Revenge: A Story of Modern Heartbreak

TW: Alcohol, sex, teenage mania

I hexed my first boyfriend when I was seventeen. Although we hadn’t had sex by the time we broke up, I was still madly in love with him. So when it happened, I found myself more hurt than I’d ever been.

The day he left me, we were supposed to speed around the back country roads to thrift shops, bookstores, and estate sales. Afterward, I’d drive us back to his place (he didn’t have a license), where we could make out and feel each other up, like we always had. But that day, he had something different in mind.

My green Toyota Camry—Bertha, I called her, because it was good luck to name your car, and she was older than I was—squealed to a stop outside his house. We lived in a small town in a rural county, and yet his family lived in a neighborhood reminiscent of those big city suburbs. Here were ranch-style homes, cookie cutter and nearly identical, with paved driveways, attached garages, and spacious green yards; his with a blooming, boisterously pink crabapple tree in the front.

He’d been watching for me, so when my car lurched to a park, he was already at my door, waiting for me to unlock it in a shower of bright spring blossoms. He opened it and sat down.

“Debbie,” he said immediately, “I have to tell you something.”

Oh no. I shut the car off. Not some horrible news. He never loved me. He found someone else. He cheated on me. All of the above. Or worse: he recently had a small cosmetic surgery. There was a complication. He had an infection, and was going to die! All of the above, again! My frantic mind dropped an atomic bomb of worst case scenarios. I was still sorting through the wreckage when he finally said, “I’m gay.”

He looked serious. Mouth drawn into a fine line, rather than his vague, seductive smile he always had. His head turned to me, eyes piercing, body facing away, as if he was about to open the door again and get out.

“Oh. Okay.” I breathed. My eyes wandered to the dash, to the window, to the pink blossoms blowing by in the wind. This, I had not found. Not in the vaporized remains within my mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you sooner, I just had to know for sure. We would touch and kiss, you’d be on top of me, and… I’d feel nothing. That’s how I knew.”

I’d feel nothing. Now that’s a shot in the heart.

I didn’t respond.

“You deserve someone who loves you. You’re beautiful, too beautiful. I should have told you sooner.”

We hugged and he climbed out of the car, and he was back inside in a moment. First the glass storm door, gold metal frame and painted glass. Then the heavy, wooden inner door. I heard the deep clunk of it shut, even from inside Bertha on the street.

I turned the key in the ignition. Bertha chugged back to life and wheeled me away.

I’d feel nothing.

Is that what I inspired in men? Nothingness?

Of course this was not my first relationship, simply the first real one. Or at least one I’d hoped would be real. I’d had a string of unhealthy relationships and equally unhealthy coping mechanisms, even before this sad gay ever came into the picture. He was just the latest in a string of dark-haired, soft spoken, catlike and seductive men that I’d gotten to know. Often at parties, thrown in some run-down mobile home on the lake, that everyone present was far too young to be at. How many of those parties had Bertha driven me home from? How many heartbreaks? But that’s besides the point. This sad gay wasn’t like the other men; he wasn’t peddling pills from his sling bag from the moldy couch of a trap house. He wasn’t interested in me because I could drink a Four Loko and still be good to drive. He was a friend, and he knew me as a friend; he hadn’t seen me drink or smoke. He’d seen my art, my drawings. Even the altar in my room, the offerings to my pagan gods. He wasn’t interested in Debbie, the party girl; this sad gay was interested in Debbie, the person.

Well, he knew that Debbie, the person, was a pagan witch. And he knew that Debbie, the person, was also anxious and emotional and impulsive. So what could Debbie do when this sad gay went and broke her heart? Curse his bloodline, of course. What else is there to be done?

So Bertha grumbled into my gravel driveway, where I parked her behind my sister’s red pickup. I ran inside, through the house, without a word to my parents who sat watching TV, and I slammed my door shut. No one asked questions.

I had already been frantically texting my best friend Nora on the way home. Her boyfriend was the sad gay’s best friend. I scoffed at that fact as I remembered it—they were probably gay together. Who else could he be gay with in this small town?

I plopped in front of my altar and composed a most-damning message to her:

OMG, you won’t believe it. I am so devastated. I am broken. My heart has been taken and shattered to a million pieces. Daniel intentionally led me on, for months! He was gay this whole time and didn’t tell me! I think he knew it. I think I was just a test. I thought he was a friend! I thought he was a good person! And to think, I was just an experiment to him. I’ve been dehumanized by the man I loved; I gave him everything and he chewed me up and spat me out. If I were you, I’d never speak to him again!

I slammed my phone down on the carpet next to me and set to work. My salt lamp was already lit. An incense stick sat in the holder beside it, ready for fire. On top of the white wood of my nightstand, my purple altar cloth was spread. Several candles rose in various heights about each other, and beside a thin black chord, a small and simple athame sat on the table.

I lit the incense with the same lighter I lit my joint with, before my shift waiting tables. I disposed of the offerings from several days ago; ground sage and cut basil, lavender buds, dripped wax, small coins. From the drawer of my nightstand, I produced a mason jar and my personal grimoire. It was brown leather, so thick and bulbous from watercolors and acrylics that it was nearly bursting open from the strap that kept it closed. I untied it and flipped through the pages, until I found my hex.

Within half an hour, it was done. The jar and all the contents of the spell were buried in my back yard, where our free range turkeys roamed. Just across the hills and through the forest, beyond the fences that kept the turkeys in, I could see Nora’s house. The lights were on. I walked over, cried on her shoulder, and together, we forgot about that sad gay, Daniel. Or at least tried to.

I actually forgot about the hex altogether, not long after. I moved away after a few years, to ride the roller-coaster of emotionally unavailable men as long as I could. I moved to the city. It wasn’t much longer after that I abandoned my altar, my spells and hexes and rituals. I stopped leaving my crystals on the windowsill to charge in the moonlight, because the moonlight was indistinguishable from the streetlights outside. Could streetlamps charge crystals? Oh, what did it matter. What had my spells and potions brought me, aside from disappointment after disappointment?

I’d forgotten about it all, altogether. I cast my old life aside when I moved away, when I met Vincent. He was like Daniel, like all the other guys; tall and skinny, gentle in his nature and feline in his movements, but with wiry muscles and long, curly dark hair. And a dark side—the men I like always had a dark side.

Listen, the point is, I forgot about it. I forgot about the hex, about Daniel, about the way he hurt me. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. Nora and her boyfriend were still together, married even. They were still friends with sad and gay Daniel. They said he was fine, that he just had an ‘identity crisis.’ I didn’t care; I was no longer angry. He had no sway on my life anymore. It’s not like I hurt him. Maybe the thought hadn’t crossed my mind that when he sat down in maw of Bertha, and he confessed to me his deepest secret, that it had perhaps been the first time he’d said it aloud to anyone, let alone himself.

Many years went by and I hardly gave a thought to Daniel. A thought to what might have become of him, after he closed Bertha’s door for the last time. It wasn’t until a decade later, when he showed up on my doorstep, soaking wet from a thrashing thunderstorm, that I remembered what he’d said. And I remembered what I did. And of course he asked, breathlessly, “Hey… do you remember that hex you put on me back in high school? Yeah, uh… how do you break that?”

I couldn’t answer. He looked pained, desperate. I couldn’t break his heart the same way he broke mine. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I never wrote that down in my grimoire.