From the day Laurie arrived at the small liberal arts college, a freshman from Evanston, Illinois, she’d been hearing about the Magic Men.

This upstate New York school, with its sandstone buildings and glass-domed gymnasium, seemed dull so far: pale-skinned blondes wherever you looked, no different from the people Laurie had gone to high school with. Week two, things started to look up. In her drama class, Laurie had been paired with a junior named Helen, and after their improv skit got laughs even from the prof, Laurie hoped things might get a little more interesting.

A week before leaving for school, Laurie had massaged a deep, shocking—just to her parents—purple into her long, sooty-blond hair. Yet Helen’s hair drew greater wows: magnificently bushy it was, and cauldron black. Helen was impressive to Laurie in other ways, too. She was big: big chest, big butt, big limbs, big personality. She wore spaghetti-strap leotard tops that revealed her booming cleavage. An impressive history of cutting—self-harming, as the counselors liked to call it—ran up and down the inside of her left arm. Laurie had heard about cutting. Who hadn’t? No one she knew would have been brave enough. Helen’s tidy line of cuts frightened Laurie. Yet she found herself wondering if they had been Helen’s way of keeping some sort of score.

It was Helen who revealed some specifics about the Magic Men, though what she said was all over the place. Helen didn’t filter the stories. She didn’t try to make them add up. The Magic Men lived in a stone house off campus that was a fraternity. No, it wasn’t a fraternity, but it had been one, until the Magic Men got kicked out of the chapter. Twelve guys lived there. Not so—there were six. No—there was only one, a sort of Erlking who ruled from under the mountain. Females were only allowed in the stone house between midnight and six in the morning. Females were never allowed in the stone house by rule, but it was always full of them. The Magic Men made a potion that changed you. “It’s magic,” Helen said. “It makes your virginity disappear.” (Laurie was not a virgin, not really.) The stone house was haunted. The basement. Helen said it again more ominously: the basement. There were parties all the time. All the first-year girls wanted to go to the parties. They were all afraid to go and none did. A very tall Black man who called himself Satan stood at the door and denied entrance to all but the most beautiful. Those who entered were forced—forced—to drink potion.

By the end of week three, Laurie had become half obsessed with the Magic Men. One day after drama class, she and Helen were walking across the groomed lawn of the main quad when Helen pointed over toward the bell tower. “That’s one,” she said. “That’s one of them there.”

The guy Helen’s finger aimed at had his foot on the step of the picturesque chapel, as if he were giving a lecture on the history of the stained-glass windows that flanked the front door. He was small with a bushy beard—Laurie flashed on the Seven Dwarfs. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. But he wasn’t that small. Laurie recognized him. The bushy-bearded guy was in her American lit class. He had made a point about Hawthorne that morning that Laurie didn’t really get.

“You could totally crush him,” Laurie said to Helen. In her cowboy boots, Helen was 5’10” to Laurie’s 5’6” in flats.

“Of course I could,” Helen said. She had her books in a sack on her back, and the straps pulled her T-shirt so tight across her chest that Laurie could see the lace pattern of her bra through the fabric. Helen’s skin was translucent white and so smooth, it seemed unlikely she’d ever had a blemish. Though with the arm-cuttings, she’d made a few of her own. The sun came out of a cloud and reddened Helen’s cheeks.

“Have you ever used your karate on anyone?” Laurie asked.

Helen laughed. “Not lately. I told you. And if I’m late for Spanish. Again—”

“Okay, go, go.”

Laurie watched Helen jog around other students, her body—the word actually fit—majestic. Helen worked out and had a brown belt in Taekwondo. She’d grown up in Lake Placid, an hour from the college. Apparently, she’d had a choice between training for the Olympic luge and going to school. Laurie hadn’t remembered what luge was exactly, and Helen had explained that it was basically tobogganing for maniacs.

That was a Tuesday. On Thursday, after class, Laurie went up to the Magic Man. “Nick,” she said: she had learned that was his name. He did not respond. “Nick!”

He looked at her, and it was as though he was looking at nothing else, thinking of nothing else. He had, for some reason, taken off his shoes during class, and he was standing there in blue-and-white striped socks. Without his shoes, he was almost ridiculously short—heigh-ho, heigh-ho—an inch shorter than Laurie.

“Aren’t you Nick?”

“My mother calls me that,” he said. “My last name’s Dadinski. Everybody calls me Daddy—except my mom.”

“They call him Big Daddy.” Another guy had materialized beside Nick. This guy was tall and lanky, Aryan-looking. It appeared he’d been born in a swimming pool.

“Big Daddy?” Laurie gave her best skeptical look.

“There’s a Little Daddy at the house,” said Nick. “Bet you can guess what he looks like.”

The house. The stone house. They were talking about it.

“Can I come?” asked Laurie. Daddy gave a gentle mock leer.

“Can you come?” Nick asked. “There are a lot of sketchy answers to a question like that.”

“Can I?

“If you can,” Daddy said, “you can.”

“How will I get in?”

Daddy put two fingers to his lips and tenderly kissed them. He reached forward and touched Laurie in the middle of the forehead. “That should do it,” he said. “If Satan can’t see it at the door right away, tell him to use the magic light.”

“Tonight?”

“Any night.” Daddy slid into a pair of shoes with broken backs and went off with the nautical Aryan.

Laurie texted Helen to tell her they’d been invited to the stone house. “When?” Helen asked, which Laurie thought was weird. “Tonight! As soon as possible,” Laurie answered.

Thursday night, Helen and Laurie had tryouts for a play. Friday night, Helen texted that she didn’t feel up to the stone house. Laurie was let down, but she used the time to write her first anthropology paper. When Saturday night came, Laurie wasn’t taking chances. She showed up at the off-campus house that Helen shared with two carpenters, grads of the college who, Helen had told Laurie, rented rooms to female undergraduates so they’d have a steady stream of girls to date. Helen had apparently dated both, even though the semester had barely begun. “Nice guys,” she’d said. “No, really they are,” she added, as though Laurie had given Helen a skeptical look. If Laurie had given Helen a skeptical look, she hadn’t meant to. Laurie had a 16-year-old brother who was a sweetheart, everyone said, but only a sister would know if it was really true and, as it happened, it was. It had never occurred to Laurie to doubt that most guys were nice guys. Laurie was beginning to understand that there were tons of girls, girls like Helen, who assumed otherwise.

Unfamiliar electronic music floated from the upstairs bedroom of Helen’s house. The front door was unlocked, and Laurie bounded up the stairs. Inside, the wide-open windows in Helen’s room invited a cool October wind to swirl. The walls were decorated with severe pencil drawings of ordinary objects—bowls of fruit, vases, candlesticks—sketched, presumably by Helen, on huge sheets of paper that flapped noisily in the cross-breeze.

“Hi there,” Laurie said.

“Look at this?” Helen answered and pivoted her computer toward Laurie as though she’d been expecting her.

What Helen showed Laurie on the computer was bizarre.

“Play it again,” Laurie said. She needed time to take it in. It appeared that Helen had filmed herself shaving her face, as if shaving a beard of foam from a female face were the most seductive act imaginable. The strange, awful part was that after each stroke of the razor, Helen opened her mouth wide and licked it as though the razor head was a delicious lollipop.

“Oh my god,” Laurie said. “How did you not totally cut yourself? Let me see inside your mouth.”

Helen giggled and opened her mouth for Laurie to inspect. Everything looked fine inside.

“There wasn’t actually a blade in the razor, you idiot—it just looks as though there is. It’s the point. What’s happening onscreen is determined by our expectations. Besides,” she added, “no sharp-sharps allowed in proximity to you know who.”

“It’s the electronic background music—it’s so creepy. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Of course I am. Do you like the video? I just posted it, and it’s getting tons of attention. It’s probably going in my portfolio for grad school.”

Laurie wasn’t sure whether she liked Helen’s video, but she decided that discussing Helen’s portfolio right now might keep them from getting to the stone house. She said she thought the shaving video was dope.

“Dope? I’m not going with you to the stone house if you use words like that,” Helen said, but she said it mildly. Laurie blushed pink. It was the second time Helen had schooled Laurie on a word she wasn’t to use. The word bitch had been the first. According to Helen, sorority girls at the college called each other bitch, like, all the time. Hearing certain kinds of white girls copycat an insult because they thought it was cool made Helen want to turn them upside down in pairs, hold them by the ankles, and hit their heads together. Laurie didn’t doubt that Helen could pull this off if she wanted to.

“What are you going...

The American Scholar

Episodes

Ho Ho Horror

Kinship and Contradictions

Magic Men

Aging Out

My Cousin Manya