Yates nodded at me.
The doll and the marker were placed in my hands.
I hovered the Sharpie over its abdomen. “Thou Shalt Not Be Prideful for Harming Girls. Any happiness gleaned from harming girls will rebound threefold as shame.”
Yates flashed me a nervous smile.
I handed Chett over.
“Thou Shalt Not Stalk. That Addie chick included. If you even think about stalking a girl again, you’ll feel double the paranoia you inflict,” said Yates, who wrote across the doll’s plastic thighs.
“Alright, then.” I drew my knees to my chest, reached for another wing, and gnawed on it. “Yates, you can draw the sigils. First thing that comes to mind, draw that.”
She drew daisies and butterflies across his Four Commandments.
Yates, when she’d finished girlying up the lyrics to our curse, set Chett on the floor between the four of us. His shiny body caught the light and glared. Daisy smoothed his hair and repositioned him, spread his arms and his legs so that he looked like a store-brand Vitruvian Man.
I hacked into my sleeve and cast down my chicken bone like a gauntlet, seized the hands on either side of me. “Time for the invocation.”
I squeezed them tight. Forty fingers tangled together, heartline to heartline, and magic knocked me up the backside of my head. My eyes swelled in their sockets. Sinews stiffened. Blood welled up in my ribs. The circle on Chett’s neck thrummed with a livid, liquid power, and it charred its way through my bones, lacerated tissue, and seeped into marrow. The words bubbled up in my stomach, and I felt the incantation vibrate in my teeth.
Chett, ever smiling, stared vaguely toward the door.
“The four of us bind ourselves together to curse a toxic fuck. Where our hands are clasped, where skin touches skin, power flows through. As long as our fingers are tangled, the entire universe is trapped here between us. We’re naming this doll our poppet. We’ve got some scores to settle.”
Jing leaned forward with her teeth set on edge. “No one fucks with us. The bastard who did so needs to suffer, and we’re determined to see to it.” Her voice snapped—harsh fricatives, clipped vowels, throaty slides to the tonic. I didn’t have time to be jarred. She was doing this right. She was spitting magic. Those words had charge in them, had darkness. They prickled the hair on my neck. “One of ours was screwed with by a certain fuckboy. We’re going to call this asshole Chett. Chett needs to be made an example, and our clique is henceforth putting a permanent end to this kind of disgustingness. This doll is Chett. He’s going to help modify all that hell Yates had to suffer through.” Jing spoke with brittle straightforwardness. Her voice had edges. This incantation felt different than last night. It felt like a curse now, like ancient, honest vengeance.
My chest thrummed like a beehive. The tension in me was redistributing. Normally, all the elastic power fizzled in me and me alone, but I felt it radiate out of my fingertips, felt it ooze into the three girls beside me. Every word out of Jing’s mouth took some weight off my shoulders. I didn’t feel like I was tap-dancing on a scythe blade. There was balance, calibration. Breathing was easier.
“I don’t want anyone else to go through that, not ever. I don’t want him to be capable of it anymore. He needs to simmer in what he did,” Yates said. Her eyes, under inky lashes, drifted back and forth across Chett’s stiff stomach. I held her hand tighter, and she held mine tighter still.
Daisy let out a high, crooked laugh, like she’d been punched in the stomach. Her eyes stretched to take up half her face. She balled her hand up in a fist around my fingers, and she leaned forward, locked her gaze on the Chett doll’s body. “He’s gonna do more than simmer.”
“The four of us invite the chaos into our arms and charge it thus: where wrong has been inflicted, the scales have to tip. The four of us have four prongs for Chett. May he feel where we jab him forever,” I breathed, white-knuckled, as I clutched at either girl beside me, “and may he think about exactly what the fuck he’s done.”
“First prong. Dear Chett,” said Daisy, licking her teeth like a cat with a canary, “Thou Shalt Not Look at Girls with Nasty Intentions. One sick glance in a girl’s direction, and it’ll sting your eyes like a splash of battery acid. Don’t even glance their way with one of your filthy thoughts. Or, better yet, do it. I really hope you do. I want you to find out what happens.” There was a weird cast of puckish delight on Daisy’s features. Every word out of her mouth struck her face like an eerie spotlight: the mocking curve of her smile, the upturn of her nose, the triangle of peach blush that peaked her cheeks. Was she getting off on this? Magic fucks with my perception, so I’m not sure if it was real, but out of the corner of my eye her skirt looked like it was fluttering. Her fringe drifted off her face. Whether she was serious about the spell casting, I didn’t know, but Daisy’s smirking gave the room a strange static. I felt it prickle the follicles on my arms, tease the hair to stand on end.
“Second.” Jing slammed her brows into a V. She bristled with the sort of determination that I imagined Bonnie and Clyde had, righteously illegal and dripping with love. She rubbed her thumb over Yates’ knuckles. “Thou Shalt Not Touch Unconsenting Girls. I don’t care if it’s innocent. I don’t care if it was the single least harmful thing in the entire world. I don’t care if you bump into a girl at the supermarket. Unless they expressly say so, I want it to shock you like an exposed wire. I want you to feel it in your stomach for hours afterward. Not only that, but I want you to be so sick over what you did, so nauseous with it, that you couldn’t even fathom touching them twice. Not a single fucking finger.”
“Third.” My words, my voice, my heart spasming at twice its normal rate. Everything was racing faster. My tongue moved too fast behind my teeth. “Thou Shalt Not Be Prideful for Harming Girls. You won’t be cocky or smug, not even for a second. The second something snide or misogynistic comes out of your mouth, it’ll scald your tongue and taste like rot. You’ll choke on it, every single ugly syllable.”
“Fourth and final.” Yates let out a breath, closed her eyes. “Thou Shalt Not Stalk. Leave Addie the hell alone, and leave everyone else alone, too. Don’t look for me, or you’ll only get lost. And if you look for me or Addie or anyone else, you’ll feel awful for it, worse than I do right now. Three times the paranoia. It’ll be like the walls have eyes just for you.”
“This is our hex,” I said. “You earned every inch.”
A pungent, acidic smell split the air. Something like burning plastic. I looked down and my throat closed. The doll had moved, and not in a way it could’ve. The arms had snapped in half. The place where its elbows should be were cleanly broken, and thin, Sharpied filaments held the forearms to the upper arms. Its fuse-fingered hands rested over its face, covered its melty eyes. The sigil, the inscription, and the doodles had seeped into the plastic itself. They looked like a molded feature, like he’d come this way.
The tension melted away. Now there was just the afterlights, the magic embers. I let go of Yates and Daisy.
We all exhaled in unison.
There was a bottomless moment where we couldn’t speak. We stared at each other, at the doll, at our hands. There was something impossible between us. It was thin and invisible and honeyed raw, and it had an unspeakable gravity. There were hooks in it and it had put hooks in me. We’d torched the world for a second there. Reality was still flickering in its wake.