Coven Covets Boy

“Coven Covets Boy” appeared on the shortlist for the  2018 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence.

On the back of Volume 48 of her series of diaries Sandy wrote: “your that dreamy,” — David W. in large serifs with a red permanent marker, as if it were a blurb from the New York Times. The excerpted quote came from a text message David W. had sent her, in which those words were a shunt from the context. David W.'s full quote ran:

Oh come on Sandy. Not even your that dreamy.

Sandy, in her 17th year, took David W.'s words not with a grain of salt, but through a sieve. She let all the possible iterations of David W.'s digitized inflection squeeze away, allowed each word to stand dry in the glory of its own merits, bearing with it textbook definitions.

Dreamy: |'driːmi| adjective. 1. Having a magical or dreamlike quality. —This song that is playing on the radio is quite dreamy. 2. A word you use to describe the person you're in love with. —Sandy […] your that dreamy.

David W. was the second hottest boy at Sandy's school. The hottest was Brice Q., who had all the natural, anthropological qualities of attraction. He was taller, he had superior muscle tone, his hair was wavier and smooth and always clean. Brice Q. was popular and smart.

Brice Q.'s backswing in tennis was almost as legendary as his backside in tennis shorts. In almost every girls' bathroom in town there were printouts of iPhone pics, photocopies of Polaroids shot on expired cartridges, newspaper clippings of Brice Q. stuck to the walls of select stalls with chewing gum and double-sided tape. There was even, on top of a ceiling tile in Stall #3 of the girls' bathroom near Mr. Bartlett's class, a white towel stained in Brice Q.'s sweat, which he discarded after an intense final set against a high school down in Waterloo. Three vans of his fans had followed him there, though only one was able to take the towel back. The girls in the chosen van remembered that trip as a pilgrimage, while the others remembered it as a mistake of destiny. A test of faith.

Every now and again, in the bathroom, a tall girl would climb atop the toilet's cistern and carry the towel down from the ceiling, pass it around to the others like a priest passing out the eucharist. While the old faucets dripped through the quiet, the girls took turns burrowing their faces into the dusty, pheromone-crusted folds.

The only girls' bathroom frequented by teenagers in which there was not any sort of shrine to Brice Q. was the bathroom at the local bowling alley, The Lois Lanes, where almost every lane was warping, splotched with wax-less patches. There, on dead Sunday afternoons, Sandy and her coven would gather to discuss the second hottest boy, David W.—the inferno in their fledgling hearts.

Their rituals of devotion did not include photographs, did not involve overwhelming their senses with idols or iconography. They did not have a collection of relics to pass around, but instead they shared memories, moments. Some, like Sandy, brought in their diaries to read from, some brought print-offs of blog posts they'd written and published online—where they changed all the names and pretended they lived in strange places like Paris and Boise. Two simply came in and followed the oral tradition, would just stare at the ceiling and shed the words as they came. There were only six of them in all—five girls, one boy.

... while the others stood scattered around the rest of the bathroom, eyes often closed, leaning back against sink taps and stall walls, heads bobbing, possessed hands navigating their solitary topographies, each word an incantation.

On Sundays in the bathroom of The Lois Lanes they’d each recite stories featuring David W. like psalms. One of the six would go into a stall, stand or sit on the toilet, door open or shut, and read or recite while the others stood scattered around the rest of the bathroom, eyes often closed, leaning back against sink taps and stall walls, heads bobbing, possessed hands navigating their solitary topographies, each word an incantation. Stories of being brushed by in the halls. Stories of steam-stained dreams. Stories—from the boy—of David W. in the gym locker-room nudely whipping other boys with his wet towel, of the boy’s harrowing attempts to hide his desire. They were beating heart stories, stories like witnessing fight after fight between David W. and Principal Wayne over grades and pranks and tardiness. Stories of David W. looking at one of the coven girls and smirking, and even once sticking his tongue out at her when he caught her staring at him for the third time during a study hour before lunch, and then finally—after class—walking over and saying hello, his maroon uniform untucked from his shorts. The small beginnings of a blonde moustache, which was visible only from a foot away or closer, punching out from his semi-coarse skin.

This girl, of course: Sandy.

With keen attention, it was possible to see the palpable magnetism of Brice Q. when he came down the hallways, or bent down to pick up a book from the bottom of his locker. Bodies angled toward him as they passed, eyes ever glancing and grazing and surveying on the sly. When he was not at his locker, girls would reach out and touch the door as they passed.

After school, when he was training for a match in the gym, or on the court outside—or when he was studying for a final in the library—folded love notes would be stuffed into his locker through the little grate at the top. Every morning, when he opened his locker, the notes would tumble out like perfumed leaves in fall. He only ever smiled at them and put them in his pockets. He had never been known to read them. His head had always seemed to live elsewhere.

David W.’s locker was on the other side of school. The top hinge was broken so that it barely shut, releasing an aroma of dull smoke and mildew. Those who watched him did so from a distance. Unlike Brice Q.’s, David W.’s eyes were always on the lookout, trying to catch the glances that came his way. He stared out sharp from his spindle of bangs.

When he’d caught Sandy, when he had fully encircled her, she thought he would never let her go.

Volumes 26 through 58 of Sandy's diary series, an accelerated pace ranging from Sandy at 16 to 18, show the spectrum of Sandy's obsession with David W.

Throughout, his role fluctuates. He begins as a casual mention, transitions into a minor character (whose use is largely to contrast others, like Brice Q. or herself), then quickly—in Volume 28—becomes a catalyst for Sandy's metamorphosis into a girl mature enough to fall in love with the second-hottest boy. Volume 30 talks about the coven, outlines its meetings, takes notes of all the stories shared there.

The diaries begin to read like a field book, as if an imperceptible Jane Goodall had been airdropped into Sandy’s school and had followed the somewhat chimpish David W. from room to room ...

From that point, David W. begins to turn, starts displacing Sandy as main character, relegating her into something little other than the speaker or—further off—his author. In Volumes 33 through 46—written in a few frantic months—there is almost no mention of Sandy's life at all, except insofar as its function as a witness to him. The diaries begin to read like a field book, as if an imperceptible Jane Goodall had been airdropped into Sandy's school and had followed the somewhat chimpish David W. from room to room, watching him smoke and spit, pinning down his existence page by page, learning his habits of feeding, fighting, and love.

In Volume 47—after the Hello—Sandy steps out from the authorial sphere as a possible love interest, and David W. begins to contort into a possible antihero. Volume 48 is giddy and befuddled and blurbed. Volume 50 plays with the idea of David W. as a somewhat malevolent god, and Sandy as benevolent minion or casual girlfriend. Volume 51 is completely devoted to a long night in the fall of Sandy's 17th year. Volume 53, the first written almost entirely in red ink, toys around with the idea of David W. as comic book super villain. Of Sandy as the example dead on page 4.

The last five volumes—54 through 58—the rubble of old screams.

After David W. first kissed Sandy, the coven was still with her. It was widely construed by each of the other members as an accident of darkness and proximity during the 1st of July celebrations of Sandy's 17th year. There’d been a large group of girls and boys at the edge of the trees in the park that night, including the rest of the coven. Every other body was a chance for an excuse. They each believed it could have happened to any of them.

Sandy described the kiss, late in Volume 49, as a magic, aching moment. For the sake of the coven, she shared details about the feel of the fuzz of his face, the bony clasp of his fist on her shoulder, his smoke-sewn tongue twigging into her mouth like a blinded snake. She described him as his physical manifestation rather than an aethereal blast. For herself, in Volume 49, she wrote the effects on the beat of her melodramatic heart:

It was as if an instant had taken me into its arms, as if the lips of his lips and the lips of mine had spoken while our real true heart-lips were unable to part.

After the kiss, the orbit that the coven had kept around David W. began to tighten. His magnetism increased with the knowledge of his capabilities. The coven started to inch closer to him, to try and fall into the same net of his eyes that Sandy had been trapped in.

At their meetings they listened to Sandy talk about how he had driven her home from school one rainy day in his dad’s old Ford, how he had confessed to her that he had been the one to slice the tires of Brice Q.’s Honda, how he had given her a cigarette that made her sick, and they began taking notes. They listened to her and drew close to her. On a week night, two weeks into Sandy’s senior year, the boy went to her house to study chemistry with her and when she went to the bathroom he wrote down all the names of the perfumes bottles on her dresser drawer, recorded her bra size, the material of her clothes—anything of her that could have been part of David W.’s apparent attraction—and reported everything back to the others.

They wanted to be interchangeable. One heart subbed in for another.

Slowly, without Sandy realizing, they started to dress very similar to her. They matched her gait, wore bras too small or too large, began smoking in secret. The boy began bathing in water infused with the perfume to get a hint of her scent. They each were trying to turn his head away from Sandy and toward them. They wanted to be interchangeable. One heart subbed in for another. They wanted to believe themselves capable of being beloved, too.

After Sandy made love to David W., during the September of her senior year, three months before her birthday—Volume 51—the coven was no longer with her. She stood on the toilet in The Lois Lanes bathroom, reading the scene from the diary—the fear, the shifter, the moon eclipsing between blinks—the bareness of cock—the short trickle of blood and his clucking after, punctuating and gibbous. The calm quiet drive home. The second hand-job in her parent’s driveway before she stepped out of the truck.

When Sandy came out of the trance of her story and left the altar of the stall, the bathroom was empty. The taps were turned full on.

The coven was not with Sandy again until they’d each been made love to, and thoroughly fucked. Over the course of her senior year, each husk slowly became reverent of her, the prophet, the first victim of his tricks, each one except the boy, who moved with his worried mother to Manitoba after David W. and three of his goons pummelled him in the schoolyard after homecoming, after he’d been caught smiling at David W. several times from the dance floor. But by then, everything was already too late. There was too much blood and pain in being tethered together by hate, there was too much pain in being tethered together at all.

Without the coven, they did not speak of what happened to them. They all knew intimately the price they had paid in falling victim to the cult of personality, of wanting to please the perceived unpleaseable, to charm the vulnerable, misunderstood kid they believed hid beyond the wall. Split from the coven due to envy, they did not have the resources to learn from each other, to know the signs, to know not to accept the six packs, the invitations to take a long drive to hang out by the water.

They did not have the chance to shake the clouds from each other’s eyes, to try and devise ways to stop the hungry encroachment of a hand on the thigh. They did not learn the cost of surrendering to a smokey man behind a mask, did not have the chance to be warned that David W. was not misunderstood at all. That he had been there, on the surface, the whole time.

Divided, they could each be conquered with routine tactics.

During the Snow Ball dance of Sandy’s senior year, long after the coven had burst into individuals, the cathedrals to Brice Q.—at the other end of the school from the gymnasium, where the dance was held—were raided. Photos, originals and copies printed out and stashed there, were torn to shreds and flushed into flooding clods that the school’s plumbing couldn’t pass. Red paint was splashed on the scrawled on stall walls with a wide brush, walls where hundreds of one-sided hearts—B.Q. & _._.—were drawn in. Splashes and spills from the red paint mixed with the overflowing water and drained under the doors into the halls. Principal Wayne and the janitors, when it was discovered the next morning, panicked, fearing death. The sweat-filled towel was also plucked from its reliquary atop the ceiling tile, never to return.

They listened to him speak and got bored when he didn’t sound like Lancelot.

It was the beginning of a silent upheaval, broken out from the tail end of betrayal. After that dance Brice Q.’s idolaters were thrown into a fog from the violent erasing. To them, Brice Q. became a bit less visible, began to be seen as he was in the singular present and not as he was stacked upon and tacked beside himself.

The deprogramming of the myth of Brice Q. started from this systematic removal of the icons from bathrooms around town. A few zealots were able to preserve their ideas of Brice Q., but mostly they were shook from him. Suddenly, without photos, he breathed, grew angles and depths that were imperceptible in the inked flatness. Suddenly, without access to his pheromones, people began to grow an immunity to him. They listened to him speak and got bored when he didn’t sound like Lancelot.

Destabilized and dragged back into the present, they began to dismantle their own, private cathedrals. They followed suit the invisible, unnameable hands.

Sandy’s diaries ended at Volume 58, around two-thirds of the way in. The day was February 14th of Sandy's 18th year. She wrote it in third person, wrote about Sandy’s loneliness, the destructive anxiety that had descended on her, its acuteness since she learned that David W. had been expelled by Principal Wayne, how he was free to wander the world unscheduled. She wrote about how far Sandy felt from being understood, how over the weekend she had read through all the old diaries she’d written and realized that she didn’t understand Sandy, either.

Her parents were out for the night, having a romantic dinner, and Sandy sat in front of the lit fireplace in the living room. The fire was roiling from the tail end of the fuel of Volume 57, and the whole room seemed to flutter, paper ash scooting through the air like dry grey snow. There, sweating, heart racing, she wrote about Sandy through to the end of her diaried-life, ending Volume 58 like a journalist who ran out of letters mid-word.

I don't think Sandy was ever made to love or be loved. This is not how a life is supposed to work, cracked off two mo

Then, she let the flames finish it.

Years later an email chain opened up to the six of them, arriving from the far edge of a long silence, to addresses they’d hardly used or checked since graduating from high school and moving on, to university in Toronto (for philosophy) and New Brunswick (for nursing) and Brandon (for education), or to working in resorts at the lake, or—for one girl, the fourth of them—to raising a child alone, still living in her parent’s home. The email came from David W.’s second, the girl who’d written the blog set in Boise, which she deleted two weeks after he’d quit returning her calls. The email started with an apology and ended with an invitation to reconnect. She talked about how she had just got out of a stint in the hospital because of an eating disorder following a bad, bad relationship. She said she still thought about them all the time. She asked them what they were doing, what their addresses were, and whether they were doing okay.

Three girls and one boy responded, replying all, in longer and shorter form.

A few weeks later, the final response came in the form of five small packages arriving to five different stoops across the country. There were no words in any of them, no return address, there was nothing but a single plastic baggie.

Within each baggie was one sixth of an old, white towel.