When We Were Witches

by Nikki Alfar
about school I can tell you now that it was really mostly Ginnys idea to form all the girls in our sixth-grade section into a coven, dedicated to combating what we then saw as the unbearably annoying menace posed to the world by our preadolescent boy classmates, compact mirrors and all. Neither wild horses nor the collective stern glares of our assembled elementary school faculty could have dragged this admission out of me when I was eleven, mind you; but Im thirtyeight now and practically convinced that Sister Savina Syncletica will not, in fact, materialize from out of the haze of my cigarette smoke to punish both Ginny and me for the sins of nearly three decades past. Practically. What can I say? You can take the girl out of Catholic school, but you cant take the Catholic out of the girl. Lets not get into which school exactly I went to, okay? Because then you might do something nosy like ask them if it all really happened; and of course theyll tell you that no, no such thing ever happened; and Ill have to tell you that yes it did, I was there. And then youll say and theyll say and Ill say, and who knows, but we might all end up in court or something; theyre that careful about their reputation, which is partly why everything got so blown out of proportion the way it did. (But Im not making up a fake name for Sister Savina Syncletica, by the way, because first of all, she doesnt teach there anymoreshe went back to Spain or somethingand second of all, its just too bizarre a name not to mention. Ive googled it since, and found out she was named after a couple of saints known for their compassion, humility, beauty, and chastity, which just goes to show that you dont need more than one out of four relevant qualities to get named after whichever saint you want.) Anyway. Our school was nestled in the heart of an exclusive subdivision, which is what they said in the brochures then and what they still say now (Not that this will help you figure out which school it was, because practically every private school says that), I suppose because it sounds a lot nicer than smack dab in the middle of Snob Central, which is where it was. It was allegedly a coeducational school, where boys and girls grow and learn together in a balanced atmosphere of healthy camaraderie. The reality was that we were actually segregated into all-boys and all-girls sections, the logic being that each gender would only be a distraction to the other during actual class. We were supposed to be able to mingle during recess and lunch hour, but in fact you could have neatly drawn a dividing line straight down the middle of the grade school canteenbetween the giggly part that was suffused with the scent of Nenuco (for the rich girls) and Johnsons Baby Cologne (for the rest of us), and the sweaty part that was distinguished by much yelling as well as flying spitballs, folded planes, and other airborne paper products. We were so used to being kept apart that we thought of each other as separate species, and mealtimes did nothing to dissuade this notion. No girl would have been caught dead crossing over to the boys section, and no boy would have survived the ridicule engendered (pun thoroughly intended) by walking the other way. Eventually, somebodys parents finally caught on that there was something non-coed in Denmark, if you know what I mean, so they made a big fuss about not getting what they were

paying for, which led to a whole bunch of PTA meetings, which led to the compromise of trying out one Experimental Mixed Section per grade level, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty four. Which is when the proverbial shit started making its way toward the fan. about me They put all the smart kids in the Experimental Sectionspresumably with the notion that smart kids would be less likely to run riot at mere proximity to the opposite sexwhich is how I ended up in the sixth-grade one. Not that Im all that brilliant or anythingdont think thats what Im telling youbut I was cunning enough to know my strengths (English, Science, and History) and trade them off to cover my weaknesses (as in, Ill write your essay if you do my crochet for Work Ed.). So I wasnt exactly a Good Girl, although the teachers thought I was, because certain types of educators tend to cling to the belief that good grades equal actual goodness. I was, in fact, something of a ringleader type in grade school. I wasnt the most popular girl around, not by a long shot, but I did get chosen several times as a candidate for Miss Intramurals, which inevitably has a lot more to do with how well liked you are than how actually attractive you are. I wasnt gorgeous or rich or fashionable (and if you dont think you can be fashionable or unfashionable in a uniform, youve obviously never been to private school), but I was funny, and smart (which is not necessarily an asset in school social circles), and most importantly, I could get away with things (which totally is). I could talk rings around most of our teachers (By now youve gathered that the majority of them werent all that bright anyway), persuading them that no, it was not me and my friends who had been smoking in the girls locker room; we were merely hapless victims of whoever had left the choking miasma of tobacco smoke hanging in the air before us. I could convincingly testify that so-and-so had eaten some truly traumatic substance at lunch time, and was therefore completely justified in asking to go to the rest room three times in thirty minutes. I could forge any parents signature (including Mr. Simbulans, despite the fact that it appeared to contain no actual letters, and resembled a deformed dinosaur more than anything approximating a name), and endlessly invent plausible excuses to explain the many bizarre accidents that frequently happened to befall missing homework. I was a genius, in my way, and because of it, everyone knew me or knew of me. All the girls did, anyway, which was all that really mattered to me at the time. (Ive explained, right?) I presided over my own little table at the canteen and everything, close by the candy stand, which was a pretty prime location though not as good as right next to the soft drink vendo, which is where the real crme de la crme girls got to sit. (See? I told you I wasnt that much of a big shot.) I didnt know beforehand that there were going to be mixed sections that year, or that Id been picked to be in one of them. My parents werent the PTA type (although my dad was the opinionated type, but thats for much later in our story), and they probably would have figured that, with four older brothers, I had all the exposure to male behavior a girl could possibly wantand moreanyway. So my big concerns the summer before were making sure Id get the girls in my gang into the same section with me (annually accomplished by sweet-talking the registrar during enrollment, though inevitably I only wound up with one or two out of the three of them); having my plaid uniform skirts shortened or lengthened in my continuing sad effort to keep pace with current fashion and my own height; and charming my grand-aunt into wrapping my

books in plastic for me, which the school required, and I could never do neatly, and would gradually end up picking off in shreds over the course of the year. I only got one of my girls in the same section with me when school started upLee, who, granted, I was closest to and was the only other one of the gang with a good enough grade point average anywayand can you believe that registrar never said a word to me about the mixed gender sections? I mean, here it was, this big exciting thing happening for the first time ever that year, and I had to walk into class that June as clueless as the next person. Honestly, whats the point of having people skills if people refuse to cooperate? about Ginny So, okay, like I said, first day of school and I was as pathetically uninformed as everyone else who didnt have PTA-type parents, and therefore kept wondering what the fuck theseew boys were doing in our classroom. (I would not actually have thought the word fuck, though, since I was still young enough at the time to retain the superstitious dread that Mama Mary would descend from the heavens to call me on my foul-mouthed internal voice.) They probably thought we were in the wrong place, just like we were all convinced that they were in the wrong place. (I later found out that Rowena Salgado, whose parents not only attended PTA meetings but actually showed up for sports events and the school fair and that kind of thing, knew alreadybut she didnt say anything, because Rowena Salgado would not have said anything if her hair was on fire, unless you called on her to recite.) Unlike the teeming masses of ignorant classroom humanity, however, I was not content to sit around and wonder, so I got up to check the class list on the door. (I know this seems like the simplest, most obvious thing to do, but you have to remember that the main goal of schools, especially Catholic ones, is to turn hapless students into sheep, which is why I was the only one who went and did it.) It was there, in the middle of my apocalyptic shock and dismay at discovering that we girls were indeed expected to coexist with those boys, that I first learned Ginnys real name, which provided me with a much-needed source of amusement at the start of what promised to be a truly trying school year. On my birth certificate, it says Gently Go, the new girl said later, during the ritual tell-ussomething-about-yourself in front of the class. But if you want to be my friend, call me Ginny and dont make any jokes about the dying of the light. Now youre probably sneering at this point and wondering how I can possibly remember what someone said at a certain moment on a certain day twenty-seven years ago, but honest to God, I really do, because it was that little speechette that moved me from my initial position of laughing at the profound silliness of her given name to actually being intrigued by the transfer student from California. I was impressed by her confident assumption that people would actually want to be friends with her (It took an admirable amount of sheer nerve, I figured, to go around laying down ultimatums on making friends when youre new in school), as well as the implication that, including me and very likely excluding only a few of our teachers, there were now two of us in the entire grade level who actually had some notion of who Dylan Thomas was. So I invited her to sit next to me, which involved booting some other girl (I dont remember who anymore) from our prime spot at the back of the class (which means it wasnt Rowena Salgado, an inveterate first-row-sitter). Theoretically, of course, there was a seating arrangement, but our homeroom adviser was so pleased that someone was willing to reach out to the new girl (and, honestly, so bamboozled, this being her first exposure to the syrupy, suck-up sweetness of me) that she let the matter lie.

By lunch time, I was utterly entranced with Ginnys outspokenness, her bluntly professed hatred of her father (which made my own perfectly pleasant relationship with my parents seem childish and boring), and the multiple earrings she obstinately refused to remove from her left ear, despite admonitions from various teachers throughout the morning. (It turned out that there was no actual rule in the school guidelines dictating the number of earrings a student could wear, so she got away with it, at least until the faculty managed to muster up enough organization to get said rule invented. This tells you a little something about the hierarchy of priorities at my schoolthey never could get all the toilets working at the same time, but God forbid anyone should wear more than two earrings, or that boys should have hair long enough to touch their shirt collars!) I ended up asking Ginny to lunch with me and my gang, who were confused but compliant enough about my unusual decision to add someone new to the mix at the very start of the year, when I tended to be picky about who could or could not sit at our Sacred Canteen Table. (It wasnt really as effortless as that, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of itI mean, Janice said and Lee said and Rosetta said, and then Lee said again; but in the end I was louder and bossier than all of them put together, so I got my way.) As it turned out, though, Ginny had already arranged to have lunch at her house, which was within the same village as the school, so she invited us home with her instead. Of course, by school regulations, we werent allowed to leave the campus without written permission from our parents or guardians. But equally of course, I never let details like that stop me. about witchcraft The second thing I noticed when we got to Ginnys house was her bookshelf. (The first thing I noticed was that she was, obviously, putridly richas in, beyond filthy. I mean, not only was her place in Snob Central, but her bedroom was actually larger than our dining room at home! I kid you not.) It was a massive bookshelf, all her owneliciting my immediate envyand naturally, there was the usual Sweet Dreams stuff youd find from any girl our age who bothered to crack open anything that wasnt a textbook. (There wouldve been Sweet Valley Highs too, probably, but this was actually before the Sweet Valley High series came out, which tells you just how long ago this was, and how shockingly old I now am.) Much more interestingly, though (at least, after Id confirmed that Id already read all the Sweet Dreams titles she had), there were four or five books on psychic phenomena, the occult in general, and witchcraft. Now, I know when I told you about me earlier, I never said word one about that kind of thing, but I wanted you to understand that I was pretty much a normal girl in most respects (aside from being, you know, pushy, self-centered, and habitually noncompliant). But Sweet Dreams notwithstanding, I devoured any reading material I could get my hands on that had anything to do with the occult, from horror novels to those Rosicrucian ads in the backs of magazines that promised to teach you the secrets of the universe if you only lived in the States and could dial a 1-900 number. Unfortunately, I met neither qualification, so I had to do the best I could on my own, following whatever advice I could glean from the writings of Richard Bach. (Yes, Richard Bach. Stop laughing.) I had been told by a fortune-teller when I was even younger that I had enormous psychic ability, and seriously believed that I had had out-of-body experiences a couple of times in my sleep. (You know the kind of thing, where it feels like youre floating above your bed, and just as you realize, Wow, look what Im doing, Im so cool! you come crashing down and waking up, right?)

But that was as far as my knowledge went, though certainly not my curiosity. You have to understand that in those days, in the Philippinesat leastor maybe just in the admittedly limited circles I traveled inno one had even heard of the word wiccan. You couldnt find occult books in the local bookstores, not even the ones an eleven-year-old like me would have known were written by crackpots (and probably wouldve bought anyway, in desperation). Heck, you couldnt even find The Lord of the Rings then, thats how straight-arrow Philippine book buying wasin which sci-fi, for instance, was synonymous with Star Trek, and practically nothing else. So Ginnys little store of supernatural stuff was like a gold mine to me, and somehow she knew that right away. I mean, when I looked up from where I was staring at that shelf, she was watching me; and then she said and I said and we said, and I wish I could remember exactly what it was that we did say, but give me a break, it was twenty-seven years ago, remember? Basically, we understood that here was another thingmaybe the most important thingwe had in common, and it put the seal on our becoming instant best friends in the course of one day. After that, we had lunch at Ginnys house a lot (although never more than twice a week, since anything more would risk our claim on the Sacred Canteen Table). The two of us would hole up in her room poring over The Books, while the other girls would hang around downstairs, giggling over Ginnys older brother Joel, who was good-looking in that tidy Chinese way, like his sister, and nice enough to bother actually knowing our names, despite his exalted status as a first-year high school student. (He also had the distinction, by the way, of being the only scion of their family who managed to escape infancy with a halfway-decent sort of name. Their youngest sister was christened Whispering Hope, and the twin boys in between Ginny and Hope were calledwait for itLearnwell and Welcome, names which their father had apparently decided went well with Joels. He gave me a reason to hate him almost before I was born, Ginny liked to say.) Anyway. While Lee, Janice, and Rosetta were busy being normal girls in the thrall of burgeoning hormones, Ginny and I were in another thrall entirely, lighting candles to help focus our inner beingsas well as mask the scent of our cigarette smoke (even though smoking mostly made us choke, which probably didnt help with the focusing); chanting the mantra I am alive, I have power, it is real to help develop what was described as man and womankinds innate ability to affect change in the cosmos through the emanation of their essence; and arguing amiably about whether a candle flame had gone out because we had finally managed to channel our mental powers, or just because of Ginnys arctic-blast air conditioner. Did we take it seriously? I cant honestly tell you, because when youre eleven its uncool to take practically anything seriously except how you look or whats happening to characters on TV, whom you actually know better than you know yourself at that point, because youre still figuring all that stuff out. (Ginny, of course, had a bigger and cooler TV than I did, but they both still had actual buttons on them for changing channels, because people like my mom still had trouble working the remote control. And we all thought these buttons were very cool, because they were easier to use than the rotary dials TVs had had when we were little; and we also thought the Betamax was the best thing to happen to movies since sound.) It was fun, anywayeven the small but distinct voice of panic telling me Not To Play Dice With The Universe (which we probably both heard but would have mutually died before owning up to) was fun, in that perversely thrilling way. If we didnt take it seriously, we sure took to it faithfullywe hit The Books every time we were at Ginnys house, and what we

studied in them was the subject of most of our conversations at lunch and furtive note-passing in class. But we didnt do much more than mess around with candles and try to levitate pencilsuntil Dominic Protacio. about boys Okay, I need to explain this part in case youre a guy, because if youre a girl you probably know it already, but if youre a guy you may be mystified by the fact that, to a sixth-grade girl, guys the same age are verminand sometimes significantly lower than that, which well get to in a bitwhereas older guys are considered to have evolved into actual humanity and are therefore crushable. Which is why my friends were crushing on Joel and I was crushing on Kevin Bacon (Footloose was big that year), both of whom were about equally unattainable, since the distance between Manila and Hollywood was not, subjectively speaking, substantially greater than the divide between grade school and high school. I dont know if its the same for everyone, but in my school, at least, it was definitely not until seventh grade at the earliest that some of the males apparently began to comprehend the benefits of deodorant and cologne (But once they did, it was in a big way; I could have died at the age of twelve from asphyxiation due to Drakkar inhalation), as well as addressing the opposite sex by means of human speech, rather than through an assortment of snorts, grunts, and a truly peculiar auditory phenomenon that I can only render here as nyuk nyuk nyuk. (Dont ask me why or what its supposed to mean; Im not a preadolescent boy.) These were only the tip of the glacier of reasons we had for categorizing the boys in our class as subhuman, even subvermin. They were loud. They were smelly. They picked their noses and were perpetually shifting their crotches around, as if they had actually grown anything there by then worth shifting. (I probably didnt actually think that second part at the time; I just thought they were gross.) Some of them had rings of dirt embedded not just on the inner collars of their shirts, but in the skin of their necks. Granted, there were a few of them who did appear to be acquainted with the rudiments of hygienethese were supposed to be some of the smartest boys in our grade level, after allbut by and large, if they werent disgusting in themselves, they regularly acted disgustingly. They took any incidence of anyone reciting in class as occasion for derisive hilarity, whether the recitation was right or wrong. Then they would turn around and cheat off our test papers! (Not that we didnt copy off each other all the timethose of us seated toward the back of the class anywaybut just you try having a sweaty mouth-breather leaning over your shoulder, compared to someone who smells like baby cologne, and youll see that our discrimination was not without basis.) They were constantly trying to peek in between the buttons of our uniform blouses, and Dominic Protacio, who was like my opposite number in the enemy camp, essentially won his leadership position among the male creatures by sticking his chewed-up gum in poor Ana Lopezs hair, an act that was celebrated during recess of that particular day as the evident pinnacle of preadolescent boyish wit. And then there were the compact mirrors. For the longest time (but bear in mind that a month counts as a very long time in the sixth grade), none of us girls could figure out why these worm bellies that we were forced to share space with all seemed to carry around a small mirror of some sort, when available evidence suggested that none of them had bothered to actually look in a mirror since the little plastic ones that might once have been included in the mobiles hanging over their cribs. It was only one day in July or August, while Lee was standing up to spell the word risqu (I am not

kidding, that really was the actual word, and Im not making it up just so everything fits better. Can I help it if the universe has a well-developed sense of irony?), that Teret Andolong spotted what the boys closest to her were doing with their mirrors, and the light dawned. By now youve probably figured it out, and any eleven-year-old these days would probably have caught on way sooner too, but these were the 1980s and it was a (somewhat) simpler time and we girls were a lot less sophisticated than girls are today. When we finally understood that the pond scum who polluted our otherwise scented atmosphere had been using their mirrors to peer up our skirts practically since the start of the year, we wereI dont think outraged is a good enough word to describe it. Remember, this was back when Madonna had barely begun to spread her religion of weaponizing feminine sexuality, and maybe before Britney was even born. In the time just before I became a teenager, madonna was not so much a cultural icon as the thing a girl needed to be if she didnt want to be classified as a whore instead. We were young, we were female, and most of all, we were Filipinawe could only be innocent or slutty, it was one or the other; generations of conventional wisdom had told us so. The sexual revolution had already occurred before then, of course, so we werent sure we absolutely believed them; but we were absolutely sure that we ought to believe it when our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and sundry told us that our purity was our most valuable possession. (Brains, for instance, being not a distant second, but quite possibly twenty-second. Heck, you could have had the ability to climbMount Everestblindfolded while waving a pompom with your free hand; but if you werent a virgin, you were pretty much worthless, was the general understanding.) So really, the word apoplectic would not be an exaggeration. Neither would livid. Or infuriated. Or vengeful. about witchcraft, part two It started small, just Ginny and me and a piece of paper on which we wrote the phrase Dominics hair over and over until it filled the page, front and back. We spent the entirety of math class (I know it was math because I was completely secure about not listening, having already bribed Melissa Jimenez with the promise of a baking soda volcano for her science project in exchange for a copy of all her notes for the semester) tearing our respective halves of the paper into the tiniest shreds we could manage, muttering our mantra I am alive, I have power, it is real, and basically wishing him all the concentrated ill a young girls righteouslyoffended heart can hold. Does actual witchcraft work this way? I doubt it; remember, we were working from whatever knowledge wed manage to piece together from a couple of books (which Mr. Miyagi could have told you is hardly the best way to learn karate), the authenticity of which we had no way of even verifying. It wasnt the kind of thing you could look up further in the school library, and the Internet wasnt even a concept any of us wouldve imagined at that point. I have friends today who tell me theyre witchesor magic-users of one flavor or another, whatever and they mess around with herbs and black candles (which are the most powerful, so they say) and semiprecious stones that channel specific energies, shit like that. Ginny and me, all we had were imagination and will and a piece of paper. But it worked.

Dominic started clutching at his head, during probably the sixth or seventh repetition of Mr. Cortezs habitual Do you get what Im trying to say? (uttered, one memorable day, a recordbreaking nineteen times, since the combination of his subject matter and Mr. Cortezs own haplessly ineffectual teaching style virtually ensured that no one, ever, got what he was trying to say). We werent sure, of course, if it was a result of our efforts that had Dominic grasping at his skull as if it was threatening to fall off his (grime-encrusted) neck, but when he started vigorously messing up his hair, we felt that maybe we were starting to get somewhere (although Ginny refused to discount the possibility of head lice). Dominic went to the clinic, and we went on to bigger and more ambitious attempts, bringing first Lee and then other girls in on our occultish endeavors. It was Ginny who suggested that Ana Lopez might be interested in joining our little trio; it was me who figured that we should avoid the word witch, since it might scare the other girls off. We called it light magic, since a lot of it involved stuff like focusing imaginary pink light toward our mental image of Teret Andolongs parents so that theyd give her permission to join the class field trip. (See? It wasnt all nasty stuff.) Someone or other suggested that we call ourselves the Pink Ladies because of it, but that was voted down with mild vehemence and not-so-mild ridicule. We finally settled on the name Coven-ant (Get it? We thought we were being subtle and clever), and were supposed to all become blood sisters, only Ana practically passed out in the girls comfort room, which made me drop the needle, and then no one was willing to get on their knees on the highly dubious tile floor to find itso that was one idea that fell by the wayside; and looking back, who knows? Maybe I shouldnt have let it. Maybe it would have changed things, but then maybe not for the better. Anyway. Our biggest success happened in PE, another class taught by a male teacher. Most teachers at our school were womena lot of them nuns, evenbut the rule of thumb was pretty much that physical education in the all-boys sections was taught by men, and by women in the all-girls sections. (And you havent experienced surrealism until youve been led, doing jumping jacks, by a nun in a habit!) For the Experimental Mixed Sections, it was toss-up which gender of PE teacher you got, and our roll of the dice landed us with Mr. Albao, a former seminarian whose first act of the year was to decree that we girls would be wearing our uniform skirts with our PE t-shirts, instead of the usual shorts. (This resulted in a complaint from Rowena Salgados parents, of all people, because they had paid for the regulation shorts and would therefore be damned, apparently, if Rowena wasnt going to wear them. This in turn led to Mr. Albao being quite possibly the only teacher in the entire school who did not like Rowena Salgado, which, admittedly, made me like him a little more than I probably would have. By now youve realized that I was more than a little bit of a snob myself.) Although I liked Mr. Albao well enough, this did not prevent me from pretty quickly sniffing out his acute discomfort with all things pertaining to the female body (as demonstrated by his dumb skirt idea, which only Ginny had thought was okay; and that was only because she said she tended to be a bit klutzy at times and get her legs all banged up, which you couldnt tell unless she was wearing shorts) and progressing from there to the realization that all you had to do was tell him you were experiencing a feminine complaint, and ta-da! Not only would he let you sit out the class, you could actually get away with this several times a month, before he overcame his beet-red embarrassment enough to wonder just how many periods a girl could have in the course of thirty days.

Naturally, I took shameless advantage of this, and equally naturally, a bunch of girls started following suit. (There are generally just two types of schoolgirls who actually enjoy PE: the popular ones who honestly are athletic and all that, and the freakishly obedient ones who strive not only to do everything authority figures tell them to, but to do it with enthusiasm. Clearly, I was neither.) So it was me, Ginny, Ana Lopez, Melissa Jimenez, and the unfortunately named Chinny Eugenio (whose sobriquet needed no explanation once you clapped eyes on her, providing said eyes were not perforated beforehand by the eponymous chin) who were sitting around, pretending to cramp up from time to time and complaining as per usual about the boys and their perennially puerile behavior. For once it wasnt Dominic who was hogging all the attention over on the boys side of the gym where they were playing basketball, because his number-one sidekick, Matthew Fernando, was a fantastic basketball player and, unfortunately, knew it. (And it should tell you, in case you need reminding, something about the alleged coeducation available at our school and the general views of gender roles at that point in time that the boys got to play basketball while we did jumping jacks.) He would strut and preen whenever he made a shot or stole the ball, not minding in the least the sweat that would drip greasily off his nose or earlobes, thoroughly nauseating the repulsed viewers (us) on the far side of the court. I saidI cant be sure exactly, but something like, Wouldnt it be cool if Matthew just suddenly tripped? And fell flat on his fat face! Melissa said (or words pretty much to that effect). And Ana squealed with delight and said, and Chinny said, and you get the picture. Call it roughly ten minutes of the same and more, until Ginny said, Well, why dont we make him? So we did, just a couple of weeks later, after the six of us (We dragged Lee into it, even though she was one of those Actually Athletic girls) had managed to squirrel away bits and pieces of things associated with Matthew: stray hairs, pencil shavings, candy wrappers, anything hed touched and left behind for quick, malicious hands to find. We cut this collection up and worked the pieces into the collage Id sweetly suggested to Sister Savina Syncletica (You knew shed come back into the story at some point, right?) as a group art project, which followed a particular pattern Ginny had researched and transposed for us from one of The Books. It must have all seemed perfectly innocuous when we all sat around during PE (I was on my second supposed menstruation of the month by then) holding the edges of the collage, although careful observers might have noticed we werent actually looking at the collage, but at the basketball game. I made sure that we did it softly enough that no one heard us chanting, Fall, fall, fall, fall, fall. Not even when Ginny and I looked at each other from the opposite ends of the group North and South, earth and fire, that much we knewand said the words: We are alive, we have power, it is real. And Matthew fell. Got up, shook it off, tried to recover the ball hed dropped, and fell again. Got up once more in time to intercept a pass from one player to another, managed to make it across the court to try for a jump shot, and fell for the last time, with a resounding crack of bone on wood you could hear all the way from the benches we were sitting on. When he showed up for school a few days later with his leg in a cast, I know that Lee felt guilty. So did Melissa. So did Chinny. (But not Ana, because Matthew was one of the boys who laughed loudest when the chewing gum was stuck in her hair; and a sixth-grade girls hair is serious business, I kid you not.)

Me? Well, come on, if I was going to lie to you, there wouldnt be much point in telling this story, would there? about sleepovers By then I was spending every Friday night sleeping over at Ginnys; and since Lee used to spend every Friday night sleeping over at my place, she tagged along now and then, though not all the time since, to be honest, she kind of cramped our style. I mean, she wasnt really all that into the witchcraft thingshe only did it because I did, and actually spent more time messing with Ginnys other stuff than practicing with The Books like we did. (Which was sort of understandable, in a way, because Ginny had practically more cool merchandise than your average department store, and most of it in mint condition except for Mr. Stuffy, a raggedy blue elephant her mother had won for her at Disneyland when she was little.) And anyway Lees parents knew my parents socially, but they didnt know Ginnys family, so she wasnt always allowed to go. In my case, Friday was gimmick night for my older brothers, as well as my parents weekly alone together date night, so no one in my family cared that I wasnt around the house, as long as I was somewhere safe. (Of course, I conveniently forgot to tell them that Mr. Go kept a gun in the house, because that might have made them reconsider its relative safety as compared to, say, my own firearm-free home.) My mom worried that Ginnys family might get sick of seeing me every damned week, thoughshe kept sending me off on Friday mornings with leche flan and stuff like that to hand over after school, which of course I just promptly shared with the Covenant Girls during recessbut Ginnys dad was always nice enough to me, although not in a way that made me exactly comfortable, or like him all that much. Vintage Mr. Go lines: Gently, why cant you sit with your back straight like your friend? (Remember Ginnys crummy real name? He always called her that, just like he always called me your friend, like I didnt have a name, even though I had dinner at his house at least four times a month.) Gently, why dont you eat your vegetables like your friend? and See how your friend always calls her mother once she gets here? Why cant you be responsible like that? The mom thing didnt always come up, but when it did Ginny would get riled up and fire off something like, What are you talking about? You dont even want me to talk to my mother! because of course Ginnys parents were divorced, and her mom still lived inCalifornia. And then Mr. Go would say, and Ginny would say, and he would say and she would say, and then shed either get sent off or go stomping off to her room; and Ior Lee and Iwould be stuck at the dinner table trying to pretend like nothing had just happened. This totally freaked Lee out, so she wanted to stop going over to Ginnys place, and she wanted me to stop too. Of course I wasnt going to, but I made the dumb mistake of mentioning it to Ginny once, and she went and got pissed at me! Like Id betrayed her in some way. Or maybe she was just still pissed over the fight at dinner (particularly nasty that time) and took it out on me; I know I reacted badly because I was still tense from having to sit in the dining room, even though I obviously didnt belong there when Ginny wasnt around. So we had a fight, and the worst part was that this happened in December, just before school let out for the holidays; by the time Christmas break started, we were speaking again (mostly because not speaking would have affected our co-leadership of the coven, and we were both too committed to let that happen), but not quite the closer-than-this buddies we had been before. I wasnt sure wed still be best friends when January rolled around.

Stop! Now youre thinking that this is going to be all The Craft or something, with Ginny turning evil like Fairuza Balk and me in the good witch role of Robin Tunney, and well wind up duking it out in some awesome display of mystical powers; but this isnt that story, okay? Ginny came over to my house during the holidays (which was a huge deal, because she almost never went to my house; it was always the other way around, since her house was nearer to school and nicer, to boot) to give me an additional present from the one shed sort of sullenly handed me at our class party. It was one of The Books, the one I liked best with the vines twined all over the cover in the shape of two joined hands. I gave her an extra present back (not nearly as cool, but I hadnt expected her, and the neon pink legwarmers Id gotten from my grand-aunt were the only decent new things I had lying around), and we made nice and were soon jabbering away like only preteen girls can do; and by the end of the break I was sleeping over at her place every week again, and we were burning up the phone lines practically every day in between. So no, Ginny isnt the villain of this piece. But pretty soon after school started up again in the next year, the introduction I mentioned earlier at last occurredin other words: shit, meet fan. about school, part two I figure it was Lee who ratted us out. It could have been Chinny, I guess, or Melissa. It actually could have been almost any of the girls, because let me tell you, Christmas break is poison to anybody trying to maintain a regime of benevolent (more or less) dominance over a significant segment of her classmates. More than two weeks is potentially enough time for people to develop Independent Thinking, which is definitely to be frowned upon. (I objected to the Catholic school system trying to turn me into a sheep; me turning other people into sheep, obviously, was more than okay.) Then theres the fact that while we were pretty scrupulous about keeping our little club secret from the boys and our teachers, we werent all that careful about other girls, even the ones who werent officially Covenant members, like Teret Andolong, or the other girls from my lunch group who werent in our section, like Janice and Rosetta. It could have been any of them, feeling left out or whatever. But Im betting on Lee. Probably she felt like Id chosen Ginny over her (and lets face it, I kind of did, didnt I?); and probably shed thought that Ginnys and my little falling-out meant that she and I would be best friends again like before, only to be frustrated when it didnt work out that way. For someone pretty smart at getting what I wanted and thinking ahead and keeping people in line, I was pretty dumb, wasnt I? I can only sayyou know, I was eleven; and there were a lot of things I didnt understand that I didnt understand. It was nearly February (I guess whoever the tattletale was needed some time to get her nerve up) when Sister Savina Syncleticawho was our grade level supervisor as well our art teacher barged into our classroom, marched right up to Ginnys desk, and opened Ginnys bag, ignoring our shocked protests. Of course The Books were there, all but the one shed given me wed been really strict about not taking them to school when we started, but wed kept our secret so successfully for so long (School months are like dog years, right?) that wed gotten all casual about it, even the one with the huge skull and pentagram embossed on the cover, which

of course was the one that Sister chose to brandish with overwrought accusation in Ginnys face. That was the first shocker (the barging in, not so much the brandishing; that part sort of followed logically, if you know what I mean). The second came hours later, in front of the faculty room firing squad, after My Father the Lawyer had delivered himself of a diatribe concerning Innocent Until Proven Guilty and the Right to Remain Silent (I always knew he wished he was a trial lawyer instead of a tax attorney) in defense of my obstinate refusal to respond. My dad became my total hero that day, considering those people were threatening to expel me (I told you this was all blown out of proportionalthough considering that we did possibly break someones leg, maybe not horribly out of proportion, but still). I mean, he didnt even ask me if Id done what they said, this spreading the practice of witchcraft maybe because the idea of preteen girls fomenting the black arts was completely absurd to him; but more, I think, because I was his daughter, and he wasnt going to let a bunch of adults gang up on me, no matter what I might or might not have done. Mr. Go, in complete contrast, slapped his daughter. Right there, in front of everyone; and I figure thats what ended the whole ruckus stone cold, because we were sent off not fifteen minutes later, even though nothing about the matter innocence or guilt, punishment or leniencehad actually been resolved. I need to remind you again here that this was 1984, and what parents did to their children was considered no ones business but their own, and not even my hero dad said a word; he was utterly silent as we drove all the way home. He didnt say a word later either, when Ginny called me up that night in tearshe just got up from the sofa, grabbed his car keys, and we went. about Ginny, part two This part I remember pretty clearly, and youll see why. We got to Ginnys house; and Pumpkin, go help Ginny pack some things; shes staying with us for a while, my dad told me, and that day of all days I wasnt going to whine at him just because he happened to like calling me by a pet name that compared me to a species of squash. Instead, I dragged Ginny after me to her room, and we both pretended not to hear Mr. Go yelling after us that we would do no such fucking thing, this was his fucking house, and no fucking lawyer was going to fucking judge how he fucking raised his fucking daughter. (This wasnt the exact wording, Im sure, but fucking did come up a lot; sadly, Mama Mary did not show up to smite the fucker.) Ginny had bruises not just on her face, but on her arms and legs, which I could see for once because she was dressed in just a t-shirt and shorts (and Im fairly certain this was the night I started to understand how little I really understood about anything). She wasnt crying anymore; she was just saying, I have to bring Mr. Stuffy, I have to bring Mr. Stuffy, while I threw every piece of her clothing I could get my hands on into whatever bags I could find, because of course her suitcase was in one of the storage rooms with the rest of the family luggage. We were both checking under the bed for Mr. Stuffythe blue elephant from her mom, remember?when her father slammed the door open, lurched into the room, and pointed his gun at us. I hadnt known before right at that moment that hed been drinkingI wasnt experienced enough then to tell the difference between drunken anger and ordinary belligerence. I could hear my father shouting something from the direction of the stairwell beyond, and Ginnys big

brothers voice too, from down the hallway, but I knew that neither of them could possibly get to him fast enough to do anything, and we were probably going to die. Then Ginny grabbed my hand. I looked at her, but she wasnt looking at me; she was just staring at her fatherexactly as cool and in control as I always tried to beand mumbling, Fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall. So I twisted the fingers of my other hand the way I knew she was doing, into one of the gestures wed practiced, and said, not anywhere near as clearly as I was supposed to, I am alive, I have power, it is real. about me, part two Im sorryI know when we started out I made it seem like this was going to be a perky school story, full of high-jinks at first and then winding up to some sort of minor scandal with the Powers that Be that would nevertheless end Happily Ever After; and in a way it still kind of is that, and in another way, obviously, it isnt. But thats more or less what growing up is like, isnt it? Theres all this shit going on inside and underneath that no one sees, not even you most of the time; and there isnt all that much you can do to affect anything in a big way, except that the little things you do manage to do sometimes turn out big after all. I found out from Joel later that their father had sustained a concussion when he tripped over Mr. Stuffy; it was lucky, the doctors said, that the gun had discharged into the ceiling instead of him or one of us. This was, like, months after, because as soon as Ginnys aunt arrived at the hospital, my dad hustled us girls away, and we packed Ginny off to her mom inCalifornia, practically before Mr. Go could even manage to regain consciousness. There really was a bit of a scandal at schoolI mean, the Concerned Parents got together, and the teachers got together, and they all got together with each other; and I teeter-tottered on the brink of expulsion for all the weeks that I was suspended (during which I discovered that I was getting too old to appreciate shows like Voltron). But eventually it was decided that Ginny and I had been through enough trauma, and all could be forgiven if I swore never to even look at, much less talk about, anything to do with witchcraft again. (And yet, here I amSister Savina Syncletica, where art thou?) I guess youd think, after something like that, Ginny and I wouldve been best friends forever (BFFs, as girls say these days), but that isnt what happened. I think it was too much to want to remember; too heavy to have to hold onto, with all the years we still had left to go through the normal horrors of approaching adulthood. We do write each other every few years or so: this is whats happening in my life now, Im with a new company, hows the weather over where you are, like that. Shes a photographer; Im (You may have noticed) a writer. I dont know if Ginny still practices magic, or whatever it was we were doing. I dont know if the man she tells me shes marrying is a good guy, or just another version of her fatherthey say victims of abuse do that, you know, they just go through the same pattern over and over. I dont know if shes still angry, or scared, which is not that surprising since, hell, even back then I didnt really know, and its not the kind of thing you can figure out from sporadic email. I dont know if she even remembers it all the same way I do. I still have the book that she gave meI dug it out of storage the other day, when I got her wedding invite. I couldnt bring myself to open it, because Im thirty-eight years old now; and while Im willing to consider that witchcraft may have the power to bring a man down, I no longer have faith that its enough to get a girl back on her feet.

I can only hope that shes managed to pick herself up, and try to be there for her in case she fallseven from this distance of thousands of miles and twenty-seven years apart. Its the only small magic I have left; because sadly (and you know that this is true, dont you?), the thing about growing up is that neither magic nor friendship can ever be quite as powerful again as it was when we were eleven, when we were witches.