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“You look ready to garden. Pick your poison.” I point to the numerous weeding tools her father has in the shed and she comes out with a fishtail weeder. We weed side by side; the only sounds are the birds and insects, the quiet tinkling of music coming from inside her parents’ house, and her sporadic frustrated grunts when she can’t lift a particularly entrenched weed. The sky is cloudless. The sun at its highest point. As we move along the beds, near the house and under trees, the light catches Lulu in odd ways, making her hair both dark and golden, her skin pink and peachy, her eyes shine.
“So.” She wipes the back of her hand against her forehead, leaving a streak of dirt. There’s a pair of gardening gloves tucked into one of her gigantic apron pockets but she’s let the dirt get under her fingernails, into her fingerprints. “How’s work?”
“Like, security?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She scoops up a pink worm from the soil, placing it gently in a patch of dirt we’ve already tilled.
It’s hard to condense eight hours’ worth of sitting on my ass in a company car into an explanation that doesn’t sound mind-numbingly dull. “I read a book during my shift the other night,” I say. “About witches.”
“No way.” She sits back on her heels for the express purpose of shoving me.
“Way.”
“And?”
I shrug. “I liked it better when I heard it from you.” The words slip out before I think too much about them. They’re honest. But maybe too honest. I don’t have to look at Lulu to know that she’s beaming at me, her smile a little crooked, her lower lip rounder on one side than the other. I clear my throat. “How about your work?” I ask.
I still don’t really understand what Lulu does. She teaches, I guess, but the other side of academia is a bit hazy. It seems like Lulu’s job is to research the past and then just have...thoughts about it. And write down her thoughts.
It sounds like both the best and worst job ever: getting paid to think; having to share those thoughts with others.
She sighs. “I’m trying to pitch a new class.”
“About what?”
“It would take me like, thirty minutes to explain everything. I’m really bad at pitches.”
“I’ve got the time,” I say, gesturing to the metric ton of dirt around us.
“I want to teach a class about magic,” she says.
I wait.
She smiles.
“I thought you said this was going to take half an hour?”
She rolls her eyes. “I think the witch craze created magic.”
Lulu didn’t really strike me as the type, but OK. “I see,” I say slowly.
“Ugh. No. Not actual magic. There’s a historian of religion and spirituality, Audrey Robbs, who teaches a history of magic course in my department.”
“That sounds...cool?” I can’t tell by her facial expression.
“Itiscool. That’s the problem. She talks about the ways we’ve conceived of magic throughout the centuries. She’ll even re-create some alchemical experiments—the ones that are the least likely to kill you, of course.”
I only vaguely understand that reference but nod along as if I know more.
“The history of what we’ve perceived as magic is cool and sexy, where the history of witchcraft is all burning people at the stake and a rational discussion of the gender-based violence that we are still experiencing to this day.”
“Wait. We still burn people alive?” I ask.
She laughs. “Not quite. That’s a bit of a misconception. We often associate women burned at the stake with witchcraft but far more women were drowned or hanged than burned.”
“Neat?”
She eyes me. “Are you being sarcastic? Am I talking too much?”
