Consensual Hex Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  WINTER BREAK

  Chapter One: Amoral Familism

  Chapter Two: Madwomen

  Chapter Three: Gender, Power, and Witchcraft

  Chapter Four: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Columbine

  Chapter Five: Seven Sisters

  Chapter Six: Mountain Day

  Chapter Seven: White Boy Magic

  Chapter Eight: Dragon Girl

  Chapter Nine: Singin’ in the Rain

  Chapter Ten: Ghosting

  Chapter Eleven: Eel Donburi

  Chapter Twelve: Immortality

  Chapter Thirteen: Weehawken

  Chapter Fourteen: Salt

  Chapter Fifteen: Death of the Firstborn

  Chapter Sixteen: Kamakhya Devi (The Bleeding Goddess)

  Chapter Seventeen: The Snake

  Chapter Eighteen: Documenting Madness

  NEXT FALL

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Reading Group Guide

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are completely imaginary. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Amanda Harlowe Miller

  Jacket art and design by Tree Abraham. Jacket copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Grand Central Publishing

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  First Edition: October 2020

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  Print book interior design by Abby Reilly.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harlowe, Amanda, author.

  Title: Consensual hex / Amanda Harlowe.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020005492 | ISBN 9781538752203 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781538752210 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Occult fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A7445 C66 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005492

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-5220-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-5221-0 (ebook)

  E3-20200804-DA-NF-ORI

  To my unconditionally loving, phenomenal parents. And to the survivors who weren’t believed. I believe you. Keep going.

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  WINTER BREAK

  THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF rapists, the corkscrew-haired receptionist at the local hotline says with an additional drag on her cigarette—she doesn’t smoke often and she’s going to quit any day now, probably tonight, probably after this one last smoke, it’s just that she’s only come back from the hospital in the past hour and now she’s being questioned and she needs to take the edge off, you know?

  There are two types of rapists, she repeats. Her eyes are dark underneath, shot with cracked-glass veins—she’s just returned from the hospital, you see, she had to hold the hand of a three-year-old going through a rape exam after they picked her up from her stepfather’s trailer at midnight. If that’s not an excuse to smoke…

  She takes the cigarette away from her mouth. Smoke unfurls over the monitor of her mid-aughts Dell. The phone starts to ring. She cranes her long neck over the cubicle divider.

  “Georgia, can you grab that?”

  She sits down. Her fingers shake, and her cigarette wilts like a half-dismembered branch after a hurricane.

  The first type of rapist is stupid, she says. He openly admits to rape. The jury laughs at him in court, standing in front of the judge in his hockey jacket (not that she means to demonize athletes, but the stupid ones are often athletes), saying that, yes, he “forced” his penis into Ms. Doe’s mouth, until the jury thinks about it and their lips go numb.

  The other type, she says, is a snake.

  He joins feminist groups. Collects signatures for Planned Parenthood. Even wears a T-shirt with THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE displayed across his skinny chest. The hetero girls think he’s gay. Or bi, hopefully. He listens like a good ally when the girls discuss Margaret Atwood and Judith Butler. He shuts his mouth like a man should.

  In three months he rapes four girls. All in his room. Because alcohol was involved, he proposes that they simply don’t remember what really happened, that just because a sexual experience wasn’t enjoyable doesn’t mean it was rape, my God, don’t victimize yourself.

  At once, the receptionist with the birthday-ribbon mass of hair draws her hand over her mouth like a curtain and leans in.

  This is not for the record, but that boy you’ve come in asking about—she knows him.

  She can’t say what happened, not definitively. She doesn’t remember all of it. Just his Axe cologne. And the jaded yellow tile of the bathroom floor. And—well, you get the picture.

  But when she took him to court—to upgrade her campus no-contact order to a civil order, the kid was stalking her after the incident and she had loads of texts, he was a little novice of a garter snake, not a viper—he shook and shook and the six-hundred-dollar-an-hour Hamptons lawyer his parents flew in started wiping his brow repeatedly with the edge of his Brooks Brothers sleeve and checking his watch.

  Oh.

  All right, then.

  So you want information on the potential whereabouts of John Digby Whitaker III, otherwise known as Tripp, the Amherst senior who disappeared right before finals?

  You think this could be connected with the vigilantes from the fall—the “witches” (obviously the boys showing up at various infirmaries with burns and broken thumbs meant to say bitches)?

  The receptionist finishes her cigarette and laughs.

  Chapter One

  Amoral Familism

  THE TRUTH IS, I DIDN’T want to go to college at all. Even once we’re chugging gas down I-90, west to the foot of the Berkshires, the end of Massachusetts and the beginning of New York, I don’t have the overwhelming desire to leave home and find myself at the bottom of a tequila bottle. I just wish home were populated with different people. I tried to tell my parents that I didn’t want to go to college—I wanted to write books, or go to L.A. and live out of my car until I made it as a big-time director—several times: the drive up to Middlebury sophomore year; baccalaureate, graduation robes slung with not-enough honors; when my mom was crying in the master bedroom last night. My dad’s response, lingering on the edge of Miller Lite bliss, was the same as before: I’d have to experience college before I could hate it.

  He doesn’t understand. My distress comes not fro
m unawareness, but from intense, crystalline knowledge of communal shower floors and the piercing memory of my chemistry tutor’s story about her cousin who died from swine flu because his roommates forgot to get him Gatorade and he got dehydrated. She had a tattoo of his face, forever young, in black ink on her left calf. Sure, I was relieved, after four years of delirious coasting (still doing better than the pissing-yourself-in-front-of-your-sophomore-soiree-date-after-too-much-vodka majority, but never as well as I could have), sneaking food into the computer lab behind the ninety-year-old nuns’ backs and playing with the Adobe suite some donor paid for, to have gotten into Smith, a bona fide very good college that will enable me to go to a law school that I can really brag about. But my desire to do more than scrape by, to have reached some kind of summit on the cliff of my potential rather than just sunbathing on the valley floor, always rises from the dust of Zara’s drawer (where we would always hide our report cards before my parents started calling the school and asking for extra copies). In the two-plus hours between home and Northampton, meditating to emo drums and drizzling window views of the remote stretches of the Mass Pike, pines craning their slender necks over the guardrails, I feel nothing but subterranean dread, on a day that’s supposed to be bursting with the fresh juice of a major life milestone.

  We reach Northampton—lesbian couples with strollers, hemp clothing store, yarn emporium—around three, and my father is angry. He’s screaming at the car in front of us, a crimson Honda Civic with a REDDIT license plate and a driver who bears an uncanny resemblance to George R. R. Martin.

  My father beats the horn as we round the traffic circle. He then interjects with “Cocksuckers!” because homophobia helps him let off steam.

  The light turns green. We’re about to cross the intersection when a couple with a Baby Bjorn and two French bulldogs saunter onto the street. My dad hits the brakes.

  “Jesus Christ, do all the dykes in America live in Northampton?” he says, and I remember how the absolute last thing I want to discover is that I’m gay at college, because then I’d be a scarlet-lettered LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation), gay before May, a trend chaser, a sheep, not my own person. Weird. A failure. If there’s one thing that would deepen my father’s frown, that would make things worse than him just ignoring me every time I walk downstairs and say “Hi, Dad,” like I’m a ghost, like I’m dead, it’s discovering I’m gay at college. Though he mentioned once that it would be okay if I were really gay, which I wasn’t, so long as I were to marry a real woman and become one half of the type of lesbian couple “men like to fantasize about,” my mom added, before she also assured me that I definitely wasn’t gay.

  But I won’t be gay at college. I’ve never touched a dick but I know I love them.

  We cut through the maze of cars and arrive at my new residence, Chapin House, the biggest house not on the Quad. Margaret Mitchell lived here for one year before she dropped out, and her description of the staircase at Tara is said to have been inspired by Chapin’s staircase, except the building got renovated ten years ago and they demolished those stairs and built something dull and dark in their place (Yankee revenge on the fictional Old South). Behind Chapin is the greenhouse, and then there’s the lake, and across the lake are the woods. I don’t think the woods are forbidden, but the close-crocheted amber summer pines remind me too much of Wompatuck, the huge reserve in my town where sex offenders camp out with stolen greyhounds and a year’s supply of baked beans. I vow not to go hiking, at least not alone.

  My roommate Rachel’s mother has MS, so Rachel’s family got permission from the school to move in one day early. Even though Rachel and I swore on Facebook in June we would make a floor plan for the room together, draw straws or flip coins or rock-paper-scissors, she’s gone ahead and claimed the good side of the room and I can tell by the horde of overhydrated plants occupying her superior windowsill that she has no intention of drawing up a treaty or agreeing to a cease-fire. I’m not surprised. Rachel is the kind of person who doesn’t get why people hate John Green, and it’s often those Pumpkin Spice Latte types who can’t be fully trusted, not with matters like collaborating on our room design.

  My dad goes back to the car to grab my fourth suitcase.

  “Are you feeling okay?” My mom puts her hands on my shoulders, and I realize I don’t remember the last time she touched me.

  “I’m glad I’m at school,” I say. “I need a new start. And to start exercising.”

  “That’s all a doctor would ever tell you to do,” she says, kneading her fingers between my shoulder blades like I’m made of frozen dough.

  I push her away and go to sit on the edge of my bed. “You still don’t think I should get checked out?”

  “Any doctor would just tell you to exercise, honey.” She goes to open the window, starts talking about the importance of fresh air in her Snow White lilt, as if she’s about to burst into song and command the little sparrows to dust the cabinetry. It’s just like sophomore year, when she was sitting in the green velvet chair in the newly renovated living room with the floor-length windows and her only response was No you don’t, honey, like I was a three-year-old ranting about Pretty Pretty Princess and not a nearly grown woman who’d just worked up the courage to say I want to kill myself.

  My dad returns, complaining about all my stuff and how not all parents are so generous, how most parents would not let me bring four suitcases. “You’re going to love college,” he continues. “It’s such an intellectual environment, you’ll fit right in.” Of course, intellectual is code for impractical, useless, disappointing, but I thank him anyway and promise to get perfect grades and get into Harvard Law.

  He dumps the suitcase on my desk chair, brushes the dust from his hands, and reminds me that I wouldn’t survive at Harvard Law, not like his friend’s son who is just more that type of kid, if I catch his drift.

  “Columbia Law,” I say, and he reiterates that he’s just trying to help, and I don’t need to worry about where I go to law school; it’s not about where you go to school, it’s about who you know and whether or not you make Law Review. And Mom never went to graduate school, she went straight into the workforce and she hasn’t exactly done badly either.

  “Honey, I have a call this afternoon so we need to move it along,” she says.

  Once I have the mattress pad down (so Mom can sleep at night, knowing I won’t be in contact with whatever has happened on the mattress before) and Dad makes sure I have a phone charger and a raincoat, my parents hug me and leave.

  “Goodbye,” I yell after them, watching the backs of my mom’s older-than-me Eddie Bauer suede and my dad’s Patagonia flash through the door.

  “Love you,” my mom says, feigning tears.

  My dad seizes her arm and barks something about traffic.

  Alone. I check my phone. Then I check to make sure I have my birth control pills. I open the package and—shit. I took two pills last night when I was supposed to take one. I think I put one pill in my mouth and halfway through swallowing I thought Zara texted me, so I ran in the direction of the vibration before discovering that it was just my iPhone calendar letting me know that I was leaving tomorrow.

  Hormones—probably why I feel like shit. Or I feel like shit because of Zara. But I shouldn’t feel like shit because of Zara, because Zara said goodbye really nicely and waved and smiled and I’m sure she’s going to text me and we’re still going to be friends.

  Rachel comes back. She’s sipping a venti mocha and won’t mention where we’re going to get dinner until I ask her point-blank.

  She finishes watering her plants, screws her Poland Spring closed, and leans over her twin XL to crack open the window. “I actually was going to get dinner with Katherine from next door, if that’s okay,” she says.

  I wait for her to ask if I want to come with them.

  She leaves. I rush across the room, slam the window closed, and sink my face into her pillow. I know I should get up, but I can’t stop crying, even though this
is Rachel’s pillow and I’m going to have to replace her pillowcase with one of mine and she’s going to notice. This is the same feeling I’ve had all summer: observing my decline into sedentary misery like a reptile-blooded surgeon standing over my own shaven-head form, ready to cut my skull open right along the hairline and scoop out the problem and replace it with what should have been my rightful human inheritance, the ability to gracefully sit in a darkened cubicle of a room and do as I am told.

  Too bad what’s wrong with me can’t be fixed with a scalpel.

  In the absence of social validation, after replaying and recontemplating Rachel’s obvious hatred of me and what it could be about my skull and scent and skin that makes people loathe me as soon as they are unfortunate enough to look my way, I opt for the momentary delight of mindless consumerism—the sustainable, proto-commune type. Chapin’s free bin is right at the foot of the stairs, a decrepit cardboard box underflowing with Dora pencils and Pocky boxes, and a pair of really obscene platform shoes, complete with pornographically high heels, in goldenrod yellow. The kind of shoes that belong in the attic of that great-aunt who lived in the East Village back when it was the real East Village, during her tenure as the free love girlfriend of an art dealer with an overgrown handlebar mustache.

  I exchange Zara’s Old Navy jacket (a navy blue cropped bomber I actually really like but I now hate because I hate Zara now) for the shoes, because maybe height does equal power.

  After dropping the shoes off in my room, I find the will to go to the bathroom. There’s a pair of feet in stiletto Oxfords in the last stall. I hear the subtle clack of thumbs on a screen, and a few sniffles, so I assume if she does come out, we’ll make a silent pact to ignore each other and, if we see each other again, pretend we never met.

  I’m still sobbing when I get to the sink, so I splash my face with water repeatedly, but it doesn’t help, I still have the blotchy cheeks and red eyes of a social-media-induced twenty-first-century breakdown.