I know I should be saying all these things out loud instead of thinking them and pretending not to argue, but… fuck, I don't know these girls! These are all Moonsilver's friends, and she's their leader.

"Please do try to relax," Moonsilver says. "You don't have to participate, but you should, you know…" she waggles a hand from side to side, "clear your mind and see what stirs in you from the energies at play." She smiles brightly. "I'll tell you what. When we get back to the States, I'll call Mom, and we'll arrange a spiritual pilgrimage to Salem for you." She leans over to rest her hand on mine. "I think it'll really help you to grow. But for tonight? I'm going to see to the rest of my sisters." She winks. "You're always welcome to join in."

Then she's flouncing away. Someone tackles her a minute later, and she whoops with laughter--then, starts moaning.

Am I just being spiteful? Clinging to what I wanted from tonight at the expense of what I'm actually being offered? Either way, this isn't a place where I can try to have a real discussion.

The more I think about that, the more confused and angry I get, because Moonsilver just tore open some of my most painful doubts as a witch. Then she left without really helping me come to terms with any of it. It's bad enough that pop culture and everyday society tell me I'm greedy and unreasonable for wanting big, spectacular spells without hearing it from another witch.

Easy enough for her to flounce away with a smile on her face and talk about spiritual journeys--how am I supposed to be turned on in the middle of an existential crisis? If magic is real but the only thing it can do is make me feel the same emotions anything else in life would, then how can I ever know it's magic? Good food and good sex both make me feel bubbly, but they're just plain different. I mean… except if you put them together.

I usually don't, but I'm not going to yuck anybody's yum.

"Look, Carrie," the other blond witch--right, yeah! Morrigu! That's her witch-name--says, as she sits down beside me. She's very naked and just a little sweaty. At this point, I'm just noting her body as a matter of clinical routine--documenting this to myself so it'll still feel real later, and I won't gaslight myself into thinking it was a fever dream.

"I get it," Morrigu continues. "We all had that phase of wanting to pull the hairbands off of the cheerleaders with our minds, or make them pee on each other's heads. It's totally normal to be disappointed when you have to accept that real magic doesn't give you the power to enact righteous vengeance on the preps, but," she fiddles with her dreadlocks, "it just doesn't."

What is she talking about? The cheerleaders at Freigeist High were nice and worked really hard. I always felt terrible for them--the whole school gossiped about them behind their backs. They knew it, I knew it, everyone knew it, but they still went out there all the time to try and perk people up.

Yeah, they could be catty sometimes. That's normal. It's a teenager thing. Boys do it too, they just call it "assertive" or "witty" or "rational". But the cheerleaders were always forced to center stage, so they didn't get the privilege of hiding their uglier sides like the rest of us--not if they wanted to remember how to be themselves at all.

I just can't imagine seeing other women and being so ready to dismiss them. What's a cheerleader's sin, anyway? Being conventionally girlish? Why is that bad? Girls are cute!

"That doesn't sound like what I wanted at all," I say, after about as awkward, strained, and painfully long a pause as all those thoughts imply. "I just thought it would be cool to turn myself into a cloud of mist, or open portals, or control fire--"

"Oh, yeah, so you could burn some teacher's behind!" Morticia interrupts, before nuzzling into Jenuthra's boobs.

I open my mouth to say that's a horribly irresponsible way to use otherworldly power. That people aren't as dumb as they are in movies--or, okay, we are, but we have way more time to think about things in real life and being smart is mostly an illusion created by persistence in the first place. They'd figure me out. That even if they didn't, burns really hurt, and the stress is real, and physically harming someone just for annoying me is wrong. That these are all terrible ways to handle the power of witchcraft. I look at them all: fat and thin, curvy and toned. All beautiful. All adorned with tattoos and necklaces and…

"Hey, Morticia," I ask, "is that a Solomonian pentagram on your belly?"

"Huh?" she asks, breaking off whatever she was doing between Jenuthra's legs and glancing down at the intricate designs. The Hebrew names of God. A tool for binding demons. Coercing them. Hurting, threatening, dominating them until they do a sorcerer's bidding. "You don't have to try and sound fancy," she laughs. "It's just a neat pentagram design I found online. Ashley--my tattoo artist--she did a great job, right?"

I don't understand. She's a witch. How can she have just put those symbols on her body without knowing their meaning? I could understand if it was deliberate reclamation, or a jab at Solomonian magic to suggest there's no real magical power in it because it's just Christian mysticism--I don't agree, but I could understand--or even a precaution to protect the souls of any children she conceives from changelings or other would-be bodysnatchers.

But to just put an active spell on your body, one that's meant to call things into the space it's inscribed on, and not even have an idea of what you want it to do…

"Yeah," I say, playing for time. "She did. It's really cool art. Really suits you."

My words sound so fake. They're so obviously fake because any serious witch would understand that symbols and inscriptions might very well invoke things just by existing, that any spell could be more potent and active if it's tied into one's own life and inscribed on her own body. Maybe I'm the only witch who actually committed to those theories, but any serious magic practitioner should at least have considered them at some point.

If magic exists, then gestures like that are bound to have power. They just feel too strong not to. You don't just ignore the risks on a whim, even if you don't fully agree with the theory that lays them out. I keep waiting for someone to call me out for all these or other reasons, and they just… don't. Morticia goes back to pleasuring Jenuthra. Girls keep kissing each other around me. Caressing. Fondling. Moaning.

And I, Lady Slutmaster Supreme, feel… empty. How can an entire coven of witches be this uninterested in talking shop, for good and for ill?

This doesn't make sense. Not having an orgy and calling it a ritual without doing anything to guide magical intent, not inscribing coercive Christian mystic symbols on our bellies, and definitely not taking pieces of someone else's culture, artifacts of a magical tradition we have no claim on, and rushing to sell them for mundane profit--or any profit.

Real magic should be treated with gravity, with care. Sure, it's not as fast as a firearm, but it can save or lose souls, see the future, alter fate itself! Or, well… magic could do that if it is real, and we're just failing to tap it somehow.

I don't know whether it is or isn't. But I know that out of respect for the magnitude of what I'm trying to harness, I should assume it's real. I should assume any terrible thing could happen. Just like the scientists at Los Alamos really believed the Bomb might set the whole sky on fire. I should treat every single way I use my magic with all the care I can muster.

I had thought any witch older than a child must have considered these things. I mean, even the old Spiderman flicks have that line about how great power brings great responsibility, and Spidey is a fictional…

Safety off. Round chambered. There it is: that fast-brightening light at the end of the spiral-groove tunnel.

Spiderman, any lay person could tell you, is a fictional character. Just like vampires, ghosts, ghouls, werewolves, demons, and witches… at least, witches who worship the Devil.

I'm trying so hard not to cry right now. My nose stings and my eyes are warm and achey, but I'm not going to let myself cry right now. I don't want the conversations that will come with that--not here. Not in front of these girls. And sure, most of them are too busy chasing orgasm to have any chance of noticing, but it'd be just like them to notice I'm crying just so they can guilt me for ruining the mood again.

Gods of the lost, I was so excited for tonight. I was so ready to believe I'd finally found my sisters--my coven.

A normal person doesn't talk about the damage a superhuman might do to New York's skyline by swinging his weight from webs narrowly applied to surfaces that may or may not be rated to handle it. They don't talk about that for the same reason they don't debate whether a succubus is truly dangerous enough to deserve the risk of stabbing her privates on one of those spiked pads people used to wear on their chests to thwart her nighttime visits.

Fictional characters don't push back. They aren't bound by the messy questions of being alive, or having to think about the consequences of their actions even when it won't provide a tidy moral any ordinary person can learn from. If the story doesn't talk about it, then it just doesn't exist.

The Sisters of the Boundless Cycle of Body, Sun, and Moon don't believe it's real.

Deep down, they don't believe any of this is real. Heinrich Kramer was a warped, strange, sex-obsessed pervert who served the Catholic Church at one of its most fascist periods--a Nazi hundreds of years ahead of his time. But in this one way, that awful, awful, awful man is closer to me than any of these women: he clearly believed. He clearly believed there was something loose and potent in the world, a real threat he had to study, practice with and against, and confront even if doing it forced him to face things that made him doubt his entire being. He truly believed he had to, lest that seductive whisper in the night destroy his faith. He believed in the power of demons and witches, even as he reviled them.

This doesn't feel like a witch's Sabbath because it's not a witch's Sabbath. It's a bunch of yuppie white chicks sitting around a campfire in a foreign country, getting extra credit to have sex and go on vapid monologues about some goddess they don't really believe in.

I mean, really? A pilgrimage to Salem? A spiritual journey to Salem. It's a tourist trap built on erasing the real deaths of real women, who were never even really witches! If there were ever any ghosts there, if there ever was one real witch in that whole town, I'm sure her ghost has been gaslit straight to annihilation by the psychic screams of a million girls just like these. I really, really hope she found her way out of the world before it started.

I think a million thoughts like that at once while I just stare back and forth, broken.

"You're just throwing it all into the spirit world," I say. I know how I look, and it's not very imposing or enlightened or eldritch. In short, not very witchy at all. Eyes wide in disbelief and dismay. Mouth hanging open. Standing with my arms wrapped over my belly like I'm wondering whether to keep the baby. "Everything you don't want to face about being human. Every feeling you have that you don't want to admit is yours."

"Carrie Rider, that is quite enough," Moonsilver says, staggering upright. I'm sure there are plenty of women who could manage an intimidating sense of presence while stark naked and… let's say, showing signs of having a good time. Right now, she's not one of them. "You have done nothing here tonight but spread negative energy--"

"Just say that I'm making you angry," I interrupt. "That's what you mean. I'm saying things you don't like and that makes you angry. Talk about your feelings like a grown up. All this dancing around, using other stuff to talk about ourselves… it's for kids. It's verbal 'I'm not touching you' when you've got your fist halfway up," I pause, watch her eyes bulge, then say with special relish, "into my chest cavity."

"Fine," Moonsilver snaps. "If that's what you want, then here you go." She jabs her finger at me. "I invited you here because I saw you practicing your little rituals alone, and I felt sorry for you."

Wow. I was actually really enjoying that ritual and I thought maybe Moonsilver invited me because she was impressed with my talent, so… god fucking damn it, I know now that this girl doesn't deserve my respect! Why does it still hurt?

Good Samariwitch is still talking, of course. "I showed you trust, and brought you into our fold, and you've rewarded my kindness with nothing but toxicity. I don't know what you've been through or what you think you've been through, but there is absolutely no excuse for this kind of behavior! I will not have slut-shaming from my own people--"

"Do not dare talk to me about slut-shaming," I snarl. I can snarl? Wow, that sounded good. With some practice it might even rate as blood-curdling. "A slut is someone who embraces their own sexuality. That's it. You know what's part of that?" I wait just long enough that she starts to answer, then immediately shriek, "CONSENT! You don't just ambush people with sex! You flirt, you suggest, you test the waters, you give them space to decide how they feel about it, and if you're inviting them to an orgy, you say, 'Hey, do you feel up to an orgy tonight?"

By now, all the sex has stopped. That does give me a kind of bitter satisfaction. Fuck, I wish it was still this easy for me to be horny.

"If you think that getting pushback for failing to do those things is slut-shaming, you don't know what slut-shaming is," I continue. "Now, me? Oh, I know real damn well. You're talking to the town bicycle of Freigeist Public High School. 'Care for a ride,' 'Ride-Me Rider' 'came-and-went Carrie,' I've heard way worse than a well-behaved feminist paragon like you would ever think of admitting she can think of." Instead of pointing it at Moonsilver, I use my finger to jab myself in the tit--might as well kill the last of our subtlety while we're at it, right? "I have been raped twice, once in a locker room on film, and I'll just let you girls guess how much justice I ever saw for any of that."

"You…" Moonsilver looks like she's about to shit herself. It's not satisfying. I didn't want to destroy her self-image, I wanted her to live up to it. This guilty quiet of hers isn't going to lead to me getting help or her learning a lesson. I've seen it too many times before to think otherwise. She mumbles, "You could've told us that…"

"I didn't want to tell you that!" I say. Here we go. Here come the tears. "I wanted to be myself as much as I could, to try and be Carrie Rider as I would've been if the world didn't break me! I don't want to milk my trauma for social status, you… you… you lunatic," I hiss, making claws of my fingers. "Do you have any idea how much worse that makes it? I've seen how that goes. Everyone clustering around, saying 'oh, you're so strong, you're so good and pure, you're a goddess,' but I'm not a goddess, I'm hurt and broken and weak and I feel like I've been tainted beyond reclaiming and I just want someone to let me rest."

I pause, heaving for breath. "Can you understand that? I don't want to be a heroine or an icon. I don't want to be hurt anymore. I don't want to fight. I don't want to die. Like… fuck, Moonsilver," I shake my head. "You've got your coven members talking about the women murdered in Salem as martyrs. But martyrdom is a choice. Someone takes a risk to show their faith and accepts that they may die for it. They didn't get that choice. They were just trying to live their lives, pissed off the Puritan patriarchy by accident, and died. Real, breathing women, with wants, needs, desires, women who just wanted to live, like…"

I wave a tired hand at myself. "Girls like you are always talking about glory and purpose and revolution. Those things aren't real for me anymore. I don't need a mission statement. I need help."

"I'm… I'm sorry, Carrie," Moonsilver says. Don't say it, I think at her. I can feel you thinking it. It's okay to think of it. I want you to have your thoughts to yourself. We all deserve that. We all need that. Just have one iota of compassion with what you actually say. Recognize I'm a wounded person baring her wounds in a last attempt to reconcile, and this is not the time to admonish me about right conduct--

"I really am sorry," she continues, "but those aren't things to seek from witchcraft. You need a professional, a therapist, someone who's trained to deal with these issues. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't seem fair to us to bring these things in here. I'm not judging you…"

Firstly, that's a canned response to a deeply raw, incredibly, uniquely personal display of emotion, and that's just unfathomably shitty even by itself. Secondly, this is pretty rich coming from a girl who keeps hammering my triggers by projecting her ideas into me. Thirdly, 'these issues' aren't separable pieces, though that's the kind of galaxy-brain logic I'd expect from someone who thinks that she can avoid judging people if she just says she's not judging them, even if her statements are incredibly judgmental.

Believe me, Moonclit, I really wish I could open up my brain and set "Trauma triggers = 0" until I'm in a safe place to deal with them, but unfortunately the things other people did to me did shape me as a person. I can't not carry them. That's how trauma works, as opposed to, say, having some unaddressed insecurity about one's womanhood that one projects onto a goddess figure as a metaphor for the ideal self. Just a random example.

And lastly?

"I have a therapist," I say quietly. "Gene's a good man. You know what Gene told me?" I sniffle. "He told me that he agrees abandonment issues born out of social isolation can only be solved by finding a community that embraces me. That no amount of one-on-one therapy can replace a fundamental human need."

I shrug. "I guess I'll just have to keep looking."