Jing clucked her tongue. “Hold on.” There was a horrible, anticipatory beat while she looked at me dead on, said something vicious with her eyes, and then fell backward and rolled onto her stomach. She shimmied under her bed, movements low and lizard-like, and clawed around for something out of my line of sight. A breath later, she emerged with a battered Rubbermaid container in her hands. She sat up, popped the lid, flipped the container over. A hail of naked Barbies clattered to the floor.
These were not virile Barbies. They were half headless, limbless, tattooed with Magic Marker and floral stickers. Hair hacked to bits. A few faces had been scrubbed off and redrawn. They looked like Jack the Ripper victims. The Ken dolls were in equally rough shape, if not worse. Those were the dolls Jing was sorting through now. She pulled all the buff-colored plastic boyfriends out and laid them in a row, shoulder to shoulder, and tapped her nails over each of their abdomens with a frown. “These oughta work, yeah?”
“Christ, Jing, I didn’t know you still had these.” Daisy clapped one of her hands over her heart and snatched up a Ken doll with the other. She pinched its ankle between her fingers and held it at arm’s length, eyeballed it from head to toe. This was a blond Ken. Its left eye was worn away, but its perpetual smile was untouched. If Toy Story was right, and toys were sentient beings capable of suffering, this Ken was one unlucky bastard, indeed. Daisy pressed it to her sternum and fanned her fingers over its back. “I haven’t seen these since second grade. Do you remember their names? I feel like this one was Eric. My first boyfriend. It’s so sweet I could die.”
“Pick a Chett,” Jing said with a leer. She looked at me for a long minute, like I might say something to contradict her, but there was nothing to say. She was right. Barbies would work damn well. Curse dolls were a trope for a reason.
Yates ran her fingertips over every battered doll boy. She pressed her prints into the notches between neck and chin, danced over their nipple-less plastic pecs, prodded hollow faces until they squished. Yates bit her bottom lip, scrunched up her brows, pondered every plastic body with equal consideration. Her eyes moved from left to right and left again, textbook-reading style, until they froze mid-motion.
Her gaze drifted up an inch at a time.
It settled on the doll in Daisy’s fists.
Daisy scoffed. “Really? Yates, this is my boyfriend, Eric. He’d never put anyone in a pool. You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Yates turned that gaze on me and fluttered her lashes.
Damn.
I ripped my hand through my hair. “Yates called it. Eric is moonlighting as Chett tonight. Sorry, Daisy.”
“Ugh. Screw you guys.” Daisy, pouting, tossed Eric/Chett onto the faux fur carpet and crossed her arms over her chest.
Yates delicately picked it up, placed it on her lap. She squeezed its head between her thumb and forefinger. “How did you even manage to smudge its eye? I thought the paint on these things was immortal. I’ve never seen a smeared one before.”
“Bug spray,” said Jing. She wagged her eyebrows. “Melts the paint right off.”
“Alright.” I cleared my throat. “Do we know what we’re doing to him? Have you decided for sure, Yates?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to put him in the hospital or anything.”
“I want to put him in the hospital,” said Jing and Daisy in unison.
“It’d look really bad to colleges if we killed the guy, so I’m drawing a hard line with anything that could fuck up and result in murder. Besides, that’s a tad complicated. Let’s go with something easier to pull off. Mental anguish, something like that,” I said. I ran my thumbnail over a chicken bone on my plate. There was a cold, queasy feeling in my gut. I tried to ignore it. My palms clammed up anyway.
Jing considered for a moment and gave us a nod. “I could work with mental anguish.”
“I mean. I want to implode his gonads,” Daisy said, “but I could settle for psychological torture, if y’all are going to be boring about it. You game, Yatesy?”
Yates sucked in her cheeks, and after a long pause, she set the doll on the floor. “I’m game.”
“Alright.” I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We need a piece of paper to draw our sigils on, and a cup or some such to trace a circle with. Don’t overthink it. We’re all going to lay down a few curse lines, Thou Shalt Nots—actions you want to stop and their consequences. It doesn’t matter what they are, so long as they feel right in your gut, alright? Just, again: zero murder. We’re going with mind games. Then we draw shapes over the lines to lash them in place. The shapes can be literally anything. You guys saw the basement. Seriously. Anything genuine goes. Questions?”
“Yeah,” said Jing. “What if we just wrote it all on the doll? I want them sticking to him forever. We can make it like we’re tattooing our grievances on him. Make it count.”
Shit. That was clever, and would totally work. I nodded, shoved my hands under my armpits. A nasty, cloying thought writhed around in my stomach like a long, icy centipede, squirming, twisting, and I felt it threaten to clamber up my esophagus and batter itself through my teeth. It was the urge to fuck up this whole thing and say something like the truth: If Jing was as good at magic as I was, would that be the end of whatever this was? If they didn’t need me, why keep me around? This, the four of us, was hardly anything, but I felt attached to it now. I set my teeth in a hard line and forced it back down. “Yeah.” I swiped my tongue over my teeth. “I guess that’ll work, too.”
Daisy fetched a Sharpie from Jing’s bedside table.
Jing picked up the Chett poppet and flipped it over a few times in her hands. “He’s fucking small. Where do we draw the circle?”
“Around his neck,” I breathed. I reached for another slice of pizza. The cheese was approaching room temperature, but the litany of mismatched toppings smelled bizarrely delicious. I sank my teeth in and tried to steel my nerves. Chew. Swallow. Take comfort in the fact that it tastes fantastic. “If you draw it around the doll’s neck, then everything we draw on the body is technically inside of the circle. There isn’t enough room on his chest to draw a decent circle, even if we crammed our writing as small as we could.”
“Cool,” said Jing. She passed the Sharpie from Daisy to Yates.
Yates, looking pensive, uncapped the pen. Pop goes the toxic Sharpie smell. Nausea lurched in my gut. Yates drew a skinny black ring around his neck. It resembled a nineties choker. She shook her head and put him down, pulled her knees to her chest. “Someone else write first.”
“I’ll do the honors,” Daisy said. She gingerly plucked up the doll and the marker and laid them both innocently across her lap. She lofted the Sharpie, poised as Marie Antoinette with a teacup, and tattooed where the doll’s clavicle should be. “Thou Shalt Not Look at Girls with Nasty Intentions.” She took the Thou Shalt Not thing literally, I suppose. Works. She used hearts to dot her i’s. “If you do, you’ll go blind looking at them.”
Jing took the doll out of Daisy’s hands and flipped him over, poised the Sharpie between his plastic shoulder blades. “Thou Shalt Not Lay Hands on Unconsenting Girls. So much as an accidental brush in the hallway, and it’ll trigger more panic than a cavity kid at a dentist.”