The whole time, I’m numb as flames; my brain is flesh poutine; my vision is a fish tank; I’m dead but I must be living because this is a hospital and if I were dying I would be hooked up, plugged in, the essence of Leisl represented in a glaring red squiggly line on a monitor. I wonder if this is where I’ll end up, when Tripp comes after me. I’m sure he’ll remove any evidence with magic, so they won’t find anything during the rape exam, and then I’ll climb to the top floor of Chapin and get out onto the roof and jump and not-quite-die, and since Tripp is a witch—no, a warlock—he’ll sniff my insecurity like sharks can smell a four-hour-old tampon dangling out of your bikini bottom, he’ll find me anywhere, everywhere, he’s probably in the waiting room right now.
Gabi’s aunt says she’s coming to the hospital and hangs up. Luna goes to the bathroom. Charlotte goes to the vending machine. Gabi and I are alone.
I glance at the soulless school-and-hospital analog clock tacked over Gabi’s bed. “Do you want some dinner?” I pick up the menu. “They have stir-fry, some kind of vegetable korma, a veggie burger with pico and guac.”
Gabi’s frown is on fire. “Lee, can you Google if acetaminophen is administered intravenously?”
“Gabi, it’s generic Tylenol.”
“Is there a concussion treatment that’s delivered intravenously?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gabi shuts her eyes and scrunches up her face like an American Girl doll shoved in hot embers. “Is Luna back?”
“No.”
“I hope she doesn’t go out this weekend. When she’s without me.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t have her drinking. I’m worried she won’t think of me.”
“What?”
“I don’t want her getting sick. Like, I’m just worried. That she won’t think of me. That she won’t consider her girlfriend in every decision she makes.”
“Why can’t she go out?”
“She could get alcohol poisoning and go to the hospital and I’d have to see the IV in her arm. She can’t do that, she has to consider my trypanophobia,” Gabi whispers, words low in her throat, half swallowed, like a confession that you broke the new digital camera or backed into your own house (when, in reality, Zara backed into the house, but you’d just gotten your license and Zara was such a good driver so it didn’t really make sense that she would have backed into the house considering she visited the house almost every night unless she was on one of those orchestra trips to Chicago that her parents paradoxically paid for even though they wouldn’t buy enough rice noodles for both of you when you ate dinner at her house because we don’t have all the money in the world).
“Luna is an adult,” I say. “She can do what she wants. If she gets sick, it won’t be in front of you.”
Across the hospital wing, a nurse walks across the heavenly white linoleum floor, and when she halts beside an elderly man’s bed I see she’s going to give him a shot.
I try to shield Gabi from view of the nurse, but it’s too late. Gabi’s face turns very red, her breath starting to race.
“Gabi, don’t look,” I say, putting my arms around her and offering my shoulder as a mask.
Gabi is shifting and shaking, rocking the bed, a raft on thin unsteady wheels; I move to hold down the bed, and Gabi starts to kick and lodges her elbow in my face and I stagger back, swallowing warm-sterling blood and any indication that Gabi recognizes me as a mirror, a reflection, an equal image of God and not just a set of arms.
The bed tips over. Gabi slides to the floor, her legs tangled in sheets and hospital gown. I close my hand over my lip, try to stop the bleeding.
Luna and Gabi’s aunt burst into the wing.
Aunt Kristin sinks to the floor and handles Gabi with an ephemeral touch. “Gabi? What happened?”
Gabi flails, swatting her aunt away, but Aunt Kristin is practiced enough to avoid the sting.
Gabi: “You didn’t get here soon enough—you fucking—fuck you—you don’t care about me, you didn’t get here in time, you didn’t get here—”
The lone nurse, eye on the mess of Gabi’s bed, syringe in hand, shouts for assistance. Luna is at Gabi’s side. I catch her wiping her tears with the flimsy hospital blanket.
Aunt Kristin takes a bottle of Xanax from her purse. “Gabi, darling, if you would just take your medicine and—thank you, Luna—drink some water, you’ll feel better soon—remember, this is momentary—”
Chapter Seven
White Boy Magic
GABI’S AUNT IS POSTPONING HER fall retreat and staying in South Hadley until the end of November (it used to be the beginning of November, but after the apple and the ER and the panic attack, she’s going to stay until Thanksgiving), and she takes Gabi back to the house for a few days. Luna and I, at Aunt Kristin’s behest, take care of getting all of Gabi’s notes and emailing each of her professors every morning to remind them that Gabi has a head injury and is unable to attend class right now. “Thank you so much for this small favor,” Aunt Kristin says over the phone to Luna, promising to take us all out for Moroccan at Amanouz once Gabi recovers.
“Don’t order sardines,” Luna reminds me. “Gabi hates fish.”
Life goes on. Charlotte starts carrying her cracked-mosaic MacBook Pro in a medium-large straw basket because she traded her backpack (some Korean minimalist design you can only get knock-offs of on eBay) for weed. When I try to talk to her about the incident in the parking lot, she’s high, and her only response is that I should ask Sienna about it. “She’ll know what to do.” Sienna doesn’t notice until halfway through our Thursday magic practice that Gabi is gone, which briefly floods the ditch in my chest with something I think might be happiness, but all my progress disintegrates when Luna repeats how much she misses Gabi, what Gabi told her over FaceTime an hour ago, whether or not we should make a care package for Gabi, even though Gabi is literally being waited on by her aunt at home as we speak.
At the end of practice, Sienna drives us all home. She drops Charlotte off at Hubbard before arriving in Chapin’s parking lot.
“I’ll email all of you tomorrow,” Sienna says, shifting gears and glancing at the clock, “but we’re going to have to start having practice earlier in the evening, with my other commitments.”
“Do you still teach at Amherst in the morning?” I ask.
Sienna pauses. “I never taught at Amherst.”
“Professor Meyer mentioned you taught a seminar at Amherst last year.”
Sienna shakes her head. “She’s confusing me with Patricia, who teaches a Five College twentieth-century women’s history course.”
Luna gets out of the car; I don’t follow her.
“Professor,” I say, “I want to talk with you about my paper.”
“I’ll see you upstairs,” Luna calls to me over her shoulder.
I shut the car door.
“Your paper?” Sienna asks.
She doesn’t look at me.
What exactly I had rehearsed, memorized, I don’t remember, so I blurt out, with a fresh tide of tears I wish were fake: “Professor Weiss—Sienna—you said men couldn’t use magic.”
“Is this about your paper, Leisl? Would you prefer to schedule a meeting for office hours?”
“I don’t think so. I want to talk about men using magic. If it’s possible. If there have been any known occurrences.”
“Is this a research question?”
“Of sorts.” I take a deep breath. “I just want to know, if, say, magic ever got into the hands of men, in the local community, if you would know about it. If they would have contacted you, or attacked you—”
“Magic is the province of women,” Sienna replies.
“Yes, but are there unusual circumstances in which—”
“You know, Leisl,” Sienna says, rapping her rings on the steering wheel, “you remind me of myself, when I was younger.”
“How so?”
“You’re ruthless.”
I try to frown.
“You’re saying I’m a bad person?”
“Your power doesn’t come from doing the right thing,” says Sienna wryly, with a hint of approval. “You’re good at magic precisely because you care nothing for rules or tradition. You’re a gambler, and you just so happen to win on a regular basis.”
I gulp. “Sienna, I just want to know if it’s possible for men to use magic, if there have been any examples.”
Sienna turns to face me, weaves her hands together, sighs. “You know, you never see it coming. Your coven breaking up. Small conflicts, tiny disagreements can fester and turn into deadly arguments. You must ensure that the peace between you girls is genuine. That you confront any conflicts immediately.”
“We’re not breaking up. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then where is Gabi?”
“Gabi just got out of the hospital. She was injured while we were apple picking.” I twist my fingers together, strain to keep my voice steady. “Someone hit her in the head, with an apple, and I think it was enchanted.”
Sienna smirks. “And who would have enchanted the apple? You?”
“No! I—”
She shakes her head. “You and your sisters must act as a team. Always. You must agree on every spell you put out into the world. You must be united. One. You check each other’s excesses. The others will benefit from your boldness, but you need their caution, perhaps even more than they need you. And it’s late. Your friends will be wondering what’s taking you so long.”
“Sienna, you never answered my question.”
“Leisl, I’ve done my best to explain the basics of magic to you on multiple occasions. If you are so interested in the idea of men using magic, do your own research. Be my guest.”
“I’ll take you up on that.” I crack open the door and exit the car.
We’re sitting in Luna’s room—Luna polishing her record player and rearranging her bookshelf (all works of Capital-L Literature, but nothing basic like Gatsby or Dickens; she’s all Martin Amis and A. S. Byatt and Rimbaud and Wolf Hall—and The Host, because she has a sense of humor); Charlotte slathering her inflamed ankle tattoo in hemp-store antibacterial cream; and I at Luna’s desk, trying to finish a French listening assignment—when Luna complains about what bad luck Gabi has, getting struck in the head with a falling apple.
“It wasn’t a coincidence,” I say. Even if Sienna is going to lie to my face, I know the truth.
“Yeah, I know, Jung and synchronicity and everything,” Luna says.
“The Amherst guys showed up in the parking lot,” Charlotte admits. The same pit returns to my stomach. “Tripp and two others from Amherst. They tried to attack us.”
I look at Charlotte pointedly. “You saw it? Last time I talked to you—”
“I didn’t want to believe it. I thought Sienna would be able to offer some comforting explanation,” Charlotte admits.
I swallow hard. “Charlotte scared them off. Lightning, fire, broke the windshield on his Rolls-Royce. It was great magic.”
“You brought down the lightning,” says Charlotte, quizzical.
Luna gulps. “So they’re magic and they know we’re witches. Great.”
“They know we have magic, and they have magic too.” My declaration catches me off-guard. My chest seizes, like the wind has been snatched from me, but I can see in Charlotte and Luna that what I’ve said is the truth, even if it’s inconvenient as fuck.
We recap: The Amherst boys saw us using magic, the frat boys have magic, they attacked Gabi with some kind of enchanted lacrosse stick and an apple that was either poisoned or unripe, it was hard to tell in the afternoon light.
“Shit,” says Luna, throwing down the paper towels and Clorox, perhaps accepting that her record player will always be caked in dust, and joining Charlotte on the bed.
“Fuck,” Charlotte agrees.
“We should attack them,” I suggest. “Make it even.”
“No way. No fucking way.” Luna shakes her head vigorously.
I shut my laptop, accept that I’m not going to finish watching next week’s batch of eighties instructional videos about Pierre who likes to faire du vélo in Paris and talk about what color cheveux he has at chez Jeanne.
“Luna, Tripp has magic,” I say.
Charlotte: “I think smashing his windshield counts as a counterattack—”
“They’ll come after us,” I say. “If we don’t intimidate them, they’ll think we’re weak. We need to prove otherwise.”
“I’m not comfortable making any sort of decision without Gabi,” says Luna unhelpfully.
“We don’t need Gabi,” I insist. “You know, majority rule.”
I read online that the best way to get a raise, a big one, is to state your amount and just stare at the person doing the money-giving, and wait for them to suddenly realize that, because you are quiet and staring unblinkingly ahead, you radiate authority and competence and deserve all the money in the world.
Luna, however, is stingy. “That’s not fair,” she says. “Gabi’s part of the coven.”
“And my rapist is a warlock who’s going to come after me unless he knows we could fight him off, injure him, kill him, if need be.”
Luna is silent for a long moment. “He would come after us anyway.”
Charlotte suggests we at least text Gabi, so she’s included in our discussion.
Luna goes to grab her phone. “I’ll tell her—”
I seize her arm. “We’ll let her know after.”
Luna’s gaze flicks between my hand and my eyes like her arm has a gaping flesh wound, deep as bone. “Let go of me.”
I release her. “Don’t text Gabi.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
She grabs her phone, types in her passcode.
“Luna, seriously?” I shake my head. “You don’t want Gabi to have another panic attack, do you? After all the stress she’s been under?”
Luna considers me. “She’s part of the coven.”
“And we’ll tell her when it won’t disrupt her health. But you and I both know what he could do with magic. What he’s already done.”
“We should ask Sienna,” says Luna. “Also, if there are warlocks at Amherst, seven fucking miles away, why wouldn’t she have told us?”
“I tried to ask her about it. She just kept repeating that only women can use magic.”
“Maybe the warlocks are hiding themselves with magic, so she doesn’t know either.” Luna frowns. “I trust Sienna. And we’re new to magic. We can’t just strike out on our own, we need her guidance.”
I sink my nails into my palms. “I’m going to Amherst tonight, to demonstrate to the warlocks who they’re dealing with. We need to give them the impression our coven is bigger, more of a threat—”
Luna takes a long moment to respond. “You’re absolutely determined to go? Tonight?”
“Yes.”
Luna presses her phone to her ear.
“Hello, Sienna? This is Luna. Thank you so much for picking up. Yes, this is an emergency. A Seven Sisters emergency. Yes, we’ll be at Neilson in five.”
Sienna: “You asked me if men could use magic hypothetically, and if there were historical examples. There are no historical examples, and no, men should not be able to use magic.”
She’s in a handprinted-looking silk robe, confirming our suspicions that she indeed lives in her office, and this time she didn’t bother going through the Quadratini, leftover curry, jasmine loose leaf routine, she just shut and locked the door with a single swipe of her hand and waited for Luna to start crying.
I say: “Should not doesn’t mean—”
She cuts me off. “I suppose, in retrospect, it was naive to assume magical potential was connected to the ownership of a uterus. Transphobic, too. Historical witches went to tremendous lengths to prevent men from learning about magic, and, over time, we in the magical community came to believe that men were incapable of magic, rather than just ignorant of its existence. Ye
s, there is indeed a coven of warlocks at Amherst, who operate out of the Sigma Beta Zeta fraternity house.”
“How did they acquire magic?” I ask. “Do they have a talisman?”
“They have something even more dangerous.” Sienna goes to her bookshelf, pulls out a thick black scrapbook, and brings it to her desk. “This,” she says, dark nails puncturing the leather binding, “is my grimoire, which originally belonged to my grandmother. Witches frown upon using your grimoire as your talisman. I believe a Sigma fraternity member came upon one, last fall, and the brothers have since become well-versed in magical practice.”
“So you knew about this.” I gulp. “You knew about this the whole time.”
“This is an issue for an experienced witch,” Sienna says.
“If they’ve had the grimoire since last year, perhaps experienced witches aren’t doing a particularly good job of handling these warlocks.”
Luna grips my hand. “Lee—”
“John Digby Whitaker III has a grimoire—he’s a fucking warlock—and you didn’t tell us,” I spit out, tearing my hand away from Luna. “And you expect me to just go back to my room and take a sleeping pill and—”
I stand, reach down for my bag, but my knees give out and I’m on the floor. The heels of my hands press into my face. My own tears and mucus flood my mouth, swimming, I can’t breathe and I’m positive I’m going to die.
Sienna: “Leisl, sit back down.”
“No.”
“Leisl, I want to help you,” she assures me.
“You could have helped me by warning us that a rogue group of Amherst frat boys, including my rapist, have supernatural powers.”
Hands on my shoulders.
“Lee,” says Luna, thumbs hitting my shoulder blades, “Sienna couldn’t have known who Tripp is.”
“She could have taken it away immediately! Besides, how did a group of frat boys happen to come across a real grimoire to begin with? Some witch must have given it to them—”
“No witch would ever allow a group of frat boys to possess her grimoire. Not by choice,” Sienna snaps. She is stern, impenetrable, a thick sheet of ice. “It’s one of my sisters’ grimoires, from the seventies. It must have been entered in the Five College library system somehow—or perhaps it’s been collecting dust in a Hubbard or Cutter Ziskind closet and a girl showed it to her boyfriend. We’ll never know. But I can tell you, I’m not able to retrieve the grimoire from the warlocks. There’s a spell preventing me from recognizing any of my coven’s grimoires—it’s a long story, but sisters don’t always see eye-to-eye.” She stares at me, unblinking. “I didn’t want to involve you, endanger you, but considering you are so advanced yourself—all of you, really, despite a mere month of magical practice—perhaps I could ask you to assist me.”
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