"I told you there wasn't going to be room for the refrigerator," Miriam's mother said with satisfaction.

"Never mind," Miriam said. "I don't need it anyway." She surveyed the overcrowded dorm room, glaring at the floor space where her as yet unseen room mate had encroached onto her side with various tupperware containers.

"Then why did you-- never mind. I'm not going to try to understand you."

"Hey, very good, you're learning," Miriam muttered quiet enough that her mother didn't catch it. Her burgundy hair reached the middle of her back, or would have if she let it out of the severe bun that kept it out of her gray eyes. She was tall and thin without managing the willowy look that was so fashionable. After eighteen years she was leaving her home, her family, all she knew, and it was a relief. The next order of business was to get them out of her room so she could get on with her life. Her mother was sulking, perched on the edge of the desk in the corner, but not about to leave.

"Oh no, you didn't bring those things did you?" her mother said with exasperation.

"No, Mom, you're just imagining it," Miriam stated flatly as she laid out her altar cloth on the dresser and arranged her ritual tools in their proper places. There might be a problem explaining away the ritual dagger; for that matter both candles and incense were not allowed in the dorm rooms. Well, they could all freeze in their choice of hells if they tried to interfere with her religious practices. Miriam almost hoped she'd have a chance to shove the Bill of Rights in their bigoted faces, whoever they were. That wasn't fair, she knew. Most people were simply ignorant, not prejudiced.

Her mother on the other hand? Mom had her Bible out and seemed to be conducting a faith healing on the room. Miriam shook her head. Mom had always been a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and these Dances-With-Snakes Christians she'd gotten with a few years ago were not helping any. It was coming, she felt it?

"Miriam?" There it was.

"Yes, Mom," Miriam said with resignation, determined not to let this turn into an argument. That would only make it last longer.

"Our God is a jealous God, and He doesn't want His children worshipping filthy heathen idols."

"Mom, I don't want anything to do with a spoiled god who can't deal with it if a human follows something other than blind faith in ridiculous doctrine." There it went, all her good intentions out the window.

"Miri, I've had my share of sin in my life, and I've been saved." Mom had predictably started the waterworks. Her share of sin. What? Getting tipsy on graduation night? She sniffled. "I don't want you to suffer eternal damnation because you persist in evil and worshipping false gods."

"Mom, that's my business. I don't agree with your religion; you don't agree with mine. Now can we please leave it at that?"

"Well, I'm starved," announced Aunt Callie, in the doorway with yet another armload of curtains or something. One window in the place and her mother and aunt had insisted on playing Martha Stewart. Well, if it made them happy to decorate maybe they'd leave as soon as they were done.

"Lunch sounds good," Miriam said gratefully. "I think we need a break." All religious debates stopped when Aunt Callie was around. Callie was devoutly agnostic and had long ago made it clear that she didn't want to hear any of it.

"Yeah, I guess," said Mom, getting up from her desktop pulpit. "Now where did I put those keys?"

"Your pocket?" suggested Miri, seeing the little "What would Jesus do?" lanyard dangling out.

"Oh."

Some good karma must have been paying off, because Mom and Aunt Callie dropped her off in the parking lot outside her dorm after lunch rather than trailing her up to the room. Miriam waved to them until they'd pulled out of the parking lot and then turned to go inside.

People were still moving in, and the doors were being held open by cinder blocks. The lobby was congested with freshmen signing in for their keys and ID cards and parents anxiously pouring over pamphlets and information sheets. Miriam shouldered through the mess in a terrific mood. Although there was a tearful goodbye here and there, everyone seemed so friendly and open. Right now it looked like it wouldn't be too hard to make a clean break with Snotty Smalltown USA. After a slight panic when she couldn't find her room (she was on the wrong floor) Miriam walked into her room, and found her roommate there, perched on her bed, looking at a magazine. "Melissa? I'm Miriam."

It won her a dirty look. Melissa was one of those really pretty blondes that manages to look like a sex goddess and a twelve year old at the same time. "Oh. Hi," Melissa said disinterestedly, and returned to flipping through her magazine. "Oh yeah. Your poster fell down."

At a loss, Miriam looked over where Melissa had pointed. The Tree of Life poster lay where it had fallen, half draped over the desk. As she applied more of that poster goo stuff, Miriam tried to make conversation. "I got the information sheet with your name and I tried to call you over the summer, but nobody answered. Did you move?"

"We were at the summer cottage."

"Really? Where?"

"Long Beach." Melissa looked up, chewing the cuticle of her fluorescently manicured nail. "Look, I don?t mean to be all in your business, but you aren?t a Satanist or anything are you?"

Miriam started to answer, but her jaw froze, some lucky instinct preventing her from saying something incredibly rude. Finally she managed, "No, I'm not a Satanist."

"I mean, I saw your candles and your knives. And your posters like really freaked me out. And then you walked in here all in black?" Miriam sighed and wondered whether to simplify things to tell this bimbo that yes, she was an evil witch and would turn anyone who messed with her into a toad. "I'm a pagan. You can ask me anything you want, but please don't touch the stuff on my dresser."

"Why? Is it cursed or something?" Melissa actually looked genuinely interested, but she'd probably watched way too many movies.

"No, it's just very personal. I use those things for meditating and rituals." No need to explain how annoying it would be to have to cleanse the instruments and charge them with her own life energy again if they were mishandled.

"Oh," Melissa said in a tone that indicated that as soon as Miriam was out of sight she'd be calling her best friends and telling them all about how she was afraid to go to sleep in her own room because her roommate was a witch like from The Craft.

Melissa had spent about forty-five minutes picking out the right pair of jeans and peering closely at the mirror while messing around with cosmetics. Miriam watched out of the corner of her eye while she supposedly was playing solitaire on the computer.

Girls who spent that much time on their appearance had to have something seriously wrong with their self-image, she decided. They might as well paint their butts red and assume the position like female baboons. So many guys were just looking for an ego boost and an easy fuck, and most girls seemed perfectly happy to provide them with it. Finally Melissa tossed her blow-dried hair over her shoulder and clunked out the door in her clogs.

It was a little depressing to find no one to sit with at dinner. The dining hall was crowded and Miriam recognized a few faces, but none well enough to just join their well-established cliques. She ate quickly at a table in the far corner, hoping that the food would stay this good all year. She wasn't going to let it get to her that she didn?t have someone to talk to yet. It was the first day, for Goddess's sake.

The room was still empty when Miriam got back to the room after dinner. She made ginseng green tea in her new hotpot, blasted Tori Amos through her headphones, and filled in the little tags for her page dividers in meticulous calligraphy.

For now the room was hers. It was absolutely blissful. Melissa was probably out doing the round of getting to know you activities the college scheduled for new freshmen. Miriam had taken one look at the calendar of events and decided to blow off the next day before classes began. "Campus map treasure hunt?" "Straight talk about sex and alcohol?" What, did they think we crawled out from under our rocks this morning? And what in all the hells was a "foam pit dance?" Miriam figured she'd surface for the psych department meeting and maybe for the clubs and activities bazaar. It would be good to meet new people, ones who maybe wouldn?t think she was a freak. Being scary was funny only to a certain point, and then you just wanted someone to talk to without all the bullshit.

Around eleven, Melissa showed up with three friends, all male. One plopped down on her bed, one promptly dropped to the floor, pulling Melissa with him. The third shrugged and made himself at home right next to Miriam with his filthy sneakered feet on the quilt. "Get off my bed," Miriam told him in short, hard syllables.

"Hey, back off. I'm just sitting here." He was short and blonde, and he smelled like beer. Cheap beer.

"Take it as a compliment," suggested the bulky, dark haired one who was currently investigating Melissa?s shirt buttons.

"Fuck you," Miriam told him pleasantly. "And you, get off my damn bed!"

He sneered at her, but slid off the bed. "Probably the last guy who'll touch your bed as long as you have that pole up your ass."

She could not leave. That would just establish the room as Melissa's territory. So she just turned up her music even louder and buried herself in the intro of her abnormal psych textbook. It couldn't hurt to read... aloud.

Not much actual reading got done. It was an hour and a half of trying to ignore their drunken obnoxiousness and pointed comments about nerds. One of them started messing around with her altar, and Miriam had to put a stop to that, which only resulted in sullen muttering, something about crazy weirdo freaks. Junior high crap. Was this what college was like? Then they all decided to go out drinking. Miriam went to bed, and if they came back, she slept through it.

Miriam woke up with warm sun on her face. She vaguely remembered waking up in a cold sweat earlier that night with one of her nightmares. It really made no sense that she dreamed about her father's death when she couldn't even remember it. She had been five when her father had died of a stroke. Mom never talked about it. From what Aunt Callie said, it wasn't much of a loss. To say she hadn't liked him was a massive understatement.

Finally when she was thirteen, Miriam had worked up the guts to ask about her father. "You really don't remember honey?" Aunt Callie had said, a two vertical lines forming between her eyebrows in her characteristic worried look. "Well, I guess that's a good thing. You see this?" Callie showed her a round scar on her arm. "This is what your father did to me with a cigarette one night when he was drunk. Your ma has her scars on the inside."

Miriam had nodded, feeling a little sick. "My dad did that to you? And Mom? Is that why Mom's--?"

"You keep this between you and me, girl, hear?" Aunt Callie's upcountry dialect always came out when she was upset. "Your ma always was a bit fragile to begin with. Your pa shook her up something wicked when you were a little girl, and her mind's never quite recovered. I never liked him to begin with..." Aunt Callie trailed off for a minute. "But we Kennett women stick together, hear? You ever need help, you come to me."

Miriam never had gotten the whole story about how her father died. Mom seemed to get deliberately vague whenever the subject came up, and Aunt Callie simply found something urgent that needed to be done right that moment. It had never seemed to matter before at any rate. Mom and Miriam kept out of each other's way. Aunt Callie was like a mother and more.

Miriam thought about dozing off again. No need to hurry about getting up, it was another day of orientation. But eventually the luxury of lying around in bed without being yelled at to get up got boring. She shuffled over to the closet, put on her bathrobe, and picked up the shower caddy. Halfway to the shower she realized she'd forgotten her towel.

Shaving in the tiny cubicle showers was an adventure, but the radio that somebody had put in the bathroom was blasting something inanely cheerful song from the summer's Top Ten, and it was putting her in an inexplicably good mood. The next four years were looking pretty good. On the way out of the bathroom she noticed some girl wandering from the showers to the toilet stalls completely naked. A day in the life, she thought.

Melissa was still sleeping soundly when she got back. Miriam tried not to make too much noise as she pulled on a pair of cargo pants and a black tank top, but the soft snoring didn?t stop even when she dropped her keys. She grabbed a Nutrigrain bar and a can of grape soda and headed for the Academic Quad where they were supposedly holding some kind of clubs and activities bazaar.

The September air was cool, but the sun felt scorching through the black fabric of Miriam's shirt. The Quad was still fairly empty, except for the people sitting at their tables or wandering back and forth to chat. The "bazaar" stretched from the dining hall to the student union, and was nothing more than a double row of decorated tables along the pathway. Somebody was setting up a sound system on a platform, and a few guys were already involved in a barefoot game of frisbee.

Miriam grinned as the frisbee whizzed toward her and caught it over her head. She winged it back at the guy who had missed it completely. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of ratty denim cut-offs. "Join us?" he called over.

"Sure!" she yelled. How else was she supposed to meet people? At foam pit dances?

It was a horrible game, truth be told. They spent most of their time chasing the frisbee across the dewy grass and shaking it out of trees. They gathered under one of the bigger trees, not minding the fact that they were probably getting dirt all over their pants. There was something to be said about guys. If you made sure that from minute one they knew you were more than just something to hang a pair of breasts off of, some of them could be cool. They might have the grace and sophistication of big clumsy dogs, but they'd at least treat you with some degree of respect. And Miriam had to admit, these guys seemed to be a lot of fun.

"You're Dave?" she said to the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.

"Yep. And that's Tom, and that's Tim." She knew she would have gotten Dave and Tom mixed up for a while if Dave hadn't been wearing that crazy shirt. They both had scruffy dark hair and beards, and wore similarly disreputable shorts and sandals. They leaned forward greeted her with lazy handshakes. Tim, on the other hand, had his black hair pulled back into an impeccable ponytail. He was wearing jeans that looked only a little worse for the wear, and his tee shirt had a portrait of intertwined dragons. His blue eyes were astonishingly pale in contrast with the darkness of his skin, but they smiled along with the rest of his face as he shook her hand.

"I'm Miriam," she said, not knowing where to go with this.

"Like my shirt?" said Tim.

"Sorry, was I staring?"

"Not really. You just liked my shirt. You think loud," said Tim, grinning broadly.

"You're gonna freak her out, man," said Tom.

"No, it's ok," said Miriam, put off guard a little by their overwhelming friendliness. "It's a cool shirt, but actually I was looking at your pentacle. You pagan?"

"Yep," said Tim. "You?"

"Sort of Wiccan, but I can't find a coven around where I live," Miriam said, feeling strange to be talking about it so openly. She'd gone to a public high school, but in a very conservative part of New Hampshire where people still complained about 'papism,' never mind witchcraft.

"Well, we don't have a coven, but you've come to the right place. See that table over there?" He pointed to a deserted booth at the far end of the now-crowded bazaar. "That's the Alternative Religions Club. We're still looking for a better name. I'm the president, Dave's the secretary, and Tom's just the Grand Poobah or something."

"Do you do rituals or anything?"

Tim nodded. "Well, we have celebrations at the Sabbats, at least the ones we're in school for. Fall Equinox is coming up, we'll probably do something cool for that just to attract new members. And Samhain's a big thing for educating the rest of the campus that we aren't worshipping devils or sacrificing virgins while the rest of the world is out Trick or Treating."

Miriam grimaced, thinking of Melissa's reaction. "Yeah, I was kind of hoping people would be a little less parochial here than they are up in New Hampshire. My roommate thought I was a Satanist."

"Yeah, well, we deliberately try not to be spooky. We're a religion just like everyone else. That's the idea we're trying to promote."

"I'm glad I ran into you," Miriam said.

"No such thing as a coincidence," said Dave. "Tim didn't mention the really important stuff though."

"Really important?" Miri asked.

"Psi. Magick," said Dave. "When you're talking to some pagans, it comes with the territory. Others think it's a bunch of hogwash. But you've got to deal with it, and it's a really sensitive issue with the club."

"I'm not sure, myself," said Miri uncomfortably. "It's not like I avoid them, but for some reason if i think too much about mind powers it gives me the creeps."

"It's perfectly natural," said Tim. "It just boils down to quantum physics. Everything is energy, including thought. Psi is just a quick way of saying humans have more than the five physical senses. Magick is just based on the idea that your intentions shape reality. If you put your force of will behind some energy, things will happen. The rest is just decorations."

"Don't push it, man," said Tom. "Not everybody in the club believes that. Some of 'em think magick is just a bunch of superstition that's going to give paganism a bad name. Some think people who do magick are in it for the power, and they don?t like the ethics behind it."

"Its ok," said Miri. "I don't mind. I'm interested in it. I just don't have much experience with it."

"Everybody's had experience with it, they just don't know it yet. But you'll see. Come sit with us at our booth, if you feel like it."

Miriam went back to her room late that afternoon with a wicked sunburn, their phone numbers, and an annoyingly intense crush on Tim. Who was, as it turned out, gay. Typical of her life, Miriam thought. One disastrous relationship in highschool, which, she noted grimly, lasted only long enough for her to figure out what a self-centered bastard he was and dump him. Since then, Miriam had basically concurred with Aunt Callie that men were pretty much good only for lifting heavy objects and fathering other women. Maybe that was why worshipping a goddess instead of a male deity made so much sense to her.

At any rate, none of this thinking resolved the Tim Issue. He was good looking, intelligent, sensitive, and a really nice guy. And gay. Permanently, irrevocably unattainable. It figured. Miriam gingerly applied lotion to her glowing pink skin and decided that, overall, finding a good man was a bonus, even if she couldn't have him. As for the rest of the men in the world? some were like Tom and Dave. They were pretty cool guys, plus or minus a few social or hygienic mishaps. But as far as she could tell, the majority were scum, like Melissa's entourage last night.

And some were like her father.

Miriam waited until Melissa left for the evening, rereading The Mists of Avalon and trying not to seem impatient. The girl putzed around for an hour and thirty-seven minutes after she got back from dinner, and all she did was change her clothes? three times over. "You going out?"

"Yeah. Dan and Joe and my boyfriend and me are going out to the frat houses. Want to come?" Melissa added as a reluctant afterthought.

"No thanks. I'm going to be busy in here. What time are you planning to get back?" Boyfriend? That creep from last night? None of my business unless she asks for my advice.

"I don't know. Late?"

"Ok. Be careful and don't come in too late," Miriam said, deliberately sounding as much like a nagging mom as she could. The humor was lost on Melissa. She gave Miriam a dirty look and left.

Miriam sighed the frustration out of her as she locked the door behind Melissa. She lit every candle in the room until she started to worry she'd set off the smoke alarms. 'Atmosphere' was not technically necessary for conducting a ritual, but Miriam figured if it made her feel more 'in the mood,' it was a good thing. She arranged her altar on the floor in the middle of the room, closed the curtains, and shut off the lights. This ritual was simple, merely a matter of protecting the room from harmful influences, but Miriam hadn't wanted to let it wait any longer.

Miriam hadn't been lying when she told Tim and his friends that magick made her uncomfortable. But there was something about it that attracted her, an ominous kind of attraction like moths toward bug zappers. It had the taste of forbidden fruit about it, and she knew it wasn't her mother's silly ravings about 'not suffering a witch to live.'

As a fifteen year old she had come across Wicca on the internet. A silly place to have a religious conversion, but it had happened, as if it were supposed to. As Tom had said, there was no such thing as a coincidence. But the stuff on the web, and even in books had started to pall on her before long. It was words and gestures, pretty arts and crafts with deep symbolic meaning, but nothing more. There was something else that Miriam sensed beyond the empty 'spells.' Energies, and the senses and abilities to work with them that were always just out of her reach. Every ritual she did was like a wrestling match with herself, the part of herself that did not want to look, could not bring itself to touch what lay beyond the world of the five physical senses. There was a barrier of reluctance, an inhibition that tasted of remembered fear.

This time, she felt so close to embracing the awareness, the ability, as she wove strands of light (or something like light) in a web around the room, setting nodes in each corner of the physical cube that would collect and circulate the energies, cleansing and balancing. She could almost see the force like a concentrated heat wave emanating from the tip of her dagger, but it was the almost that frustrated her. Still, when she was done, panting from the exertion of focused will and channeled life force, she felt the settling in of a new aspect of local reality. It seemed to have worked.

She was tired. She extinguished all the candles, put her tools back on the dresser-altar in some semblance of their proper arrangement, and flopped down on her bed. On the verge of sleep, she swore at herself for being so thirsty. She swung her arm over, feeling around for the soda she hadn?t finished that afternoon. She took a swig, put it back with exaggerated care, snuggled her belly into the soft pile of sheets, and fell asleep.

Miriam woke at eleven that night. Melissa wasn?t back, but that wasn?t a surprise. Annoyingly, Miriam was wide awake and felt like doing something. Her hair was a disaster, out of its bun and plastered to one side of her face. She undid the whole thing and shook it out. For once it seemed content to stay out of her face, so she left it that way. She grabbed her book and headed for wherever. Wherever turned out to be the soft cushion of grass between the exposed roots of a huge willow tree near enough to a streetlight for Miriam to read by. Somehow that tree seemed more friendly than the others. She snuggled up against it?s rough bark, still warm from the day?s sun, and squinted her way through a hefty chunk of pages without even noticing the time pass. Books always managed to do that to her.

Between one sentence and another the bad lighting and the day's exposure to the sun attacked her with a blinding headache, stabbing her precisely between her eyebrows. Within a minute it faded to a dull throbbing but Miriam had lost interest in anything but getting to her bed. The walk back to the dorm felt charged, like a thunderstorm about to happen. A whispering, a glimmering-- Maybe working the ritual had finally eroded the dam that was holding back her psi. Miriam reveled in the sensation of power, running through and around her.

As she walked down the hall to her room, the sensation grew tense, constrictive. Miriam walked faster, trying to concentrate on breathing. Is this a migraine or something? This is all in my head. But my room--.

She was almost vibrating with tension as she put the key in the lock and fumbled the door open.

It was like walking in on a wax museum. The creep from the other night glared at her out of hazily focused eyes, temporarily interrupted in the process of ripping Melissa's shirt off with one hand. The other hand firmly grasped Melissa's trachea. Melissa?s eyes were half shut, and showed no sign that she was conscious.

Her roommate?

Being raped?

Possibly killed?

In her room?

Disgust, rage at that thing-- unnamed concepts of filth and twisted sex swirled with suddenly unforgotten images of her mother, bruised and staring vacantly from the floor as her father stood over--

Miriam's awareness flooded with poisonous heat, a building, surging pressure that knew how to release, and did--

The body on top of Melissa jerked once and slumped over.

Miriam felt consciousness draining out and bent over gasping, supporting herself against the stabbing agony behind her eyes by gripping the edge of the desk. When the dark dazzling that obscured her sight had faded somewhat, she gulped down nausea and made her way to the bed, her bed, where the two bodies were still entangled.

The male was dead. Melissa still had a pulse, hard to find, but there. There was a scabbed knot on her skull where she?d probably hit her head on something.

I have killed someone.

I've killed a man. With my mind. I am not--

I can feel it. I can see it. I hold this energy in my hands to use and I don't want it now.

I just want to--

The phone rang. Mechanically, she went to answer it.

"Miriam! What just happened?"

"Aunt Callie--" Miriam's voice hesitated between a quaver and a shriek.

"Miriam, are you all right? I felt-- Never mind what I felt. I just need to know if you?re all right."

"I-- I killed someone. You knew about this-- Mom killed my father--"

"Hold still, girl," Callie commanded. "I want you to go through this as if you walked in on it already done. Call the cops. Call the ambulance."

"You knew about this. You hid it from me and now--"

"I'll be there in two hours. Or less. I told you we girls stick together." Aunt Callie hung up.

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This page copyright to Sarah Morehouse/a>
April 1, 2000