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

hell you wanted! And yes, I do have suspicions about how all of a sudden I started to feel badly right before Samhain—”

“Well, now you sound crazy.”

“Don’t call me crazy!” Caroline snapped.

“I’m sorry. But nothing bad happened,” Margot said, her voice calm, as if she were dealing with a child having a tantrum over nothing. “We’re all fine. We didn’t even do any magic toward the old goal, I promise. Maybe you and I should discuss this somewhere—”

But Margot’s measured tone seemed only to make Caroline more upset. She steamrolled on, as the other women exchanged uncomfortable glances. “It never seems bad right away. It didn’t seem bad with Nicole until months later, and then it was a disaster.”

“When will you let us move on from that?” Margot said. “I don’t know how much longer I can sit around and do small, selfish magic about Iris’s book—”

“Excuse me,” Iris said.

“—when we have a potential to be such a powerful force in the world!”

“I can’t deal with another mess like that again!” Caroline said, throwing her hands in the air. “Do you know what the guilt has been doing to me? I haven’t been able to sleep since! I’ve told you over and over again that we have to stick to stricter boundaries, and instead it’s always oh, what if this, and maybe we should do something huge that!”

“Caroline!” Margot snapped. “I wanted to help you fix it, and you wouldn’t let me! Stop trying to control everything. You’re not the queen of this coven.”

“I’m not the queen, but I am the one who restarted it,” Caroline said, drawing herself up to her full, not-very-high height. “You’re taking us down a dangerous path again, and I should kick you out.”

Margot looked at her for a second. Then she laughed. “You can’t. Yes, you came to me, and yes, you own the building, so you think you’re the one in charge here, but you and I are both the great-granddaughters of the founding members. One of us can’t just kick out the other. You don’t have the authority.”

“You’re right,” Caroline said. “So I’ll have to do the next best thing.” She turned to Vy. “I’m kicking out Vy instead.”

Vy blinked. The other women shot one another worried looks. Margot’s face went white. “What?”

“Yeah, what?” Vy repeated, her eyebrows slowly traveling up her forehead.

“Something needs to be done, or we’ll be right back on track to repeating the mistakes we made with Nicole, and nobody else here wants that, do they?” Caroline glared at all the other members of the circle.

“Of course we don’t. But you can leave Vy out of it,” Margot said, putting her arm around Vy.

“Vy started the drinking, didn’t she? Vy’s your little confidant in all this, and encourages your behavior. Vy’s not related to an original founding member. So all I need is a simple majority to kick her out. All those in favor?” Caroline shot her hand up like she was punching the air.

“Maybe we could all talk about this—” I began.

“Jillian,” Caroline snapped. “No offense, but you’re the newest member and you don’t know what’s been going on—”

“Then maybe someone should tell me,” I said.

“This is not the moment. You don’t really get to talk right now, okay? If Vy wants to advocate for herself, she can.”

“Well, I’m not gonna beg,” Vy said. She stuck her hands in her pockets, her face still unreadably blank.

Caroline sniffed. Way down on the street below, a car honk sounded. “Then it’s time to vote. Everyone?” The other women hesitated. “Let me remind you,” Caroline said, “of how we all felt the day that Nicole resigned. Do any of you want to go through that same disappointment again? That heartbreak? Knowing that we elevated a candidate into power so quickly that it went to her head, and she felt she could threaten someone’s job if he wouldn’t keep sleeping with her? If we don’t set strong boundaries, it’s only a matter of time before we go too far again. So it’s time to choose what you want the future of this coven to be.”

Slowly, all of the other women besides me, Margot, and Vy put their hands in the air, their expressions solemn. Just a couple of hours ago, we’d all been lounging like sisters. Caroline counted, taking note of my hand at my side, then addressed the group.

“That settles it,” Caroline said, solemn. “I’m sorry, Vy, but you broke the rules. You’re no longer in the sisterhood. So mote it be.”

For the briefest of moments, a heartbroken expression crossed Vy’s face, before it returned to its usual inscrutability.

“Caroline,” Margot said, her jaw clenched.

Caroline whirled on her. “If you want to quit in protest,” she said, “go ahead.”

Everyone turned to look at Margot as she swallowed. After a long moment, she shook her head, avoiding Vy’s eyes.

“I didn’t think so,” Caroline said.

Vy turned on her heel without any last words, without even a good-bye, and clomped over to the door. The elevator let out its soft, high shriek as Vy descended.

“I’m sorry, Margot,” Caroline said, a flush coming over her cheeks. She’d won the war, but her voice wavered, as if maybe she were wondering if she should’ve fired shots in the first place. “But you didn’t give me a choice. Now we need to do a casting-out ritual, and then we can begin to heal.”

Silently, Margot knelt to gather little pebbles from the dirt, and soon everyone else joined her. Someone else—Tara—began to build the fire, like Vy usually did, and it wasn’t nearly as good.

FORTY-FIVE

I dreamt of Raf that night. We were in his old living room, teenagers again, and I stood before him, holding a sheet of paper, ready to recite some of my terrible poetry. I began to read the words in front of me. “‘There is a world where it works with us, a world where it works so well, and we