Page 6 of Under Your Spell

She passes the paper to Lil, who reads the next line: ‘We also ask that you curse our enemy. A man who has wronged our beloved sister.’

‘Leonard,’ Serena snarls, inserting his name here instead of the name written on the paper. The one I definitely don’t want to think about.

‘Yeah,’ I nod, cranking the cork out of a bottle of red wine and slopping it into my mug. ‘Len, we curse you!’

Lil hands the paper back to Serena. ‘Leonard, we curse you! May you never satisfy another woman sexually, and may you get some sort of extremely itchy rash down there,’ she cries.

‘It does not say that!’ I hiss, horrified.

Serena holds out the paper to me and I see the words written there in her handwriting.

‘God, we were savage,’ Lil says sunnily.

‘Poor Jenny,’ I murmur. Serena hands the paper to me and I read the next line, which is in my handwriting. ‘May you learn the error of your ways and feel guilty forever for how you treated me.’ I feel a dip in my stomach as I think about the girl I was when I wrote that. ‘Hmmm, a bit earnest, maybe.’

‘It’s not earnest,’ Lil jumps in. ‘It’s true! Len should feel guilty forever just like…’ She catches Serena’s glower and cuts herself off, before she brings up the ex we never mention. ‘But the rash thing, too,’ she says, flustered. ‘Definitely the rash thing.’

With a nod, Serena plucks one of the candles from the pizza and throws it into the pan of leaves. The three of us cheer, and Serena cackles again.

‘Now the wishes,’ I say, looking at the sheet of paper.

‘Three wishes for Clemmie,’ Lil says. ‘To heal her heartbreak.’

Serena immediately snatches another candle and throws it in the pan. ‘Hot sex!’

‘You didn’t even need to look at the spell,’ Lil says admiringly.

‘I remember it well.’ Serena smirks. ‘Just what she needs. I don’t know if it helped, Clem, but it certainly came true for me. A lot.’

‘I remember pointing out that you could have given it a bit more thought at the time,’ I say.

‘That’s your problem, Clemmie,’ Serena exhales wearily. ‘Too much thinking, not enough doing, and by doing I mean…’

‘We all know what you mean.’ I roll my eyes.

‘You haven’t been with anyone but Leonard for years,’ Serena shudders. ‘Frankly, I can’t imagine anything worse.’

‘It would be good to really embrace your sexuality,’ Lil says more diplomatically.

‘I embrace my sexuality,’ I huff.

My sisters are suspiciously silent.

‘Just put yourself out there a bit,’ Lil pipes up in the end.

‘Casual sex, Clemmie… it’s great and you’ve never had any,’ Serena says.

‘There was Tom at uni,’ I say indignantly. ‘That was casual.’

‘You were together for six months. It was only casual in that you found out he was shagging half the drama society.’ Serena’s tone is withering.

That’s not exactly true. It was casual for me because I was still not over the aforementioned very devastating breakup and therefore not really invested in Tom.

‘I’m just saying a one-night stand would do you the world of good,’ my sister continues.

‘I could do something casual,’ I insist. ‘But I’m not using any apps.’ Last time I was single, Serena signed me up for all of them and made a profile describing me as ‘A curvy redhead with a mind for business and a bod for sin’, incorrectly assuming that this would attract men who could quote Working Girl (good), rather than a bunch of massive pervs who thought I’d be instantly enamoured by pictures of their penises (bad). ‘Thank God I’m a lesbian,’ Serena had said by way of apology.

Now she rolls her eyes. ‘How are you going to find someone to have sex with otherwise? You’re basically a hermit. You hang out in libraries and the only men you interact with have been dead for eight hundred years.’