VenCo(52)

“Ah, come on, now. We’re men! We act like men. We’re almost to the end! Matthew, show Casey how it’s done. Grrrrrr.” His face was turning red from his body builder posing.

“That is not my name,” she said, articulating every syllable. She felt her voice in her muscles.

Casey stopped squirming to watch her.

“Okay, that’s it, I can’t wait any longer.” Sarah-Beth shouldered her purse. “C’mon now, Matthew, grab—”

“THAT IS NOT MY NAME!” She screamed it.

Her parents stopped dead. Casey hiccupped in the silence.

“I am not Matthew! I’m not your man, I’m not anyone’s man. I’m Freya.” She picked up her little purple golf ball, too light to be regulation, and tossed it into the woods. “I’m not a man. I’m not a boy. I’m a girl, and I always have been. Always. Why can’t you see it? Why can’t you see me?”

The sound of her own breathing was loud in her ears, like she was listening through a seashell.

This was it. The “conversation” she’d meant to have over tea on a patio after dinner or in an office with a therapist wearing a sweater vest—now screamed on hole nineteen at Merlin’s Mini Putt while her mother’s culottes grew wet down the leg and pee ran into her espadrilles.

Freya was seen, and she was no longer small. She was fucking huge.

Casey broke the silence of her father’s shock and her mother’s humiliation with a long, single wail, like a siren.

“Fuck this, I’m going to get a beer.” Mr. Monahan tossed his putter. It spun in the air, then landed with a bounce where the false green met the real green. He threw both hands up and stomped off without a glance back.

“Now look what you’ve done, with your . . . ridiculousness,” Sarah-Beth hissed at Freya, picking up Casey and holding him in front of her body like a shield. She wobbled off towards the parking lot, carrying a distraught Casey by his armpits, the soft pink of his belly exposed. She shook her head—no, no, no, no—with every step. And Freya was alone. But she had her name. She had said it. It was hers.

She straightened her shoulders and smiled, just a little, to test out the motion. She carefully gathered the putters left like aluminum feathers in the wake of her family’s flight and stacked them by the final hole. Then she walked into the woods after her ball. Under the canopy of the trees, the light was different, every colour highlighted and every bough backlit. She saw the purple ball right away.

“What the hell?”

It had landed in a small clearing dotted with bright buttercups, discarded chip bags, and crushed pop cans, balanced like an Easter egg in the bowl of a small silver spoon.

Freya—Freya now for real, because she had spoken it out loud, no matter how uncomfortable the rest of the week would be, no matter how many beers her father went for or the silent drive back to their suburb two days ahead of schedule—Freya bent to pick up the spoon, holding it steady so the ball didn’t tip.

Then she carried both out of the trees and headed back to their car, where they would wait almost an hour for Mr. Monahan to return, with one talisman in each pocket—the golf ball that she launched with her name and the spoon that would launch her into her new life.



Freya’s face shone in the moonlight with booze and absolute glee. “Believe me,” she said. “Once you understand that this has been you all along, well, that’s when the real adventure can begin.”

She raised both arms to the sky, closed her eyes, and spun down the rocky beach in wide circles, laughing. She looked so free. She was so free.

“Oh!” Freya stumbled to a stop, wavering a bit, and pointed at Lucky. “You just gotta watch out for the Benandanti. ’Cause those fuckers’ll kill you.”

“Wait, what?”



Meena sat with Wendy in the front seat of their car, grabbing a moment of privacy from the bacchanal in the Trout pub. “Are you sure?”

“No.” Meena rubbed her temples with two fingers. “I’m not sure of anything, none of it.” She dropped her hand and looked out the windshield, as if searching the overcast sky for a god. “Can’t I get a little fucking certainty?”

“Alright, alright.” Wendy reached over the armrest and rubbed her leg. “We’ll figure this out. So, okay . . . if you’re right, if the seventh witch is Lucky’s mother and she died years ago, what does that mean for the last spoon? For us?”

“Goddammit, I don’t know,” Meena snapped. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you. But what do I even say to the others? Do I say anything? Is this over?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think the Oracle would have led you this far just to have it all collapse. Lucky’s mom died before you even got your spoon. Why would the universe begin something it couldn’t possibly finish?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. It’s just—Arnya’s brooch is a map. It brought us to Buzzards Bay, so that has to mean something.”

“Maybe it has to do with Lucky. The brooch is hers, so she’s a part of the next step. It could have nothing to do with her mother at all.” Wendy’s voice was soothing Meena’s nerves. “Maybe it means that Lucky has seer skills. Maybe she divined the next step to Lucille, but it took a seer with more skill to read the step, hence your dream. She is just a baby witch, after all.”