A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

this Uber points for good driving, but the ‘fun conversation’ is a little lacking,” I joked. Nobody answered. Nobody laughed. (Which, given the quality of the joke, was fair.)

It’s only Margot and the rest of them, I told myself. Once we’d gotten to the inner sanctum, they’d tear off my blindfold and hand me some champagne and show me their diagrams of all the people they wanted to take down and how they were going to do it.

Maybe it would be like a dimly lit club with cigars and snifters of brandy, or maybe it would be more like a classroom, or maybe it would look exactly like a meeting room in the White House where politicians gathered to decide on matters of life and death. All of these options flashed through my mind as the women pulled me out of the van and into an elevator, as I put myself into their hands and let them move me where they wanted. I heard a door open—this was it, we were going behind the door!—and we stopped. I braced myself for them to remove the blindfold. But then we entered another elevator, not smooth and quiet like the clubhouse one, but old and creaking. A freight elevator. When the doors opened with a grinding sound, the women pushed me out into someplace colder, ripe with the rich, loamy scent of earth, plus something smoky. A hand pulled the blindfold from my eyes, and what lay before me was something I hadn’t prepared myself for at all.

I was standing in a forest. No, I saw, as I got my bearings. Not an actual forest. But we were surrounded by trees in planters, tall ones arcing up from their pots, spreading their branches, amid trellises covered in ivy. And the floor was actual dirt, dirt that they must have trucked in from somewhere. In the center of the trees stood a circle of small stones with wood arranged inside, ready to be lit. That had to be a fire code violation, right? Did this room come equipped with sprinklers? I looked up to the ceiling to check, and saw sky. We weren’t in a room at all, but on the rooftop under the stars, or at least as much of the stars as could be seen in the smog of New York, arranged around the glowing orb of a nearly full moon. The ivy-covered trellises closed us in, so that a casual observer looking over from the window of a nearby building wouldn’t be able to see anything but a beautiful rooftop garden. Besides, there weren’t many nearby buildings this tall anyway—most were at least a floor or two shorter. I looked back down again and saw, at the edge of the stone circle, a dark wooden chest with drawers, standing at about waist height. I narrowed my eyes to bring it into focus in the sage-smoke rising around me. On the chest sat candles, bundles of herbs, and a large, sheathed knife. Almost like an altar? But that couldn’t be right.

Two of the figures appeared in front of me and pulled the hoods back from their heads, revealing one head of straight auburn hair and one with wild, dark curls. Caroline and Margot. “Welcome,” Margot said, “to our coven.”

THIRTY-ONE

Okay. What? Hadn’t Caroline and Margot hated the casual references to witchiness that some of the members made, pressing their lips together whenever other women went on and on about crystals? Margot had said that she’d made a mistake, joking that Nevertheless was a coven in that interview. Type A, corporate Caroline had practically bitten off the head of that member who proposed a Spell Your Success workshop. But now, they were wearing full-on floor-length black robes made of velvet, taking it way further than those other women ever had.

I searched their faces for a hint of embarrassment, an acknowledgment that they knew they were playacting. But they were contained, sincere, as the other women removed their hoods. Vy was there, and Iris, along with four others whom I recognized from the clubhouse but whose names I didn’t know, all of them luminous, their bodies alert with anticipation. Vy bent down to the wood in the center of the stone circle, pulled out a lighter from her pocket, and lit a fire. As the flames began to crackle, they sent dancing shadows over the faces of the women before me.

“Coven?” I asked.

“Mm-hm,” Margot said, a smile curling on her lips.

“Like everyone talks about in the clubhouse?” I asked haltingly. “Like, rah-rah, love my witches, we’re totally a coven?”

“Not quite,” Margot said.

“For those members who want to talk about spells and such, it’s just a fun fad,” Caroline said. “Some casual appropriation. Up here, it’s different.”

“How?” I asked.

“Simple,” Margot said, and smiled at the women flanking her before turning back to me. “Because we actually do magic.”

“Um,” I said. I waited for someone to flip on the lights and for them to shriek with laughter, for them to point at my face and crow about how I was so fucking gullible. But they just kept looking at me, even and appraising.

“What kind of magic?” I asked, trying to maintain a mask of impressed sincerity. Most of me was trying not to shriek with laughter myself, although another, smaller part half expected Margot to whip out a wand and transform Vy into a cat, for Caroline to peel off her skin to reveal a crone’s face beneath. “The magic of sisterhood?” Maybe saying that they “actually did magic” was like when I said that I could “literally eat a horse”—I felt like it in the moment, sure, but I knew it wasn’t really possible.

“No, real magic,” Caroline said.

“Right, okay,” I said. “Like Harry Potter? Enchanting mirrors and hanging out with dragons?”

“Of course not,” Caroline continued. “I told you, real magic. The kind where we make things happen.”

“With every spell we do, we’re