Photo by Famartin

To read the first and second installments, click here and here.

WITCH AND WARLOCK (CONTINUED)

It was fucking funny, he thought. She’d seen him watching her after negotiations had broken down at the Estee Lauder counter. Cornered him near the watches and that’s when they’d officially met and he’d learned she was walking the mall trying to get a job for the summer because she needed money to “pay off a loan” and that no one would hire her because she wasn’t sixteen. So she wanted to buy some blush to help her pass for older, but she couldn’t afford it and the saleswoman wouldn’t give her a break. He remembered he’d offered immediately to ask his mother for the money and would lie to her about what it was for, he was Peter of the Engorged Loins after all. The girl, Gabby, Witch, she’d said that it was too late she’d already decided to put a curse on Morechant’s, the food court, the entire fricking mall, and once a witch had declared her intentions she couldn’t go back on them lest she wanted to be cast out of her witch’s organization. Which by the way was the Wretched Order of Flagfield Witches. Of which she was the founding member, its sole member actually, so technically she could have flouted the rules without fear of expulsion, but what a terrible example to set for future members of the order, right? Its CEO incapable of following through on one of the most basic principles of witchcraft? So she was moving forward and the first step was stealing the blush—all of the ritual implements would have to be stolen for the curse to work properly. The thing was, this being her first curse, she could really use a warlock’s help. Would he be her warlock?

The specificity of the memory startled him out of it. He felt flush and a little disoriented and half-expected everyone in the restaurant to be staring at him. To his mild disappointment the restaurant was oblivious, carrying on just fine without him. Peter took another roll, disavowed the narcissism he’d inherited from his mother, and wondered where in his mind that girl had been hiding the last three decades. Maybe he’d reflected on her in the immediate days and months and even a few years afterward, but she hadn’t become his friend let alone his girlfriend, they hadn’t seen each other again. She’d been buried under by the layers of his subsequent life and like the videotapes he used thirty years ago to record soap operas on top of soap operas the resolution of the image suffered badly. He wasn’t surprised now that she was reappearing for him that she’d never completely faded. She’d made her mark, beyond the pantsuit and the physical details Peter back in his head was bringing into sharper focus: her heart-shaped face and freckles and braided bun and determined eyes—he realized she’d essentially asked him out on a date. His first ever real date. Aiding and abetting a self-proclaimed witch in putting a curse on the Flagfield Mall. Of course he’d said yes. Because she was different and serious and confident and his mother would have hated her, and, if he was being completely honest, because she was a girl and she’d asked him. Peter reflexively sipped some wine through the bemused opening in his mouth. He would have called her Witch and answered to Warlock as long as she wanted.

He’d had only a fuzzy notion of what a warlock actually was. He figured she must have been counting on that, that “hot witch’s henchman” would sound too appealing to a thirteen-year-old dork he wouldn’t question it. She was a girl and she’d asked me to. The “Pink Kiss” to represent Morechant’s Department Store. The food tray the food court. The info booth’s laminated store directory for the mall entire. Yes, the implements. For the “cursing ritual.” It was all just so ridiculous and yet Peter couldn’t help but marvel at the balls he’d had back then. He quickly caught himself. Really, he was proud of that? Had it been so hard to steal those things? He felt old suddenly, and vicarious. Another case of misplaced pride. Another trait he’d inherited from his—no, there was an implement missing; he was forgetting something big. He wasn’t so arrogant that he—

“Blood of an innocent,” he said. That was it. He almost pumped his fist in his air.

Witch had said that. Jesus, was he really going to call her Witch? Fuck it, he was having fun with this. Witch had said they needed the blood of an innocent to appease the dark forces or whatever, the term she’d used eluded him—they were the International Olympic Committee of Curses that needed its collective palm greased before they’d allow the curse to be cast. Peter—Warlock—he could hear his younger self asking her and sounding so cringingly wide-eyed, like you mean a baby’s blood? And like all of its blood? They hadn’t, had they? Draining a baby of its blood was not something Warlock—Peter—would have forgotten, no matter all the intervening years and bad dates and chicken salad sandwiches with his mother. No they’d had to compromise and he wanted to believe it was because of the logistical nightmare draining a baby’s blood at the Flagfield Mall presented. More likely Witch had sized him up, the limitations of his warlockian capabilities, and immediately downgraded blood-draining to plucking a few innocent hairs. The wine was getting to him again. Warlock could get very self-critical when he was drunk. Another black hole to suck a relationship into. He pushed himself to stay with the right memory. Ruffies. It had ended there. The store at the opposite end of the mall, the other-side-of-the-tracks end of the mall. The bastard child to Morechant’s prodigal son. Everything was cheaper and uglier at Ruffies. But that wasn’t why they’d preyed there; Peter was hoping as much as he was certain of it. It couldn’t have been classist he’d been raised by a single mother. It’d been maybe more depressing than that. Witch. Right, Witch had access to a janitor’s closet on Ruffies’ basement level. She’d been there before; many times, Peter feared.