Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  His hand grips my arm.

  “Sorry, Leisl?”

  It’s him.

  “What an absolutely magical coincidence, seeing you here—how are you?”

  I scream, I scream so loud he has to let go of me, I scream so loud the concrete cradles me, I scream and scream and all sorts of people can hear me, they’re all surrounding and pointing like spectators with rocks in their fists, ready to bury me in stone, they’re everywhere and then I hear her voice, Varana.

  She puts her arms around me and the rest of them dissipate like foliage escaping a leaf blower.

  I wipe my face; she helps me stand; I push her away.

  “Don’t come near me,” then: “No, I mean, it’s not you, I can explain—”

  “What happened?” she says, and I just stare, not-yet-words lodged in my chest, the truth etched in my trembling and goose bumps and the nausea crowning at the back of my throat. “Leisl, do you need me to call 911? Are you all right? What happened?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, finally; I’m not gay, I suppose. She’s compelling like a painting or a photograph, 2-D, static, beauty without a heartbeat, great design that uplifts you, raises you, guides you, but can’t inspire you in that way.

  Varana says she’s going to walk me home, and she would prefer if I had a friend come and stay with me. She’ll stay with me, if no one else is available. I search her face as she brings me home, arm locked into mine, and I know she’s lying and she hates me and this is all a sick joke and she’s probably in league with him, maybe she is him, in magical disguise.

  We get back to Chapin and I claim that Luna is going to come and stay with me. Varana types her number into my phone. I vow to text her, instead of giving her mine.

  She makes sure I don’t need anything, shuts the door, and I vow, in my deepest of hearts, never to see her again.

  Even as the coven obeys Sienna like a pack of huskies lugging a sled across the tundra, I find myself pushing for more. Refusal to exercise power, when you have it, strikes me as a waste, ungrateful. But perhaps it isn’t their fault, or mine. For so long we had no way of fighting back. Now, everything is possible. I can’t let this slip through my fingers and end up dead, gone, potpourri.

  The next night in the apartment over the Vietnamese restaurant, Sienna implies we are proficient enough to try magical combat. I zone out while Sienna hands us fragments of citrine, carnelian, apatite, demonstrates basic attack spells: how to knock someone out (Gabi), freeze them (Luna), and choke them (done to herself, briefly). She says the crystals amplify our power, but the root of any attack spell is rage, harnessed, seized, directed.

  Now, our turn.

  The root is rage.

  I grip the crystal and my scissors and immediately set half the apartment on fire, forcing Charlotte (my dueling partner) to jump on top of the kitchen countertop.

  Sienna extinguishes the flames. “Leisl, I will need to see another spell to assess your progress as a witch. Summoning flames is extremely showy, likely to attract nonmagic attention, and excessively damaging to the surrounding environment, no matter how skilled you are at magical cleanup.” She indicates the slightly singed edges of the lace curtains.

  “I was just going off instinct,” I insist. “I can try again—”

  “Yeah, it would be cool to see you do something with magic aside from acting out your Avatar fantasies,” Gabi quips. “You’re not a one-spell witch, are you?”

  On impulse I walk right up to Gabi, break my scissors apart, and slam the blades together.

  She bends forward, clenching her fists, face contorted.

  “Fuck you,” she croaks as I open the scissors, slower than I should. As soon as I release her, she races to the bathroom. I hear her knees hit the floor; she retches several times.

  Luna glares at me. “Lee—”

  I dig my nails into my palms, dreading Sienna’s reaction. But when I look to her, her face is lit up by something close to pride.

  “Very good,” says Sienna. Something in her voice is strange, like she’s speaking into my own personal set of headphones. “But you must never attack a sister—or, at least, she must never remember it.”

  Sienna grabs my scissors out of my fist, slams her hand over my eyes.

  When she takes her hand away, Gabi is back, Charlotte is still on the counter, and the apartment is again on fire.

  “Charlotte, put out the fire,” Sienna shouts. “Now!”

  Charlotte does—but she’s too slow, and the curtains burn to a crisp.

  Sienna ignores me completely, turning to Gabi and Luna. I watch Gabi struggle to light a single candle; Luna refuses to choose a target from among the coven, instead immobilizing herself in midair, giving Gabi (with heavy assistance from Sienna) the chance to rescue her girlfriend from her own spell.

  On the ride home, Sienna finally acknowledges me, making a vague comment—not quite a compliment—about my “talent,” wondering if it extends beyond combat magic. But I can see from her expression in the rearview mirror that what I did was very good. I can’t help but settle my head back against the leather seat and feel capable, effective—like I finally have a talent that can do something for me. Back at Chapin, I wake up around four A.M. and go for a walk, headphones in, Danse macabre, grinning and spinning and knowing that I have the power, I have the solution to all my problems, I have something to live for; I can make things right, I can be my own justice. Regardless of the ice in my bones, the terror I can’t digest—no matter how helpless I feel, I can do something about it, I’m fucking magic and that’s enough.

  Friday is Mountain Day, a surprise day off the college president announces via chiming chapel bells at eight A.M., when all classes are canceled so we can go forest bathing in tangerine foliage and swallow apples from the branch and not sit inside floral-wallpapered psychiatrists’ offices or study for exams, which is what most of us do.

  After I have cake for lunch, I go to the library to work on a paper for intro poli sci, which I can’t focus on, because, even though I have a pocket full of sage-infused pepper spray and three witch-sisters sworn to protect me, I can’t stop hearing Hello, Leisl, and the girl on the couch next to me is playing Martina McBride Christmas carols out of her Beats headphones (yes, in October), which I initially mistake for LeAnn Rimes. I see my poli sci professor at the vending machine; she alludes to my talent for argument and expresses vague gratitude for a student like you in class, but she hasn’t read my paper yet, and I’m sure it’s terrible. I’m eager to get away, but she wants to know what else I’m taking, what I’m thinking of majoring in, how I like Sienna’s seminar. “Her course at Amherst last year got some rave reviews,” she says.

  I manage to escape, but I’m hardly past the soda machine when I hear a familiar voice shouting my name.

  “Lee?”

  Luna darts down the hall, settling on the couch and throwing her arms around me. (Even since she started officially dating Gabi, her shows of physical affection are frequent, intimate, long-lasting.) She yawns. “Did you get my texts?”

  I scroll through my phone; an hour ago, she wanted to get lunch. “Sorry, I texted Charlotte around noon and she said you two had already eaten.”

  “Charlotte never eats lunch,” Luna says flippantly, then: “I was just meeting with Sienna.”

  “About what?” I ask, glancing around at anyone who might overhear us (mostly upperclasswomen, each staking out their own couch, shoes off, feet curled under thighs).

  Luna’s hands fold in her lap like a claddagh ring, fingers braiding together, palms curling. “Nothing important.” She pauses. “Well, actually, I was with Gabi, then Sienna emailed me back, said she had a few minutes.”

  “Were you meeting about the paper?”

  “I just lost my virginity,” she says. Then: “I mean, it was the first time…with someone I care about.”

  “Congratulations?”

  We laugh, then she starts to cry. I put my arms around her—loose, noncommittal, like hugging a
relative. Luna doesn’t pull away, and the longer her body meshes against mine, the longer I smell her hair, the more I start to appreciate that in some other multiverse, on a planet next to Mars, I might have been honest and everything might have been different.

  Luna tugs me away from the library to go apple picking with the rest of Chapin House for Mountain Day. She texts Charlotte and Gabi, telling them to come with us instead of their own houses. We meet them on the lawn, climb into one of the pickup trucks in Chapin’s driveway stocked with girls and boots, “Blurred Lines” on the radio (which half the girls are complaining about).

  We look for seats; there’s only room for Charlotte, Gabi, and Luna.

  “You’ll have to sit on my lap,” Luna says to me, and after one glance at Gabi’s indifference I sling my arms around her neck and endure the bumpy ride on top of her knees.

  We get to the orchard and have an hour to pick all the apples we want. I’m not sure if there are pesticides, but I’m hungry and I start eating the first apple I can reach that isn’t surrounded by swarming bees.

  Charlotte leads the coven to an abandoned section of the orchard by a barbed-wire fence, next to the whizzing highway, where most of the apples are new and green, and we sit in a circle and suck meat from apple cores, and Gabi starts talking about Sienna and how she’s kind of problematic. “Sienna’s whole seventies Earth Mother matriarchal-prehistory spiel is kind of essentialist and a bit transphobic,” says Gabi. “I bet Sienna’s the type to still say men and women, you know? At all the fundraisers I did in high school, we always opened with telling everyone how folks was a good, neutral, nongendered term that you should use, because people sounds weirdly Communist if you use it over and over again and individuals or guests just don’t really work either. When I met Paris Hilton at the Trevor Project fundraiser—you know how I was invited along with only like four other high school kids because of my activism—I remember she kept saying ladies and gentlemen and it drove me absolutely up the wall. It was very disrespect.”

  Gabi takes out her phone and shows us the picture of her with Paris Hilton, which we’ve all seen before.

  “Such impress,” I say under my breath, masking my disregard in the language of doge, which we’re all certain will survive 2013.

  “Forgive Sienna. She’s elderly,” says Charlotte, diverting her eyes from the screen to toss her apple core through the fence. A pickup truck runs over the apple, splattering its seeds across the highway. “And Gloria Steinem and all those seventies radfems apologized for being transphobic, so I’m sure Sienna isn’t some kind of terrible TERF.”

  “Seriously, do you think Sienna’s queer?” says Luna. “I know she mentioned she had a boyfriend while she was at Smith at our last practice—”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t mean anything,” Gabi agrees. “I mean, my ex was still the president of the GSA her senior year even after she left me for a guy. It was the worst.”

  “Why is that the worst?” says Luna.

  “I’m just saying, that position should have gone to someone who has to deal with presenting as queer in a toxic cisheteronormative society on a daily basis. You know, not the kind of queerness you can take on and off as it suits you.”

  Roaring engines and distant cheers fill the silence. Luna fixes Gabi with a stare, stands, turns, and disappears into the ripe center of the orchard.

  Charlotte runs after her.

  Gabi frowns. “She left her bag.”

  I take Luna’s bag. I’m all hot inside, back of my throat tight with tears. “Gabi, what the fuck?”

  Gabi starts crying, says she didn’t mean it like that, and takes another Xanax before setting off with me to find Luna and Charlotte. We find them at the center of the orchard, faces stamped with shadows of branches and leaves, Charlotte’s mantis arms curled around Luna, Luna’s face in Charlotte’s chest.

  Gabi puts her hand on Luna’s shoulder, digging her short nails into Luna’s bare skin. “Please, I didn’t mean—”

  Luna swerves out of Gabi’s way. “Don’t touch me like that—”

  “Luna, I love you—”

  I am nothing but an inanimate observer as Charlotte moves between Luna and Gabi, Gabi staggers back, the wind whips the trees, and a humming fastball of an apple ricochets out of nowhere and smacks Gabi square in the head.

  Gabi tumbles to the ground.

  Luna rushes to Gabi’s side.

  “Lee!” Luna shouts.

  I emerge from the position of spectator to grab a sweating bottle of water from Luna’s backpack. Luna has Gabi’s head in her lap; Gabi blinks, her hand suctioned to the site of the injury.

  “Char, get some help,” I shout. I glance around our section of orchard: no source for the apple. “Where did that come from?”

  Charlotte rushes into the clearing. I take Gabi’s pulse under her neck. She’s panting, shaking, but conscious. I unscrew the bottle, encourage her to drink; she refuses.

  Luna leans down: “Gabi? Gabi?”

  Gabi takes her hand away to reveal a new magenta bruise crowning her forehead.

  “I’m a second-degree black belt,” says Gabi, eyes fluttering.

  “How does that impact this situation?” I say.

  “I got hit in the head before,” she says, breathing fast. “Concussion. I’m not supposed to do contact sports anymore.”

  “You don’t have a concussion,” I insist, bringing the bottle of water to her lips again. The water spills over her neck and Death Note shirt, and she yells at me.

  “Gabi, let’s see if you can stand,” says Luna. She helps Gabi up, clutching her like a ladder; Gabi is fine, until she lets go of Luna and crashes back to the ground.

  “Okay, maybe we do need an ambulance,” I say.

  Gabi is crying again, Luna on the ground with her.

  “Call my aunt first,” Gabi is saying.

  Luna tells Gabi her phone is dead (even magic devices need to be charged). “Does Charlotte have my phone? I think I gave her my phone.”

  Charlotte still isn’t back. “Why did you give your phone to Charlotte?” Gabi whines.

  “She lost hers,” says Luna, then: “Lee! Go find Charlotte.”

  I pass several rows of trees before I see the back of Charlotte: black undamaged roots, knee socks, gaunt shoulder blades. I’m about to call her name when someone else—a boy—careens out from behind a tree, shaking off the last drops of urine and zipping up his pants, followed by a taller, huskier friend in an Amherst tennis sweater and dingy red sweatpants, LAX printed down the leg. The bigger boy holds a lacrosse stick with a sickly green, glowing apple caught in the net. The smaller, khakied friend points to Charlotte’s back; the lax player aims the apple—which I pray is not magic, just unripe—straight at Charlotte’s head.

  I sprint into the clearing. “Charlotte!”

  The boys turn and spot me, aim the apple at me—the khaki one saying, “That’s her! The blonde”—just as Rachel and a group of her New Balance friends round a corner and start picking the remaining apples, filling their baskets like hoarders on Black Friday. The lax boy tucks his stick under his arm; khakis throws his hands in his pockets and walks off.

  I grab Charlotte. “Why were you taking so long—”

  She wipes a string of vomit from her mouth before popping a mint from her back pocket. “Sorry.”

  I frown. “Are you sick?”

  “No, I just had to throw up. I’m fine now.” She pauses to spit.

  “You sure?”

  In rare form, Charlotte’s mouth hardens into an uncompromising line. “I’m sure. Why don’t you text Luna, okay?”

  I text Luna, then I remember Luna doesn’t have a phone, so I group text everyone I know from Chapin. Rachel’s chemistry friend replies, says Luna and a group of Chapin girls are bringing Gabi to the parking lot for the ambulance; we can meet them there. Charlotte and I arrive on the pavement while the lot is still deserted, the pickup trucks settled in a tight shady corner. The only other car is a bright blue Ro
lls-Royce, parked crooked in the center of the lot.

  Bronzed arm hanging out the window, long fingers secured over the wheel, is John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, honking the horn at me.

  I freeze. He revs the engine.

  Charlotte looks to me, puzzled. “Lee? What’s up?”

  I hear laughing, cawing from above, and glance up to see the two Amherst guys from before, khakis and the lax player, straddling a pair of plastic broomsticks, circling overhead. They reach into their pockets, start pummeling the ground with the same green apples, narrowly missing our heads.

  “Lee!” Charlotte seizes my arm, drags me back toward the orchard. “Lee, move—”

  Tripp shifts gears, the car swerving in our direction, closer, closer, his face moving closer, I can see the color of his eyes.

  “Lee!”

  Charlotte’s hands around my waist, dragging my feet onto grass.

  “Lee!”

  Out of the untroubled blue sky, a single bolt of lightning emerges, striking the ground between us and the Rolls-Royce. Tripp backs up, blood drained from his face. Charlotte takes a green apple in her hand and flings it at Tripp’s windshield.

  My back on the grass, I watch as Charlotte ignites a small fire at the edge of the pavement, sends it reeling toward the Rolls-Royce. Tripp speeds out of the parking lot. The flying warlocks follow him, ascending farther and farther until their images are the diameter of fruit flies against the backdrop of latte-foam clouds.

  “Fuck off!” I yell after them, clenching my stomach, doing everything I can not to cry.

  We all go in the ambulance with Gabi, then wait with her at the ER, where the nurse repeatedly tells her she’s going to be fine. Once she’s in a bed waiting for the doctor, Luna holds up Gabi’s phone while it’s charging so Gabi can FaceTime with her aunt (Gabi says her arms are too weak). They talk for an hour; at one point, Luna asks to switch arms because she’s getting tired. Gabi doesn’t respond, just keeps asking her aunt to Google if she’s going to need any drugs administered by IV.