I’m studying in my dorm room for a final tomorrow. It’s my criminology exam. And that reminds me of Alondra. Well, I suppose every little thing reminds me of Alondra lately. It’s Thursday and it’s been a week since I’ve spoken to her. I remember Jane’s warning, but I’m finding it harder and harder to accept. I’m on the verge of driving to her house tonight. Because, like I’ve already told you, I’m an idiot.
It’s a bit creepy going over Jeffrey Dahmer and his eating habits with all the darkness outside. It’s foggy and super dark tonight. My dorm room has been empty since my roommate left at the beginning of the year, and it’s times like these that I wish he was back, or that someone was in the room. Anyway, I’m reviewing how Dahmer sexually molested his victims and then ate their flesh.
I jump at a knock. I crack open the door.
Alondra.
She’s standing there wearing her red “Hawthorne” sweater and blue jeans without any goth makeup. She even has on red lipstick. That all bothers me. It’s manipulative. I don’t like how she wears witch makeup or not based on her predicament.
She smiles sweetly. That feels manipulative too. “Hi,” she says with a wave.
“I haven’t heard from you since your house.”
“Your face,” she says, wrinkling her brow and reaching to touch it. I step back. “Oh, Liam. Does it hurt?”
“I’m fine. You could have called?”
“You didn’t call either.”
Touché.
“I’ve never been in your dorm at night,” she says, trying to peek over my shoulder. “Makes me curious.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve never been in your dorm at night,” she repeats with a shrug.
“Alondra…it’s just—”
“You need a study partner,” she says, wagging her finger at me. She smiles. “Test’s tomorrow.”
Her green eyes stare into mine. She doesn’t need to say another word. If I wasn’t angry, I’d grab her, pull her inside, lock my lips on hers, and be uncontrollably lost in making out with her—I’m so attracted to her. But I’m still angry.
“Allie—”
“Allie,” she says bitterly with a sad nod. “I like it so much when you call me that. Please call me Allie, Liam.” Because only her best friend and I call her Allie. And Jane’s left her.
“Come in,” I say.
She walks in, closes the door behind us, and checks out my small room. Of course, it’s a pig sty. I quickly move shirts and pants from the chair and bottom bunk.
She plops down on the bottom bunk. Then she gazes out the dark window.
“There’s going to be a building out there in a few years,” she says. “Right now, there’s just an empty lot, if you peer through all tonight’s fog. I know because sometimes I can tell the future. Did you know that?”
“Nothing surprises me about you anymore, Allie,” I say, rummaging through my desk. I grab my textbook. “But it’s not hard to imagine a building there with an empty lot.”
“I see this dorm has significance for something.” And she’s staring outside. “Something that will happen to someone else who will one day hold my book Broomstick.”
“What’s Broomstick?”
“My book,” she says, turning back with her lovely emerald gems. “Don’t you remember? The one at Winona’s.”
I hand her my textbook. Our class textbook, not her freaky witch book. Then she sits on the bottom bunk, and I sit down on my wooden desk chair across from her.
“Thanks,” she says, grabbing the book. “I see lots of highlighting. Good boy. What serial killer would you like to talk about?”
“How about Alondra Billington?”
It’s meant as a joke, but it’s not received well. She loses all her joy and playfulness. Then I remember Jane. She quickly turns from me. I didn’t mean to hurt her that much.
“Sorry.”
“I can’t believe Capper hit you in the face. I didn’t want you there, but he was a total jerk. He’s heard an earful from me over that, believe me. I’m probably going to cast him out of our coven.”
“It doesn’t hurt that much anymore.”
“He has quite a shiner too,” she says, turning back. Her eyes are teary. “I didn’t know you were such a slugger.”
“I used to box in high school.”
“Hmm.” She thumbs through my textbook. “Well, I’m not a serial killer, Liam.”
“I know.”
“Yeah. But Jane’s not so sure.”
“She came by and told me she was leaving in the dining commons. She warned me about you. She said I should stay away from you.”
“She’s probably right. You should. But we’ve had this discussion before. You like fast cars.”
“Why are you here?”
She squints at me as if I’m stupid. Then she gives me her infamous sweet smile. I’m hating that smile right now. “Lee, the only way I’d never see you again is if I became a serial killer and killed you.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“That’s not all,” she says with a laugh. “Even though we cast you out of our meeting, you spoke of a haunting. A demon haunting you is very serious. If a ghost followed you after our exorcism, it could be that the spirit now resides in you. I told you you’re forbidden to attend our sabbaths, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to get rid of what’s trying to harm you. So I’m here to ask you to do something you probably don’t want to do.”
“What’s new?”
“Is that really fair?” she asks, serious again.
I shake my head.
“I’m inviting you to our Sabbath this week.”
“Are you serious, Allie!” I surprise myself with my tone. “Why? This is so you. This is just like Kenosha and Winona’s room. You guys forbid, forbid, and forbid, I get into a brawl with your high priest, then you tell me to come back the week after and join. I don’t get you guys.”
“I’m not asking you to join. I don’t know any other way to get rid of this demon. I’ve called Kenosha to bring another expert to help you at our Sabbath. She is traveling very far. If you have an Ekimmu haunting you, like Winona—and I believe you do if you say you do—then you’re in big trouble. They stick, Lee. It’s gonna take a lot of magic to get it out.”
I stare at her. She seems to think that’s funny and chuckles. Then she shrugs and flips through my textbook again.
“Jane doesn’t want to talk to me anymore,” she says with a shrug. “Did she tell you that? That hurts a lot. It’s not proven that witchcraft killed Maddie’s parents. Jane believes it did. She claims that when I used her to rid us of the poltergeist with left-sided magic, she and her family were cursed as reciprocation for using the backward pentacle. Maybe. But that hardly means it’s my fault. We expelled the poltergeist and helped Maybelle and Alice, if you remember. Wasn’t that good? Well…” She takes a deep breath, thumbing through more pages. “I don’t totally blame her for being mad. But I love Jane. What happened to her sister is so horrible. But I don’t accept her blame. I don’t. That’s not fair.” She seems to finally find the page she was looking for. “Has that demon haunted you since the night you came to our Sabbath?”
“No.”
“Good. Many ghosts appear due to stress. It’s like the deer we saw when we fucked in the motel room. Stress makes for powerful magic.”
She smiles slyly. I can feel the attraction. And I’m reminded what Jane said about her. Yes, exactly like Jane, I love and hate her at the same time.
She runs her long fingernail, colored witchy black, along a page and asks, “Tell me who the Whitechapel Murderer is? You don’t have much highlighting here. I wonder if you read this chapter.”
I fold my arms, lean back in my chair, and look at her blankly.
“I’ll give you a hint, handsome, red-haired Irish boy,” she says. “Bloody Sunday, 1887.”
I shrug.
“God, I’m glad I came.” She takes a deep breath, closes the book, and leans forward. “You really don’t know? Bloody Sunday was the famous Irish revolt in London in 1887. This is not to be confused with the U2 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—which you probably love, since we have the same taste in music—about the British soldiers who opened fire on the Irish in 1972. In Whitechapel, in 1888, this serial killer I’m alluding to went on a rampage. A very famous one. He preferred prostitutes, which were all over this seedy district. Authorities thought he suffered from satyriasis. There’s a psychology term for your major. Satyriasis is…” She winks. “A sudden uncontrollable sex urge. Like a witch’s wandering. In women, they used to call it nymphomania. You’ve heard that word, right?”
“Only this killer murdered his women after sex,” I say.
“I told you, I’m not a serial killer, Liam,” she says, shaking her head and looking back at our book. “I’m not a killer at all. I’m a witch.”
“Jack the Ripper,” I answer.
“You got it! You did read it.”
“The century’s a giveaway. I didn’t remember the dates and all your other facts. How do you remember all those things, Allie?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always been good with dates. Jack the Ripper killed between 1888 and 1891. Dr. Kriegel loves dates. And he’ll grade you an A if you throw them around in your essay. Remember that this silly psycho killer course is really a way to study history, so pour on the extra stuff in your essay. Did the police ever catch Jack?”
I shake my head. She nods.
She’s back to looking through our textbook. “Okay…and…” She plops her finger near the beginning of the textbook. “Here. Let’s go forward to more current stuff. Tell me the—”
But I snatch the book from her hands.
“Hey!”
“My turn.” But then I don’t even look at the book. I look into her eyes with the book sitting on my lap. For a moment, I get lost in those damned eyes again. She smiles. “Tell me the name of the Greek who snatched weary travelers and forced them to fit into his beds by either stretching them on a rack or cutting their limbs.”
She smiles but then she rolls her eyes as if it’s too easy. “Procrus-something-or-other.”
“You don’t know the name?”
“We won’t need to know exact names for the test. We can either omit them on the essay or guess based on the the procrus part in the multiple choice section.”
“Procrustes.”
“How do you remember the name?”
“I like Greek mythology.”
“I don’t think we’re gonna be going that far back in history tomorrow.” She shrugs and snatches the textbook back. “But I can see you’ve been a good boy and read the whole textbook. You wanna go far back, huh? Okay.”
She’s back to flipping pages, and I’m enjoying watching her pale fingers move through each page and her furrowing her brow and smiling to herself. She’s thinking, and I enjoy thinking about how she’s thinking about stuff. I tell you, I’m hooked. So? Sue me.
“Ah, this one. Who is the serial killer in history with the most kills? There’s something not to be proud of.”
I can’t recall. I’m too busy enjoying watching her. She looks right into my eyes again and raises an eyebrow, cute as hell. Then she throws her long dark hair back.
I shrug my shoulders.
She deflates hers. “Oh, come on.”
“I think it was in the fifteenth century or something? Some freak they tortured for a really long time because he kept a log of his kills.”
“Who? And don’t joke with Alondra Billington again. This was a man. You might have noticed they were sexist even with the list of serial killers in history.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think of a backward cross. Christ-man. Cause you’ll never get the name.” She looks at the book and reads: “Christman Genipperteinga. The book says he lived in Germany in the sixteenth century and logged nine hundred and sixty-four kills. The freak was disappointed that he didn’t hit a thousand.”
“I thought you said we don’t need to memorize all the names.”
“Yeah, but don’t you love saying that name: Genipperteinga?” And she laughs real hard and touches my hand. “You won’t forget it now.”
“Next,” she says, raising a finger and flipping through more pages.
As she’s flipping, her fingers slow and she loses her mirth. She seems to get very serious. She puts the book on her lap for a moment and stares down at it.
“Do you mind if I stay here for the night? I’m… having a hard time.”
I think if she was a different sort of girl, she’d cry. I come over and sit by her on the bed. She leans on my shoulder.
“I don’t care what Jane says,” she says quietly, “I have to be with you.” She wipes her eyes. She snuggles deeper into my side. “I’m so sorry,” she says quietly. “God, I’m so sorry I hurt you. You don’t even know how much. I’d rather Cap have hit me. You come to our Sabbath again like that and, whatever the rules, you’re welcome. I don’t care anymore. Okay?”
“I’m sorry too.”
She moves from my arm and peers deeply in my eyes. Her eyes are moist. A tear runs down from those green gems. “Our first fight,” she says with a sad smile. She very gently touches the side of my face, which is still bruised, and frowns again.
I put my arms around her and embrace her more tightly.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, Lee,” she says quietly. “I really am.”