Consensual Hex Read online

  And, even though it’s super essentialist, it’s like my mom always says: Boys will be boys.

  SooRa—nestled at the bottom of a hill, next to a parking lot and the Peter Pan bus station, marquee sign and neon-nailed hostess, a table by the window—is the restaurant my mom took me to when we first visited Northampton, when I decided to go to Smith because the tour guide and a bunch of her friends had all gotten into top-fourteen law schools, there were no triple rooms, and Northampton had good restaurants. (Though, looking out the window, up the hill, past the used bookstore and the witch shop, not much else.)

  I order a sparkling water and wait. They bring out the free kimchi and chilled potato appetizers, and I’m still waiting. I take out my book (Cold Mountain) and then I’m like, Fuck it, I don’t know anyone here and I’m sick of pretending I can focus on any block of text for more than thirty seconds without my own inner experience dripping down my eyes.

  The waitress comes back with a second Pellegrino. I wonder what Zara would say if she saw me eating kimchi alone, the first weekend of college. I search my backpack for the wrong-prescription glasses I have for lectures and crying in public and hope the staff doesn’t think I’m looking for a homemade bomb.

  The waitress returns. “May I please take your order?” The back end of her pen tangles a long string of Mardi Gras rainbow beads. She must go to my school; she’s probably planning to hit the Convocation after-party once she gets off work.

  “I’m still waiting for someone,” I say.

  “The kitchen is closing in thirty minutes,” says the waitress as she scribbles down my order, and it’s not a second after her denim-skirted back turns and I shove the Warby Parkers onto my face that I sink my mouth into my hands and start to cry.

  The hostess swings by, and the next table fills up with a young man who has the sort of greasy split-down-the-middle haircut typical of libertarian fans of Lars von Trier, his gooey secularist heart encased in an ironic Darwinist T-shirt from CafePress. He’s followed by an older woman, perhaps not his mother but a relative, putting her weight on a walker.

  He stares at me, longer than could be justified by my hair sticking straight up or a piece of seaweed obscuring my two front teeth. I start to think of Zara and how I’m so unfuckable, of my dad and how last spring when I tried biking to school to lose weight he swerved his head underneath the kitchen table to get a good look at my thighs and frowned wordlessly. He’s still staring at me. Greasy film guy is exactly the sort of man Zara predicted I would be fucking in college, because who else would want access to my unappetizing pussy, even if his gaze vibrates like a hornet, the whole restaurant smells like fish but it smelled fresh until he got here.

  Salmon donburi arrives. I call the waitress back to the table and ask her to bring me chopsticks instead of cutlery, because I can’t stop staring at the knife and thinking about the serrated edge sawing through fingers or leg or stomach.

  I eat and don’t feel better, just less angry.

  The guy at the next table is still staring at me.

  I grab my purse and decide to go to the restroom, to see if he’ll forget about me if I’m not in his sight.

  I brush past his table and he grabs my arm.

  “The fuck?” I tug my hand away, with enough force that he knocks into the table and his glass of water tips over, soaking the tablecloth and the lap of the older woman.

  The staff rush over.

  I hear the front door slam, and my name: “Leisl?”

  Tripp rushes over like a nineties fairy tale knight, saving me because I’m genuinely in danger and not because I’m incompetent and need to be saved. He’s red across the forehead and down his nose, fist stretching toward the middle-part guy, but I get between them.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “He wasn’t—”

  Tripp seizes my shoulders. “Are you okay?” He’s loud, perhaps too loud, and I sense the eyes of the staff and other patrons on the cutout back of my cheap linen tank top, on his square sun-bruised fingers digging into my skin.

  Tripp waves to the hostess. “Can we get another table?”

  We move to a table in the very back, halfway behind a shoji screen. I can’t see the hostess or the door. Tripp sits down across from me.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says. He stares at my mostly empty bowl, chopsticks laid across the rim. “Did you eat?”

  “Yeah, I did,” I say.

  Tripp orders a tuna roll and two cups of hot sake, flashing his fake.

  “No, just one,” I tell the waitress.

  Tripp shakes his head. “Make it two.”

  “I’m kind of sensitive to alcohol,” I tell Tripp after the waitress departs.

  “Sake is not that alcoholic.”

  The food arrives, with the drinks. Tripp insists I drink the sake.

  I sip it; my nose crinkles. “I don’t like it.”

  “You need to try something more than once to see if you like it,” he says, mouth full of rice and fish.

  He starts looking at his phone, and all my doubts return.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I say, standing.

  He slips his phone into his pocket. “Don’t worry, I’ll watch your drink.”

  I lurch past the central tables, through the bamboo curtains to the bathroom. When I return, Tripp still isn’t done eating.

  “I think the restaurant closes soon,” I remind him.

  “I know,” he says. “You should finish your drink.”

  I go to grab my drink, then stop. “What if I don’t want to finish it?”

  He frowns. “You know, I bought it for you. It’s only polite to drink some of it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Tripp seizes my hand.

  “I think you do,” he says, and even though my mind says pull away pull away pull away, I can’t.

  I look at his chest—there’s a crystal point hanging from the black cord around his neck—and at his napkin, where my name is written in faint red ink, LEISL DAVIS.

  “I think you should finish your drink,” says Tripp, and, like I’m attached to someone else’s limbs, my spare hand grabs the sake and brings it to my lips. I swallow the entire cup.

  Tripp lets go of my hand and calls for the check. He pays.

  “I’ll walk you back,” he says, helping me to my feet, his touch gentle again.

  I feel like I’m watching myself from an observatory, my body leaning into Tripp, moving with him through the door, up the shallow hill and onto Northampton’s Main Street, the humid night speckled with blinking red lamps and giggling throngs of college girls.

  “I’ll get you home,” Tripp assures me. Every movement I make is a surprise; I should feel terror, but there’s this strange, dreamy calm within me, indifferent to the fact that I’m basically a puppet.

  Tripp turns us in the opposite direction of Chapin. That terror, the no no no, returns to my gut like a crack of lightning.

  “I need to sit down,” I insist, but I still can’t move of my own accord; my mind is all fire, no no no, but he still has my body.

  Tripp brings me inside Thornes, the mini mall near CVS, with benches and public restrooms.

  “I’m pretty sure this place is also going to close,” I’m able to say.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t leave you here,” says Tripp, reaching down to kiss my cheek, his wet lips like a slobbering dog.

  There doesn’t need to be a rape scene, but let me tell you, everything you’ve heard is true. It comes back over the course of the next few days in flashes, fragments: the song (LeAnn Rimes), the bathroom tiles (blue, green, off-white), the exact point my head hit the tiles (that little bump on the back of your skull, just above the brain stem), stumbling back to Chapin without my glasses or shoes, indifferent to the possibility of getting tetanus from walking barefoot on the sidewalk. When I go for a strep test at the infirmary because my throat aches and Rachel’s already on antibiotics, the little stick they use to swab hits the back of my tongue and my whole body—ch
est to stomach to feet, everything—tingles like a subzero lake, head bobbing up against ice, caught under the surface, drowning, but inside there’s fire, the need to vomit, immense pressure behind my sinuses. Excedrin doesn’t work in these cases. This isn’t a migraine—it’s a memory.

  The nurse rips off her gloves; instead of calling the psych ward, she touches my shoulder, tells me I’m fine, I’m safe, no one is going to hurt me.

  When I tell her about that night, she hugs me and says the same thing happened to her.

  The day after—before I started using the word rape to describe what happened—I argued with him over text. He insisted he asked for my consent, and when I pointed out that I was intoxicated, he said, Well, you didn’t say no.

  Chapter Three

  Gender, Power, and Witchcraft

  BY THE END OF THE first week of class I’ve deleted his number, though my subconscious still grapples for a word to describe what happened between us. I keep waking up in the middle of the night with additional details filled in: the smell of toilet water, the carpet of unrolled paper towels, the flash of his great white teeth. I take Benadryl, which always dulls my senses, get dressed without looking in the mirror, and set out for my ten A.M., a history seminar called Gender, Power, and Witchcraft: Sex Work, the Body, and Blasphemy in Early Modern Europe, with Professor Sienna Weiss.

  The course description was the first one I circled in the catalog that arrived in the mail way back in August; not to mention the note at the end: Only five spaces would ultimately be available in the seminar, with the students chosen according to the strength of their first paper. Cheap marketing trick or not, the course filled up before my registration time, but I’m only second on the wait list.

  I cross campus to Seelye Hall and amble up the grand marble stairs, past the fray of smoky fake Parisians, the future librarians with unshaven legs peeking out from tea dresses, and a dapper young newsboy-capped person trying to rebrand the fanny pack, reaching the classroom just as virtually all the seats are taken. I grab the remaining chair, clear my throat, and try to squeeze between two girls crammed around the long wooden seminar table.

  “Sorry, would you mind if I put my laptop down?”

  The girls turn. One is an über-lanky Asian girl in a tennis skirt and knee socks, paging through some art/fashion/culture website I haven’t heard of, and the other brushes her bangs aside to reveal an undercut, smudged red lipstick, and a smile I recognize.

  Luna grins, seemingly forgetting our interaction at Smithies Against Sexual Violence. “Leisl, right? Don’t you live on the second floor of Chapin?” She looks me up and down. “I love your nineties look.”

  “Thank you, and I prefer to be called Lee, actually.”

  “Lee. I’ll remember that.”

  I jam between them, taking out my laptop.

  “Crazy what happened at SASV, right?” Luna says, folding her gum into a napkin. “I feel so bad for that girl. Doesn’t surprise me that Amherst just wanted to lock her up rather than listening to her, though.”

  My stomach drops. “Crazy, right.”

  I’m still trying to think of some kind of small-talk topic that won’t feel like a punch to a vital organ when Professor Sienna Weiss enters. She’s a willowy black woman in a fluttery dark ensemble, a sort of Angela Davis/Stevie Nicks hybrid, complete with clogs and a crown of dyed-gold coiled hair. She places her beat-up rucksack at the head of the seminar table and goes to the blackboard.

  I leave my laptop and rush to meet her.

  “Hello, Professor Weiss? My name is Leisl Davis, I was second on the wait list as of nine forty-five this morning. I’m really, really enthusiastic about this subject matter. Is there anything I can do to have a better chance of getting into the course?”

  Sienna Weiss’s nails are painted a gooey crimson, and her hands are stacked with so many rings I can’t tell if she’s married. “No, there’s really nothing you can do,” she says, and I get the sneaking suspicion that she thinks I’m an idiot and doesn’t like me at all. I don’t have any evidence for this except for the way her dark red mouth curves into a wide Cheshire smile and her eyes don’t move.

  I sit back down, and class begins.

  Professor Weiss seizes a long piece of chalk and writes on the board:

  PROFESSOR Weiss

  Gender, Power, and Witchcraft—course # in the syllabus

  Do NOT miss class

  Do NOT call me by my first name

  Professor Weiss fits the chalk behind her ear. “Laptops away.”

  We scramble to obey.

  She weaves her fingers together and nods, satisfied. “Any questions?”

  None.

  “Well, I’m sure you all know that you must do the reading,” she begins, “and that your first paper is due on the seventeenth. The paper will cover the Ehrenreich and English text. And if I go a little over time, please feel free to remind me that our class has ended—I was teaching in Berlin this summer and our lectures were four hours, no break—though not before twelve fifteen, and please resist the urge to pack up your bags before class has formally ended. I can’t stand the sound of all your laptops and whatever else being crammed into your bags while I’m trying to speak.”

  She wipes the chalk dust from her hands. “I had the pleasure of carrying Ehrenreich and English’s text with me the first time I was arrested. The historicity of their claims has been disputed, which we will review later in the semester—Goddess knows claiming that midwives were persecuted as witches to eliminate the threat to the male medical establishment would get you laughed out of any doctoral seminar faster than claiming you’re a Marxist—but it’s an essential part of the historiography.” She clears her throat, ring-sheathed fingers curling into a resolute fist as she coughs. “And, before you ask, the third time I was arrested was not with Gloria Steinem in South Africa in 1984, though I had the pleasure of interning for Ms. the summer of 1973.”

  Professor Weiss picks up the roster and starts to call names. “If you use a different name or pronouns, please tell me and I’ll try to remember. Though I must confess I’m terrible with names.”

  She goes through Celia Aaron, Gabrielle Avery, Ally Babenko, and Kelly Bayers before calling a name I recognize.

  “Clara Dale?”

  Her pen grazes the roster, and she starts to cross the name off before realizing no one has raised her hand. Professor Weiss’s eyes probe the faces around the table. “Clara?” Blink. “She’s not here?”

  We look around at each other. Professor Weiss’s gaze flicks from door to roster and suddenly, like the ring of the tocsin heralding a cart of heads about to roll, she drops the clipboard on the heavy wood with a clatter and walks out of the room.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” we hear as the door slams.

  She comes back a minute later to grab her flip phone.

  A small conversation, quarantined among the seniors, breaks the silence. “Who’s coming to Fetish on Saturday?”

  I rip off a small end of paper and start to roll it between my fingers, enjoying a rare flash of idle mind before Professor Weiss returns. She takes the roster again and clears her throat.

  “Leisl Davis?”

  I can’t decide which hand to raise and end up embarrassingly raising both. “I’m on the wait list, yes.”

  Professor Weiss doesn’t look me in the eye. “Jillian Ebben?”

  Karen Edgars, Sarah Fifer, Charlotte Hwang, Gracie Lacroix, Rahmah Musa…

  “Lorraine Trenton?”

  “I go by Luna.”

  All the names accounted for, Professor Weiss slams the roster on the table and starts pacing back and forth, but not in an addled-professor sort of way—she knows exactly where she’s going, but we don’t, so every change of direction sends us reeling like rabbits, with no peripheral vision or concept of the future.

  “The witchcraft craze during the early modern period was influenced by a variety of factors,” says Professor Weiss, “including the burgeoning development of
the nation-state—especially the shift in people’s identity from residents of an insular town community to members of a collective nation—as well as changes within the family structure and especially the legal status of sex workers, which we will be examining in this course as a major element of the shift in gendered power that aroused the witch craze.”

  She goes to the board and writes:

  Summis desiderantes affectibus

  (Desiring with supreme ardor)

  My hand clamors for attention.

  She blinks, striding back to the table to glance at the roster. “Leisl? Do you have a question?”

  “Pope Innocent VIII,” I spit out. “Pope Innocent VIII distributed the papal bull condemning witchcraft in 1484, Summis desiderantes affectibus. Forgive my Latin. It gave the Inquisition the power to condemn supposed witches, even witches practicing so-called ‘white’ magic that had previously been dealt with through penance and confession, but was probably really issued to grant officers of the Inquisition greater control over local German jurisdictions—”

  Professor Weiss stops me. “Yes, but we’re not going to be discussing any of that today, especially since so many of you will regretfully not be present for the majority of the course.” She goes to her rucksack. “On with the lecture, then.”

  She flicks back the flap and removes a large neon green Super Soaker, jostling with water.

  “Power,” says Professor Weiss, “is the capacity for violence—holding power is an act of violence.”

  She proceeds to spray the class, concentrating on the one girl who did not put her laptop away.

  The girl scrambles to wipe her computer with her sheer summer clothing, tears crystallizing at the start of her cat eye’s messy flick.