Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  I look at her. “That’s why we have magic. So you could train us to retrieve the grimoire.”

  Sienna frowns, her crimson lip pencil smudged at the outer corners like a pair of bloody wounds. “My priority is preserving the craft through the education of young witches. Yes, I did intend to include you in my search for the grimoire, if and when you were ready. I never expected you to be ready so early.”

  She hands me a box of tissues and finally grabs the wafer cookies, passing them around. “Perhaps,” she says as soon as our mouths are stuffed to the point of being unable to respond, “we keep our little mission from our darling friend Gabi, for the time being. So she can recover fully.”

  I swallow fast. “That’s very considerate, Professor. I mean, Sienna.”

  Luna doesn’t press the issue when it comes to Gabi; she permits her girlfriend to dwell in a periwinkle haze of her latest benzodiazepines and ignorance sweet-syrupy enough to swallow, enlisting our help only to come up with solid excuses for why none of us can hang out the nights of our extra magic practice with Sienna. (“We’re getting our flu shots together and Lee is even considering volunteering at the clinic.”) Sienna encourages us to be cautious, to gather information on the frat through social media, not the sort of magic the warlocks can detect; but every day we don’t act, I wither, crumble, all my leaves falling off.

  October climbs to a precipice and our concerns again turn mundane: midterms, adviser meetings, Chapin’s Halloween party. We agree to deal with the grimoire once our midterm papers are handed in, though I still place a double lock charm on my bedroom door every night, accidentally barring Rachel from entering one Saturday when she’s out drinking.

  We all skip Hampshire Halloween to sit in Luna’s room and resurrect a legendary Tumblr known as smithboobs, where anonymous Smithies, recognizable only to the friends who have joined them for topless parties, send in pictures of their bare breasts, captions optional.

  “This is like, the reason I came to Smith,” Luna reveals, as the chief moderator of the new smithboobs. “I think it’s really important for prospective first-years to be able to find this page and see the kind of campus we are, you know?”

  Boob submissions roll in, Luna going through them (“Can I really reject anyone’s boobs? Wouldn’t that be, like, the worst kind of white sex-positive feminism?”) while Gabi endures a Hulu ad about male-oriented yogurt and I’m doing another French listening assignment, feeling like I’m about to cry.

  Luna pulls a blanket over me. “It’s okay,” she assures me. “Wasn’t Sienna going to help you get a scholarship to that Middlebury summer immersion program where everyone else also doesn’t speak French?”

  “But I need to be fluent if I’m going to be a historian, and what if the program doesn’t work for me? I don’t know if I even want to be a historian.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to be a historian. I thought you wanted to go to law school,” says Luna.

  “Well I really want to be a filmmaker but I need a backup that’s impressive, you know? And I’d much rather be a historian than a lawyer.” I wipe my tears with Luna’s blanket. “Sienna says if I want to go to the sort of grad school where I will actually have a job after, I need to write about colonialism, which means I’m going to have to actually read French to look at sources instead of reading translated sources that everyone has already used. Gender and the French Revolution is so nineties. I’ll probably write about Saint-Domingue. But am I replicating a colonial dynamic by writing about Haiti as a white person? I don’t even know if I want to be a historian.” I look at Luna, her newly pink undercut, her poker smile. “What do you want to be?”

  “I want to teach English,” says Luna.

  “I want to be an activist,” says Gabi.

  “I used to want to go to L.A. and live out of my car until I made it,” I say, and this is the first time I notice a change, an erosion, the sort of transformation that you can’t see with the naked eye but that raises and shatters mountains in a fleeting blink of ecological time. When I used to talk about my hypothetical Hollywood career, penning screenplays and maybe directing a feature or two, big historical pictures like I used to watch with my father, Spartacus and Ben-Hur, movies that made you momentarily believe in God and greatness and the love of your father, I felt like living. But now, used to want to go to L.A. really refers to the past. That place inside me, where yearning used to linger, feels dull and dead. Like, beyond having a roof over my head, and the fancier kind of Cup Noodles, I just don’t care about dreams or goals or wonders of the world. I don’t want to go anywhere and I don’t want to do anything, but not because I’m at peace. I’m fucking terrified of going too far, of meeting new people, people who could tear me apart from the inside, people who could haunt the space beneath my bed for the rest of my life.

  “Do you think,” I start, “we’ll still be doing this? In grad school?”

  Luna: “What?”

  “Magic.”

  She shrugs. “You could probably use magic to get into grad school.”

  Gabi has to study for her archaeology midterm, so she goes back to her room. Luna confesses she has a D in English.

  “How?” I demand.

  Luna says she has a D in every class. She hasn’t gone to class in three weeks and there’s this policy about how missing more than three classes means your grade drops a certain percentage every time you miss class after, and she’s missed so many, she’s on the cusp of really failing. The reason she missed so many classes is she has to take care of Gabi, of course.

  She laughs at my horror. “Lee, you’re incapable of failure,” and that makes me want to cry, because little does she know. “I don’t think you could ever get an F. Like, your body would combust, or something.”

  She asks about my grades, assumes I have the magic four-point-oh, even though I’ve only gotten my early midterms back in two classes and thus don’t really have a GPA yet.

  “At least you’ve gotten an A on every assignment so far. My parents are going to take me out of Smith if I continue to get Ds,” says Luna.

  I hug her. She smells like vanilla and licorice, a bit like Charlotte, but I think she uses an actual bottled perfume and not just essential oils haphazardly rubbed all over her body.

  Luna is thinking of majoring in history with a focus on the fourteenth-century Avignon Papacy. I start telling her about all-girls’ Catholic school, how one would expect there to be a lot of gay antics going on in the locker room, all that cooped-up estrogen and uniforms and absolutely no men aside from the youngish math teacher and the priest, but the only queer incident I know of in my year was when my friend Gianna offered to give me kissing lessons so I wouldn’t go to college a kiss-virgin.

  Luna asks me if I’ve kissed anyone since then. I tell her not any girls. I mean, there was that one time with Zara, but it hardly counts. It was the first time I had champagne, and we were best friends. We did that sort of thing.

  “Making out is easy,” says Luna. “You just ask a friend. Someone you trust.”

  I reach out to brush a stray thread of hair from her face as Charlotte bolts through the door.

  “Luna, Lee,” she says, fumbling with the lock, her face encased in shadow. “Did either of you pay attention to Sienna’s lecture on potion antidotes?”

  She steps into the light. Luna’s hand grips mine.

  “Charlotte, you look like you have smallpox,” I inform her. Red welts cover her face, her neck, her hands, even the sliver of ankle peeking out from between her legging and sock.

  “Thanks,” she says, grimacing.

  Luna breaks out the small kit of antidote ingredients we’ve stockpiled—full moon water, ground-up chicken bones (“I’m thrilled none of you are vegan,” Sienna said when we reviewed potions), sprigs of lavender and thyme, a cluster of amethyst. She stirs everything into her SMITH: A WOMEN’S COLLEGE WITH NO BOYS mug, then drops the crystal into the mixture.

  Charlotte was at a Quad party drinking some kin
d of mystery punch when she started to get really itchy, and the girl she was with started commenting on her skin, so she went to the bathroom and, lo and behold, there was a tiny cauldron filled with potion that looked an awful lot like passion fruit punch, and someone’s Amherst ID, which she grabbed for us.

  Luna reads the name aloud. “Brett Mackenzie, DOB 1988. How is he class of 2014?”

  “Hockey,” I explain.

  “Lee,” says Luna, calling me to the floor. We join hands and chant over the mug:

  “POWERS OF GOODNESS AND LIGHT, BANISH FROM CHARLOTTE THIS WICKED SPITE; KNOW THAT HER SUFFERING IS TRUE, AND WITH OUR HUMBLE OFFERING, MAKE HER NEW.” (Sienna invited us to write our own spells but, considering I’m not a poet and Luna works more in free verse, we decided to stick with the originals.)

  The concoction swirls of its own accord, powered by an internal tornado, before smoke rises from the mug.

  Charlotte drinks the antidote; her face starts to clear, each welt making a pop as it bursts and disappears.

  “This is actually really painful,” Charlotte confirms, nose shriveled up.

  Once Charlotte’s skin is simply irritated rather than cursed, and she is calm enough to scroll through Facebook and judge people from IB school, we lay her down on Luna’s bed and brew her some chrysanthemum tea with honey. Luna sits on top of her desk, debating whether to call Gabi while she’s studying.

  I pace the room, knowing what must be done.

  “Ready or not,” I announce, watching Luna put her phone down, “this means war.”

  “We should keep searching for the grimoire,” Luna says. “Once we have that, we have the main source of their power. We can erase their magic. Then we won’t have to see them ever again.”

  “Only in our dreams,” I say.

  Luna’s head sinks into her hands. “That’s why I can’t see him, you know. If I see him, if I look into his eyes, everything I’ve done to help myself, all that work, all that time and effort, it’s meaningless.”

  “I’ll never stop seeing him.” I sit on Luna’s nonexistent roommate’s bed and try to keep my voice down. “I’ll never forget. So I might as well try to help someone else. Get rid of him so he can’t do it again.”

  “I thought this was about the grimoire,” says Luna.

  “I need revenge.” I bunch a fistful of blanket in my hand. “I need to get even. I need to make sure he can’t do it again. To anyone.”

  “What about helping yourself? Helping Leisl?” says Luna. “Are you not worthy of feeling better? Shouldn’t you offer all that care to you, too?” She pauses. “You’d have to kill him, if you wanted to stop that from happening. Rape is a pattern. Part of someone’s character.” She pauses, gulps. “You know, when I saw what happened to you, I wanted him dead too. But when it happened to me? I couldn’t help but wonder, what happened to him to make him do that? I felt bad for him. I really did.”

  “We have magic,” I say. “We can stop him. And it would be a huge fucking shame not to make a massive difference in the world, with all the power in the world.”

  “Or maybe we’ll just make the world into more of a mess than it was before.”

  I stare her down; she’s space-age stunning, wide eyes and scarlet lips, shining everywhere, absurdly succulent, but nonetheless incapable of convincing me to bow to the sort of victim-cynicism that comfortable people wearing fuzzy socks, feet propped up on warm knit ottomans, Audis toasty in the new garage, use to justify their comfortable lives as the poles sink and bears drown and college girls across the nation remain ignorant of the key blades and pepper spray lurking within them, dormant, comatose, but never dead.

  “We won’t get any closer to the grimoire without going on the offense,” I plead. “Let’s start small. This Brett who left his ID—even if he’s not a warlock, he knows something. We’ll start with him. See if he leads to the grimoire, see if he’s been a participant in any of the warlocks’ other activities.”

  Luna joins me on the bed. “I need to sleep on it.”

  She turns off the light; I don’t remove her arm from my waist.

  Chapter Eight

  Dragon Girl

  I DON’T EAT BREAKFAST THAT Saturday; still, I have diarrhea all morning, even though I didn’t eat dinner either.

  We meet behind Chapin, in front of the greenhouse with our talismans. In addition, Charlotte has Brett Mackenzie’s ID, powdered Valium, and a hammer; Luna has crystals, a Fiji bottle full of potion, and rope.

  Friday night in Amherst, it was easy to find out more about Brett. One girl we met, an Amherst sophomore, said that last year at a party, her boyfriend of three weeks decided to date-rape her, but then got tired, so he just left her, unconscious, in the middle of the frat house, and Brett found her and finished the job. One word that came out of my mouth, regrettably, as soon as I heard the story, was unbelievable, but therein lies the truth—monsters are everywhere, but they don’t have the courtesy to stay under your bed, they get right between your sheets, so you’re unable to distinguish between nightmares and reality, because reality is a nightmare.

  Her head on my shoulder, Patagonia mopping up her tears, she said something about how the punch was fucking hallucinatory, ayahuasca shit, and my skirt, we couldn’t find it after, literally it vanished. My eyes meet Luna’s and Charlotte’s and we all know what we have to do.

  “Lee, we’re a coven, not a vigilante gang,” Luna reminded me in her room that night. “We don’t need to attack Brett to retrieve the grimoire.”

  “We’re going to Amherst tomorrow,” I repeated, huddled between her pillows and scratchy clearance-aisle wool throw.

  Sometime around three A.M., with the aid of a mild persuasive charm I develop, I convince them.

  Amherst is barren in the morning; we pass closed storefronts and restaurants, lone residents walking their dogs. Charlotte is commenting on Luna’s interest in papal history. “TBH though, Christianity is a mess. There’s one God, but also three? And Jesus is God, but also not God? And the Holy Spirit is also God, and what about the saints?”

  “But wouldn’t you get scared, being all alone in the galaxy?” Luna throws out the remainder of her coffee at the next trash can.

  I chime in. “I believe in God. My mom was supposed to be at the World Trade Center on 9/11, but her alarm didn’t go off and she was late. Everyone who made the meeting died, and my mom has never been late for anything in her life. That’s why I believe in God.”

  “I thought you didn’t like your mom,” says Charlotte.

  I slow down, not sure how to respond. “Not like that.”

  We move onto campus, and Luna brings up how lucky we are that not all the frat brothers live in the Sigma Beta Zeta house, or we’d never be able to do this.

  “Never is relative,” I mutter.

  Brett we let off easy. After tying him to his bed with the rope (his roommate, thank Goddess, is out for a morning run), we knock him out (potion and powdered Xanax dribbling down his sleeping chin), take the hammer (held aloft with magic, no traces of DNA), and smash his ankle, ending his hockey career and, hopefully, his Amherst education.

  (No, the grimoire is not under his bed, nor in his closet.)

  “Are you sure that wasn’t too harsh?” Charlotte wonders as we walk to the PVTA stop.

  I remind her of the girl last night, how she had to get an abortion, take medical leave, endanger her scholarship. “He made his choice. We just delivered the rightful consequences,” I say.

  Charlotte frowns. “And we definitely erased all of our DNA?”

  Jeremy Hudson-Winslow IV, who goes by Hudson, lives in the Sigma house, but we get his schedule from his ex-girlfriend, who took him to court last year and got a civil no-contact order that Hudson consistently violates. She tells us that Hudson goes to the gym three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at five A.M., and lifts weights until pretty much the start of his eight A.M. lecture.

  Hudson’s got his computer science midterm, so we break his
thumbs and, just in case he’s chummy with a classmate who would offer to help him type, give him a potent memory potion, erasing the entire fall semester from his memory.

  Pierce Ellis, alleged triple rapist, lucky bastard who used magic to ensure his last victim’s rape kit was destroyed months ahead of his trial, has, in the opinion of Luna, sifting through her makeup bag, a neutral-cool complexion that would be complemented by MAC Ruby Woo (this is after we’ve hung him from a branch by his ankles and secured his hands with rope). Charlotte, on the other hand, thinks he’s got more of an olive undertone, so no Cherries in the Snow, Girl About Town, or Schiap. We eventually settle on Luna’s Train Bleu pencil, as we can’t resist the temptation to enchant the lipstick so that, no matter how many hours Pierce spends scrubbing with St. Ives and rubbing alcohol into his skin, a bloody blueberry-purple stain will remain. (Charlotte: “Wait, I thought that was NARS without magic.”)

  On his forehead, we write 1 IN 5.

  The next night, we’re able to get free from Gabi again: She has a cold and miraculously doesn’t insist that Luna bring her ramen and fulfill the role of Aunt Kristin, who last week left her South Hadley house to attend a White Tantric retreat out west, and she’s staying in Idaho the rest of the year. It’s Sunday, there’s a party at the Sigma house, and Sienna sent us an email in the early hours of the morning ordering us to attend.