Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  I don’t say murder, not once, door locked, Charlotte splayed across the foamy orange love seat—I don’t even think of death. Instead, I propose a spell from one of our lessons with Sienna, one of the “gentle methods” of ensuring that no unfortunate eavesdropper would ever reveal the existence of magic to the wider world.

  “You want to trap his consciousness in a doll?” Charlotte pauses. “He’ll be your puppet?”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what I want to do.” I gulp. “Goddess forbid he figures out Sienna’s put a lock on our magic.”

  Charlotte’s into it. She reports she found two of the warlocks on OkCupid; she messaged them and they didn’t recognize her. (She also got a message from this dad, who sent her pictures of his two kids, four and seven, respectively, to prove that he’s really a dad and really a safe person to tie up and whip at the Hotel Northampton for ninety dollars.)

  Charlotte suggests the whipping idea to the warlocks, who are happy to oblige, and they’re going to meet her at the hotel on Thursday night.

  She’s upped her rate: two hundred dollars. (She’s wearing stilettos and a corset.)

  Her condition: John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, has to attend as well.

  Charlotte changes her profile to reflect that she is “bisexual,” in case they had any doubts.

  I know you’re wondering, and yes, we keep our plans from Luna and Gabi to prevent them from noticing that we are indeed about to use up the entire month’s paltry allotment of magic in a single night. We brew something of a persuasive potion for them, dump it in their extra-large bubble teas, extra sweetener (Charlotte, the whole time, is on the verge of tears; I worry she’s going to back out).

  The trouble is not getting to the Hotel Northampton, Charlotte’s fishnets peeking out from under the totally-not-subtle oversize trench coat I lent her. I mean, with me hauling a backpack stuffed with tarot decks, pendulums (the pointy kind, in case we lose the knife), and a Grey’s Anatomy DVD box set, with the actual murder weapon encased in a Ziploc bag at the bottom, my other arm slung with Charlotte’s straw basket stocked with rubber gloves, Sudafed, and bleach, we look like we’re about to at least rob the hotel, or perform some kind of Eyes Wide Shut Satanic ritual with masks and collars and the like.

  The problem is not calling the two warlocks to come up to the room, nor convincing them to take off their clothes and close their eyes while two OkCupid bisexuals tie them to the bed, Charlotte drawing from her rich-people boating experiences and securing them to the headboard with military sailor knots. By this point they’ve texted Tripp the room number, so we’re able to gag and blindfold them, which they don’t like, but no one can hear them screaming.

  The trouble is not lending Charlotte the key so she can run downstairs and knock the lone receptionist out with magic, just before Tripp arrives and becomes a victim of the same spell. The cool thing about double standards is that a pair of cult-outfitted girls can drag an unconscious twenty-something guy through the long stretch of Northampton’s Main Street and not face a single obstruction. In fact, we get some approving nods, townie offers to help us.

  “Rough night for your boyfriend?” asks a burly lumberjack type ambling out of a bar.

  “My brother,” I respond, and we laugh together.

  Yes, we were about to become murderers (though we only knew it the way you know you just got your period for the first time even though your conscious mind tries to convince you it’s a cut from your overlong nails), but the truth is, we were the brethren of all those sixteen-year-old girls you see on Tumblr who are sentenced to nineteen years in prison because they killed their forty-year-old rapist and captor and father of their rape baby. Those cases that make you want to break the justice system open and suck out the inhumane unsympathy of juries like a vacuum scraping up shards of invisible glass from the kitchen floor.

  Why were we different just because we were organized?

  Would you like it better if we hadn’t been so damn self-determining? If someone else had called us to our mission, Hero’s Journey, no-agency-Skywalker style? The truth is, people don’t get chosen by big destinies, they choose big destinies. We weren’t special. Just bold.

  But even if we’d been Chosen, even if we’d been a few years younger, shackled to a heatless Ozark shed all winter by a bearded cult leader, you might have still hated us. Do we remind you of unpleasant things? Like those suburban whites who don’t want to watch The Wire because they don’t want to think about black people or the shitty things that go on in families?

  To you we were born monsters, immortal Gorgon sisters and not snake-heads forged by circumstances. Didn’t you know Medusa’s venom was defensive? Pepper spray doesn’t cut it, not in the face of a core Pavlovian need for male approval, tonic immobility, and sea gods who will watch your drink, who know exactly what they’re doing, who have six-hundred-dollar-an-hour Westchester lawyers on call on the off chance that one of those maidens dares to bring forth evidence.

  Might you see that, in order to be safe among the untamed wild of streets and bars, subway platforms five minutes past midnight, we must grow snakes from our scalps and learn to turn men to stone—just to go outside?

  That’s the truth. Medusa was an Everygirl. Her venom comes from necessity. Her earbuds, shades, and frown are shields, encasing her in noise of her own choosing. The slamming of her Timberlands on concrete emits a fragrant Don’t talk to me, her short hair shuts up the sea gods lurking in shallow pools of loitering male privilege, scares them as bad as snakes, reminds men of their mothers’ vaginas or something. But you don’t need psychoanalysis to recognize a girl like that. Next time you see her, know she is Medusa and she is strong as fuck. And if you come after her again, she’ll summon her magic, her real magic, and cut off your dick before you cut off her head.

  Because that’s how it happens in most stories. You behead the survivors and cheer. Behead the Everygirl who dares not to erase herself as soon as it happens to her. You’d better make sure girls like that don’t survive, because they failed their number one task, which is to not get raped in the first place.

  But, for the Medusa who can’t shed the past—

  Maybe you don’t want us outside, because if you were really to look us in the eye—if you were to understand—it would kill you.

  The true sight of us will kill you.

  The trouble is, once we get to the woods behind Chapin, pull his pants down, take out the knife, snap some rubber gloves on, suddenly Charlotte starts to sob hysterically, drops the knife, and I snatch the flashlight from the bed of leaves and start to sob too.

  “I can’t use my scissors,” I explain, when Charlotte wants her knife back. “Think of the stains.”

  “You’re buying me a new Swiss Army after this,” Charlotte says through her tears.

  I look at the khakis and dog boxers pooled around his ankles. He’s drooling. A few hours ago, I would have done it already—my fingers would be sticky with blood—but now, in the moment of truth, all my sleepless hatred for him, those nights walking home, chest a rip current, drowning in memory, my head aching against that bathroom floor, dissolves into a sort of passivity that feels like a trance—a high, the first dawn, too much vodka, apathy. Maybe this is the niceness people back home always talk about, where nothing is raw, nothing hurts because you live inside a personal bubble of antiseptic fluid and numb indifference, 2.5-Lexus-induced enlightenment.

  Charlotte clutches the only doll she had in her room—her preschool one-eyed Cabbage Patch Kid in a urine-tinged, stolen-from–American Girl apron—and shuts her eyes. “I’m willing to help you, Lee, but I just realized I’m going to pass out if I see all that blood. Can’t I just throw the doll into the fire while you handle the castration?”

  I pivot the flashlight so the light cups Tripp’s head, shadow cutting a sharp line across his exposed neck.

  “Blood is life,” I say. “Blood makes you feel alive. I know when we see him, after we do it—you know, how wh
en you wake up in the middle of the night with cramps that feel like I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and you hate your uterus and you hate being female and you question feminism because you’re in so much fucking pain like how can you go to work and become president? But ultimately, bleeding that much, you feel really present and once the cramps die down, you feel this immense relief and you really appreciate things like your sheets and the heating pad and the feeling of not being in immense pain even though five minutes before you didn’t appreciate your painless equilibrium whatsoever? Blood is here and now. Blood is the opposite of stillness, the opposite of death.”

  Charlotte: “I always wonder, since it’s so fucking hard to find the right shade of red lipstick, if you could take your period blood and make lipstick and nail polish out of it? Like how the Warden makes rattlesnake-venom nail polish in Holes and threatens to kill men with her nails.”

  “It would be the correct undertone,” I agree.

  I hand the flashlight to Charlotte and pick up the knife. The hilt is cold, like the sturdy root of an icicle.

  “I’ll tell you when,” I promise. “So you don’t have to look.”

  “Look at what?”

  I swerve, just in time for an overflowing cup of passion fruit black tea and jelly boba to drench my face.

  I blink away the tea, jaw dropping. “Luna?”

  Luna emerges from the trees, drops the plastic cup into a bed of leaves (“Litterer!” Charlotte calls), and takes out her phone.

  “I’m calling Sienna,” says Luna.

  Behind her, Gabi waits with rope.

  Luna types in her passcode. “I’m calling Sienna and telling her you tried to drug us.”

  “You don’t even know what we’re doing,” I say, eyeing Charlotte, whose gaze is fixed on Tripp’s drooling head. “You don’t even know—”

  “Lee,” Charlotte says, gripping the doll. “Lee—”

  I glance down. Tripp starts to stir.

  I reach out, seize Luna’s phone, knock her to the ground, end the call, and toss her phone into the dark unknown of the forest. “Char!”

  I race to Tripp’s side, knife in hand. “Char, get Gabi!”

  The knife hovers above his neck, flesh splayed out, twisted and white, like Christ, or a swan.

  “Char, shut Gabi up, will you?” I repeat, lowering the knife.

  “Do it!” Charlotte shouts, restraining Gabi in a headlock.

  I bring the knife down to his chest, his stomach, lower, grazing his skin, ready for it.

  Tripp seizes me by the neck.

  His fingers press into my throat, and I’m lost, I’m done, I can’t breathe, the knife is out of my hand, I’m falling, defenseless, I have nothing, I’m dead, I feel it, the blood, my blood, it’s thin, watery, painless, metallic, splattering everywhere, but I’m not really in pain, maybe this is what it feels like to rest in peace.

  His nails leave my neck, and I collapse to the ground.

  Above me, clutching the knife, is Luna. Below her, Tripp’s throat is split open.

  “No,” I shout. “You weren’t—we didn’t mean to kill—”

  Blood leaks through the gaps in Luna’s fingers, and Gabi starts to scream.

  Luna really starts to cry, her mucus spilling onto Tripp’s upturned nose, pooling around his eyes. I’m crying too, and Luna helps me up, raises her hand to wipe my face. Her thumb smears blood over my lips, and I learn that love is red, and tastes like a bite of gold.

  I’m the one who volunteers my scarf (Charlotte-knitted, an early Christmas present in scratchy cyan) when Luna and Charlotte agree we have to gag Gabi.

  Gabi, slobbering into my scarf, hands bound behind her back with Charlotte’s fringed macramé belt, still earns the attention of Luna. She stoops down and hugs Gabi, holds her tight, tells her everything will be fine and we’re not going to prison, nor to hell; I’ve never been more jealous.

  We share a quick snack (Pocky) and start to get rid of the body.

  His ear sticks through a hole in the basket, and Charlotte goes to poke it back inside with her knitting needles and I scream at her, That’s got our DNA, and Luna keeps slathering her gloved hands in Purell, and Gabi, scarf pushed down to her chin, keeps sobbing, and asking when we’re going to give back her phone so she can call her aunt.

  “If we’re lucky, he’ll sink,” I say, and Charlotte is in the middle of a response about how we’re kind of past the point of pretending he committed suicide or went drunk sledding down the hill behind Chapin when Gabi’s phone rings, and Luna picks it up.

  “Oh, hello, Ms. Avery,” says Luna to Aunt Kristin on the receiving line, nodding. “Yes, of course, I’m with her now—she’s just gone to the bathroom.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck to do with murder gloves,” says Luna, shaking like a plastic Jesus swinging from the rearview mirror of a flipped-over SUV.

  “We have to bury him,” says Charlotte, remarkably nonchalant. “If we burn the body, someone could see the light. If we drown his parts, he’ll wash up on shore.”

  “But we should mark the place we bury him,” Luna says. “Runes on the nearest tree. Invisible to anyone but the four of us.”

  Charlotte passes out rubber gloves and we each take a severed part of him—head, arm, thumb, dick—until we’re left with a mannequin-like torso, no head, no limbs, anatomically incorrect. Charlotte and I grab him from either bleeding side, one, two, three, and as soon as we lift his remains, a large black block clunks to the ground, slipping out from his back like a wallet escaping a bra with broken underwires.

  We drop his torso and lean down to examine what appears to be a book, obscured by guts and plasma.

  “It’s the grimoire,” says Luna.

  Luna, around three A.M., gets mad. “You’re afraid to Google ‘how to hide a body’?”

  “They keep track of those things,” I say.

  “They?”

  “The government. Russia. NASA. You know.”

  “I don’t know,” says Luna.

  Charlotte pulls her cigarette from her mouth and coughs.

  “Who hasn’t looked up how to hide a body?” says Charlotte. “First off, no one leaves their wallet at the scene.”

  We bury everything—our clothes, the body, the penis, the head, the basket—and escape with nothing but our phones, our IDs, the grimoire, and ourselves, hair and lashes dripping, feet caked in silt, through the older hours of the night.

  I heard once that back pain comes from repressed rage, but I go to sleep that dawn with a sore neck, knots behind my shoulders, fitfully tossing and turning, unable to really access the landscape of dreams due to the sting of skin overexfoliated by apricot scrub, unable to get the taste of the lake from my mouth, the color red from my lips.

  Instead, I keep thinking about Luna taking the shovel and staring down at the bluish visage of John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, watching him dissolve into the earth, soil coating his skull. She took his ring off his right hand, the last part of him we buried, and then started taking her clothes off, insisted we needed to wash ourselves before we went back to campus. I watched her walk with the ring into the lake, watched her standing there, half-submerged, while we all prepared ourselves for the shock of December water, and Charlotte poured bleach over the leaves.

  We cleansed ourselves, but instead of letting his legacy sink, Luna slid his ring onto her thumb and walked away with it, her hand still curled into a fist.

  Chapter Ten

  Ghosting

  THE WORST PART IS, I kind of want to do it again. Aside from the cleanup, the process of wrangling the life from John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, had been my closest personal approximation of the state of flow you’re supposed to experience on a regular basis if you want to be happy like Danish interviewees in minimalism documentaries. In the midst of Googling imperfect tenses on my French final (an easy feat, considering Smith’s honor code mandates that there are no proctors for final exams; they just open Seelye and you
go in and take your test and you can go to the bathroom at any time, you can even bring the test to the bathroom if you really want to experience the power of now), and Charlotte shoplifting another straw basket from Urban Outfitters the night before her flight, I feel like I’m watching my life from a treehouse tower, never really here, always back there, inhaling pine needles, damp from the melt of the first snow, the metallic, menstrual scent of his blood, all over my hands, smeared across my lips.

  I sleep about two hours each night. Rachel leaves at the beginning of the week because her finals are all take-home. At the end of the week, on the eve of handing in Sienna’s paper, I finally get a call from the Counseling office (I tried to make an appointment like six times in September and October), saying that the psychiatrist, Dr. Applebaum, has an open appointment right before dinner. I go, tell her everything that isn’t the magic or the murder, so really nothing at all. She agrees I probably have PTSD, depression, anxiety, the works, and prescribes me Wellbutrin, this antidepressant that’s supposed to work immediately, and Ativan, after I tell her how Xanax made me throw up the morning of my AP exam and Valium doesn’t even do shit when I go to the dentist.

  My mom comes to pick me up after Sienna’s final. I slice one Ativan in half with my sticky-bladed pair of scissors and swallow it with not enough water. We pile laundry and sweaters I never wear into the trunk, and she opens up a brown paper bag of gift shop delicacies, including maple butter, which I eat right out the jar, which runs down my chin, leaves a sticky residue even after I wipe it away with a couple of Kleenex. For dinner, we end up at the French bistro in Amherst with the exterior drenched in rooster motifs, BOUILLABAISSE scrawled across the chalkboard in the foyer. The decor is all crimson and espresso; the soundtrack is Van Halen. We sit at the bar and my mom gives me several sips of Bordeaux, and once the night has completely risen, total black and blinking red traffic sinking through the window, the bartender pours me my own glass.