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

to me at lightning speed (God, she was little but quick, like a fucking hummingbird) and grabbed the phone from my hand.

“Wait—” I started, as she stared at what she saw.

She held up the phone for everyone in the circle. “She’s been recording this whole time.”

A series of murmurs—angry, sad, shocked—burst from the women, rippling out as my betrayal sank in. Margot stepped back from me. “Jillian,” she said. “But I thought . . .”

Miles was probably entering the code on the downstairs door now, ready to start up the flights of stairs. I needed to buy some time, to keep the circle from disbanding and extinguishing the fire before he got up here. He wouldn’t get to see them in full worship, but at least he’d get to see the roof, the fire, the robes. That would be enough for something at least.

“What about all the good we could do?” Margot asked, and the fact that she had the nerve to try to make me feel guilty is what set me off.

“This isn’t good,” I said. “This is insane.” Margot stepped back, her mouth opening. “You’re all a bunch of delusional, elitist assholes, playing with the rest of us as if we’re not real people, as if we don’t matter!”

“No,” Caroline said. “We’re trying to help—”

“Right,” I said in a withering tone. “You’ve built this ivory tower and stacked it with only the shiniest women who can pass all your tests—never mind all the other women out there who just don’t happen to be as rich or credentialed—and yet you want to keep all these shiny women downstairs because you still think you’re better. How dare they call themselves witches when you’re the only true ones with the power, according to your family history or some other metric that shouldn’t really matter?” The others bristled, uncomfortable, as I went on. “You’ve appointed yourselves the gatekeepers and played God, and then you want to whine about how everyone’s trying to control you?” I stared at Margot, practically spitting the words at her. “You’re the controlling one now. You’re exactly what you claim to hate.”

“No,” she said, her eyes turning red. “I’m not.”

“Oh, spare me. The whole reason you had to bring down Nicole was because you wanted her to enact your agenda over anyone else’s. That’s why you told her about the Coven, and then you had to go scorched earth on her to cover your mistakes.”

“It wasn’t for my agenda,” Margot said. “Caroline’s work on parental leave, on everything, was so good, I just wanted it to get out in the world.”

“What?” Caroline asked.

“Same difference,” I said, my voice dry and steady even though my body was shaking. “And besides, what’s more controlling than pretending to summon someone’s dead mother to get them on your side?”

“I wasn’t . . . Oh God, that’s what you think? I would never pretend with something like that,” she said, her voice choked. “I felt her there, I swear to you.” For a split second, as she held her trembling hands up to me, she seemed to have no guile at all. She was just a defenseless, scared child telling me the truth.

“Okay, I’m getting rid of this,” Caroline said, holding my phone up and moving her thumb over the delete button, making the voice memo vanish off into the ether. She threw the phone down onto the ground, where it skidded back over to me, its screen cracking. “I hope you know, Jillian, that if you publish this article, we will sue you so hard. If you want to take us down, prepare to be taken down in return. And as for you, Margot—”

In front of me, the phone lit up again, glowing with a new message from Vy, barely readable through the shattered glass. Also I don’t do shrooms. Brain’s weird enough as is.

“You keep hiding things from me,” Caroline was yelling at Margot. “And now look what’s happened! We’re supposed to be a team!”

“Oh, we haven’t been a team for a long time now,” Margot yelled back. “You’ve always lorded it over me: you own the building, you’ll take care of Nicole all alone, I make one mistake and you’re going to punish me forever.”

I picked up my phone and stared at Vy’s message, trying to make sense of it. Vy hadn’t put anything in the tea. But I had seen things, felt things, that I never had before, things that I wasn’t supposed to be able to feel unless I was under the influence of something, because I was the kind of person who stood on the outside watching, my arms folded around myself, a snarky comment always locked and loaded.

I’d told myself that I’d been able to lose myself in the circle only because of the shrooms in my system, but I was just looking for an excuse. Deep down inside of me, I wanted that communion, didn’t I? And more than communion, I wanted to believe in something, whether it was magic, or the possibility of something greater, or maybe just the idea that people could be better than they were.

I wanted to believe that I could be better. Because I had been playing with them all like they weren’t real people too. Throwing Libby under the bus, letting them open up to me while planning to expose them all. I told myself it was for a greater purpose, and in some ways it was, but really, I wanted that impressive byline so that someday I could be a gatekeeper myself.

“I know I messed up, but you didn’t trust me to learn from it—” Margot was saying.

“And I was right, because you did it again! Again, you’ve shared it with the wrong person, and jeopardized us all!” Caroline screamed. She lunged toward Margot as if she were going to kill her, as if she were going to push her backward to the roof’s edge and throw her off. The other members were all arguing among themselves too, yelling about what to do, about