Consensual Hex

by Amanda Harlowe

  Charlotte holds the door open for me. “I actually was going to go back to Aunt Kristin’s house with Gabi. Thanks, though.”

  Why it seems to me that Gabi is consolidating her forces, stockpiling flour for a siege, I’m not sure. We’re all one coven, and the threat is from without, not within. And Charlotte is a person—she can’t be stolen. Still, unease trickles down my spine and seeps into my stomach; I can taste fish in my mouth, the sweet-and-freshwater umami of eel sauce, ready to surge back up my esophagus and choke me to death in a bed of vomit, snow, and knives.

  “Lee, watch out!”

  I stumble, my foot hitting the plastic hilt of another vibrator, that same blushing, ontological pink, and all my certainty rushes from me as quickly as my dinner splatters the mahogany edge of Chapin’s doorframe.

  Charlotte catches me. “Lee—”

  She holds me as I vomit twice more, and hands me a tissue before I collapse, my ass hitting a patch of snow on the front stoop.

  “I feel like”—I lean into the banister—“I’m not done throwing up.”

  “Just stick your fingers into your throat until you feel your tonsils,” says Charlotte. “Works every time.”

  I shake my head. “I’ll ride it out.” I wipe my mouth. “Do you have any water? I can’t taste eel any longer.”

  Charlotte searches her bag, shakes her head. “I’ll grab some inside.” She glances at the door, furtive, at the vomit dripping onto the slick chunk of black ice. “We have to get rid of this, we can’t have Gabi seeing and wondering if you might have to go to the hospital—”

  “You’re worried about Gabi’s fucking trypanophobia when I’m sick?” My head lolls back against the wood, and my gaze flickers up at the infrequent stars. “I need water. Now.”

  Charlotte runs inside, grabs a bottle from the vending machine on the first floor. My stomach starts to settle, especially when Charlotte offers to take the lone vibrator and chuck it into the lake.

  We clean up, go back to my room, and Charlotte brings me ginger ale in bed.

  “When’s the full moon?” I ask.

  “Two weeks. January thirtieth,” says Charlotte. “It’s in Leo.”

  “Maybe we should all go home,” I say. “Maybe we really should transfer.” What I don’t say is, He came home with me, he was sitting in my basement, he watched me sleep every night, home won’t expel him, there’s nowhere I can be rid of him.

  Charlotte gets me a second ginger ale. She settles on Rachel’s bed, takes her makeup off with these Korean face wipes she has in her bag, and frowns at Netflix on my laptop. “Holocaust documentaries are not comforting.”

  “I disagree. They remind you that it could always be worse.”

  I reach for the light, tell Charlotte to lock the door.

  Charlotte’s heels meet the rug just as the knob twists and Luna, red-cheeked, eyes shot with veins, bursts into the room, not bothering to shut the door behind her.

  “Luna?” I say, raising myself from my pillows. “What’s wrong—”

  “She hit me,” Luna says, her voice cracking open as she starts to cry deep, unbelieving tears, shielding her face with her hands.

  Charlotte and I swallow her up in our arms and stay there for a long time.

  “She hit you?” I say, Luna’s nose brushing my collarbone, her breath on my chest. “Gabi, your girlfriend, hit you?”

  We sit Luna on my bed between us, not letting go.

  “What happened?” Charlotte is able to ask without seeming like she’s questioning Luna’s take on events.

  “We were watching Adventure Time,” Luna says, curling into herself, hands folded between her breasts like she’s trying to pray but can’t quite get the signal of divinity, like she’s protecting her heart from a sacrificial knife. “And Gabi started to have a panic attack, and I had to go to the bathroom, and I was trying to leave for a couple of minutes, but she kept saying No, no, you can’t leave, and I started to get up and, it was a hit, she raised her hand and slapped me”—Luna imitates the motion, a firm, focused slap—“right across the face.”

  Luna shows off her left cheek: pink-tinged, a bit irritated.

  “She was having a panic attack,” Luna says, taking my tissue.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “She hit you. She intended to hit you.”

  I start to stand—all my suspicions, all the pointed fingers of my gut, validated—when Luna tugs me back.

  “Don’t,” says Luna. She glances out the door—which starts to creak open, gradually enough that Luna and Charlotte would never suspect that Tripp is opening it himself, squeezing his reedy ghost form into my room, leaning his head against the wall, against my Cranach poster, his ghastly hair resting against Judith’s silver plate.

  Luna: “I should go back to her, I’m worried—”

  “She hit you,” I repeat. “Gabi hit you. You can’t go back to her. She doesn’t deserve it.”

  “I should at least call her aunt—”

  “I’ll make sure she’s okay,” says Charlotte, slipping through the door, leaving Luna in my arms, her tears soaking my shirt, her fingers curling into my shoulder blades.

  Why I feel suddenly, remarkably happy, I don’t want to know—but the feeling dissipates as soon as I see Tripp perched on Rachel’s bed, smiling at me, giving every indication that he’s staying the night.

  “Shame you can’t punish Gabi with magic until the full moon.” The ghost coughs into his sleeve. “In the meantime, shouldn’t you hear her out? There’s two sides to every story, you know.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Immortality

  I CONVINCE LUNA WE SHOULD go back to her room. She goes to sleep around three. I fold the comforter over her chest, her neck, and slip downstairs to Chapin’s basement, where Charlotte and Gabi are splayed out on the worn tartan couch with the broad tracks of duct tape holding together the cushions, Gabi’s head in Charlotte’s lap, Charlotte’s red jeans wet with tears.

  Charlotte reaches into her backpack for Pocky and an orange soda; Gabi is crying and won’t shut up.

  “I love her,” Gabi keeps saying, in a mousy tone intended to cleanse her of all sins, the vocal equivalent of putting on footie pajamas after watching porn. “I can’t lose her, I love her.”

  I say hello; Gabi looks at me. She doesn’t know I know.

  “We can’t break up, I love h er,” Gabi spits out, sinking her hands over her scarlet eyes, blowing little snot bubbles out of her nose, gulping down pockets of air like she’s breathing through a broken snorkel.

  “There’s lots of fish in the sea,” I say.

  Gabi covers her face and emits a sound halfway between a sob and a scream; I glance at Charlotte, she’s muttering to Gabi, Your aunt is coming tomorrow, you can go back to her house in South Hadley and figure things out, your aunt is coming.

  I say goodbye and go back upstairs. They don’t notice me leaving.

  Luna stirs when I close the door to leave and asks me to stay; I offer to sleep on her nonexistent roommate’s empty mattress, but ask for a blanket and one of her pillows.

  She opens the covers and beckons me. “Just sleep here.”

  I join her, unable to avoid us touching at all points of our bodies, ankles to breasts, in the coffin’s width of the twin XL. She places her hand on my shoulder, and I wonder why she’s holding me when she’s the one who needs to be taken care of.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, turning my back to her.

  “I’ll be fine tomorrow,” says Luna, slipping her arm over my stomach and letting it hang there, heavy as meat, but warm.

  Luna falls asleep, and my legs tingle with pins and needles. I shift, slowly, turning myself around so we’re face-to-face, so she’s breathing on my neck and her fingers drape down my chest like willowy strings of pearls. I reach out, touch her hair—then feel really bad about touching her without explicitly asking, staring at her like a work of art, forever asleep in a fixed container of marble.

  I shut my eyes, breath
e as she does, and think about how you can’t survive if you don’t have one major area of joy in your life, someone or something to shred your pain and rearrange it. For so long, my joy was Zara (joy need not be healthy—you can slap your joy, kick your joy, bury your joy alive without one of those live-burial-prevention bells circa the mortality-obsessed nineteenth century). I wonder if Gabi was Luna’s joy, until tonight, when everything Luna already knew about Gabi, how she’s desperate and manipulative and malevolent, surged into a hand and struck Luna red.

  The sky shifts from ink to charcoal, the first intuitive punch of morning. I reach out, touch her again, keep my hand on her hair; the truth is, I will do anything for her. I will take any compromise, I will bend myself, I will keep the peace. Because I need her in a marrow-deep, survival-instinct way, but I’m not sure she needs me.

  How to lose your lesbian virginity, a three-step program:

  Tell her you’ve got a secret. “I’m not really blond.” (After the two of you have spent three days sleeping in the same bed, glancing at Zillow’s Fresno County listings while Spotify shuffles Indigo Girls and you wonder if a farm can sustain itself on weekly farmers market hawking of goat milk products and cherry tomatoes. Talking about buying a house together must come first, in all proper gay girl courtships. Luna and Leisl sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, first comes U-Haul, then comes livestock—)

  She’s shocked by your secret. “You look so natural.”

  I take off my underwear—we’re already braless—and show her. That’s how it starts: like a naked party, where the bras clip off like dominos and you’re relieved the lights are dim so no one will notice that your breasts are uneven, how your nipples get hard in the slightly-below-room-temp chill. In those moments you really sympathize with that artist’s model at the weekend figure drawing class you took with Zara at the Art Institute of Boston, that stringy Asian guy who got an erection during one of his sitting poses but came back for the summer session and asked to see our drawings during breaks, his chiseled knees peeking out of the pink silk robe they give the models to wear when they’re not working.

  Luna takes off Tripp’s ring and settles back against her pillows, ass resting on her faux-shearling throw, ankles crossed, toes flexed.

  I should mention, I’m pretty drunk. Or else I’d have kept my secret.

  “Do you think the warlocks are finished with J-term?” In other words, How much time do we have?

  Luna frowns. “You’re really no good at compartmentalizing.” Her gaze lingers on my chest. That was Zara’s excuse for just the way I treat people, every time I tried to confront her about calling me unfuckable and naive: She compartmentalized like it was a pro tennis match, folded up her dad’s car-totaled night in jail in a Ziploc bag inside the band of her pleated white skirt, cut high on her thighs, boxy flesh storing all the vulnerability she drowned with vodka-spiked Red Bull and witty insults hurled in my direction.

  I sit on the bed.

  “You know Gabi cheated on you.”

  Luna is unperturbed. “When?”

  “The party at Amherst.”

  She sits up, core shaking, and kisses me.

  “So you’ve never had an orgasm?” I ask her.

  I remember that time when I was a sophomore in high school, it was February and my mom was picking me up from school in my dad’s naked-color Saab. I liked the Saab better than the other convertible, the VW one that my mom said was useless because you couldn’t cover it for winter, because the Volkswagen was the car my mom picked me up in the night I quit swimming, when she screamed at me so much that I sank to the floor, my seat belt unbuckled, stretched around my neck like rope, and the whole stop-and-go highway could see us, could probably hear my mom accusing me of all sorts of suburban crimes, like having a serious interest in art (Who knows if you can even write?) and hanging out with gay theater kids (Honey, actresses don’t come in your size) and going over to Zara’s house on Thursday nights sometimes instead of, I don’t know, spending five hours at a swim meet followed by five hours of homework, dinner optional, depending on whether or not I dropped my times.

  My mom told me how lucky I was, but I didn’t see it. Anything that made me smile, she screamed about. It almost seemed that she wanted me to be on the brink of suicide all the time, her emphasis on filling the days exclusively with activities that felt like medieval torture. It will prepare you for the Real World, she would say, not knowing I was plotting my escape into a dollhouse universe of cauldrons and Baudelaire and the red-hot nails of other girls.

  February sophomore year, that car ride, the Saab with the heated seats that swaddled my whole lower back and butt, my too-wide hips, my too-soft thighs, we were talking about my body, how I was no longer daughter-of-a-model skinny, how I looked like a fifty-year-old woman, daring to have thighs that chafed together at the ripe age of fifteen, and how did I expect to find “companionship,” looking like I did?

  This, of course, was why I went out with Tripp. Because even though I know in a feminist sense it wasn’t my fault, I will always feel, somewhere in the padded upper layer of my thighs, that it was entirely my fault; on a shockingly similar continuum, it’s why I sleep with Luna, even though I know Gabi is still her joy.

  I wonder if I’m going to end up sleeping with everyone who looks at my ugly face and my fat thighs and still manages to think about sex.

  When it comes to sex, straight people follow a script more than instinct, which is why most senior-year-of-high-school accounts of first times include scary campfire stories about him sticking it in you when you’re totally dry, which hurts like hell and makes you bleed like the no-agency protagonist of an anachronistic period film where the writer is under the impression that in the olden days you had to procure a bloody sheet after the wedding night to prove the marriage was consummated, which is totally gross and sounds a bit like what the Mormon girl at Catholic school said about getting married as a Mormon, you have to marry within the church and before your wedding you have to go and tell your father everything sexual you’ve ever done with a guy, which is supposed to dissuade girls from doing sexual things before marriage. Except it didn’t work for that Mormon girl because apparently, according to Zara and like five other people at the public high school, when she was a freshman she had sex with a senior in the hallway next to the auditorium and her parents put her in all-girls school as a result.

  “That was the problem with my upbringing, I had plenty of free time to be sinful,” says Luna, voice in my ear. “This Mormon girl, was she hot?”

  Two girls, in effect, have to write their own script, even down to dental dams. (Luna and I agree that safe queer sex is super important but we also agree that we don’t feel like putting clothes on and going to get a dental dam from the bathroom dispenser.)

  “I’ve literally slept with one other person,” Luna says, which almost ruins the moment.

  At first, it feels like fumbling with a container of expired Play-Doh, trying to make a castle without knowing what a castle looks like, doomed to fail by ignorance. But it’s also exactly what everyone says, about people having had sex for thousands of years and it being innate, and eventually we fall into the trance, into the routine practiced by cave gays and Neolithic lesbians and pioneer dykes in calico and bonnets who weren’t committing a crime, even in Utah, because, legally speaking, in the nineteenth century gay girls didn’t exist.

  Fucking another girl is sort of like scribbling in a diary that you’re going to burn five years from now, never read by anyone, never even revisited by your own eyes. To the culture, you’re an afterthought—and, tangled in her, together in a vacuum of blank space, of eraser waste, you’re free to make art that isn’t going to survive, art that’s just for you, that’s just for the experience of art alone, for this exact moment, for the here and now.

  Lesbian sex is the true little death, making for making’s sake, not to procreate but just because she’s beautiful and you are here and feelings are good for themselves. If you ever
want to escape from the productivity quotas of late capitalism, strike a match, light a hunk of sage, and sleep with the girl whose bra is crumpled on the floor of your mind, and know that, between your fingers and her skin, this is the end. And look forward to death, the only other moment where the fireworks burn down to your toes and vanish without a witness; the greatest art is never known.

  I enjoyed it, but the whole time I imagined myself to be a man, and close to the end, my ears submerged in her thighs, I started to remember who I was, how you’re not supposed to fuck other girls because other girls are supposed to be sisters, confidantes, and there’s something just icky and incestuous about having sex with someone so close to yourself, with touching the slick floral secrets of your mirror image. In our world, where men have weapons and women have forgotten theirs, other female bodies are supposed to be the spaces where you’re safe, where you don’t have to be productive, and by the time her hands knead my scalp, breath and body squirming, I’m totally out of it, and I start to go back there, my head smashing the tiles, lemon soap and toilet water, the scar on his brow, and there he is, legs dangling off Luna’s headboard. I bet he’s been watching us the whole time, he’s had the REC button of the camcorder under his thumb the entire fucking time.

  She holds me while I cry, and complains about how nothing is open past eleven in Noho. “Back home you can get Thai at three A.M.”

  I break from her, stumble to the microwave. “There’s Trader Joe’s peanut noodles.”

  “That works.”

  Then comes Leisl drinking alcohol, two cans of hard lemonade from the bottom of Luna’s backpack, and finally putting clothes on and going to the bathroom so you don’t get UTIs, and Luna repeating that she believes in God and her head on your chest, wearing your sweatshirt, and your last thought before your dreams, walking up to your parents and saying, I’m gay and I don’t want to straighten my hair anymore.