Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

I approached her carefully. “Miranda. You can go home in the morning. There aren’t any footholds down this wall — you can’t climb down it. If you try you’ll fall and you’ll… you’ll be hurt. The house doesn’t want that. It wants you back in one piece.” Her back was to me; I couldn’t see her face.

“She doesn’t. She doesn’t care how I come back. You can’t hear how we… how they’re calling me,” she said. She bent forward

(did she mean to fall headfirst?)

wobbled and almost toppled from the sill, but I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her off the ledge with a sharp jerk, sharper than I meant it to be, but I was scared. I lay spread-eagled over her, pinning her to the floor until her struggling turned into giggles. “What are you doing?” I heard her ask, in her usual voice, her waking voice. I let her crawl out from under me, watched her walk up to the window and close it. She got back into bed, but I stayed where I was. The floor felt secure.

•

Ore spent afternoons reading to Miranda. Miranda liked hearing The Arabian Nights best, because then Ore used all her voice, changing accents and tone and speed — when she was a djinn, she threw her voice so that it towered. Miranda was awed by the strange sorceress who could force men to become birds and mules by throwing dust into their faces and commanding: “Wretch, quit thy form!” On the very rare occasion that her necromancy failed and the man stood before her unchanged, the sorceress would laugh coyly and say that she had only been playing.

Miranda lay on her side in her bed, or in Ore’s, and she heard Ore and dreamed with her eyes open. She grew to find a sunlit room bearable; she no longer feared a change of light that she couldn’t control. She stopped taking the pills she’d been prescribed. She washed them down the drain, ripped the labels off the bottles and threw them away. There wouldn’t be any of those doctors’ letters reminding her to make another appointment until after Christmas.

She felt fine, but she began to feel followed. When she passed through the back gate of her college, it took an age until she heard the gate close behind her. But as she turned the corner into New Court, no one else came through the arch. Clare College had prettier grounds than her college, and she took big detours so that she could pass through them on her way to and from supervisions, fanning herself with a rolled-up essay and catching falling leaves in the skirt of her coat. And there came moments when she knew that there was someone behind her, remaining out of sight by taking one step for every five that she took. Other people moved past her over the bridge between the gardens; they carried books and bags and musical instruments, they were on their way to places. But not the person she felt hovering up in the air behind her, doubling the path she’d walked from Ore’s room to her supervision, or from her supervision to hall. She paid attention to the sense of surveillance because it seemed unconnected to the night. She never felt followed at night, and that made this feeling she had less likely to be paranoia. Probably. She was afraid. Afraid that she was imagining the surveillance, afraid that it was real. When she entered a room she tried to look at everyone in it individually, trying to catch the person who had just been looking at her.

•

For at least ten minutes most evenings I’d taken to waiting outside a phone box on King’s Parade while Miranda tried to call her brother. I watched her stiffen expectantly and then slump, and it made me dislike her brother. There was no way that he was so busy that he couldn’t answer the phone just one of the times that she called. There was no way he couldn’t find five minutes to e-mail her or something. When Miranda came out of the phone box I’d get her a hot chocolate in the yellow-tinged gloom of a vaulted underground café on Market Square. She’d make excuses for him.

I said, “I think he is probably just self-absorbed.”

She kicked me in the shin. It’s no joke being kicked in the shin by a chick wearing stilettos. I was in pain.

Miranda found out about a rock ’n’ roll dance night at Fisher Hall, and she fetched a flared skirt with a poodle embroidered on it from her wardrobe. The skirt was pink, and she tied a pastel-pink scarf around her neck in a jaunty bow. I think that was the only time I saw her wearing a colour other than black. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I settled for wearing a crinoline under a strapless polka-dot dress that already had a big skirt. She tied pink ribbons to the ends of my plaits. I left my room with her kisses tingling on my shoulder blades.

When we got to Fisher Hall, I found out that Miranda could jive . She grabbed my hand and shimmied in circles, flicking her heels and flapping her hands as if the music the Elchords were making was mowing her down. She said she had learnt the style from a videotape. I just shuffled and two-stepped and let her use me as a prop. I couldn’t get five minutes’ rest, either — the other dancers stayed away. They cast admiring glances but stuck with their partners.

At the end of the dance Miranda was so exhausted that she lay flat on the floor by the emptied drinks table, unable to move even to minimise the effort of the people who laughed nervously and stepped over her. I made her drink lemonade through a straw, and got her back to her room on a sugar rush, singing too lay too lay peppermint stick . I wanted to say something to her, something like “Hey I like you,” or “You’re so so pretty. You’re actually gorgeous.” She had a black sash tied around her head; it drove stray strands of hair behind her ears and suddenly even her ears were beautiful.

“Why don’t you take a picture,” she said, flapping her hand at me. “It’ll last longer.”

I climbed onto her bed and tucked myself around her, my knees against the backs of her knees, my stomach against her back. We were both trembling.

“Nice ears,” I said.

Our bodies struck like matches; she changed form under my hands, I went slowly, slowly,

(only do as much as we both want)

her nipples hard under my lips, her stomach downy with the fuzz that kept it warm, the soft hollows of her inner thighs. She said, “Please stop.”

I flopped down beside her, turning her face towards me, stroking her hair. Her hair felt endless in the dark. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Then, surprisingly, she asked me if I was okay.

“Not really, not if I’ve upset you. Did it feel weird?”

“No. Well, a little, perhaps. It was… I don’t know. Too much, probably. I’ve never… not even with a boy.”

I know I said something, but whatever I said made no sense. She was so worried that there was no way for me to assure her that I was no marauder out to feast on the shattered remains of her hymen or something. My fingers snagged in her hair and her head jerked on the pillow. She got up and got dressed and I did too, trying to think of a way to stop this becoming a crisis.

I caught up with her at the college gate. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

We both smiled, embarrassed, not at each other, in different directions. “What are you sorry for?” we said.

I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.

She opened the college gate with her key and stepped out onto the street. I followed her; she hadn’t said that I couldn’t. It was full moon. No one was out, and it was so cold that our breath stained the air around our heads. Birds chirped. I don’t know what kind of bird chirps at night. We walked towards the mill pond.

“My mental health is questionable anyway,” she said, not looking at me. She told me she’d been in a clinic for just over five months because she’d had a breakdown and forgotten who she was. I sat down on a low wall; the river was at my back. She sat down too.