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The first time you almost died, you were eleven years old. You were abducted and held captive within the walls of your magical boarding school by a ghost who tried to take your life in a spell that would have returned his.You met him through a diary that he haunted. You wrote back and forth to one another throughout your first year at magical boarding school. He wrote to you as though you were uniquely interesting and special, yet the more of yourself that you poured into his pages, quill after quill, the more of his words and his will soaked back through the parchment and back into you, and the less certain you were of your value at all.The ghost, so it was said, was a shard of the soul of an evil wizard who was older than your parents and even your grandparents, but as a ghost he was permanently fifteen, maybe sixteen. He was at once a slightly older boy and a much older man, and at the time this made him seem terribly interesting and mysterious. He claimed to want nothing from you, yet you found yourself giving more and more to him, doing more and more for him. You acted out in the usual sort of ways that kids at a magical boarding school do to impress each other: you let out dangerous monsters, you wrote threats in animal blood on the walls. But then it escalated, didn't it? In the spring of that school year, and all at once, as if the danger and the reality of him bloomed with the flowers.That he was handsome allowed you believe that he was good. That he was well-spoken and calm allowed you to believe that he was thoughtful and kind. Most of all, though, he was tragic, being neither of the living or the dead and trapped, so it seemed, in a romantic old leather book--a really sophisticated thing it was--and the mere suggestion of tragedy, especially in boys and men that are already so handsome, and already so well-spoken and so calm, can easily substitute for a personality if you are prone to feeling that broken things are yours to fix. Oh, and you certainly did feel that way; well before you came to school you knew it, believed it, just shy of having any words to describe the conviction.He emerged from the book and took you to a secret room beneath one of the student bathrooms. The secret room was tiled with the same cracked rectangles of gray stone as the bathroom, and the same crumbling grout and mortar flush with black mildew, pink mold, piss and water stains. The floor there was damp, partially flooded. He lay you down with your open eyes pointed towards a drain that gurgled and backed up with hair, and the hair caught in the corroded iron grate, and you wanted so badly to pull it the whole clog out in your petrified fists. You could think of nothing else in the moment that was so important.The process by which you faded to a shadow and he filled to solid flesh was slow. Excruciating. The particulars were vague. At first, all of him could move through all of you, and he did. The cold of him was inside and everywhere. Then worse was feeling the contact grow to a heat, feeling him press solidly against your blanching, vanishing body.The secret room smelled like all the flora of adolescent human bodies. It smelled like toilet water and flushed tampons, and foot fungus, and that especially acrid sweat of stress and anxiety.The ghost boy enjoyed himself and was not in a rush to be alive again, perhaps. Yet the duration turned out to be convenient, as it was also long enough to be rescued. And you were--rescued of course--by one of your brothers, and the brother's best friend, a famous jock who would become your once and future boyfriend.All was forgiven and said to be forgotten, and you came back to school, and you sat at your favorite spot for the first class of the first day back, and someone had burned the word SLUT on the desk with a spell so strong that the letters glowed and scalded to the touch.A girl you'd never even spoken to before cornered you at lunch and told you how "everybody knew" you'd gone off with that ghost boy on purpose to fuck him, and that you did, and most outrageously of all, that you liked it."None of that's true," you whimpered, but your lip trembled and the girl's smile grew with every tear that dropped down your cheeks. Bullies like her were good at what they did, were so especially cruel, not because they told lies but because they told the truth in a partial way: whatever part of the truth, taken on its own, was the most humiliating, devastating.The girl laughed. "I knew it," she said, and you never even saw her again. You rushed to the rest of your classes early and sat in the back to monitor who came in, who was looking at you, who was talking about you, but she wasn't in any of them, and it was everyone who was looking at you, and everyone who seemed to know what she had insisted, after all, "everybody knew." In less than a two days the story had been told and retold so much that you heard an elaborate, alternate ending. You overheard a whisper in the halls, around a corner: that your brother and the famous jock had actually caught you in the act of fucking the ghost boy, and then furthermore, you fucked your brother and the famous jock, too, and you could hardly get enough of it.You reeled around the corner and tackled this girl, another complete stranger claiming intimate knowledge of your life, and you pinned her to the floor. No hexes, no curses. No, you gave it to her old fashioned; when she opened her mouth to scream, you spit in it, and told her to shut her lying hole or you'd fill it with thumb tacks.A teacher pulled you off her and you both served detention, and it was the first time you'd ever been formally in trouble for anything at school. You got an earful about that from your parents. They didn't want to hear the reasons why. You told your mother that going to school felt like the end of the world, and she sighed and condescended that everything might feel that way until you grew up.When you grew up, you looked back on those years and realized how they absolutely were the end of the world and how different your life might have gone if anyone had ever taken a single one of your emotions seriously.The girl you tackled told her friends that you had tried to beat her up to molest her, and you became twice dangerous after that: both a filthy incest cock slut as well as a predatory psycho dyke.Jealous little twats, all of them. They didn't know the half of it.
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You later found it interesting--"interesting"--how the same girls who feared your sexual advances based on the fact that you had short hair and mental health issues never thought anything outside of flesh-and-blood, cock-in-pussy fucking was "actual sex." The threat you presented and represented to them was probably that very irreconcilable tension: on the vaguest base levels of having and doing your gender with a body in a society, you might know something they didn't. So it was either that you had solved or opted out of the problem of normalcy (beauty, achieved or attempted), which would make all the energy they poured into worrying over their own normalcy (beauty, achieving or attempting) meaningless, or you were disreputable and broken. And since it wasn't fair for someone as ugly as yourself to have had so much attention in getting abducted by a handsome older boy, ghost or not, you must have cheated.Seeking out desires of any kind was cheating, too. It didn't really matter if you desired other girls--and you did, unfortunately for you at first, fortunately for you later--and it didn't really matter if you desired the ghost boy and your brother and the handsome jock--yes, no, yes; respectively; with different misfortunes entailed. That is how you ended up at once every bad thing that an adolescent girl might be. There was nothing left to do but exceed the expectations.A pre-adolescent girl, you remind yourself. When it gets very difficult to imagine a long future for yourself, which sometimes it does (the morbid certainty bubbling up and spitting forth: someone asking "where do you see yourself in thirty years?" and you laughing with inappropriate candor, bitterness, negative certainty though nothing is funny), and when it gets very, very difficult, sometimes, you fill whole scrolls of parchment with the reminder. "I was a child. I was a child. I was a child."In your six remaining years of magical boarding school, you kept up with decent grades ("inconsistent; does not work up to potential"), clubs, athletics, a little political activism against the most evil wizard of your age and his minions, and two-hundred and fifty three sexual partners before you stopped counting and writing their names in a diary (an unpretentious, unmagical, unlined notebook). It might have surpassed three-hundred by the time the famous jock boyfriend and you got back together for keeps. You only stopped keeping track because you weren't sure if or how to count Beltane witch orgies and erotic Legilimency/occlumency play (L/o) with people you never even touched. Was it a name for the book if all he did was jerk off under his robes when you "forgot" underwear before mounting your broom and riding it above him? Did it count if all she did was stare at you across a wash room, dip her little toe into the opaque pearls of soap atop your bath, whisper a spell of her own making, and send shivers through your naked body while you were submerged in steaming hot water?All your little school-day trysts and one-night-not-quites. All the nights you snuck out, the boring classes you skipped to seem like you were not supposed to be in school at all. Only some of them were other students, different years. Most of them were not, however, because it was much easier to have hundreds and hundreds of hideous, much older men.These much older men were usually awkward, troubled, a little tragic even. And they were sometimes brutal. And they were always, always your favorites.
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You and everyone you know can do magic, though it doesn't seem to change a whole lot about the unfairness and dysfunction of the world.You and your entire family had red hair. You were the youngest of nine: mother, father, first brother, second brother, third brother, penultimate brother-brothers (the twins), final brother, you (sister, daughter, baby/girl). You would like to say "are," you would like to describe your family in the present tense, despite all that they have done and not done, but you can't anymore. When you were sixteen or seventeen, one of the twins was murdered and the other of the twins almost-murdered, so there are eight of you now, or, "seven and three-quarters left alive" according to the almost-murdered twin whose features were largely blown off by the flesh-melting curses of an evil witch."She's beauty, she's grace, she's missing half her face," he slurs, sing-song, through what remains of his lips before each meal served to him, then he casts a liquefaction charm and takes it through a straw with a miniature spoon at one end. You, too, were almost murdered (yet again; as routine as final exams in those school years). You were almost murdered in the same fight as your brother was, by the same evil witch, but the spells directed at your face were deflected by your mother. Your mother blocked and hexed that witch into the Dark Ages, so you're told (the moment is muddled in your memory, like most of your memories). Everyone heard, or heard of, your mother's battle cry: "Not my daughter, you bitch."For the simple, awful, arbitrary fact of being the sister, daughter, baby/girl, you are constantly in death's path, and for the same reasons still alive, inwardly swollen with complex post-traumatic pustules, outwardly unblemished and unscathed (loveliness first, always loveliness) by the same powers that found your brothers more expendable.It's while the surviving twin is seated and hunched at your parent's kitchen table (straw-to-slurry and sweating down his back in the stagnant summer air), a year or so after that last battle, that you come downstairs and tell him before you tell anyone else that you and the Famous Jock Boyfriend are engaged."How exciting," your brother says. "I'd be grinning ear-to-skull-hole if I could." He sucks in through his teeth. "You'll have to imagine it for both of us. Congratulations." But there's nothing in the rest of his body, in the intent behind his eyes, to suggest he cares at all.He likes the Famous Jock well enough, though you know he forbids everyone from sitting in the dead twin's seat at the table specifically to keep the Famous Jock from sitting there, to keep this surrogate-son, twice-over-brother-in-law thing the Famous Jock has with your family from ever approaching replacement. But it's not that. It's not the part you choose, it's the part you couldn't. It's you, personally, permanently beyond the pale of his priorities.Your surviving twin brother is a happy and successful man, even that first year. He lives at home but it's more that mom needs him than that he needs her, or anyone in particular. He dates (prolifically, infamously), he works at his own shop where he invents and sells his jokes and toys and games to school children who regard him as a larger-than-life character who simply possess a memorable appearance, the same way all larger-than-life characters in cartoons and fairy tales are visually distinguished. He is never angry when the very young or sheltered ones ask him questions they don't yet know are impolite. He shakes his head with a generous stance to their mortified parents, and he kneels to their level, let's them inspect to be sure."It's not a mask or an illusion, see? We all look different from each other. This is what I look like. I'll prove it, then: hold out your hands for me." Then he winks and a penny appears in their little palms. "Now that, on the other hand, is a trick. Good for one toffee from the counter, too. Would you like to learn how to do it?"Kids get sent to his shop when there's nobody around to look after them and he send them home at the end of the evening with sweets and riddles alike to work over in their heads. Everybody loves your brother. He doesn't need your pity, and he doesn't want it.So when you bid for his friendship in adulthood--making him the first to know important news, helping out in the shop, keeping mom and dad busy when he's out with his girlfriends--it's easy to get caught up in the warmth of his world for the moment and forget how the thing that the two of you could share, the terrible intimacy of near-death (a subject on which you consider yourself fairly expert), has become a yawning stretch of impersonal, impartial, impenetrable cold. The simple fact that you're alive and "well," regardless of how pitiful your own losses, how externally directed your fate/s have been, confirms a suspicion all of your siblings hold and you know to be true (and that is the worst part about it, just like the truth of the bully's cruelty is the worst part about it):Your mother saved your life and safety, and not your dead twin brother's life, and not your surviving twin brother's safety, for the plain fact that you were her daughter, the baby, the girl. Among friends of the family, her words are regarded as heroic, even feminist. Within the family, it is understood (collective, quiet, seething) as your mother's long-overdue acknowledgement that she had all six of your brothers in an anonymous assembly line of boys, solely to arrive at having you, her baby/girl.At last, a little princess. A little mirror. A little confidant to inherent the emotional ambassadorship that is being an adult woman within the Family (blood kin, hetero-patriarchal, no matter how domineering/feisty/badass you might be or become it is your milquetoast husband who is awarded the bread-winning salary and esteem from the greater society of other Families).Your brother’s boyhoods formed a menacing weight around you, a comedy stage set for you to achieve your ridiculous role. Pressing in from behind and ahead, of course, along came death. Magic does not make death more distant or more comfortable to endure (the opposite, maybe: magic lures it, and faster, and messier, and more wildly). To wield magic, to be a magical person, is to sing death without breathing, to see death without blinking, pass through death without moving. What room is left inside of magical girlhood to invent any sort of life, any sort of interior that can be expressed beyond "high risk behaviors"?The Halloween that you were thirteen years old (the Autumn of your third year at school, two years after the ghost boy), when both of the twins were still alive, their joke costume was just to cross-dress (the eventually-murdered twin glowed with much more sincere enjoyment, however, which you distinctly recall). What could have been a funnier thing to pretend to be ladies? What an absurd act to change ones appearance, to shift and flip yourself within the inescapable matrix of gender? Hilarious!They matched their tutus and bonnets and high heels and dress robes. They took a magical photograph and sent it off with an owl to the homestead with a note on the back: "Still can’t tell us apart, mum?"
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You learned the kind of left-brained disassociation habits necessary to maintain top grades in all your classes. You learned to retain information and explain it as though you understood it, and maybe part of you really learned something in school, but you never let information about the world come close to your own feelings. You could argue any thesis and perfect any potion, but you never improvised, improved, impressed, invested. Nothing that might demand a part of you, nothing that might touch you.You were the sort of passionate student that is passionate for being a student, for the performance itself and the hit of pleasure that comes with the predictable reward, with the sole exception of one particular subject. Like your twin brothers and their pranks that were only sometimes just pranks, you spent a bit longer on Transfiguration studies than necessary to pass a given test. You started off turning rats and frogs into teacups and saucers, and left them that way for weeks at a time on your nightstand. Then you turned an actual teacup into a spider and an actual saucer into a fly, just to see what would happen. When the spider inevitably ate the fly, had any true violence occurred?This was much more interesting to you, philosophically, than crying over something as straightforward as eating meat or worrying about why the sort of men you sought out, the sort strong and resourceful enough to kill you and get away with it, thrilled you like they did. The strongest orgasm you ever experienced as a girl was the night a unicorn hunter in the Forbidden Forest tied you up like one of his kills and fucked you so hard that you bled, and he kept you tied up that way for days, bleeding out the cunt like a dead unicorn bleeds out through its wounds, and he teased his hunting knife across your throat and new, sore breast buds and skinny thighs, and with it he shaved the flossy hair off your public mound to make you look even younger and more naked than you already were. He paused only to feed himself dinner, eating his game rare, staring hatefully into your spread, bald, and brutalized sex, and only once you were shaking with cold, with pain, with fear like the prey that you were, only once you were crying and begging him to kill you and mean it sincerely, did he gingerly lower and release your body, nuzzle his face into every soft spot of your body, and then with a single, slow, and viciously gentle lick of his tongue across your clitoris-- his tongue turned silver with unicorn blood, an enchanted tongue inside a cursed mouth inside a damned man-- he made you come harder than you knew possible.With magic, there were endless new ways to gesture at and around death, invite it closer without forfeiting completely.Transfiguration gradually wormed its way closer to something you felt any sort of way about. It became a fascination, then a fixation. One year there were songbirds nesting outside your dormitory window. Starlings, perhaps. Something glossy and dark with blue eggs. One of them got into the bedroom and ate one of your spiders and when you discovered this, you reacted with a cool sort of impulse, almost an instinct, transforming yourself into a cat and beheading the birds.When you had to visit your family in the summer or winter holidays, you'd became any manner of things. A pony that trampled the vegetable garden. A kettle that shrieked instead of whistled. Your Famous Jock Husband, who was at the time merely the Famous Jock Family Friend, to his credit never treated you any differently. When you were an object, he would carry you about and talk to you as usual and never lost patience. Quite the contrary, he seemed to willingly develop a new paraphilia with each form you took. The summer that you were a spoon, he took honey in his tea with you and licked you clean when no one else was looking. He always had been a bit of closet freak.It seems ridiculous to you now-- but of course, so understandable, the world being the way it is, magic or not-- how long it took you to realize how entirely possible, easy, available it was to you to transform into yourself the way you wanted to be: to become yourself as a boy.