Gemma Files
KNOW what a pear of anguish is? Imogen asked me, that last day we spent together, and I shook my head. I’ll show you. Take a look.
She opened up her book and thumbed through it quickly, spreading its dog-eared pages to display two illustrations set next to each other, one a sketch, the other a photograph. Both were indeed roughly pear-shaped, as advertised; the one on the right spread out in petals, weirdly organic, while the one on the left was black iron, spiked all over, sharper outside than in.
You use the screw, here, she said, pointing. Tamp it down, tight, and thrust it up inside, anyplace that’s big enough to take it. Could be the mouth, like a gag, that’s why people in Holland called it the choke-pear… but other people, they say they used it during the Burning Times, on women. Down there.
Jesus, that’s gross, I said. Seriously, what—why? Why would anybody—
—stick that inside someone and pull the screw, let it open up, see what happened? Her eyes were still on the page, half-slit and dreamy, like she was hypnotized. It’s no different than cutting yourself, Una… all on the inside, though, instead of the outside. No scars. None that show.
And somebody else doing it to you, instead of you doing it to yourself, I pointed out. Cutting, I could have said—would have said, later on, when I finally knew how to say things like that out loud—was all about control in a world without it. Hurt yourself to dim or stem the pain you already knew was coming. What kind of control would shit like this give you?
It’s dumb, I told her, finally. That’d kill you. Totally different.
Imogen smiled then, her smile that looked more like a snarl, skewed left and upwards, in a way that made her look as if she was having a stroke. Like you’ve never thought about it, she replied. Steal your Mom’s booze and a bunch of pills so it wouldn’t hurt as much, slit your wrist the right way and let them find you like that. I used to plan on setting myself on fire with the gas can my dad kept in our shed, back in Gananoque, but it’s harder here.
Why not throw yourself off the bridge, you want it that bad?
Maybe, one day. Maybe.
Around us, the Ravine wasn’t quiet so much as full of a very different sort of noise. As part of a system of watersheds downtown Toronto sat overtop, the section we knew best ran underneath the St Clair Ave East bridge, bisecting our shared neighbourhood for a mile in either direction—trace it far enough south and it blended into Rosedale, eventually becoming part of the Don Valley Parkway, which an enterprising hiker might trace almost right on down to Lake Ontario. The trees grew so close they strangled the sky, and the creek rushed by at full flood over rocks and trash, striking liquid against the runoff tunnel’s concrete walls. Green dusk here at the bottom of the slope, true dusk starting to show up above. The insects sang and the leaves rustled, and for half a heartbeat I thought I heard a cicada whine so loud it cut through my skull like a skewer.
Seriously, I said, at last, don’t be so fucking stupid; don’t pretend like it even matters how. You’d still be just as dead.
Sure. But think about how they’d all feel, if we did.
From “me” to “we,” in one small slide. That was Imogen, all over.
They’d laugh at us, Im, is all, I told her, after a long minute. Look sad in public and make fun of us in private, for being weak-ass losers who couldn’t stay alive long enough to get into high school. Like usual.
But Imogen simply sat there studying those horrible pictures, as if she thought somebody was going to test her on them later, ignoring me entirely.
* * *
The very first day I met Imogen, I followed her down under the St Clair West bridge without even thinking twice, straight into the Ravine’s heart. She let herself out of the recreation yard through a crack in the fence and moved downwards into the green shadows through weeds that grew big as bushes, clumps of nettle and deadly nightshade, scrums of birch with big torn strips of bark hanging down from their trunks like loose bandages. There was a path, but she avoided it, preferring to make her own.
I’d been coming back from lunch when I spotted her, still reading that book she’d been nursing under her desk all day in the corner of the recreation yard, ignoring a clot of “popular” girls discussing her from near enough to make it obvious, yet far enough away to make objecting to being discussed more work than it was worth. I didn’t know any of their names yet, but I recognized their faces from earlier; I didn’t know anybody here yet, given I hadn’t known I was changing schools until Mom had told me the week before, when she’d picked me up at the airport after coming back from Melbourne only to take me “home” to a completely different house from the one I’d left a month before.
“You’ll like it, Una,” my mom told me, “it’s a whole fresh start.”
“Sure,” I agreed. No point in arguing.
Arguing never helped.
One p.m. on Day One at the new school near the new house, and the only one in class whose name I’d managed to learn thus far besides the teacher—Miss Huergath, roughly my height but twice my width, sporting red plastic frames and a big cross at her neck—was Imogen, who nobody seemed to like and everyone seemed to be afraid of. She didn’t seem all that scary to me, but then again, why would she? Usually, I was that kid.
That alone made me want to follow her, to see what all the fuss was.
“And what did you do over the summer, Imogen?” Miss Huergath had asked, that morning, after the national anthem was over and we’d all sat down again. I followed her gaze to see who she was curving her mouth at and found it was a girl sitting almost beside me, head cocked and long, pale hair half-shading her face, eyes glued to whatever she had in her hands. She barely looked up, flicked her eyes back and forth, before replying.
“I spent most of my time reading mythology,” she said. “Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Aztec, African. Christian.”
“Christianity isn’t mythology,” Miss Huergath said.
Imogen twitched one shoulder, not quite a shrug, but not quite not one. “All right,” she said.
One of the other girls snorted. “But why?” she asked, as if the answer implied: Because you’re the most giant geek who ever geeked, obviously. And for a minute she seemed like she might go on, but Miss Huergath raised her hand instead and snapped her fingers at the same time, silencing her.
“Jennifer Diamond,” Miss Huergath said, “do we talk out of turn in this class? No, we do not.” And then she was turning my way, scanning the attendance sheet. “So,” she began. “Mmm… Una, is it? And how did you spend your vacation?”
Everybody looked at me, then, the way I’d been praying they wouldn’t, freezing the breath in my lungs and thoughts in my brain together at once, for one painfully long moment, as I struggled to form my next sentence. “In Australia,” I told her, at last, when I was able. “My dad lives there.” Which drew a snicker, of course, courtesy of what sounded like the same girl as before: Australia? But why?
I felt my face heat, all my pimples flaring up at once, and tried to distract myself from the strong, immediate urge to throw something at her by looking back at Imogen, whose eyes were back on her book. That was good; I remember thinking how I wanted to know what the title was, whether it was one I’d already read, and tried to crane my neck to see. But the light on the spine was too strong for me to make anything out, even if she hadn’t had it opened so wide.
Around us, the class went on with Miss Huergath’s Q&A, a steady drone, busy-dumb as bees in a hive. And I was able to sink back into myself, invisible, or at least as much so I ever could be—me, with my adult height and full pubertal shift at age ten and a half, almost eleven. Me, so gawky and inconveniently well-developed, my face painfully sunburnt from that last trip to the beach before boarding the flight back to Toronto; I still wore the horrible navy-blue acrylic turtleneck I’d spent a day and a night travelling home in, if only so nobody had to gape at those long strings of red-brown skin working their way off the back of my neck and into my cleavage, let alone the scars on the insides of my wrists.
Which was uncomfortable, but no more than anything else, really. The glasses with lenses so thick they sometimes fell off when I leaned too far; the braces, rubber bands linking my top to my bottom canines, tending to snap when I yawned. The stretch-marked C-cup breasts I’d somehow grown over those last two weeks of August, so fast I had to wear one of my mom’s bras until we could take a trip downtown to the Eaton Centre, with her underwire cutting into me every time I slumped.
And all that fucking blood, that was the worst of it. The way it always seemed to catch me by surprise after that first time, with an acne flare-up, a pre-migraine squint and a general feeling of having been punched in the crotch as heralds that I’d yet to get used to tracking.
Not to mention the rage that came with it, stronger than it had ever been before, which is saying something.
I hated it all, hated my body, hated myself. Didn’t help I’d always felt like a monster, long before looking like one—never in on the joke, not until I figured out the joke was always me. Like a bomb with a timer anybody could wind up, a storm made from screams, thrown fists and broken furniture. Like anyone could make me explode by looking at me the wrong way. Like everyone would, eventually, because it was oh-so-fun to watch when I did.
My last school had been like that, from Grade One on. You make it so easy for them, Mom used to tell me, and I guess I did. I guess I always had.
So yeah: if there was someone else who already filled this new class’s mockable outsider slot, I’d love to make sure she was the person I had to make fun of in order to keep the roving eye of social malevolence securely away from me, for once.
Down into the Ravine, therefore, trailing after Imogen. I didn’t even know her last name then, and it didn’t matter—I wanted to see what she’d do. My plan was to spy on her, take notes, carry stories back to the clot of “populars.” Be practical and start out on the right side of things, for whatever good that turned out to do me.
Didn’t work out that way, though.
* * *
You’ve been hanging around with Imogen, Jenny Diamond said, as I put my glasses back on after drying my hair, still huge and naked from my post-swimming-lesson shower—I surfaced blinking, taken aback to find her there and horrified to see she had the whole fucking pack with her, all the “populars” at once: Fazia Moorcroft, Nini Jones, Peri Boyle. I mean… we wanted to make sure you knew about her, before you made a mistake. It’s not too late.
I already knew I was blushing again, probably all over, clutching my wet towel like a shield and wanting to hit her so hard she’d cough blood, so hard I had to breathe a moment, deep, before I spoke. Too late for what? I asked her, finally.
Nini and Faz grinned at each other. You know she’s a witch, right? Faz asked.
Witches aren’t real, I said.
That’s what a witch would say, Nini told me. You a witch too, Una?
No, I snapped back, already knowing it was the wrong answer.
Later, after they’d gone—after I’d screamed at them until they left me alone, at last, hard enough to hurt myself, hard enough that swallowing felt like something scraping the inside of my throat—I retreated to the toilet and crouched there crying slow, hot tears, rereading the back of the cubicle door top to bottom like a litany: le freak c’est chic, heather sucks dick, frig yourself, imogen = witchie-poo. Pretty soon my name would be up there too, probably misspelled. So I bit into my thumb until I could taste salt, until the tooth-marks were deep enough to sink an entire nail into, until I knew I’d still have bruises two weeks on, purple-grey in yellow. Like swearing blood brothers, I guess, but without the other person.
When Imogen saw what I’d done, saw the marks I’d made on myself, her otherwise unreadable eyes got all wide and soft, as if I’d handed her a ring or something. And: I knew it, was all she said, quietly. I knew you were like me.
Nothing to say to that but, Yes, obviously, so I nodded instead. Knowing that from now on, we’d be the same in everybody’s eyes. Kicking myself for thinking I could ever avoid it.
* * *
I know why I am the way I am now, and part of me managing to figure it out eventually involved teaching myself to forget—to place that time, those events, my entire childhood, at one remove, behind a scratched and dirty porthole through which I could either view things without actually having to feel them, or feel things without remembering what caused those feelings. To recall my experiences without getting caught inside them, forced to re-live them on a loop for what seems like hours, pinned in an endless useless churn of postdated embarrassment and rage and hate.
From where I am now, my adult perspective, I can see that what I once thought was spite on others’ parts was actually fear that if they let me get away with being abnormal, then what use was the standard of normality they kept their own status by clinging to? We were all women, at least prospectively… but since puberty made me the only one with overt female characteristics, I was the one who stood out. So why not be a cop instead of a criminal, the “populars” must have thought, policing the tall poppy for crimes we’d all share a year or so later? Slut-shame the girl who thinks of herself as a brain on top of a spine, who barely notices boys except as noisy distractions; raid her locker for maxipads because she never remembers to bring her lock, then stick them to the inside of her desk so she’ll find them when she flips up the top, a mocking message written underneath with shoplifted drugstore lipstick: These belong to you, hee hee hee. Since they all purported not to know what these things were, because none of them had to, yet.
Similarly, I can see that what I used to think was my own innate evil—the evil Imogen obviously shared, which called her to me, and me to her—was simply a long-inculcated belief I’d been somehow born wrong, a bullied bully, book-smart but street-stupid: violent from puberty on, but always uncontrollable, an egotistical liar who could never be relied upon to do the right thing, mainly because she was incapable of understanding what the right thing was. After years of therapy and some chemical help, I now understand I wasn’t bad, different, blind to what most people apparently came into this shitty world knowing about how to fit in, how to get along.
But even only glimpsed through the porthole, the feeling sometimes comes back without me even knowing what it’s about, in waves.
A tidal wave submerging me, but it’s all faceless, formless, attached to nothing. It’s like I’m being haunted by the ghost of a feeling; I don’t know who I’m angry at, or why; I don’t know what I hate them for, but I do, and that seems illogical, selfish, weird. So it turns into me hating myself, being angry at myself, for being weak enough to want to trust, to make friends, to find love somewhere outside the divorce-broken ring of my own family, in the first place. For laying myself open, so stupidly, again and again and again.
My parents thought they were each other’s best friend, too. That’s why they thought they never needed anybody else, till suddenly they did, but didn’t have anybody to turn to. And while I told myself even back then that I’d never live like that, if I could help it… really, how could I have ever expected things to turn out differently? They never taught me how to manage to live with other people without hurting them, not even by bad example.
You scared them, Una. (Good.)
You made them scared of you. (Good.)
(They fucking should be.)
Things I did in the moment, that passed through me like a storm, so fast and hard I could barely remember I’d done them, later on. Like: oh yeah, that happened. I cut holes in other people’s clothes. I pissed in other people’s shoes. I stuck someone else’s Barbie’s head up inside me, then put it back on the doll for her to find. I smeared my own blood on the wall, wrote things in it. The same year I met Imogen, I picked up a cat by its tail while listening to a record on headphones, then couldn’t figure out how my mom could have known what I was doing; even after I left Imogen behind, I strangled a girl and knocked her head on the floor because she said my whales looked more like tadpoles. Later, in yet another “new” school, I got sent to the principal for interrupting class by describing how to do a lobotomy in detail— which I’d picked up by reading a biography of Frances Farmer—then threatening to do it on one of my classmates with a compass.
I know why I am the way I am now, but only because I’ve managed to live long enough to figure it out. That’s the simple truth. And I wish— I do wish, even after everything she did, I did, we did, together—that Imogen had been able to do that, too.
Eventually.
* * *
“Come out,” Imogen told me that first day, as I crouched in the bushes, watching her. “You’re Una, right? Think I can’t see you? I can see everything.”
That seemed unlikely, but I instantly felt dumb for being there, so I stood up instead; crossed my arms and scowled at her, fuck you face screwed on hard, expecting her to be frightened. Which she very much obviously wasn’t—beckoned me over, peremptorily, and showed me what she was doing: how she’d set creek-washed rocks in a circle with a baby-doll’s detached plastic face in the middle, looking up, blue eyes blind in the green-dark diffuse sunlight slipping down around the bridge.
“The fuck is that for?” I asked, and she giggled.
“You swear like a boy,” she said. “Is that because you’re so tall?”
“I don’t know, I fucking like it. So what is that, anyway?”
“I’m making a scrying mirror. Watch.”
She turned it over, then, showing me a small, round mirror she’d carefully fitted inside the face, probably from somebody’s make-up kit. “First you have to cure it, see—take a flame and melt the edges so it won’t fall out: the sign of fire. Then leave it all night where the wind can get at it, especially if it’s blowing past a graveyard; the sign of night, the sign of air. Then wash it in the creek and leave it down here under a bunch of leaves, looking down into the dirt: the sign of earth, and water. One thing left to do, now: anoint it, and see if it works.”
“Anoint it with what?”
Another giggle. “What do you think?” she asked, pointing to where my sleeves had rucked up, glued with sweat, to show off the scars inside both my wrists—those scratches I always told people came from the cat, if they asked, which they mostly didn’t. Not to mention the deeper cuts, treated with Bactine and band-aids, which I never told anybody about at all.
I had a hook I’d stolen from my nana’s embroidery kit once, meant for ripping seams; Imogen had a penknife, the kind that folds out, its handle wrapped in tape she’d coloured black. She stuck its point into the pad at the base of her pointer finger, between heart- and head-lines, and twisted till she had to pull it out sideways, freeing a drop of blood the size of a dime. “Now you,” she commanded, and I didn’t even think to disobey. I was far too interested, at that point—I wanted to see if it would work. Nothing I’d ever tried by myself had, up to that point, and I’d always wondered why.
(All little girls try practicing magic, eventually, my first girlfriend would tell me, in our second year of university. That’s because magic offers power, and they don’t have any… magic tells you things can change, if you want it bad enough. They haven’t figured out yet how that’s a fucking fairy tale, and fairy tales aren’t real.
(And I remember nodding, but that was mainly because I was drunk and she was beautiful, enough so I wanted to agree with her. Thinking, as I did, how I could sure tell her some stuff to the contrary, if I wanted. If I felt like I had the right to.
(I used to have a friend who’d disagree, was all I ended up telling her, though, so low I don’t think she actually heard me.)
Imogen squeezed her wound until she’d painted a triangle on the mirror’s surface, point up. “Now you,” she said, “but widdershins, opposite, other way ’round. Point down.”
“I know what widdershins is,” I told her, grumpily, sticking the hook between my index and middle fingers. To which she laughed again, full-on this time, loud enough to startle a nearby pigeon.
“Of course you do,” she said.
* * *
And what did you see in the scrying mirror, Una? a voice asks, from deep inside my mind—that first psychiatrist Mom sent me to, maybe, with her sad, smart eyes. To which I answer, internally: Nothing. I saw nothing. I never saw anything at all. Not even when I said I did.
And what did Imogen see, do you think?
I can’t know that. I only know what she said she saw, over and over: a way out, an escape. A door to somewhere better than this shitty world we both knew we were trapped in, the place where one step forwards always led two steps back. Where everyone else got away with everything and we got away with nothing, not even with being two similarly inclined weirdos lucky enough to find each other, to share an affinity, to make up stories together and lie our way into believing them… acting like we believed them, anyhow. On my part.
And yes, we hurt ourselves; we hurt each other. Why not? Pain was already a constant. Imogen’s fairy tales at least promised that pain could be harnessed, used as currency. They promised it could be bartered for entry into the numinous. No different from any other religion that way—any other mythology. All the ones we’d studied and discarded on our own, before finding each other.
I mean, pain really should count for something, don’t you think? Considering how much it hurts.
Think about it, Imogen told me. Why do other people hurt us? To get what they want, which is for us to hurt. Cause and effect. So when we hurt ourselves, Una, what do we want out of it? What can we possibly want?
…to… not hurt, anymore? She didn’t answer, simply waited, which is how I knew she must be disappointed in my reasoning. Okay, no— no, obviously; that’s too easy. To hurt, so long as it hurts them, too. Like they hurt us.
And? she prompted.
That’s part of it, sure… witchcraft, all that. Baby steps. But I want to go farther, as far away as possible. To a place where my pain makes me queen, empress. To a place where my pain makes me—
—what, fucking god? Good luck with that, man. She wouldn’t look away, which meant I had to, eventually. Asking her, after a beat: And besides… what about me?
Well, you too, Una—come on, did you really think I didn’t mean it like that? We’re sisters now. Of course, you too.
(So long as you’re willing to pay the same price, that is, she didn’t say, and didn’t have to.)
* * *
This thing we were after didn’t have a name, but we knew we’d know it when we saw it. It felt like… some prospective culmination for all that leprous, unchannelled pubertal fury I felt, that crazy rage to procreate held completely separate from true sexuality, never thought about in conjunction with other people, because they all hated me and I hated them. All those “hunky” boys whose attention Nini and Faz competed for, never understanding they knew even less about the whole shebang than they did; I’m not saying I didn’t think about sex at all, but not with those idiots. I mean, I already knew how to masturbate—“gouging,” I called it, for some reason, probably because everything that appealed to me at that age was about secrecy and humiliation, revenge and freedom from consequences, a toxic antique glamour wrapped in blood and gold and jewels. And power, power, power, like my girlfriend-to-be would say.
I remember how I used to stand in the bath looking upwards into the shower’s spray and touch myself till the blood rushed so far out of my skull I blacked out: that’s how it felt, the thing Imogen wanted us to find, together. I’d wake up in the tub, cold and wet with the back of my head ringing against the porcelain, and believe me, it’s not like it never occurred to me I was probably killing brain cells, or risking I might crack my head…
But because it felt so good, I kept on doing it—chasing that high, the mounting buzz and pixelation, the letting go, the refreshing dark. Even more like dying, I suppose, than the little death itself.
“Blood’s what opens a door,” Imogen used to say. “Did you really think you wouldn’t have to pay for something like that? Something wonderful?”
“No.”
“No, that’s right. I knew you understood. That’s why we’re friends.”
So every day we’d go down into the Ravine, look in her scrying mirror and try to find a place where the world wore thin, a crack through which to reach somewhere else. We looked for it everywhere. Under the bridge, through the trees, inside the downwards slope of the walls, the deepest part of the creek. We mapped things out in either direction, a mile or more south and north, down towards Rosedale, up towards the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. We broke through thickets of willow-whips and blackberry thorns to emerge into what had looked promising from below, only to have it turn out to be yet another slice of some too-quiet side-street lined with twin-garage houses and speed bumps, its off shoots all cul-de-sacs, for absolute minimum public access.
Imogen would always be the one to see it first, of course; she’d cry out, point with her free hand and set off running, pulling me along. Hand in hand with our wounds pressed tight, grating, throbbing: the lope and the stagger, faster and faster, lungs burning, until it finally blinked out almost as we reached it. And I’d bend at the waist to spit on the ground, coughing as Imogen cursed, damning everything she could think of.
“It shut again,” she’d say, finally, once she’d calmed enough to form new words. “We weren’t fast enough. We have to be faster.”
And I’d nod, still gulping. “I know,” I’d reply. “Next time, maybe. Maybe next time.”
* * *
A third voice, now: Imogen’s, of course. Who else?
You never saw anything, Una? That’s not what you told me.
Well, no.
Because sometimes… sometimes, I did. Almost.
Probably a shared illusion born of mutual self-hypnosis, or whatever— but I got scared after a while, because increasingly I fooled myself that if I squinted at the exact right angle, I eventually might be able to catch something forming in the air, superimposed over whatever supernatural beacon Imogen was leading us towards. Because, on one particular day, at the very moment dusk turned to twilight, I genuinely thought I could see the threshold… a thin, bright line starting to trace itself around what could only be a frame, hanging high in the air with light from another world spilling out as the door it came attached to began to crack, just a fraction. Before it slammed tight once more.
A fingernail of new moon shining down on us where we stood, and stars, so many stars, caught in the trees’ darkness like glitter in a woman’s hair. And Imogen grinding her thumb into my wrist, wringing my already-stinging hand so hard it spasmed: Fucking faster, Una, goddamnit. It’s like you don’t even want it.
I do, though, Im, I swear. You know I do.
She gave a long sigh, then, almost a snarl. Ragged and ugly. It scraped me inside, like sandpaper.
You’d better, is all she said.
* * *
Here’s what I do know: when someone disappears, no matter the reason, they leave a hole. Wait long enough, and that hole is all you have—it’s all you’re left with. The assumption that they’re gone, and they’re not ever coming back. It creates its own gravity, like every other anomaly; everything left over revolves around it, forever.
It’s like a scratch on a record, it leaves a groove. It’ll never play right again. So every time you hear this wounded song you associate with that gone person, you’ll remember she is gone—remember she might be dead—and it’ll hit you all at once, everywhere, over and over again. Shake you like a bag full of rocks. You’ll be one big bruise.
The dead hate the living. We have what they want: time. We have choices, chances. The dead are hungry, always. They resent us everything, even our pain.
By remembering what you’ve forgotten, by trying to see what it is that happened objectively, what is it that you invite back into your life? Do you open a door, summon a ghost? Do you announce yourself as open to being haunted?
The past is a trap and memory is a drug.
Memory is a door.
* * *
Blood holds the door open longer, Imogen realized, after we’d not-quite-done it enough times to have some statistics to work with. We need more of it, that’s the key. Which is how we ended up poring over A History of Torture and Execution, which—in turn—is where Imogen found her pear of anguish. And it wasn’t as if I really believed she’d be able get ahold of one, but who knew what she was capable of, or what she assumed I’d be capable of? I really didn’t feel like stabbing myself (or her, or both of us) in the vagina as part of some Let’s Go! Narnia craziness any more than I felt like throwing myself from the bridge with her on the off-chance a door might open in thin air, halfway down…
I wouldn’t tell on her, though. That was never an option.
That evening, however, my body decided things for us. I stole an empty jar from the kitchen and squatted over it for an hour after lights-out, reading Salem’s Lot by the streetlight leaking through my bedroom window. The result was clotted red-black, thick and dreadful; I’d filled it halfway by the time I stuck the lid back on and screwed it tight, wrapping it three deep in plastic bags before stowing it away at the bottom of my backpack.
Suffice it to say, nobody ever told me that, much like any other sort of dead flesh, shed uterine lining really does need to be refrigerated.
* * *
Nini Jones. If someone had given me a gun, even at age twelve, I truly think I’d’ve shot that bitch right in the face. The strange part is that when I think of her now, I see her as she was—plain, not pretty: rake-skinny and dishwater blond, weird eyes, weird angles. But back then, she was really, really good at convincing me and everybody else that she was perfect, the righteous social arbiter of everything “in” or “out.” Jenny Diamond had money, supposedly from the fleet of cabs bearing her last name; Faz was born glamorous, a lovely brown girl centre-set in a bright white trio of semi-pro assholes. And Peri Boyle, I eventually figured out, simply trailed along behind all three of them, avoiding censure through protective coloration. A low-grade trick, I guess, but I sure couldn’t manage it… Imogen, either. So, good for her.
“The hell’s this?” Nini drawled, the next day, down in the Ravine— and grabbed the jar from Imogen, who’d barely started to twist its cap. The force of the move alone was enough to make it spring the rest of the way open, releasing the worst stink I’d ever smelled, a whole hot summer day’s worth of fermentation. Nini sprang back, dropping it; the jar shattered against the ground, sprayed rocks, dirt and glass shards coated with decaying menstrual blood everywhere, including across her white canvas shoes. “Jesus, fuck!” she screamed, kicking out at Imogen with one stained foot, who kicked back, hitting her in the knee. Nini started to fall and caught onto Faz, who flailed, almost upsetting them both, while I saw Jenny Diamond retch in the background as the wave reached her, coughing: “Oh holy shit, fuck me, is that—? Una, god, you freak.”
I laughed long and loud, hyena-harsh. “Medical waste, bitches,” I growled, “same as your mom throws out every month. You stupid fucking retard children.” To which Faz replied, too loud, at almost the same time, with her one arm wedged under Nini’s now and the other hand tugging at Jenny’s skirt-waist, trying to pull them both away: “Seriously, guys, c’mon—what do you want, like… some disease, courtesy of the St Clair coven? A serious case of Tampax cooties?”
“Cooties don’t exist, you dumb-ass,” I threw back. “Or witches.”
“Yeah? Tell that to her.”
I glanced over my shoulder, in time to catch Imogen in mid-crouch, coming up with two fresh handfuls of creek-bed rocks, wet-slick and twice as heavy. She flung them at the “populars” underhand and barely aimed, as if she was pitching the world’s worst softball game. One glanced off Nini’s shoulder to whack Jenny in the chest, both of them squeal-braying in protest as Faz broke into a run, dragging them with her, straight past Peri Boyle, who’d been hanging back all this time behind a nearby tree; she whirled to yell after them, but I didn’t hear what she said.
That was because the other rock collided with the side of my head, opening a gash in my scalp that ripped open the top of my ear and sent my glasses flying, leaving me face-down in the dirt with blood in my eyes, functionally blind and howling. Already in half-Hulk mode to begin with, I felt myself go off, top of my head exploding into metaphorical flames; I rounded on Imogen with both hands clawed, ready to rip, to tear, to knock her head on the ground until it broke. “I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!” I vaguely remember roaring, even as Imogen saw my face and cried out like some weird bird, half in guilt, half in ecstasy. Like…
Fresh blood, Una. That’s exactly what we needed. Not that old stuff, that garbage you brought—fresh. Because it doesn’t count if it’s too easy, right?
It has to hurt.
* * *
It was Peri who found my glasses, in the end, and gave them back to me in the nurse’s office, once I’d blundered up out of the Ravine with Imogen still screaming after me—Peri, who was never really my enemy, and became my friend after both of us ended up in the same Alternative High School, a few years on. Her mom was a French teacher who thought she was extraordinarily cultured, I later found out, always rabbiting on about Yeats and Robert Bresson, and married to this asshole writer, penniless but culturally approved; he was award-winning, her reward for putting up with Peri’s dad all these years, a “mere” journalist. The two of them would go after Peri tag-team style, work her like a nine-to-five, trying to convince her that because she was physically rather than mentally inclined, she must be genuinely stupid. And while I do think Peri might indeed have had a learning disability, she had more heart in her finger than her bitch of a mom had in her whole body.
For a while, every time we met as adults, Peri would always end up reminding me how brave I was, how much she’d admired the way I wouldn’t lie down and take it back in school, even if she’d never done anything about it. And every time she’d tell me this, I’d wonder what exactly she was on—until the night I finally made myself peer back through the past’s dirty porthole at it, and remembered a dinner with Peri’s mom and stepfather during which I’d spent three courses smouldering at the way they baited her before finally erupting, yelling at them both at the very top of my voice: “She is not dumb, but you are a pair of assholes who deserve to die alone!”
They don’t know, though, do they? Imogen sometimes asks, from inside my scarred ear. That you’re not brave, never have been, but get you mad enough and you’ll leave anyone behind. People can count on it. You make it so easy for them, Una, after all. You always have.
Like that, yeah. See what I mean?
Which is when I see her, or think I can, through whatever door her own blood eventually opened, smiling at me sweetly from whatever black-jewelled throne she sits on, pointing a finger at me with its long, gilded, cormorant-claw nail. Then shrugging, and returning to whatever duties she has on the other side of the crack: organizing a library made from cured rolls of human skin, maybe. Writing new spells in gold-dust and quicksilver. Mummifying her enemies alive, or flaying them, or flaying some to mummify others. A twelve-year-old sociopath with a crown serving gods who run on rage and hate and pain, never quite grown old enough to bleed herself, except with a ceremonial knife: powerful, finally, enough so she can probably order rain to fall and mountains to rise, if she wants to; a suitable reward, no doubt, for all her effort. But alone, now and forever, in every way that matters.
The same way we both are.
* * *
So the school nurse called my mom, and the look on her face when she saw me… I don’t have to try to remember that. She made me tell her who all the other kids were, marched to the principal’s office to tell him she was keeping me out of school for a week, and booked us an assessment at the Clarke Institute for Psychiatric Health. After it was done, the doctors told Mom they thought that if I actually believed I was a witch, I might have anything from narcissistic personality disorder to early-onset schizophrenia. They recommended she commit me for observation, to be sure. “We’re not doing that,” Mom said, which is why she’s my hero. Instead, they gave her the name of a child psychiatrist I ended up going to for the next five years, as well as suggesting I should stop seeing Imogen. Mom agreed.
Then it was Monday again, and I was coming back to school for one last day, essentially to pick up whatever stuff I might have left behind. I walked across the bridge and through a side-route I often took in order to avoid the “populars,” a wind-tunnel triangle between the Ravine’s west slope and two residential apartment buildings in an L-shaped arrangement, following along the Ravine’s side until it blended into the yard’s back fence. But today, this path wasn’t empty like usual. Instead, it was crowded with kids, teachers, even janitorial staff, all pressed up close to the fence and staring down through the trees, the green shadows, the close-knit weeds and bushes. An ambulance was parked at one edge of the crowd, flanked by two police cars, their lights on and blinking; someone had strung crime-scene tape through the fence from one end to the other, suturing the hole Imogen and I used to go down through.
I couldn’t see what they were looking at, not from where I stood. So I edged my way around the outer rim of the crowd instead, a loose arrangement of younger-grade kids in clumps of two, three and four apiece. There I eventually found one boy I didn’t think I’d ever seen before, and approached him. “What’s happening?” I asked, quietly. “What are they all doing here? Are those the cops?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Somebody called them this morning, after they went down through the Ravine coming to school. I hear they found a girl’s clothes down there, all covered in blood, like she’d had her throat cut or something. No girl, just the clothes.”
“No body, huh?”
“Nope.” He paused for a moment, not even looking at me, before adding: “The cops think it might have something to do with this girl whose mom reported her missing last week: Imogen, the one everybody thinks is a witch. They think maybe her friend Una did it.”
I don’t have a lot of memories I’m never quite sure I didn’t make up after the fact, but this is one, if only because I’ve thought about it so long as a series of descriptive sentences—no emotions attached, not even images, simply a string of events: this, then this, then this, then this. I know I must have found out the facts of what happened to Imogen, at least so far as anyone else knows them, but I might as well have read them in the papers, or seen them on TV. I do know I switched schools almost immediately afterwards, though we didn’t move house until three years later, and the new school came with a new bus route that went literally in the opposite direction from my old one—it meant I never really had to interact with any of these people or places again, not unless I wanted to. And I had no reason to want to.
I do think it happened, though. Maybe the very flatness of it proves that it happened.
I certainly don’t have any reason to doubt that in real life, things aren’t as dramatic as either Imogen or I would have liked them to be.
* * *
I’m still here, and she’s not. That’s all I know. And I know myself, the way she never got to. And whatever happened, I wasn’t there. It had nothing to do with me. It still doesn’t.
Nothing, or everything.
So, if I slip my fingernail down the inside of my wrist sometimes, along the closed seam of a long-healed scar, what does it matter, as long as I leave it shut? So long as I only think of unpicking it, of shedding blood and seeing what might happen? What light might leak in, and from where, over the lintel of the invisible? What door might begin to form, haloed in shared wounds, opening at last to let me through, even after I left her alone to make her own key?
Pay the price, make it hurt; reap your reward, fast or slow. That’s how magic works, or so I’ve always heard.
Isn’t it.