
“A literal dead body in the woods? Are you fucking kidding me?” a senior with purple lipstick says to the Head Resident.
“Of course the dead body is behind our house,” she replies.
I get my phone. There’s an official notification from Smith, coming as a text: ALERT: DEAD BODY FOUND IN WOODS BEHIND CHAPIN…
“No one saved the wine?” Charlotte asks.
Gabi, crying, asks if someone will take her back to Cutter Ziskind, she really wants to be in her own room.
I expect Luna to offer, and my heart drops, but Charlotte puts her arm around Gabi instead. “I’ll take her back.”
“Be careful,” Luna shouts after Charlotte, ushering Gabi through the door.
My room is closer, so we go there. I flip on the lights. Rachel is at her seven-to-nine P.M. econ lecture—her bed is made. Mine isn’t.
“I’d rather be at the Cape?” Luna reads from the poster over Rachel’s bed. She scans the rest of the wall: the Walk for Farm Animals flyer, the framed photos of grandparents and friends, the grow-your-own-mushrooms kit, still in its box. “Your roommate seems so aggressively wholesome.”
She nods approvingly at my prints of Cranach’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes and Waterhouse’s Ophelia, tacked directly above my set of four pillows.
We make sure we have each other’s correct numbers, and we repeat back to each other that we can call or text at any time of the night if we need anything, and if we don’t want to go into the shower alone tomorrow morning we could each stand in the part of the shower where you’re behind the first curtain but the second curtain is still closed to give the actual showering person privacy (the strange features of communal college showers).
Luna approaches me, and I fall into her, scarlet nails digging into the flimsy fabric of my ill-fitting Breton stripe, and we stay there for some time.
“Hey,” Luna says, still holding me, “do you think Gabi could like me?”
“Of course Gabi likes you—” I pause. “Oh, you mean, like you, like you?”
We break.
“I’m not saying it’s romantic,” says Luna, face flushed like she’s just downed two shots of the vodka lingering under Rachel’s desk. “I just think she might like me. But I don’t know if I want a relationship right now.”
“Do you like her?”
“I just broke up with my ex,” Luna says, sighing. “Gabi—she’s so cool, you know? She’s just really cool.”
“Sure,” I say. “Well, it’s up to you. If you feel like you’re ready for a relationship.” My voice cracks, and I’m not sure why.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Luna says.
“Me?” I’m shocked she thinks anyone would want to be with me. “I’ve never been in a relationship.”
I’m not sure why I
said that. Luna nods, then her lips part in confusion. “Never? Are you ace?” She pauses. “Sorry, that was inappropriate—”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“I was a virgin,” says Luna. “I mean, still a virgin. Virginity is a stupid construct, of course, but I haven’t been with anyone I love, you know?”
“You believe in love?”
“You think cynicism is the only way to demonstrate your intelligence?”
We laugh, hug again, and she goes to bed. I pick up my phone to call my mom, waiting until the voicemail message starts before giving up and climbing into bed, keeping the lights on.
At midnight, on my laptop, failing to sleep, watching local news coverage about the case against this multiple-rapist television producer and the newscaster speaking out against him (she’s crying during the interview, red lipstick staining the overhang of her twin incisors), I receive an email. Subject line: “Office hours tomorrow.”
Leisl/Sound of Music,
Meet me at my office (in the library) tomorrow at 1 PM.
Yours, SW
I make a vow to sign all my emails “Yours, LD” for the rest of my life, then toss my laptop under my pillow and fall asleep.
The student receptionists have no idea where Professor Weiss’s office is. She doesn’t have a library mailbox, and her office isn’t listed on the website. I’m about to give up when the janitor appears and offers to take me up through the special elevator that visits the fifth floor, which none of the receptionists have ever been to.
I step out of the elevator into an attic bursting with dusty encyclopedias and a cardboard box stacked with Roman busts. I step over marble heads and shoulders, taking long enough that the elevator has the chance to descend to the lobby and creep back up to the attic, shuddering open with a thud and depositing a purple-lipsticked Smithie, arms weighed down by books about Greeks she’s yet to check out.
Luna sneezes. “Lee! Did Professor Weiss tell you to come to her office too?” She gathers me into a hug. “I don’t know if my paper was terrible or what.”
“Same,” I say, pulling out my phone. “It’s just past one.”
“We should probably find her office, yeah.” Luna wades with me over boxes of manila folders with old thesis papers until we stumble upon a door that looks like it hasn’t been opened in forty years.
PROFESSOR SIENNA WEISS, the engraving reads.
I knock. No response.
“Are you sure this is it?” Luna frowns.
I knock again—this time the door bursts open, and Professor Weiss looks us up and down. “Leisl, Luna.” The corners of her smile are sharp and bright. “Come in, please.”
Professor Weiss’s office looks like the duplex everyone aspires to rent once their sugar baby careers really kick off: a ballroom-sized Alexandrian maze of bookshelves and medieval tapestries, a precarious helix of spiral stairs in the center of the room, leading up to a second balcony-floor with more books, more tapestries, and a neat arrangement of midcentury sofas upon which a number of cats are resting. Light travels down from a massive skylight, lending a circular planetarium view of pine tree tops and cornflower sky and the daytime quarter moon in black-and-white-cookie glory.
We pass tables stacked with aging papers and empty golden birdcages before Professor Weiss throws aside a set of velvet curtains to reveal her desk, and four chairs surrounding it—two of which are filled by Charlotte and Gabi.
“Would you like some tea?” Professor Weiss asks, already in the process of filling five cups of a cobalt-and-white Chinese tea set.
“Sure,” we say in unison.
She gives us each a cup and takes a seat behind her desk, downing her tea in one gulp. “I want to say first that I’m so pleased the four of you will be joining me for the seminar this semester. I am looking forward to working with all of you. I’m going to send out an email this weekend so we can decide on a proper time for the extra lectures. But—” she says, standing and retrieving an unopened bag of Quadratini wafer cookies from the top of the refrigerator, “I must warn you that I have decided to shift the content of the seminar. As much as the study of history is crucial to the intellectual development of young people, I feel that the current political climate mandates we make our class much more practical in focus.”
“How so?” says Luna—who, like the rest of us, hasn’t taken a single sip of tea.
Professor Weiss rips open the bag of wafer cookies, her eyes flitting to each of us. “I’m confident the four of you are the right students to take on this responsibility. It’s essential that students engaged in the more practical application of the lecture are as bright, focused, passionate—and, perhaps most importantly—close-knit as you four are. Though, I must also compliment Leisl’s wonderful paper on Catholic appropriation of pagan tradition.”
I beam. Professor Weiss holds out the bag of wafers. “Cookies, anyone?”
Gabi and I shake our heads. Charlotte grabs a handful, and Luna takes one.
Professor Weiss closes the bag and shakes the crumbs off her hands. “I need you to complete the first assignment as soon as possible.” She pauses. “You may want to write this down.”
Luna takes out her phone.
“Gather together and find a wooded area where no one will disturb you. Bring the following items: Graveyard dirt, preferably harvested under a full moon, but really any moon phase will do. Day-old eggshells. Medicine, something that could alter the body or mind. And blood.”
“We have to cut ourselves?” I ask.
“Any blood. How you obtain it is up to you. Now, I cannot legally encourage you to perform the next step, but this exercise will be most effective if you are without clothes. Try to expose as much skin as possible to the moonlight. Then join hands and say the following.”
She dictates a rhyme that sounds like it was lifted from the Wiccan underbelly of Tumblr.
Charlotte finishes her wafer cookies and wipes her mouth on the back of her vegan leather jacket sleeve. “And?”
“That’s it.” Professor Weiss smiles with her mouth closed. “We’ll meet again after you finish the first assignment.”
I swallow, trying to coat my throat in something other than shriveled-up dread. “Professor Weiss, what about the fifth person?”
Professor Weiss cocks her head to the side. “Fifth person?”
“Aren’t there five spaces in your class?”
She nods. “Yes, I did say that originally.”
I take a deep breath. “Is there going to be another person in the class?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she says.
We wait for Luna to finish her tea, then file out of the office.
“Oh, girls. One more thing,” Professor Weiss calls, poking her head through the curtains. “You’re welcome to call me Sienna.”
We go to the woods behind Chapin around midnight, with the graveyard dirt (harvested under a waxing moon), eggshells we found in Hubbard’s ant-infested kitchen that must be at least a day old, Gabi’s Lorazepam, and a used pad, courtesy of Charlotte.
We take off our clothes and join hands.
Charlotte: “Does anyone remember what we’re supposed to say?”
Luna wrote it down on her phone. “Okay, this is really convoluted but first: After placing the dirt, eggshells, medicine, and blood in the center of the circle”—Luna squints, sneezes—“donate an additional item, that is unmistakably personal, to the circle as well. DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE CIRCLE UNTIL THE OBVIOUS END OF THE CEREMONY.”
I raise an eyebrow, frowning. “The obvious end?”
“Sienna’s like an IKEA customer service representative who assumes you actually know how to use a screwdriver,” Charlotte affirms, nodding.
We open our bags, filter through our pockets. Gabi, sulking, throws her phone into the circle (“I would do my wallet but money isn’t really personal, is it?”). Luna chooses her stubby oversharpened NARS Train Bleu lip pencil (“Lee, would you come to Sephora in Holyoke with me next w
eekend? I need to replace this anyway.”). Charlotte, the once-used menstrual cup she tried last month at Luna’s behest.
“It’s personal,” Charlotte argues.
Sifting through my backpack, my hand keeps coming back to my scissors, the crap drugstore kind (the same pair I used to slice Zara’s eighth-grade bob into a jagged 2008-cool pixie that inspired every boy on the bus to ask if she had become a lesbian). I start to twist my claddagh ring off my middle finger, but I’m too paranoid to leave my gold in the woods, so I toss the scissors into the circle.
Luna picks up Sienna’s directions again.
“Okay, repeat after me. ‘GODDESS, WE SUMMON THEE. WRONGED WE SHALL CEASE TO BE. CURSED BY US THREE’—okay, I think this was written for Sienna’s coven—‘CURSED BY US FOUR HE SHALL BE. FROM HIS SUFFERING HE WILL NEVER FLEE. UNTIL HIS COFFIN CAN HE SEE.’” She squints. “Wait, I might have gotten some of it wrong.”
“Did Sienna write that?” Gabi says as the trees start to shake, leaves fly off the ground, an unidentifiable animal howls, and three bolts of lightning crackle and snap.
I smell heat (ever since Luna quit shampoo, that’s all she smells like, heat, the primal whiff of baby-soaped skin right under your nostrils, the aroma of getting really close). And sizzling pine needles and wood, and Gabi’s screaming about her phone and Luna’s eyes burrow into mine, this is the first time I’ve seen her terrified—
The moon ducks behind the clouds, the sky spitting hail and sleet. I seize Luna’s and Charlotte’s hands as the ground yawns, the earth cracks open, and red-gold lava bubbles over the open sliver of crust.
I scream, the wind twisting my hair. Shadows of wild things prowl the forest, bears and coyotes and a slim blue heron, leaping into flight and grazing our heads before disappearing into the pines.
I hold tight to Luna’s pinkie finger, locked into mine, my only tether to the world.
As suddenly as it started, the moon returns, the night clears, and Charlotte is on her knees in the center of the circle, throwing up.
Consensual Hex Page 6