Chapter One

It was the tenth of July, and the whole of Martha’s Vineyard vibrated with magick. The summer people had come back; among them was the great, aching love of Xanna Daniels’ life--- Jim Merriwether---who had flown in from Seattle to tend to his parents’ summer house. Now he was stopping by the Daniels’, to tell Xanna’s parents he had come.

Jim had taken an earlier ferry to the Island than Xanna had anticipated. In fact, when his old blue Honda plowed down the sandy drive to her parents’ house, Xanna was still naked. She stood in the open doorway of her little dance studio---formerly a guest cottage, now consecrated to Artemis, Demeter, and Hecate--- with two sticks of incense burning in her hands like leftover sparklers and her neck festooned with sacred amulets.

“Goddess!” she cried aloud. “Why’d he have to come now and ruin his own damn welcoming ritual!”

Xanna quickly laid her hair over her still-too-childish breasts, closed the studio door, and crawled beneath the windowsill. At least she was short and delicate enough---minus the depressingly womanly ass she was suddenly developing---to pull this kind of maneuver. She could watch him get out of his car, without getting too contorted. Plus she had enough room to stick her fingers into herself if necessary. She’d certainly tried to get her rocks off before, like in the hundreds of times. But maybe the actual sight of her Jim, not the pathetic fantasy of him, would be enough to produce some sort of sexual feeling that at least went somewhere.

School was over for real, and she was not quite eighteen and bored to desperation. Her parents’ two acres and big solar-powered house in Chilmark was the kind of set-up summer tourists just died for. But the two acres were in a valley, with no view of the water, let alone of the mainland. She had lived here all her life, hundreds of sand-paved feet off Middle Road on an island where all the roads went in a circle and met each other again, like some cutesy labyrinth. Xanna had a wicked bad case of Island fever, and she wasn’t sure how many more days she could last.

Which made the little matter with Harvard University all the less explicable. Xanna’s grades and boards and extra-curriculars were all pretty good, and she was lucky enough to have two generations of Harvard alums behind her. But getting that big acceptance package back in April was still something of a Divine blessing. She had signed up the day the forms arrived. Then, a month later, she had deferred until the following fall.

There was no excuse for this defection. Xanna had played around with plausibilties: “I like the dance class I’m teaching here.” “Lots of my friends are staying put.” Nothing sounded believable. She wasn’t even sure she had a reason. Mostly, she was just unprepared to spend all her waking and sleeping hours with other human beings, especially humans her own age. The more nights she spent in proximity to her fellow Harvard freshmen, the greater the chance she would succumb to one of them. And she was especially unprepared for that.

Jim would be hearing about Xanna’s deferment soon, and he would not be liking it.

Jim Merriwether was about halfway between Xanna’s and her parents’ ages. He had been a friend of the family, especially of her mother’s, for years. Xanna couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t idolized him. For about three years now, since she had entered adolescence in earnest, her veneration had turned deeper and more rancid: She wanted, desperately, to lose her virginity to him.

Xanna was well aware that her monolithic desire had caused the suffering of many Island boys, who, bored themselves, made her the frequent object of their own sweaty fantasies. Xanna felt bad about this. But even limited makeout sessions with boys she had practically potty-trained with were just too unpalatable. Now she saved herself for Jim in earnest, and refused even the boys’ invitations to go behind the high school for a cigarette.

They didn’t take her rejections well. Xanna had heard rumors that she was a dyke, because she dressed so provocatively but never put out for anybody. Or that she was wasting what they called her “blow job lips” on well, like, nothing.

“That could not be totally less than further from the truth,” she would have told them. But telling them would mean lowering herself to speak about her intimate life. So she stayed silent and reached inside herself, frustrated that even her own fingers did not have the skill to let her touch adult sexuality.

Xanna got dressed. She washed her hands in the outdoor shower behind the studio. How long had it been since she had seen Jim’s face? Almost exactly a year, to the day: she’d helped him pack his car to go off-Island. Touching all his belongings so intimately had made her want to faint. So had his awkward, almost embarrassed, smile of thanks.

She wanted to flee over the road towards him. But her training at Island Children’s Theatre and at Piatelli Dance Studio had taught her to think of all her actions as having an intended audience. So first she thanked the Great Mother for letting him return to her at last. Then she walked slowly, elegantly, the two hundred feet to her front door, imagining that Jim watched each step through the tinted picture windows.

Jim was not in the living room, staring out at her. Instead, he was lounging in the kitchen with Xanna’s mother, his back to the dishwasher, a glass of wheat grass juice in his hand. His blond ponytail was a little longer than Xanna remembered it; in addition he had grown a tiny, scrubby beard that looked silly, she thought, on his narrow face. He was wearing glasses perched on his head like a middle-aged woman, and he dropped them onto his nose as she walked nonchalantly through the doorway and into the aura of his sublime presence.

“Nice to see you, Xanna.” Jim bent down and gave her a perfunctory peck on the cheekbone. This gesture seemed to be for her mother’s benefit, although Xanna, feeling his lips just barely brush her skin, fervently hoped otherwise. “Emily’s been telling me how you got into Harvard. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Jim. Actually, I’m just the Vineyard ‘diversity’ kid who wins a trip to Harvard every year. By the way, I’m really glad to see you, too.” She ran some water from the tap so that she could stand next to him for another minute. “How’s Seattle? How’s your computer programming going? How’s Microsoft?”

“They’re all fine. I don’t want to bore you with what I’m working on.” He frowned. “Emily also told me that you took a deferment. It’d be incorrect for me to question your decision, but I always thought of you as a pretty serious young woman, and it seemed out of character for you. Why’d you do it?”

One of Jim’s glaring faults, Xanna remembered, was that he always took things so damn literally. She thought it was a computer person thing, or maybe his profession coupled with his excruciating political correctness. But everything was so unambiguous to him. And mostly he found it humorless.

“I have a lot of stuff going on here,” she said, taking a refined sip of water. “Some of my friends weren’t going to college yet and I still wanted to hang with them, I’m teaching this really groovy class at the dance studio...Mommy? Can you help me out here? Jim’s looking at me like he thinks I’m crazy.”

Xanna’s mother played with the beads tied at the ends of Xanna’s long black curls. “We believe in letting Suzanna do what she wants, Jim. We’ve raised her to let her make her own decisions, and we give her the latitude to check out both sides of a story. Skip and I aren’t Puritans ourselves, after all---why should we force someone else’s morality down her throat? If she wants to take some time off before college, who are we to question her motives? Instead, we should be proud of her for being admitted to Harvard in the first place.” She put her skinny tanned arm with the gold watch around Xanna’s shoulder and squeezed. Xanna suddenly felt like Mommy was putting on some kind of performance of her own.

“So, Jim, why are you here, exactly?” Xanna asked. “I mean, I know it’s the summer and everything, but you could have stayed in Seattle for your vacation. I don’t think the Island has too much to recommend it these days, what with the wicked high tourist population. Two weeks ago we had these fat-ass people drive up to our house on their rented motor scooters and ask us, ‘Where’s Jackie O’s estate?’ Pa-leeze! ”

“Aren’t you being judgmental, Xanna?” said Jim. “The Island’s economy depends on the visitors, after all. The working people couldn’t eat without them.”

“Sorry, Jim. I don’t want to make fun of your socioeconomic principles or anything.”

“I’m not here to have fun, anyway,” he continued. “My folks”---Xanna remembered them vaguely as sort of preppy conservative and not too much more lighthearted than their son---“didn’t think they’d be able to make it to the house this summer. So I said I’d come and open it up for the season. Also, my old Civic is here gathering rust. My friends and I are trying to arrange a car co-op in Seattle. So I’m driving it cross-country, back to Puget Sound, and hoping it makes it.”

“Jim has something to ask you, Xanna,” said her mother.

“Xanna, how would you like to go out to Seattle with me?”

During her sharp inward breath it did not occur to her that Jim might have been coached into asking this question. “Go to Seattle with you, Jim? I can’t think of anything better!” She looked at her mother, feeling young and desperate. “Mommy, Jim’s asking me to go to Seattle with him! What do you think?”

Jim and her mother kept looking at one another, like they were sending some oblique code through glances and blinks.

“Why Jim, that’s a magnificent idea,” said Mrs. Daniels. “Skip! Where are you? Jim wants to take Suzanna with him to Seattle!” She glided over to the white vaulted staircase and called up the stairs. “Get out of your greenhouse and come down here right now, Skippie!”

Jim gave Xanna a look that ordinarily she would associate with extreme distaste for her person. She ignored it.

“You know, Jim,” she said, confidentially, “I think Skip and Emily were wicked disappointed that I wasn’t going to college this fall. Not because it was Harvard or anything. I think they just wanted me out of the house in a big way. Having a teenage daughter is really hard on them. They like their privacy, and I’ve been messing it up for almost eighteen years now. It kind of makes me sad, but whatever. They pay the bills.”

“Mmm,” said Jim, with tight lips.

“Well Jim, this is a fine thing,” said Mr. Daniels, walking down the stairs. He was wearing safari shorts with garden tools stuck in all the pockets. His fingers were covered with loam.

When Xanna was little, he had given up his life as a diplomat to become a landscape gardener, an act of ostentatious downward mobility that many Vineyarders were very proud of. There was a trust fund somewhere, though, and buckets of money still saved up, certainly enough to send Xanna to college without worrying about financial aid. Certainly enough for Daddy to get plenty pink under his grow-lamps.

Xanna thought her father kept the dirt on his hands so he wouldn’t have to shake Jim’s. Skip didn’t like him too much; Xanna had gathered that Mommy and Jim had had an affair or something, some summers ago. Adult sexual relationships were way too complicated, which is why she hadn’t even embarked on any teen ones. That and her passionate devotion to Jim, of course.

Her father wiped his fingers on a hankie. Jim held his hands behind his back. “Greetings, Jim,” he said. “So I hear you’re planning to take our little girl away from us?”

“Emily says it’d be good for all three of you, Skip,” said Jim. “I’m willing to do the favor for her. But wasn’t Xanna going to spend this coming year working on-Island? I don’t want to take her away from that.”

Oh gross, thought Xanna. They’re talking about me in the third person. When do you ever get old enough for this to stop? For entertainment purposes, she pictured this scene happening a century earlier, and Jim was asking her father for Xanna’s hand in marriage. Except that she had no realistic hope of marrying Jim, just getting laid by him.

Some weird transaction was happening here. Jim didn’t want to take her, she didn’t think---he was mentioning stuff about the condition of the car, the amount of hard driving that had to be done, where would Xanna stay once she arrived in Seattle, etc. But her parents were enthusiastic about the whole deal, and there were two of them, and it was clear that Jim was afraid of her father.

“...It’s not that we disapprove of Xanna’s Paganism fad, but we think it’s getting a little out of control...” her father was saying.

“Daddy, it is so totally not a fad. I am in fact a witch. I did all the training. You can even ask the kids in my graduating class.”

“Do you belong to the witches’ circle on the Island?” Jim asked. He was a genuine Pagan, which is one of the reasons Xanna got interested in it in the first place. So was his Seattle girlfriend, Mollie.

“The what on the Island?”

“Don’t call yourself a witch or anything like it, without consulting the Circle first. They don’t like little wannabes who get their ideas about Wicca from TV.”

“I like Wiccans because they’re nice. They wouldn’t make fun of me.”

“It’s not a matter of niceness. It’s a matter of correctness,” said Jim.

“In any case,” broke in Mr. Daniels, “I’m not sure if I feel right about my daughter instructing women two and three times her age in the ways of...what do you call it?...”

“The Goddess, Daddy. And you never said anything about disapproving before. Mommy said, not even half an hour ago, about how you guys weren’t Puritans and you always let me do what I wanted. This is what I want. I want to go to Seattle with Jim. I’ll get a crappy job there. I don’t care.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Xanna?”

“You’re not listening to me, Daddy. Yes!”

“And what does your mother say?”

“I wasn’t the one who encouraged her to stay put on the Island, Skip.”

“What about you, Jim?” asked her father, looking at him hard. “We haven’t heard much from you. You’re the one who’ll have to listen to Xanna’s chatter in the car for five days.”

Jim looked desperately uncomfortable, and Xanna found him all the more noble and handsome for it. She shot him bright love thoughts from behind her deliberately impassive expression.

“I think it depends on what Emily thinks,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t know if I’m in a position to make arrangements for Xanna to stay somewhere...Emily, I guess you could call Mollie and see what you could work out with her...”

Xanna’s mother brightly clapped her hands together. Her own hair beads bounced around her skinny shoulders. “Then it’s done!”

One last time, Xanna considered hanging out on-Island: exasperated at everyone and everything, but safe and protected. But her fantasy of the non-Vineyard world was spreading lushly and newly in front of her.

“I’m only going to be here for a few days,” Jim said with a kind of wretched doubtfulness. “I don’t think that’s enough time for you to get everything together, is it Xanna?”

“Please take her, Jimmy,” said Xanna’s mother.

“Please take me,” Xanna said solemnly. “I want to go.”

Chapter Two

Xanna was preparing for her last session of “Embracing the Goddess Within.” She decided she wasn’t going to tell her initiates, as she thought of them, until afterwards. Instead, she would use her energy to give them one last crazy trance. Then she’d let them down, gently. Maybe they’d believe they were losing something Divine themselves, not a twittish little instructor who used to belong to their own daughters’ Girl Scout troop.

It was immature, she knew, but she hadn’t even told Wayne, the slightly creepy Mens’ Movement guy who played her chimes and synth, about her abrupt departure. The sooner she told people she was leaving, the sooner they’d ask why.

The number of Xanna’s Goddess-embracers had finally grown so large that Xanna had been forced to commandeer the big dance studio over at Piatelli in order to pack them all in. She lit some tuberose incense in the dance studio as her initiates drove their Grand Cherokees and Volvo station wagons into the packed sand parking lot.

The women---mostly in their 40s, gaunt and artsy looking like her mother, summer-tanned already with beads and feathers in their hair---passed through the door and past the embroidered velvet draperies that separated the dressing room from the sacred space.

Xanna flitted from corner to corner in absolute self-consciousness. She wore her black leotard and the modern dance skirt she had specially adorned with multicolored spangles. She had bound her long black curls magnificently around her head like a nymph on a Grecian vase.

They were envious of her youth and beauty and authority in matters of the Goddess, she knew. Also, they had told her mother as much, at Up-Island Cronig’s, or the farmers market, or the rounds of house parties for year-round Vineyard residents. To admit that she was a big-time virgin---never any clothes off, nowhere anything like an orgasm from any source---would destroy her carefully crafted image.

“Do you feel the power of the moon tonight?” she asked the assembled group. She stood in a careful ballet fourth position and raised her arms curved towards the ceiling. “It’s in its fullness of summer. I find it so...ovulatory, don’t you think?”

Xanna nodded at Wayne, who sat cross-legged on the floor and began to bow his sitar. He also played glockenspiel, hand chimes, and drums, and usually he had some taped music and some live improvisational going at the same time. If the classes’ participants tranced effectively, they would never know the full hour hadn’t been played especially for them.

Xanna dimmed the lights and crouched on the floor. “Tonight, let’s concentrate on our own personal evolution and birth, from protoplasm to Goddess Incarnate, as we prepare ourselves on the path to meet the Great Mother.” Heh, 740 on those verbal SATs and it shows, she thought.

She plunged herself into the class’s guided imagery, urged on by the knowledge that this was the last time she’d be making a fool of herself like this for a while. What an idiot she’d been for actually choosing this path instead of going to college.

But now she had a third and better choice. Jim Merriwether, her Beloved, her Kernunnos, her Pan, was going to take her away from this ruse, and she would flee with him across the country and live near him for...well, for how long? She decided it didn’t matter; she had nothing special planned for the next year, anyway.

“Imagine,” Xanna called out, “that you are fertilized egg, blessed by the Goddess into life. Now you are splitting into two, and four, and sixteen, and thirty-two, and on and on, fighting for life, blossoming in the eternal primeval soup! Imagine what that feels like, and dance it!”

She spun herself up from the floor and twirled around with her head hung back and her arms pinwheeling out to the side. Whatever incense she had lit tonight had been a bad idea; it was too strong and smoky and making her a little sick. She found herself bumping into the blue velvet curtain that separated the rehearsal space from the ballet barre, but regained her balance before she fell over. No one noticed: most of the women were dancing with closed eyes now, or with gazes fixed firmly on some imaginary point.

“Move away from your human body, and become fire! Walk in fire! Artemis waits for you in fire, and she wants you to be angry and self-centered! Dance your anger! Dance your fire! Say to yourself, ‘I deserve to become flame!’” Xanna leapt into a big karate-kick in the middle of the room that her pupils could not fail to notice. “Say, ‘I am worthy of this!’”

Nancy G., who Xanna’s mother said was going through a terrible divorce, had already broken away from the group and was sobbing in the corner, next to the water cooler. Wayne looked like he was managing two or three live instruments at one time, including enthusiastic hammering of the ritual drums, and his shiny bald temples were glopping sweat. “I am one!” shouted Carol M. Her son Trevor, a couple years younger than Xanna, was being sent to military school in the fall for, among other things, breaking into and defacing the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s computer network.

Afterwards, the group sat in a circle and discussed their feelings about what had happened.

“I can’t get away from her always being my mother,” said a dykey woman named Olivia. “I look for guidance, and it always bums me out. I’ve never been able to grasp my inner power in this group.”

Xanna played with the ends of her chiffon skirt---the little spangles she had sewn on were scattered across the floor---and softly cleared her throat. “Well, that, um, brings me to what I’ve been meaning to say all evening,” she said. “This is going to be our last class. My Goddess has given me an opportunity to follow one of my dreams. I’m going to drive out to Seattle with a...man friend...of mine and I want to see what it’s like living out there. I’m very sorry. You can continue meeting without me if you want.”

She looked around the circle, trying to gauge the expression on the women’s faces, and wondering what they imagined about her term “man friend.” It made her sound very adult, she thought, and the slightest bit 1970s-ish.

“Xanna, this is a surprise,” said Carol. “We’ll be very sorry to see you leave. This class has been just orgasmic for me.”

Whatever that means, Xanna thought. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it.”

“If we paid ahead, can we get a refund?” asked Nancy. “With the...divorce and all, I’m running pretty low on funds.”

Xanna shrugged magnanimously. “Sure.”

There was much group hugging and comforting after this. Wayne came dangerously close to committing major faux pas by stepping outside the safe space of his instruments and hugging the class participants, his white beaded ponytail bouncing excitedly behind him.

Xanna submitted graciously to all hugs given. She realized uncomfortably that she had not been the star of “Embracing the Goddess Within.” She had been just leading the class, and the women, were, of course, far more sophisticated than she and probably didn’t even appreciate getting spiritual guidance from a high school senior.

Finally even Wayne left, after a hug that lifted her off the floor, and a kiss on the lips that had a hint of tongue on it. Poor guy, thought Xanna; now he’d have to shop around his Men’s Movement skills to some other New-Agey group. She looked around the dance studio for stuff she’d been stashing there. The spangles on the floor looked pretty neat, though; she’d leave them behind.

Xanna stuffed her incense and her tapes and some old pairs of earrings into her backpack. She was about to lock Piatelli’s doors with her keys for the last time, when she heard someone call her name. It was Olivia, the woman who couldn’t find the Calling. She stood outside the door in a patch of scrub grass, illuminated by the studio’s outside flood lights.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” said Xanna, a little nervously.

“So you’re going to Seattle with Jim Merriwether,” Olivia said, sounding scornful. Her fist was on her hip, and her bare legs were outlined in fearsomely muscular shadows.

“Yeah. Monday. You know Jim?”

“I do. Jim’s too polite to tell you, Xanna, but he’s getting you off your folks’ hands as a big favor for them. He’s not going to be really happy having you around for a whole week.”

Xanna didn’t say anything.

“What are you going do in Seattle? Teach another class like this?”

“I haven’t thought about it yet. Maybe.”

“Let me give you some advice, Xanna. Save yourself the embarrassment and don’t. These Vineyard women...they’re too stupid to know the difference. They get their ideas about the Goddess from reading New Age self-help books.

“But there’s genuine, hard-core magick in Seattle. And I don’t mean just the vanilla Wiccan stuff, either. You don’t have the first idea about what it really means, or how it can backfire on you if you mess around with it wrong.

“I’ve sat out your classes here, hoping I’d get something out of them. Like I said earlier this evening, I haven’t. That’s because you are a little charlatan, Xanna.”

Xanna’s mouth made some fish-like ellipses.

“You are. You’re a bitchy little white girl who’s been raking ten bucks per class out of these pathetic divorced women. You are so far from being a witch it’s really funny. You don’t even know what it means, and if you go out to Puget Sound pretending you’re something you’re not, you’re going to be eaten alive.”

“I am too a witch---”

“You’re a pretentious teenager who has to call your mommy to get rides back from your classes. And there she is.”

Xanna’s mother’s Cherokee was bumping over the sandy driveway toward them, its headlights bouncing into the blackness. Xanna ran towards it.

Xanna slammed the car door behind her. “Remember what I told you,” Olivia said ominously. “It will be for real out there. You are not prepared.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“What’s the matter, Suzanna?” her mother asked, overly casual. “Are you having second thoughts about leaving?”

“No. Let’s just go home, OK? I’m getting behind on my packing.”

“Let me know if you want to talk at all, honey. It’s fine if you change your mind.”

“It’s not fine if I change my mind. Not not not!” Xanna let out a brief, anxious sob.

Thank Goddess she was leaving soon. She couldn’t stand any more cranky, unappreciative lesbians appearing out of the darkness and disheartening her with their oracular rants. Xanna was a witch. All the books she read said that if you thought you were one, well, then you were. And Seattle was a regular city, right?, not some capitol of the supernatural.

I am not a charlatan, she chanted to herself. I am not. Not not not not not.

Chapter Three

When Xanna was fourteen, she developed a huge crush on the college student who was reshingling their house. “I really want his body,” she told her mother.

Her mother was scandalized. “Xanna! What do you think that means?”

“It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with him. It just means that I want to--you know--have his body. Like have him strip naked and stand on a pedestal like a statue, or something. I can’t imagine having sex with anyone. It’d be disgusting.”

These days she could imagine having sex with Jim. Her mission was to make him imagine it too, and like it.

Her road-trip fantasy went like this: During the day, Jim would speed along a remote highway, singing along with Phish, pushing the long bright strands of hair from his face and squinting a little at the road. At night, at some vaguely imagined but luxuriant hotel, Jim would take her in his arms, his little biceps hard and wiry. He’d deftly unbutton her shirt. Maybe he’d even rip it off. He’d touch her breasts in a mature way, not like those few, embarrassing Island boys she had stupidly let get that far with her. On his narrow hips he’d be wearing the coolest silk boxers, and afterwards, maybe he’d even let her try them on...

Goddess knew she had refined these thoughts enough, all those nights in her narrow little-girl bed, with the radiant apparition of Jim’s golden head floating near the ceiling. And now she would be in glorious proximity to him, alone, alone in a car driving cross-country, where she would spend night after portentous night lying in the same room as her love.

Their departure from the Vineyard had been as secretly romantic to Xanna as a honeymoon. The stuffed duffel bag in the hatch of the old blue Civic; her father hugging her, not even bothering to hold back tears, asking Jim to please take good care of her: “I thought I’d get my little girl at home for another year, and now I’m losing her anyway; Xanna, your little dance studio is going to be awfully cold this winter...” and Xanna cringing at his emotional fatherly zeal, hoping she wouldn’t cry, either.

Her mother, kissing both of them, Xanna not really knowing what was going on but thinking that Mommy and Jim definitely had some history there: “Xanna, you absolutely call me the minute you get to Mollie’s. Jim, she’s going to be a delightful traveling companion, she learned it from me...” Mommy’s beads at the end of her little braids clacking together in Xanna’s ear as she kissed her one last time. “Oh, and Jimmy, make sure she doesn’t smoke.”

On the ferry to the mainland, Xanna didn’t know when she’d ride it again, and she didn’t really care. What a thrill to travel without enduring the sloshy vibrations of the Islander’s engine, the smell of diesel and the Steamship Authority’s hot dogs and tuna fish sandwiches, the public cell phones that never worked, the screaming kids and the illegally unleashed dogs chasing each other around and around the mezzanine deck, the stupid first mate who had been making the same jokes over the intercom for as long as she could remember. Goddess, she wanted to get away. She was too old for this.

She and Jim sat at one of the top deck tables. He was drinking an orange juice, and concentrating hard on something on the screen of his laptop computer; he only grunted when Xanna tried to talk to him. Xanna, pretending to read a magazine, slid down the green naugahyde bench so that her knees were closer to touching his, and studied his prissily furrowed face with longing.

Tonight, their first night on the road together after a full twelve hours of travel, including the ferry, would be spent in Niagara Falls, Lovers’ Capitol of North America. She was wearing her best white silk cami and bikinis just in case, and her pits and other offensive parts of her body were shaved.

Jim’s behavior towards her throughout the day had not been encouraging in the seduction department. Xanna felt she had maxed out on all her various winning behaviors: cute and puppy-like (“Gosh, Jim, this is so much fun! I’ve never done anything like this before!”); provocative; (“You must be tired from all that driving. Can I give you one of my expert backrubs when we’re done?”); intellectual and cultivated (“The Indigo Girls are fine, but I have a cassette of this really great Italian chamber music.”)

Xanna couldn’t even get him to smile.

Why am I planning on giving it up to some guy who won’t even smile at me?, she caught herself thinking. But one reason she was such a good student was that she saw all her projects through to their absolute completion. Three years of fantasy-planning wasn’t being thrown out the window just because her beloved was having a bad day or something.

Xanna’s parents were paying for gas and lodging. They had given her more than enough cash, plus some travelers’ checks and the Visa card they had been holding for her until she left for college. “Let’s stay at the place closest to the Falls,” she said excitedly to Jim as they drove over the Rainbow Bridge, past the wax museum and the new casino and the quickie marriage chapels.

In the faux opulence of the Niagara Sheraton lobby: “We want a room facing the Falls,” said Xanna, in what she thought was her best nonchalant and sophisticated voice. She handed over a wad of travelers’ checks to the pasty-faced concierge.

The woman smiled at her politely. “Do you need a rollaway bed?”

Jim was lugging her duffel bag out of the car, and wasn’t paying attention. “One queen-sized bed will be fine. And can we get a room with a Jacuzzi?”

“Where’s the other bed?” Jim asked when they got up to the room.

“I didn’t think we needed one.” She dashed to the picture window so that he couldn’t see her face. “Isn’t this the best view? Isn’t the sunset over the Falls so beautiful? Isn’t it so--” she searched for an appropriate word--- “passionate?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” he said absentmindedly. “I’m going to go to the bathroom, and then I need to call Mollie. I’d like to talk to her privately, if you don’t mind. Find something else to do for a little while. If you want to scout out the Falls for a good viewing point, we can go there before we leave tomorrow.”

He’s treating me like a child, Xanna fretted. This will never do.

Jim went into the bathroom and closed the door. Right away he stuck his head out again: “Xanna, I don’t understand why you bought yourself a Jacuzzi. I don’t care if we’re right next to a hydroelectric power source---it’s still wasting water.”

“Look,” she snapped, “you’re not paying for this, right? Maybe we’ll need it.”

Jim shut the door again. “Whatever, hon,” he shouted over the running water. “Can you pick me up some decaf while you’re out?”

Xanna thought daggers at her beloved while she was out at the Falls and buying overpriced decaf espresso---espresso because she knew Seattle was a coffee city, and she wanted to impress him.

Well, what did you think?, she told herself angrily. He has a big-time girlfriend. He’s known you for ten years and not once has he ever expressed any kind of romantic interest in you. He’s practically as old as your parents.

Now what am I going to do? Where can I find chinks in his armor? He’s a man, after all, and men are just generally weak about sex...I’ll have to seduce him. I’ll really just have to make him have sex with me, is all.

Filled with bleak determination, Xanna made her way back up the hill to the hotel, the water roaring in her brain behind her. She carried herself and the coffee with proud, feminine delicacy past the concierge, who she was now sure was mocking her for asking for just one bed, into the mirrored elevators, and up to the tenth floor, where Jim would be waiting for her.

Xanna pushed open the hotel room door. All she saw of Jim was his skinny legs and his Birkenstocks, propped behind the dresser. “Oh Mollie Mollie Mollie,” he was murmuring. “Honey I miss you so badly...This is such torture for me to be away from you for so long...I want you…We’re in this big hotel and Skip and Emily’s little princess wants to share a bed with me...Oh, don’t overreact like that. She’s harmless. You’re still willing to put her up for a while?…I know, it’s a burden. You’ll be good for her. Toughen her up a little...OK. You’re right. I don’t want to talk about her either--”

“Hi,” said Xanna. She walked up to Jim’s legs and propped the coffee cup above his head. “Careful. It’s hot.”

Jim’s fine-featured face was red. “Just a minute,” he whispered into the receiver. “Xanna---I’m sorry---I didn’t mean--- How much did you hear?”

“Enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him.

Jim hung up the phone. “I’m going to run some hills before it gets dark. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Stay here. Do some yoga. Does Mollie not want me to stay with her? Should I go home?” Hot tears rushed to the corners of her eyes. She sniffled.

Jim leapt up from the carpet. “No, Xanna, it’s not like that at all--it’s OK, honey, please don’t cry---I don’t want your folks to think badly of me.”

He sat next to her on the big bed and put his arm around her. He smelled like Dr. Bronner’s Eight-in-One Peppermint Castille Soap. She rested her head in the crook of his arm, and through her sobs she thought, oh Goddess, I’m touching him, I’m closer to him than I’ve ever been. His heart beat strong beneath his T-shirt, a heart she wanted to have so badly and couldn’t.

Xanna forced shut the faucet and looked up at Jim. She had spent some time examining how movie and TV heroines managed to be glamorous and seductive even in the midst of a crying jag. Xanna looked right into Jim’s eyes, and parted her lips, pink and inviting. Her chest heaved, just enough for him to glimpse her very modest cleavage.

The room was filled with mirrors. Emboldened by her languorous, weepy appearance, Xanna plunged into oft-fantasized territory.

“Jim---I need to talk to you---Jim, I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since fifth grade. I imagine us together all the time. Please talk to me.”

The look on Jim’s face was not encouraging. “Xanna... I didn’t have any idea. Is that why you wanted to come with me? Xanna, you’re a little girl, you’re the daughter of friends of mine. I’m in a very serious, committed relationship with Mollie.” He took his arms abruptly away from her and stood up.

Xanna thought she might as well pull out all the stops. “I’m a virgin, Jim. I’m a virgin because I always hoped you’d be my first man. I’ve been waiting for you. I love you so much. You’re so sexy and so smart and politically correct. You have such amazing hair. You smell good. I want your body.”

Jim was looking baffled now, and Xanna, in tears again, didn’t care. She unbuttoned her shirt as fast as she could, pulled off her shorts with trembling hands. And there she was, in Warrior Goddess mode, kneeling on the big hotel bed in her silky finery, her hair wild around her.

Jim clearly didn’t care. “Please,” she begged. “If you don’t take me, I think I’ll die. If you don’t want to be unfaithful to Mollie, let me give you a blow job at least.”

“I think I’d better leave for a while,” said Jim, backing towards the door.

Xanna yanked off her camisole. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of it,” she shot back.

“Look, people can think about anything they want. It doesn’t mean they act on it.”

“So you have thought of it!”

“Xanna, people’s minds go places. You’re young and attractive, and you’re topless and begging me and I haven’t made love with anyone in a while. But do you think I’m going to deflower Emily’s daughter? Didn’t your parents tell you anything about morals?”

“Maybe I should get you and my mom together and ask you guys about morals.”

“I’m going down to the front desk and getting my own room. You just sit here and think about the consequences of your actions.”

I am now going to sink very low, thought Xanna. Still topless, she got down on her hands and knees on the bed and clasped her hands together. “Please don’t leave, Jim. Please don’t spend the night away from me. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t control myself. You’re just such a---a stud.”

“I’m leaving. When I come back---and I don’t know when that’ll be---I expect you to have composed yourself. We have to spend all of our time together for the next week, and I don’t want your hysteria to ruin things more than they’ve been ruined already.”

Jim slammed the door behind him, but it was counterweighted so as not to bother anyone else on the floor, and it meekly sank shut a second or two after he left.

The Goddess’ power had deserted her. What a wicked pisser. The light in the room was quickly diminishing. Still undressed to her slutty silk bikinis, Xanna put her hands between her bare legs and rocked back and forth on the bed with her face pressed against the bedcovers. She cried so hard she tasted blood in her mouth. Maybe I’m just getting my period or something, she thought, but she didn’t think it was the right time.

Eventually she turned down the covers and crawled into bed. She squished herself into a little ball and slunk down under the sheets so low she could barely breathe. She was grateful she hadn’t seriously considered throwing herself off the tenth-floor balcony, but neither would she consider the black, empty, Jim-less future spreading before her.

She must have slept for a while, because when she woke the room was dark and many of the city’s gaudy lights had been extinguished. There was a streak of bright, as Jim let himself back inside the room. He sat next to her on the bed. She moaned and rolled away from him.

“Xanna,” he whispered, putting his hand on her bare shoulder. “Can we talk?”

How stupid and inconsiderate for him to touch her like this. All she wanted was to revel in the hot dry heat of his hand on her skin, and she knew she had to pretend it wasn’t happening. Long-gone was the opportunity to lift his hand from her shoulder and press her lips into his fine, calloused palm.

“What’s to talk about,” she said, affectlessly.

“I’m sorry I overreacted. I was just taken a little aback. I had no idea you felt that way about me.”

“Sorry to burden you, Mr. Merriwether.”

He leaned in closer to her in the dark. The ends of his hair brushed her arm. You’re torturing me, she thought. Get away.

“Listen, Xanna, I want to tell you a secret about me. I’ve never had sex with a virgin. It was offered up to me a few times when I was younger, but I never did it. It’s just too big of a deal. I don’t want to be remembered that way by someone. A woman’s first time isn’t usually that good, anyway.”

Xanna snorted.

“Look, I want to tell you something very important. You believe in the Goddess; I think the Goddess would tell you the same thing as I’m telling you. Xanna, your virginity is your power. Once you lose it, you become just like everyone else. Right now you can be like Artemis, running free under the full moon. You have sex with a man, you get tied down to the earth. Forever. Live up to your powers. Don’t let anything as insignificant as a man diminish them.”

Xanna was silent for a long time, thinking this over. He had a point. Plus apparently he was up enough on Goddess-worship to know what virgins could or couldn’t do.

“You’re full of it, Jim,” she said. “But thanks for the pep talk.” She paused. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“On the couch. There’s an extra blanket in the closet. I’ll be fine.”

He got off the bed and moved around in the dark as she pretended not to look at him. Apparently he knew her well: he fell onto the couch fully clothed, and Xanna knew, as she huddled further into herself, that she wouldn’t be able to see his magnificent boxer shorts tonight, or tomorrow, or any time until the planet spun itself out of orbit.

Chapter Four

Mollie Kaplan was a big woman by anyone’s standards. She was tall and wide and muscular, with huge hands made for catching babies. She had a blond Dutchboy haircut and wire-rimmed glasses, and wore flowery granny dresses that accented her boxy breasts. Her voice was loud and direct, honed from ten years of coaching women through labor. Her baby-catcher’s hands once had sent a man to another part of the hospital: seven stitches across the face and a broken nose for fondling one of her friends at a Beltaine celebration.

Mollie Kaplan did not mince words. She told you exactly what she thought, no matter how unpleasant it was, because it was for your own good. And right then she was in the process of telling Xanna what she thought, and Xanna was being reduced to dry-mouthed silence.

“You,” she said to Xanna, pointing her large finger in Xanna’s face, “tried to seduce my life partner. And now you think you’re going to live in my house. Is this correct?”

Xanna looked up at her helplessly, feeling about four years old. She swallowed.

“Just give me the facts. Did this or did this not happen?”

“Yes, it did.”

“I understand,” said Mollie, pacing around in her woolen clogs like a DA before the bench, “that you claim to worship the Goddess. In fact, Jim tells me that you taught a workshop called ‘Embracing the Goddess Within.’ Is this true also?”

Xanna nodded.

“Then how do you, Suzanna, justify your sexual ethics in light of this? Did you cast a love spell on him also?”

“No.” Damn, she thought. That might have helped.

“Mollie, you’re being too hard on her,” said Jim, who was slouched with spread legs on Mollie’s flowered couch, drinking an Odwalla-and-tonic. “She’s just a kid. I’m sure she feels bad enough as it is.”

Bad wasn’t even the word. Bad could not begin to explain the days of harrowing embarrassment and longing that had characterized Xanna’s cross-country trip. Bad was merely a euphemism for the invisible bullet-proof wall wedged between her and Jim during five days of shoulder-to-shoulder travel. A euphemism for discovering that her beloved Jim was even more narrow and close-minded than she had thought; that his opinion of her was and had always been wicked low; that he was developing a big-time grudge against her for her indiscretions, and that he intended to hold it for quite a while. That she was still in love with him, regardless.

“Yes, I feel bad,” Xanna said.

“Good,” said Mollie. “In our community we do not tolerate this kind of behavior. Some in our group practice polyfidelity, and that’s fine for them. But it’s not for Jim and me, and even if it were, your kind of sneakiness is really unacceptable. It doesn’t become someone who claims to follow the Craft.”

Xanna was still standing in the middle of Mollie’s living room with her duffel bag at her feet. She hadn’t gone to the bathroom in hours. She didn’t want to ask, but Mollie’s view of her probably wouldn’t change, even if Xanna peed all over Mollie’s nice bare wooden floors.

She wrapped her bare arms around herself, despite the humidly green heat. As she stood there, stuck to her own skin, she suddenly realized, panicked, that all the clothes she had brought with her to Seattle were embarrassingly skimpy. She didn’t really know how they dressed here, like whether grunge was still in or not, but she could easily be branded a slut, especially if a lot of the people here were as rigid and priggish as Mollie and Jim.

“First of all,” Xanna said finally, “I’m almost eighteen years old, and I don’t need to be spoken to with such, um, contempt. Second of all, Jim already let me know that he couldn’t believe I was really a witch. I don’t know if he talked to you about this or not---but he gave me a wicked big lecture, so I really don’t need to hear it from you too. I’ll go find a youth hostel or something to stay in tonight. Just tell me where to go.”

Mollie’s unadorned lips folded tightly over on themselves. “No. Don’t do that, Xanna. That won’t solve anything. I have some friends who live in a big group house maybe a half mile east of here. I think they have an open bedroom right now, or at least they did a couple of weeks ago. It’s a co-op, so you’ll have to work in exchange for rent, but you’ll find that living at Craig and Candace’s will provide you with a little bit more of a comfortable environment in terms of...lifestyle.”

Xanna found Mollie’s sudden helpfulness a little sinister. But she was really in a hard and hurtful position, and she had to get help from wherever she could find it.

“I’d like very much to use your bathroom, if that’s OK.”

Mollie pointed. “Around the corner to your right. Please don’t disturb any of the p.H. sticks when you go in. They’re my clients’ urine tests, and I haven’t matched up the sticks with the folders yet.”

The bathroom was festooned with mobiles and pretty posters, tacked onto the ceiling or hanging too high on the walls. There was a big shallow bathtub in the corner. Xanna guessed that Mollie actually delivered babies in here, while the mothers lay panting in the bathtub and looked up at the little muticolored school of dolphins slowly twirling above them.

Xanna herself found that she had unexpectedly gotten her period, and had to use one of the big obstetric-looking pads Mollie kept in the bathroom closet. By this point she was so saturated with embarrassment that this hardly made a difference. She opened the bathroom door, to see Mollie, phone in hand, pacing along the length of the hallway:

“Is she cute? If you like melodramatic little girls, sure...No, she might be a little young for you, but I’m sure you can work with it, you certainly have before...Well, that’s what Jim says anyway. I’d assume you’d trust him on his word...From what I can tell, I don’t think she’d be freaked out, honestly...I know, Candace, but she’s certainly not going to disturb the energy field in your house, and I’m really afraid of what her presence might do to my clients...”

Oooh, my energy field, thought Xanna. I guess I must be bad for all those little unborn fetuses, me and my nonexistent witchy powers. The pressure of five hopeless days and now this abrupt change in plans was really starting to build. Only anger or tears could relieve her, and she thought she had cried, in that love-crazed, hormone-drenched teenage way, in front of Jim, more than was acceptable already.

“Look, Mollie,” Xanna said theatrically, stepping into the living room. “Do you and Jim spend all of your free time having these private phone conversations about me? You make it sound like I’m being sent to some kind of orphanage. Really. I don’t need your help.”

Mollie whispered something to the woman Candace and hung up the phone. Her wide-cheeked face was red. “Xanna, I’m in a bad position here. Emily and Skip”---here Xanna flinched at Mollie’s casual use of her parents’ first names --- “think you’re staying here with me, and they’ll look for you here. Just because I want you the hell out of my house doesn’t mean I want to be on bad terms with any of Jim’s friends. You need an address, and a phone number, and Craig and Candace Hunter say one of their rooms are open and they’re happy to have you.”

“Whose car should we take her in?” asked Jim, who was still splayed on the couch, empty glass in hand.

“You mean you’re taking me over there right now? Don’t I get any input into this at all?” Xanna heard her voice go dangerously high.

Mollie leaned over her. “Xanna. Let’s get something out into the open right now. Jim drove you out to Seattle as a favor to your parents. No---actually it was a favor to Emily, who was sick of you mooning around the house. I planned on letting you stay here---for a while---as a goodwill gesture to Jim and to her.

“You did not hold up your end of the bargain. You did a cheap, inadvisable thing, and destroyed my life partner’s serenity---and mine---for Goddess knows how long. I run a practice out of my house whose success depends on my spiritual balance and my ability to focus on the needs of my clients while they’re in this delicate transitional state. If you spend one night here, I will become uncentered and unable to do my work. As it is, I’m going to have to perform a purification ritual. I think your ‘input,’ as you put it, has been forfeited.”

Forfeit schmorfeit, thought Xanna.

Mollie went into the bathroom and closed the door. Jim, apparently revived by his unpasteurized cocktail, gave her one last disgusted look.

“Don’t forget what I said about you being one of the responsible ones, Xanna,” he said. “The Great Mother has been co-opted by the patriarchy and used against Herself. Movies, even TV shows. It’s pathetic. I don’t own a TV myself, of course, but I’ve heard about it. That’s certainly a trickle-down effect, isn’t it? Getting such a wrong view of what She stands for, and then trying to make money off it. And you, Xanna, are one of those people allowing public misinterpretation.”

Mollie reappeared and thumped down onto the couch next to Jim. She was wearing round sunglasses, tinted UV-pink.

Jim grunted again, in a way that Xanna found very nasal and unattractive. “Who’s taking her?”

“I will,” said Mollie. “I want to drop her off personally and make sure everything is all…arranged.”

Chapter Five

Vulcan Press was not yet notorious in Seattle’s burgeoning comix and graphic-novel industry. But its owners, Craig and Candace Hunter, were trying their best to make it so.

Vulcan specialized in erotic SF comix. Tart-tongued, large-breasted intergalactic princesses were ravished regularly by body-pierced space pirates or tied up and violated by the tentacles of lecherous deep-water squid; scientifically astute, anthropomorphic animals coupled beneath the twin suns of some desert planet.

The Hunters owned a large old house in the University District they called “Vulcan’s Forge.” On their front door was a discreet carved sign: “Vulcan Press, Inc. Established Before the Millenium.”

What went on inside Vulcan’s Forge was not nearly as discreet. The Hunters had enough bedrooms to barrack four or five rent-paying houseguests, most from the subculture that transversed the axis of SF fandom, BDSM, polyamory, computers, psychedelic drugs, multiple-cat ownership, and Paganism.

The Hunters knew everyone in the Seattle branch of this community, many intimately. But they were always looking for fresh blood to enliven their parties or the pages of their various comix series---as writers, editors, graphic designers, artists, accountants, distributors, models, or people just to hang around and contribute to the ambience.

Xanna Daniels and her duffel bag were delivered to Vulcan’s Forge in unsmiling Mollie Kaplan’s 15-year-old Volvo, which had a “Midwives Have Loving Hands” bumper sticker on the back, and “The Goddess Is Alive and Magick Is Afoot” plastered on the rusty front hood.

The sun was out, and hot. The foliage looked like it had stepped out of a rain forest: hysterical green, monstrously lush grass, generally gargantuan specimens of flora. The Hunters’ house had ivy dripping off it. Garlands of wild-looking pink flowers were strung around the door. Oversized pine trees shadowed the yard. When Xanna got out of Mollie’s car, she slipped a little on the moss growing between the cracks in the sidewalk.

“Let’s go,” Mollie said unceremoniously, hiking the skirts of her big sundress. “They’re working right now. I don’t want to waste their time, and besides, I’ve got a client who’s overdue and I need to get over to her house before she overdoses on black cohosh tea and chocolate cake. Best way to put yourself into labor, by the way. That and intercourse.”

“Oh hi,” said a man with long braided hair, opening the door for them before they even got to the stoop. “You must be Xanna. Please come in. Craig and Candace are waiting for you. Oh, hi Mollie,” he added distractedly.

The man led them through the foyer and into the big living room, which had been turned into an office, complete with computers, copy machine, phones, and full-sized drawings of the best of Vulcan Press’ art. Xanna stared at a richly decorated planetscape in reds and browns. On all fours on the volcanic earth lay a blue-haired woman in tiny metallic clothes; behind her was a hugely endowed, hugely erect, blond Viking type, whirling a big mace over his head.

“You like it?” asked a woman’s voice.

“It’s very detailed,” Xanna said sincerely, still looking with horrified fascination.

The woman came out from behind her desk. She bore a strong resemblance to the woman in the artwork, although her hair wasn’t blue, but straight and dark, with long bangs. “My sister modeled for the picture,” she said. “I drew it. It’s one of my favorites.

“By the way, I’m Candace Hunter. I’m sure you’re Xanna, and you’re even cuter than Mollie described. You’re really lucky: Our largest bedroom is open right now, and we’re only charging $250/month for it. Let me show you upstairs.” Candace smiled at Mollie. “We’re all set. Thanks for bringing her over.”

Candace, who was wearing black denim mini-shorts and high leather boots, led Xanna up the twisting stairway. Displayed prominently on the stairwell walls were more of the same kinds of illustrations. Some of them were clearly Candace’s; others looked very different, black and white and jagged, or more streamlined and less detailed. The great majority depicted various kinds of sexual scenarios---most were very unfamiliar to Xanna---and their cumulative effect made her a little turned on, and more than a little foolish.

“Here’s your room,” said Candace, placing her hand on Xanna’s shoulder and guiding her in. “We’ll talk about house rules and everything like that later. Remember, though, that even though we’re your landlords, you can come to our suite on the third floor to ask us about anything---day or night.” She smiled. Her eyeteeth were exceedingly pointy.

Xanna’s room was white and mostly bare, with a chest of drawers, a futon, a mirror, and a big closet. She had one large window---windows in Seattle did not have screens on them, she noticed---which looked out into the front yard, and beyond to some dazzling mountain range. She threw her duffel bag on the floor and sat on the futon, looking out the window while a soft green breeze moved into the room and set the little yellow-flowered curtains fluttering.

She felt homesick and empty, but it was a clean, purged feeling, like after crying. Traveling with Jim had made her feel so dirty. And although the people at Vulcan’s Forge seemed a little, well, perverted, they were certainly nicer than Mollie and, sad to say, nicer than Jim. Mollie had even mentioned that Vulcan Press needed some office work done, and that Xanna could do that in exchange for room and board, instead of having to get a regular job.

Xanna began unpacking the important things first: her crystals; leotards, tights, and modern dance skirts; journal, which she swore she would write in every day to document her new life on the West Coast; hairbands and ribbons; tapes creepy Wayne had made for her; Urban Decay makeup; her friends’ graduation photos, which she had been planning to tape to her mirror, but which she quickly put away because she didn’t want to seem more high-school than she already did. She took out her “hard book,” The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and placed it on her bedspread, so that anyone who came into her room would know that she was in fact a thinker and not just a pretty face.

Well, after Jim’s abject rejection of her, she didn’t even feel like a pretty face anymore. She felt stupid and hurt, and hoped that Jim and Mollie would not talk about her too much.

Candace called up the stairs. “Xanna! Craig’s here! He wants to meet you.”

Xanna tied a bandanna in her hair and trotted barefoot down the stairs. A male version of Candace stood on the landing.

“Welcome, Xanna!” he said, holding out his arms. He took both her hands as she reached the bottom step. “Let me take a look at you!” He held her at arm’s length, then gave her a big, super-friendly hug, like he had known her for a long time. Xanna hugged him back, because she didn’t know what else was appropriate.

Craig was Jim’s age and reminded her a bit of Jim. Hugging anyone who reminded her of Jim and was Jim’s acquaintence, besides, was one step closer to the Source. The pictures on the stairs grinned knowingly at her.

He took her lightly by the hand and led her back into the living room. “So I hear you’ll be doing some work for us. Do you have any office skills? It doesn’t really matter, especially at Vulcan, but I just wanted to know.”

“Not really, but I’ve worked before, if that’s what you mean.”

“I heard you were a dance teacher.”

“Well, sort of. I taught some ballet classes on Saturday mornings. And I taught a workshop called ‘Embracing the Goddess Within,’ and I made a pretty decent amount of money from that.”

Craig seemed to find her last comment inordinately amusing. “Hey, Candace! Leo! Kira! Xanna’s taught Goddess Dancing!”

“That’s great,” said Candace. “What other ways do you practice? Do you belong to a coven? You’ll have to show us some of your dancing after dinner---we’re planning on having a nice group-house dinner to welcome you.”

“Can I help you with anything?”

“Oh, no, we’re fine; why don’t you take a walk around the neighborhood? Go down to the Ave. and get acclimated.”

This is pretty good, Xanna thought, as she wandered around University Way, which is known to Seattleites as the Ave. Thank Goddess she was off the damn cutesy-pie Island, where bad kids had nothing to do but smoke in front of the convenience store, or else break into summer houses and watch videos.

Here, on the gritty, student-crowded street there was all manner of vice: tattoo parlors (illegal in Massachusetts), head shops, leather stores, vintage clothing emporia, comic book stores, nightclubs, 24-hour video arcades, 24-hour bookstores, piercing boutiques, little movie theatres, and everywhere, teriyaki takeout, cheap sushi, and espresso, espresso, espresso: hawked on the street, served next to the checkout counters in the bookstores, espresso bars in the gas stations.

The kids here were truly hip, in a matter-of-fact, unselfconsious way. There were a lot of unselfconscious geeks here too, and a very few self-conscious intellectuals, who looked like they belonged back out east. Mountain bikes and skateboards zoomed by her; some kids her age sat underneath an awning and begged for change. A number of guys---and a few men---smiled at her.

Xanna went into a coffee shop called the Black Water Café, and asked for some coffee. “You mean like Americano?” asked the girl barista, a little amused and contemptuous. “Like watered down?”

“No. I mean like coffee.”

“Oh. You mean like drip. Gus---” she called into the kitchen--- “there’s a woman here who wants drip. Do we even serve it?”

The girl turned back to Xanna. “Gus says sometimes we serve drip, but usually we don’t when demand is low. How about a nice espresso con panna, with a little cinnamon on top?”

Craig and Candace had obviously thrown money around for dinner. There were five different kinds of oysters (only one tasted like the kind she knew), a big baby-greens salad, and mimosas with freshly squeezed orange juice. Xanna drank enough to get flushed and a little giddy, and hoped she didn’t have to contribute to the conversation too much.

The Hunters, Leo, Kira, and a couple of other people were talking about the development and launch of their new Duneplanet series. A few stores in the Pacific Northwest were willing to buy sample issues unseen, based on the strength of Vulcan’s previous offerings (“Faun and Faerie”; “Bad Girls of Black Orb”