Chapter 7

May 13th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Everything blew up just three weeks before prom when the locker room tape leaked. Someone put it on social media through an anonymous account. Julie suspected the Coordinator herself, but she couldn’t prove that. Chinese Bonnie’s home life got really, really tense thanks to the rumored threesome (which she denied stridently, to her parents at least). It outed Kevin Solentino. Nobody really knew who made it, but there were suspects. The DEO issued cryptic statements Julie could tell were more designed to bait the media than address the issue, really leaning on the toxic masculinity angle and hinting at some bigger scandal. The fish bit — reporters from Vox News and MSDNC put Bentonville on their checklists and flew into town. Given the township’s corporate ties, both sides thought whatever the story was might have some greater social significance.

It’s not like there wasn’t enough drama even without it. There had already been one weird pop-cultural echo — actual pig’s blood flying around just before the prom. Liz Fendermann had stripped naked, doused herself with it and handcuffed herself to the main doors of the assembly hall to protest the school’s carbon emissions. (When asked which carbon emissions, she didn’t know.) She wasn’t charged with anything, but got the school mentioned on Tucker Carlson. It likely didn’t do much to advance the cause of environmentalism — it certainly didn’t make it look either credible or sane. Honestly, she turned a life and death issue into a punchline.

A deeply sardonic part of Julie’s mind wondered if she could file a complaint with the DEO over it — as a bi-curious girl herself, she figured having to see Liz Fendermann naked, covered with blood and ranting about tormented eagle souls as she went to and from class must surely constitute some kind of conversion therapy!

The DEO’s announcement about the situation dropped at a school assembly. Jim Peterson — the kid with the knife fantasy — was expelled. Bright kid, engineering student with Ivy League grades — sent out in abject disgrace for talking about a fantasy you could see played out in late-night Cinemax films. Truly a great victory for progressivism! All the other students on the tape that could be identified were required to attend mandatory sensitivity training sessions three days a week, and would need to complete extra credit volunteer work at a women’s shelter over the summer before they would be allowed to graduate. Finally, in order to pursue programs designed to combat toxic masculinity and create a more gender-fluid learning environment, the school would be withdrawing its athletics programs from NCAA eligibility assessments and the Stallions were being removed from NFHS competition effective immediately.

Backlash was immediate. Jim’s parents talked with conservative advocacy groups about a lawsuit against the school district. There were a lot of upper middle class sports dads that were very, very angry about the Stallions. The principal resigned two days after the assembly, refusing to stand before the PTA. The vice principal was on vacation — nobody seemed to know where he was or how to contact him. Smart guy, honestly. The principal’s office was currently being run by a receptionist. The school itself seemed to be being run by Alison Dikscheide. It wasn’t a stable reign, though. Conservatives both wholesome and extremist on and off the school grounds started getting organized. Julie felt sure the Coordinator had over-reached her power — but substantially less sure the damage she’d done would be fully reversed.

“It’s like the whole campus is uniting in solidarity against the DEO,” PHB told Julie at lunch. She seemed peppy again for the first time since her suspension. “Isn’t it great?”

“No!” Julie snapped, frustrated that her friends didn’t get it, couldn’t see the social pattern unfolding the way she could. “The DEO ate the old Student Services Office, remember? It’s the only place in school to report actual sex crimes or racial harassment. If the student body pressures everyone to boycott it, that’s just as fucked up as what they’re getting away with now!”

“Oh,” Pink Highlights Bonnie said, downcast again.

There were other things Julie could say, but she bit her tongue and stayed silent. This is officially work for Adepts, now. Don’t bring mundanes into it — that just complicates things.

May 16th, 2024. Toshia Köhler.

Toshia felt scared but positive. She certainly wasn’t immune to the social tensions brewing at MWA. She’d been dressing a lot more plainly and trying to go unnoticed — and explaining to anyone that she thought would listen that she had nothing to do with the tape. In spite of everything, though, she also felt more optimistic than she usually did, for a simple reason any teen girl can relate to — she had her first boyfriend, and so far everything was going great! She even had a prom date locked in, and had tracked down an absolutely stunning dress to wear. So her confidence was at higher than normal levels when she was ambushed by her locker.

It wasn’t any of the kinds of ambush she was used to, either. In Junior High, kids three years younger than her used to scream “tranny”, hooting and throwing wadded-up paper at her before running off back down the corridors like howler monkeys. That kind of shit hadn’t happened since the DEO came in and some of them got expelled. Nor did the sweaty, forward anime brats with no filters or etiquette come up and ask her if she was into futa hentai or what sex was like for her or other weirdly invasive shit.

It didn’t make things any better for her, though, when the DEO took over — just weirder and more complex. Rather than just being grossed out by her or razzing her, people were terrified of her — and beneath that terror was a simmering anger. The hostility didn’t decrease, but it got subtler and icier. Ever since the bullshit with the drag queens, she had a sneaking suspicion the teenage transphobes would be backed up by bellicose Evangelical parents. It made her suspicious, fearing people were going to be cruel in more sneaky ways. In retrospect, Julie Lambert might be a conceited prat but she had also been wise in warning her not to try out for prom court. She never gave anyone her e-mail or phone number — she didn’t want to get hacked, or get a bunch of anonymous rape threats.

The woke ambushes were actually worse, if only because they didn’t have to run in terror ten seconds after seeing her. Total strangers coming up to her, telling her how brave she was, how much they admired her, wouldn’t she like to go out for coffee with them sometime so they could get their official “nice to the trans-girl” hand-stamp to show off at their next struggle session? Some of them gave her bouquets of flowers — not to hit on her, but as some kind of weird analogue to a “get well” gift. They weren’t obligated to leave, and just went on and on gushing over her in a way that was, ultimately, entirely about them. She hadn’t actually worked out a good way to end those kinds of meetings quickly yet.

The blunt woke people and the anger combined to profoundly disquiet her. Friendship with Toshia was incentivized. Were there woke people subtler than the blunt ones, who still only wanted to be her friend for ideological reasons? Almost certainly. It was insidious. She’d come to the creeping realization that with the influence the DEO had over MWA, she couldn’t really trust anyone — she was trapped in a whirlpool of clawing social pretension. She had no idea where she truly stood with anyone — everyone had a motive to be false around her, in one direction or the other, and she wasn’t socially savvy enough to tell who was who.

Well, except her boyfriend. He cared about her, and she trusted him. He was also decidedly un-PC in some ways, so she felt it unlikely he was angling for woke prestige with her. The situation left her with paranoid tendencies and a trust circle of exactly one person — but one was enough. There’s only a month and a half of high school left, and then I can take some time and figure out where I fit in better. I can survive that. Heck, isn’t high school pretty much hell for everyone?

For all the weird corridor ambushes she’d experienced, though, today’s was truly new. She closed her locker after getting her social studies textbook and abruptly found herself staring into the cameras of two national news crews. There was a balding man from MSDNC and a very pretty, very brittle blonde newscaster from Vox News. Miss Dikscheide was there, too, spewing out a nervous, incoherent word salad full of progressive buzzwords. Something about toxic athletic culture. She heard transphobia several times. She just stared at the cameras, a bit dazed, and desperately hoped there weren’t any stains on her shirt after lunch. “Miss Köhler, we want to understand more about the athletics culture here at MWA, and how intersectional transphobia has influenced...”

Toshia glanced from the Vox reporter to Miss Dikscheide and back. All she’d wanted was to be a girl — not the girl that crushed the gender binary and brought the Genderbread Man into classrooms. Just a normal, quiet girl. She’d told Dikscheide that three or four times now, and had it waved away glibly each time. Her newfound romantic engagement gave her the will, the confidence to be more assertive this time than she had previously, however.

“Sorry,” she said sharply. “I don’t do the Cardassian Neck Trick. Not for them, and not for you either.”

Then she got her books and walked away, knowing she was the only person at school the DEO couldn’t just have expelled. The journalists stared at each other, baffled.

“No,” a representative for the Kardashian family told an MSDNC correspondent later the same week. “Neither Khloe, Kim or Kortney have ever cracked inappropriate jokes about lynchings or teen girls hanging themselves, transgender or otherwise. We don’t know what any of this is even about. We haven’t heard anything about this supposed ‘neck game’...”

May 24th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Julie had been burning the midnight oil trying to finish a curse box for the Coordinator. She’d planned to move against her after graduation — it really would be safest, if she were only considering herself. She wasn’t, though — she hoped the expulsions and dissolutions could be reversed if the Coordinator was discredited quickly enough that people were eager to reverse her policies. But that had to happen soon, for the expelled students to still have time to study for finals and the Stallions to avoid dropping out of the NFHS circuits.

So she’d take a risk. It wasn’t a comfortable idea to her. She was only a wild child in dreams. In the waking world, she was cautious and meticulous — critics might even say paranoid. But her True Will had spoken to her when she made a life decision in the Coordinator’s office, and she wasn’t about to eschew its advice now after Lorcan had given her a non-murderous means to follow through.

Harry Lansing had confessed, though it wasn’t public yet, so she decided to scrap his curse box to lessen the strain on her chakras when adding a new one. It didn’t save her any time, though — they were all personalized.

She got Marvin to help her spoof an e-mail, without saying where it was going. It was very important that she personally not be involved in anything suspicious related to the Coordinator, obviously. A group of students apparently wanted to give the Coordinator a “Class Protector Award” — yeah, given the Coordinator’s politics, why not drop a Whedon reference — as a birthday gift, but needed to know her birth date. The DEO receptionist gave it without a second thought — it wasn’t like it was a piece of information mundanes viewed as overly sensitive.

So she had the Coordinator’s sign and could start carving her natal chart into the sandalwood box-pieces. Funny — Julie would have pegged the Coordinator as an Aquarius, given the whole social revolution thing, but she was actually a Capricorn. She did have a brutally appropriate Mars-Saturn square in her chart, though — fittingly, a warrior who devours her own. The carving was a painstaking process taking days — more if she messed it up, as she had twice with DB’s box. She didn’t mess up at all on the Coordinator’s, however.

She struggled to settle on a curse, though. All her visualizations and astral work ended up derailed by horniness. She’d done so much sex magick recently that its astral essence had imprinted on her bedroom furnishings, her ritual implements and even her body. She could reconsecrate, sterilize, wipe her chakras and realign them — but that would take days, or maybe even weeks. So, as was her wont, she chose the most practical course of action open to her. It would be a sexual curse, then.

But what? Something that would humiliate the Coordinator, undercut her social standing and the cult of personality she was building. Julie knew she was going to give some big speech at the prom. It would probably be pompous and condescending. Her karma-style curse on Decepticon Bonnie had worked really well, honestly. Unlike more direct black magick, it only punished her when she did something wrong. Why not repeat that?

So Julie put together a curse-mantra with a simple, karmic basis: every time Alison Dikscheide assumed a stance of moral superiority she did not objectively possess in order to lecture, castigate, accuse or preach to others, she would feel a surge of involuntary sexual arousal causing a gradual but cumulative erosion of her composure. Hopefully it would teach her to stop being a wokescold.

More importantly, though, it would hopefully undercut her and break her tyrannical social power. When she tried to deliver a speech, it would overwhelm and embarrass her — people might even think she’d worn a remote vibrator to a high school formal event, like in all those trendy web-model videos. Yes, that would be perfect. Julie could even seed the idea at prom, if the Coordinator acted in a way that made it credible. She tuned the spell for that outcome, not wanting anything too overt or out-there to happen.

Julie drew on her own memory-imprint of the Scorchin’ Tartan dream for symbolism, getting a tartan-print shirt to cut up at the local Salvation Army. She visited the activist students’ dorm, and nicked a “male tears” knit coaster the Coordinator had organized a charity sale of to symbolise her bigotry and self-righteousness. She wrapped the hair sample she had from Lorcan in the coaster at the center — it was, obviously, the most important part.

She then wrapped the coaster in a printout of an Internet meme she had found — an image of a social justice activist screaming at the sky in rage after Trump’s 2016 election win; what the ‘channer’ crowd called ‘ree-ing’ — to represent a woke individual losing her poise and self-control. She wanted to make sure, after all, that the Coordinator wouldn’t just keep her cool and act normal when aroused. She dipped the bundle in spicy red chili sauce to keep up the hair-color/temperament/sauce symbolism from Larkin’s dream, then wrapped it in a cutting of tartan cloth.

She taped the tarot Justice to the inside bottom of the curse-box, and the inverted Wheel of Fortune to its lid — a symbolic prison to power the spell by reflecting the target’s own sins back at her to cause her undoing. She made a bed of black henbane — an aphrodisiac with more sinister connotations than the damiana she used on her own pillowcases, and mixed in cinnamon to symbolize both the Coordinator’s cruel personality and her unnatural hair color.

Then she set the tartan bundle inside the box, and tied it shut with a black ribbon printed with the golden Enochian characters of Alison Dikscheide’s name and the intent-mantra of the curse — she had gotten a nifty Enochian font off a free fonts web page for making those, and painstakingly injected alchemically-activated gold ink into the cartridge of a dot matrix printer with a hypodermic needle. She needed the dot matrix because you couldn’t feed paper with black satin ribbons taped to it into a modern laser printer without it jamming, and you couldn’t inject gold ink into their cartridges either. At least, she hadn’t been able to make that work.

The hardest part of making her first curse-box — far surpassing the natal charts, wood-carving, Latin mantra grammar or astral visualizations — had been getting an archaic RS-232 printer to work with her Windows 10 laptop. She ended up having to screencap her Enochian text out of WordPad, convert it into a.PNG file, and print it from a 1990s command-line PostScript printing utility in DosBox. Julie was preternaturally smart, but not what you would call a technically inclined person, so that had been an utter nightmare for her. She persevered, though, and now she had it all ready to reuse. That was one point in favor of technology, Julie had to admit — unlike magick, it was usually really easy to repeat. It thankfully worked this time without any new hassles.

Then, just five days before prom, Julie set the Coordinator’s newly-minted curse-box right beside Decepticon Bonnie’s in the hidden alcove beneath her bathroom sink and went to relax. The hardest part, she found, was leaving it alone and not fiddling with it, constantly checking and rechecking it in the worry that she’d made a mistake. Unlike with DB’s, she couldn’t just remake this one a month later if it didn’t work properly. Multiple other students’ futures were resting on this — and, in truth, Julie had not entirely discounted Pink Highlights Bonnie’s apocalyptic monologue about the swinging pendulum blade. She knew it was well beyond her personal ability to stop such a thing — but if she could slow it down even a bit, she felt she owed the world that. She had no problem getting off with her gifts as an Adept, but she was increasingly realizing she ought to be doing more worthwhile things with them as well.

Still, she centered herself, meditated and disciplined her mind. She would have confidence in her own work. She would accept success or failure with equanimity. At least she tried, right? That’s all anyone could do, in the end.

And ... there were still a few more nights before prom night. She had time to finish up a more selfish side project: her prom dress. She may not be in contention for the tiara anymore, but she was still determined to look her absolute best — and that meant the stunning dress out of Lorcan’s Oscars dream. She got the basic materials — ostrich feathers, bolts of fabric, needles and thread — and set about drawing down the pattern of it from Yesod and Tiphereth to mystically fabricate it in Malkuth. Well, after she’d fixed it so it didn’t fall to pieces when someone tugged on the virtue bow in the back, of course. Julie wasn’t dumb. She’d needed to enter a hallucinogenic trance to finish it, but it all turned out really well. Needles of manifest mystic energy wove together transubstantiated fabric like she was channeling Athena herself.

It was your standard mystic fool’s gold, of course — it would turn back to leaves, fabric, goose feathers from an old pillow and various odd alchemical preparations after a month or so. Making actual, permanent items with financial worth with magick was well outside her current skills, and even this had taxed her with the aching pain of spellburn. Of course, she could have just bought a very similar, hideously expensive dress after racking up the cash on Robin Hood — but she was happier with this. She wanted to look good as a manifestation of the skills she had earned as a Practicus and the odder sort of social bonds she’d made over her very weird final school year. Julie was the kind of girl that wanted to be able to say to herself that she made her own prom dress — even if she could never tell anyone else that.