Miss Popularity (Witchcraft, Horror, Cheerleaders)
Here’s a fic request. A girl who’s bullied by the cheerleading squad finds the incantation for a love spell and decides the best revenge is to make their boyfriends publicly fall in love with her. If she had read the fine print she would have seen that the spell only works on women.
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“Amelia, I just wanna talk, I swear!”
She says this while her fist pounds against the door. With her voice raised. It’s six, the sun is just starting to set on the neighborhood. All these little pill box houses so close together. Their walls a termite’s feast, so thin already. There’s no way one of my neighbors hasn’t heard. I flick my eyes over windows and doors from the second story. Lia, she just goes right on, without a single care.
“Amelia, please!”
The knocks come louder this time. So much that I can hear them clear in my bedroom. I try to think of when my mother will be home. Then the banging stops, and I glance down. Lia stands there, her fists curled. She stamps her foot against our concrete step, and turns around. Just when I think it’s going to be okay, just when my shoulders start to slack, she turns. I’m not quick enough. She spies the curtain closing, and the door rattles yet again.
“AMELIA, open the fucking door! I fucking saw you!”
I slump beneath the window frame, and clasp my hands together.
I pick a god and pray.
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The first rule of magic is, don’t believe in it.
No.
Really. That’s it.
Don’t believe in it. Treat it like Santa and the Easter Bunny. Put as much faith in it as you do the tooth fairy. Tell yourself it’s not real, tell yourself to laugh every time someone calls themselves a “witch” or a “warlock”. Do this, and never stop doing it even for a second. Roll your eyes at the “new age” section in your book store.. Be a skeptic. Don’t even go to church.
That’s the first rule. Follow that, and I promise you’ll live a perfectly normal life. It may not be the one you want, but it’ll be calm. Typical. Absolutely pedestrian. Yours. See, I didn’t do that.
Because I’m a fucking idiot.
No, I don’t play Dungeons and Dragons. No, I don’t have tarot cards or runes or I-Ching. I’m not a wiccan. I didn’t study magic to “empower me” or some crap. It’s not an assertion to my “divine feminine nature”.
No, this started because of spanks. Choreography. Tights. Cock.
Yes, go ahead. Laugh. Get it out of your system now, and then do shut the fuck up. I don’t know how long I have. That’s the thing I miss in all of this-reliable measures. Facts. Boundaries we can point to and say, “That’s it, that’s the end, that’s the limit”. When you have those, you know when to stop. To close the book.
Only this isn’t a story. It’s not some National Geographic article from the sixties, with its word count requirement. It isn’t some pulpy dime store novel. It’s me, it’s my fucking life, and all those quaint little boundries are gone. That’s what all this does to you. It takes those limits, and shows you they were never really there. It throws you out screaming into the void.
Follow the first rule and you’ll live. You’ll be bored to death and the happiest idiot in town.
Don’t, and you’ll be just like me. With textbooks from the 1950s on ancient religions stacked to the ceiling. Out of print softcovers from the 70s tucked beneath your mattress. These ugly cloth hardcovers, so old and worn the title is missing. You use those for coasters. This becomes your day to day. The constant musk of half-mildewed paper complimenting angry white men screaming about heathens.
Oh, that’s the second rule.
Magic-or magick, if you’re an asshole-it’s not sexy. Sorry. You’re going to be spending a lot of time at the library, at garage sales. On ebay snipping books literally no one else is betting on. Whatever friends you thought you had, whatever fledgling social connections you aspired to make?
Kiss them goodbye. Do it now, get it over with. It’s better than calls evaporating into texts, both saying the same thing. Sorry, can’t make it-I gotta study! <3
I know, I know. I’m all over the place, and all this sounds so damned confused from the “nerd”. I get it. But when you’ve been floating for months, years by yourself?
When the first social contact you’ve had is because you forced the universes hand?
You look at me, and tell me with a straight face you wouldn’t be scatterbrained. That you wouldn’t look just as manic and looney as the books you’ve buried yourself in. In the end, that’s what magic does. It takes your brain, this lovely little box, and turns it on end. It scatters everything all over the floor. Just like your room.
I’ll try and make this pretty for you.
Hi.
I’m Amelia.
This is how magic fucked up my life.
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What do you hate about yourself?
I’m sure you can cite something. Some mole, some crook of the nose. Your earlobes, your freckles. Your eyes, your arms, your legs. There’s something fucky about you, but you’ve lived long enough to ignore it. People say “accept it”, but that’s a load of shit. You’ve learned to ignore it because noticing it just breeds anxiety. The anxiety, it turns into self loathing. Hate. It makes you uglier than you already are. So you pretend. You lie, and on a long enough time line, you even believe the lie.
Everyone thinks “abra cadabra” is some kind of magic phrase. It’s not. “I’m a good person and I love myself,” now that’s magic. Those words have turned people into millionaires and success stories.
But they’re a load of shit.
Magic is a load of shit.
Keep saying that, and don’t stop.
I’m sure you’re really, honestly proud of yourself. I bet you wake up every day, say that little phrase and kick the entire world’s ass.
You’re not in high school anymore either, are you?
Don’t worry, it’s not gross you’re talking to me. I mean, it totally is. But I’m a senior, and I’ll probably be dead before too much longer. It’s cool. You’ve your trick, and I’m going to tell you mine. Deal? Deal.
All these things you will away with a few words? Imagine if you didn’t have that luxury. Not because you actually believed in any of it (you don’t, right?), but because someone poked holes in it. This squaking parrot, this fucking contemptable bitch of a bird, it kept calling you fat. It said your freckles were gross. It told you when you had acne, it called you four eyes. Nothing particularly smart or intelligent-just the most baseline things. The rough grating of it’s squaks a cheap imitation of human words.
But close. Close enough for you to register, to hear with every repetition. Your magic trick, it falls to taters under that. A single person poking holes. The catholic church burned people alive for less. Cotton Mathers, he drowned people. With a full crowd cheering him on, even. One fucking person. That’s all it takes.
Now imagine a whole group of them.
A flock of crows, its’ called a murder. Did you know that? I found that out reading about wiccan symbolism. The Gilmore High cheer squad? That describes them perfectly. A murder. Because if you so much as came near them, that’s what they did. Every call, every little squawk just drove it all so much deeper.
By the time you’re coughing on blood, all that’s left is pissing away what’s left. All that remains is to become a spectacle. Cheryle Brodenberry, she loved that part.
My own personal Cotton Mather.
I’d love to give you some tragi-dorable reason I hated her. I could waste time making myself into some underdog, but we’re dealing with facts. Actual, provable things that we can clutch to. So here’s the truth:
Cheryle was a raging fucking cunt to everyone she knew. Except her boyfriend. Let’s call him “Chad”. He’s forgettable, really. The kind of guy that plays on the football team, graduates and works for his dad. You know the type, right? Right. He’s a nice little baseline, and we’ll keep him as such. Cheryle? She loved this walking dildo. Loved to kiss him, to hug him. Shove her tongue down her throat after she insulted you.
Spectacles are nothing without performers, after all. Cheryle and Chad, their lives depended on it. They wouldn’t exist without the roar of the crowd. Alone they just were, but together they were an experience. Another bar, another baseline.
I can’t say at what point ruining that seemed like a good idea. Maybe it was after she tossed a bottle of menstrual blood at me. Maybe it was during halloween, when she wore a witch costume and said she was me. It could have been the first day of freshman year-I don’t fucking know. Like Chad, it doesn’t really matter.
Like him, she chose the path of least resistance to make herself feel good. Me. She went after me because I was easy, because she thought I’d not fight back. You know what?
She was right, too.
I took it all in stride. What the hell else could I do? This isn’t like Twitter or Tumblr, with it’s roving call-outs and “cancels”. In the real world, nobody gave a shit. I was on my own. The concepts of “friends” became a moot point after a while. So I weathered it. I took it as long as I could.
Then came the Salem research.
I think back to that moment. That first reading in our history text. These women, they didn’t do a thing wrong, not really. No, they were burned, drowned, and beaten to death because reasons. Because it was okay to these uncultured luddites, these apron clutching peasants. There was a witch master general for fuck’s sake. They turned public humiliation and blood shed into a national pastime.
And for what?
Reading over those cases, something clicked. Something far back in the lizard portion of my brain, the raw intuition that kept my head low. That told me to deal with Cheryle like I always had, that it could only last so long.
For the first time in years, it made me want something just for myself. Something More. About the witches, about the concept. So I started reading when I got home. I started those ebay snipes, those weekend ventures to garage sales. After the first month, I was learned.
By the second, I was curious. The third, willing.
Now, magic is a load of shit. It’s all fake. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget that even when your head tells you there’s no harm in trying. A simple curse, a simple spell. You’re just going to burn some sage and meditate, right? Hell, they sell kits for that at Sephora now. It’s not anything unusual. It’s just an interest.
Something you do to grind time until you die.
Keep saying that even as you notice the changes. Your skin, it clears up. Your hair darkens. You lose some weight. You get that promotion at your part-time job. You do another ritual, another charm. You invoke another god because it’s cool. You won’t admit it’s working despite the proof before you.
Then comes the bright idea. Something so selfish but blinding in how obvious it is, you do it anyways. Because what can it hurt? All these little events, they’re not connected. The burning sage and the chanting. The fliers for missing pets in your neighborhood. It’s this distant patena so hazy it can’t possibly connect to your reality.
Mine came when I saw Chad smile at me. Just once. We were in the hall, and I was trying my best to turn into a locker. He was on the other side, book in his arm. Clad in a letterman jacket. He turned to me, and his lips curled with a warmth I hadn’t felt the four years I’d been there.
It actually made me stop. I waved at him, and he waved back. Then he kept right on going to class.
Those bright ideas? These concepts that seem so fucking brilliant when they first pop in?
That’s the first sign you broke rule one.
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Lia’s been turning over the living room for an hour. Just a single pleading voice asking me to come out. Then the clash of dishes, the banging of cupboards.
A window. She threw a rock through a window, and climbed in. I would have screamed, but I’d covered my mouth in time. She was still turning over the first floor of the house-then Cheryle came. She had the rest of the squad with her.
They were all yelling at each other. I’d heard the meaty smacks of palms on cheeks.
“She’s mine you fucking bitch!”
“FUCK YOU, I’ve known her longer!”
“You made her miserable!”
All this, it’s the soundtrack of a horror movie. Only there’s no monster, no giant dead guy with a machete. Just me, with my door barricaded by books. I’d tried calling the cops, tried posting about it on Facebook. That didn’t change the fact they were downstairs right now, searching.
See, where I fucked up? It was breaking rule one. Then it was the bright idea. That’s the truth, the hard facts. But where I’d really screwed up was thinking I knew what the hell I was doing. Magic, it does that. You get a drop of power, and suddenly you think you command the universe. The world. That spells will always go precisely the way you need.
To that, I’ve got to ask: has anything else up to this point? Are you the rockstar porn star president you always wanted to be?
Did you get the Chad you wanted?
Or did something flub up along the way?
They’re at the stairs now, all compliments and grunts. A chorus of my praises peppered with snarls at each other.
I’d only wanted the one guy. Just the single chance for something I wanted. Something just for me.
But instead, I’m going to be the most popular girl in school.
I’m even going to make the news.