“Char?” says Luna.
Gabi is sprinting away, grabbing her galaxy-print jeans from the ground and trying to put them on as she runs.
“Gabi!” Luna cries, shaking her head. To Charlotte and me: “She has trypanophobia. Fear of needles, but because her panic is so bad, every time she sees someone getting sick at all, she thinks they might be contagious and she might get sick and she might have to go to the hospital and get a shot or an IV.”
Gabi shouts from behind a tree: “I’ll wait over here.”
Charlotte stands, with Luna’s help. I rush to Charlotte’s other side.
“That was fucking insane,” Charlotte exclaims, wiping her mouth and making sure her nipple ring is still intact. “Should we try again?”
Luna: “You saw it too?”
“The moon disappearing?” I whisper.
“There was hail,” Gabi adds.
“Sleet,” says Luna. “And wind, and black clouds—”
“An actual earthquake,” Charlotte continues. “And some kind of forest fire? And—”
“Look at this.” I point to the center of the circle, next to Charlotte’s vomit. The dirt, eggshells, pills, and period blood are all gone, though Gabi’s phone, Luna’s lip pencil, Charlotte’s menstrual cup, and my scissors remain, just the same as before.
The only addition is a slim black notebook, cracked open.
I reach down and snatch the notebook, narrowly avoiding Gabi swooping down to seize her phone.
“Contract for the Formation of a New Coven of the Order of the Seven Sisters,” I read aloud from the open page.
“What else does it say?” says Luna.
I flip through the rest of the notebook. “Nothing. It’s blank.”
As soon as Gabi types in her passcode, it starts to rain.
Luna: “Sienna’s probably still in her office.”
“I bet she lives there,” says Charlotte. “All those cats.”
Chapter Six
Mountain Day
WE FIND SIENNA IN HER office, in a billowing silk robe printed with clouds and cherubs, one of her cats in her lap. She sits us down, pours more tea, offers wafer cookies. “I also have curry tofu.”
None of us are in the mood to eat.
The notebook lies open on Sienna’s desk. “I imagine you’re all quite surprised at the moment. I can’t sympathize. My own practice was passed down through my family. My mother used her gift as a healer at several Panther clinics. And my paternal grandmother was a talented diviner who saved herself and my teenage father from Kristallnacht.”
“So magic is hereditary?” I say. “I don’t think my family—”
“No,” says Sienna. “Magic is an ancient tool all women possess. All women are magical. They just have to become aware of their magic.”
“So, like, the Salem witch trials,” says Luna. “They were actually witches?”
Sienna shakes her head. “The Salem trials primarily targeted vulnerable women on the fringes of society who offended the Puritan establishment. Any real Puritan witches—and there were few—had gone to Rhode Island by the last decade of the seventeenth century. There was only one witch in Salem, and that was Tituba, the slave, who used her powers to escape execution. Though some of my contemporaries argue that Sarah Good, one of the victims, came to knowledge of her power just before her execution, and used her fledgling magic to cast a curse on the Reverend Nicholas Noyes that would, in her words, cause him to ‘drink his own blood’—and he indeed died from internal bleeding twenty-five years later. For the most part, women are ignorant of their true power, and those who discover their magic go to great lengths to prevent society from learning of their abilities. The Seven Sisters colleges, in fact, were originally established not only to encourage higher learning among women, but to act as safe spaces where covens could practice and preserve the craft.”
“Are there other witches at Smith?” says Charlotte.
“No. There’s a colleague of mine at Wellesley who still practices, but coven leadership of the last generation was paranoid about discovery, so the practice has mostly died out.” Sienna toys with the crystal pendant around her neck. She twists the point between her fingers, and a question strikes me.
“Professor—sorry, Sienna—men can’t use magic?”
She pauses, laying her ring-heavy hands on her desk. “You did remove your personal objects from the circle at the end of the ceremony?”
We nod.
“Take them out, please.”
As soon as Charlotte removes her menstrual cup from her so-small-her-thirteen-inch-Pro-only-fits-two-thirds-of-the-way-in backpack, it starts to levitate.
Gabi grips the arms of her seat, cheeks an anaerobic purple.
Sienna seizes the menstrual cup from midair and hands it back to Charlotte. “In my experience—in the experience of every witch who has ever documented a coven formation ceremony—it is the magical power of women that infuses your chosen objects, your talismans, with magic. So we think. It’s one of those mysteries it’s easier to accept than to uncover. Your magic is entirely dependent upon your possession of your talisman.”
“So men can’t use magic?” I repeat. “If a man was to steal a witch’s talisman, what would happen?”
“Leisl, I already answered your question,” Sienna says.
Mucus leaks from Gabi’s nose. “But my talisman is my fucking phone. I was supposed to get the 5C when I got home for Thanksgiving break. Now what do I do?” She looks to Sienna. “What’s your talisman?”
Sienna doesn’t answer; Charlotte immediately chimes in with “Can we use magic to become stupidly rich?”
“Good luck evading prison on embezzlement charges,” says Sienna.
Luna puts up a hand. “And we can’t kill people?”
Sienna shrugs. “You can do anything necessary to protect yourself and your sisters.”
I look from Gabi, to Charlotte, to Luna, whose hand still cloaks mine, and in her clammy, lukewarm touch, I feel almost safe.
“Let’s block out some time next week to start training,” says Sienna.
On Tuesday, half past eleven P.M., Sienna’s black Mini rolls into Chapin’s driveway, and Luna, Gabi, and I dart from the common room to the cream leather expanse of the back seat. I insist we buckle up, and thank Sienna for the ride.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Sienna assures me. She wears a bell-sleeved blood-of-enemies-red blouse, a more conspicuous silver nose ring than I’ve seen her wear during the day, and the same safe’s worth of rings on each hand. “The PVTA doesn’t stop anywhere near where we’re going. And I wouldn’t expect you to walk alone so late at night. You’re still novice witches.”
Sienna turns up the music (Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”). “My dear, we forgot Charlotte,” she says. “Shall I swing by her house? She lives in Hubbard, right?”
Luna pulls out her phone, which lights up the back of the car like a low-budget horror film. “She texted me. She says can’t come yonight.”
“Yonight? Like, yonic tonight?” says Gabi.
Gabi and Luna holler with laughter, Luna rocking back and forth so hard that the seat belt snaps her back against the seat at the next stoplight. She struggles against the buckle, mumbling and raising her exquisite feathered brows.
“Charlotte can’t come later?” Sienna asks. “I’ll pay for a cab.”
“I’ll text her,” says Luna, texting with one thumb as she devotes her left hand to unbuckling her seat belt.
Luna: “She’s coming.”
Charlotte meets us outside the Vietnamese restaurant by the bridge, stoned and stumbling. Sienna, if she notices, doesn’t react. “Thank you for joining us, Charlotte.”
The restaurant closed an hour ago, but Sienna has a key. The hostess nods to us from the kitchen, where dismembered chicken legs swarm, alive and well.
“Aww, my mom used to take us for hot pot when we lived in New York,” Charlotte exclaims, tugging Luna by the arm.
“Are you telling me there’s something
you actually like eating?” says Luna, nose nuzzled into the generous hollow where Charlotte’s shoulder meets her collarbone.
It’s not until Sienna leads us up a flight of stairs, past the massage studio entrance, and into a dark third-floor apartment that I start to question if I should have called the cops or my parents or just blocked everyone’s numbers and dropped Sienna’s lecture as soon as she started calling us witches.
The apartment is furnished, barely, with some eighties-grandmother touches like the brocade couch and doily curtains and a pebbled-glass coffee table catching the unobscured rural moonlight, peeking through a sliver of drape.
Sienna places a small, slim hourglass on the coffee table.
“Professor—” I call out, just as a radiant ball of light flashes into Sienna’s palm.
“I want to make it clear: This isn’t an all-you-can-heal essential oil extravaganza,” says Sienna. “This is real magic. Walking on water, spinning gold from lead, raising the dead. The only limits are your mind and skill. And the strength of your relationship with your sisters.”
“Are they witches?” I blurt out. “The owners of this restaurant.”
“The sisters are part of a coven, yes,” says Sienna. “They’ve kindly agreed to let us use their apartment for training. It’s best not to practice in my office all the time. To avoid attention from the administration.”
The room sinks into darkness. “Magic, girls,” Sienna continues, “is all about intention. With your talismans, you can infuse anything—crystals, pendulums, cards, yes, but also rubber bands, socks, vodka”—Charlotte’s face lights up—“with magical potential, with power, with purpose. But you must remember that intention multiplied by four witches is the most powerful force of all. You must not doubt yourselves.”
Sienna conjures up a second source of light in her opposite hand, then reaches out and gifts the light to several bulbless lamps thick with dust.
“Leisl.” She beckons me forward. “You try.”
I take my scissors in my fist, shut my eyes, exhale.
At first, nothing, because my mind is empty of everything but the four pairs of eyes secured on my body, how shitty my thighs look rubbing together in these jeans, whether Sienna hates me, whether Luna hates me, my feet bare on the gravel that early morning walking home from Thornes, the voice of LeAnn Rimes. Expectations, wishes, regrets—the weight, the stones, the boulder between my ribs that curls my shoulders in and tugs my head down. How much I hate myself.
I open my eyes and look to the yellow-cream floral lampshade on the side table. I breathe in, breathe out, again, until all I see is the pattern, the tiny daisies, both soothing and maddening in its repetition, and even though I can’t hold the magic for long, even though my gaze darts to Luna to assess what she thinks of me, if she thinks I look totally dumb, I have a handle on it now, the electricity, the fire, the light.
At once, the lamp explodes into ceiling-high flames.
Sienna seizes the scissors from me, and the room returns to equilibrium.
“I’ve been practicing,” I say.
Sienna frowns at me. “You must remember that you are novices,” she says. “Every time we practice, you will improve substantially, but you must take care to use magic at a distance, and never to reveal yourselves. Now, take off your shoes. We’re going to levitate.”
I have the same dream for several nights: I’m on a broomstick, hurtling through a stormy troposphere, rain slapping my face like a hose and making my hands slip off the broom, but I can’t stop because he’s always behind me. Sometimes I get far enough away that I can’t see him, but when I emerge into a patch of fine weather, he always reappears, shouting, “Hello, Leisl,” when I’m on the cusp of waking in a frigid sweat.
One night, I let him catch up to me, and then, just as he reaches out to touch me, I whip out a gun and strike a bullet through his head. He slides off the broomstick, falling, plunging to the distant ground. I hear his bones crack, his flesh splatter, but I look to the broom and he’s there, all flesh and grin, and he’s chasing me again.
Sienna reminds me, when I question her before training, that broomstick flying is much too conspicuous, not to mention horribly uncomfortable and dangerous. Back in her day broomsticks were a real craze—there was a particular incident around 1970 with a Smith coven flying around Hampshire County, flinging burning bras onto streets and rooftops, which Sienna posits may have been the actual origin of the bra-burning myth of the seventies feminist movement. Anyway, flying is a gimmick and really not that efficient of a way to get around. She advises that if I want to arrive in style I should just transfigure my used sedan into an Audi, which is what most witches do.
September ends like this: normal classes, normal hours in the library (mostly studying, sometimes talking to girls from my intro poli sci class, who tell me about frat parties and how everything you’ve heard is true, they really do rate the girls as soon as they arrive at Amherst and roofie the eights, nines, and tens), normal avoidance of the roommate who hates my guts, magic practice, bubble tea and banh mi with the coven, Charlotte and I increasingly the third and fourth wheels lagging behind Luna and Gabi, who mention, on the first night of October, boots crunching early foliage, that they are dating. Not that Charlotte or I needed confirmation beyond the fierce stone grip of their hands, the little jokes they keep whispering to each other that we only catch the first or last words of.
Perhaps, by October, life is too normal. In mere weeks we’ve fallen into magic like it’s brushing your teeth, an old exercise routine. Gabi (eventually) gets sick of talking to her aunt on speaker while her phone is levitating; I grip my scissors and conjure up flames to light the rough shards of palo lingering in Luna’s incense dish, and feel nothing. The rest of the coven marvels at my working of spells we haven’t learned from Sienna yet; Charlotte tries to repeat them but gives up, red-cheeked and frowning. “Damn, I didn’t expect magic to be some kind of fucking Stoic meditation hyperdiscipline jam.” It’s incredible, how easy it is to take things for granted. Perhaps the truth is that we came to school so apathetic, so exhausted, that despite spending most of our time splayed across each other’s beds, we don’t have the capacity to experience anything as life-altering, epic, or grand.
Charlotte, upon hearing of my ennui, offers to share some weed; I say no, because I don’t want brain damage on the off-chance that my brain is precious and will contribute to humanity in some meaningful way (and I’m already damaged enough). I do agree to meet her at the Quad on Friday night. I go to the party with my skin red, smacked with whiteheads, just-got-my-period, my face wants everyone to know I’m not fertile and I have nothing to offer. I wait for Charlotte five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, until I finally scoop myself a Solo cup of punch and settle into one of those window-propped silk striped antique chaises just off the common room, where I can inconspicuously stare at this girl surrounded by an army of friends and admirers, a queen among knee-length retro dresses and pixie cuts and unshaven legs, a contacts-wearing Hepburn, hair shimmering and black like a Viviscal-addicted Rapunzel-Cher, eyes larger and more tawny and star-powered than Zara’s ever were. The kind of beauty you can’t pay for. When she comes up to me, when I go for my third round of punch, she oh-so-professionally shakes my hand, introduces herself as Varana Patel, asks my last name so she can friend me on Facebook, informs me like a presidential candidate at my doorstep that she hopes to see me again, because she’s so impressed by me and would love to get to know me better.
We agree to drink our punch outside on the Quad and already I’m getting visions of heart emojis and words of support, Varana becoming a friend, a good friend (the kind of friend who might even sleep in my bed during finals week, when we’re both so sleep-deprived neither of us will remember what exactly happened, only that we both have needs and her hair got wound around my neck and almost choked me). Once I finish my drink, we start to make out. It’s just like that one time with Zara, nothing sexual or romantic about it, just t
wo drunk girls feeding the male gaze even within the Amazonian fortress of the stately four Quad houses, two people who don’t know each other bonding over their shared desperation for the kind of intimacy you don’t have to work for, the connection that flashes bright enough to dent your isolation then dissipates the very next morning. Only, I’m not happy at all, especially when her long fingers glide over my bra strap. I’m not here, I’m not with her, all I can think is, I can’t let her get to know me because what would she say if I told her what happened—“Why didn’t you just fight back? You just let him do that to you?”—and how I would want to say, when that happens to you, you fucking freeze, you’re a floppy fish, a blow-up doll, you’ve lost all your bullets and you’re toothless, but I would probably just say, you know what, you’re right, you’re right and I’m making it up and I must have wanted it because everything that happens I do to myself, of course, see, I’m an adult and I’m taking responsibility, the truth is I just wanted him to approve of me, I wanted him to think I was pretty, I wanted him to want me and I did this to myself, I should have gone back to his room the first time he asked, I should have sucked his dick then so he wouldn’t have had to drug me, I should I should I should I should have never been born a girl with fat thighs and bad luck and RAPE ME written on my low-self-esteem forehead in Times Square giant neon letters.
I break from her, amble around for the closest trash can, sink my face deep enough to smell the boozy tin and gum wrappers, and vomit.
“Leisl?” Varana calls, but I’m already on the gravel path, advancing back to Chapin and my bed and the nightmare I can’t seem to overcome.
People walk past me, heading to the Quad, their faces hazy in the sun-just-set charcoal evening. I know my face is red and shiny and ashamed and I just want to curl under my covers and take out my phone and research how to turn Blankie into a real-deal noose.
I nearly bump into one of the rare guys going to the Quad, and whisper a vague apology.
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