It was spring and I could hear these evening birds and I took him by the hand into my canopy bed. He was so heavy and he said he didn’t want to hurt me and then I couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s not the first time for everything, you asshole,” I said, slapping him on the back. He was surprised, and it was the funniest thing I ever saw. That’s what I loved about being high, laughing my ass off.

“Come on, Russian,” I said.

“Dorothy,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Aren’t you a bad girl.”

“I’m not Dorothy,” I told him. “I’m the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“You’re fierce,” he whispered with a huge smile the next day when he saw me at school. “My wicked witch.” I winked at him and he smiled.

I didn’t bother telling Sergei that when I was little I saw a real witch who I was related to. Just after we built the house, I was on the front lawn with my parents. They were deciding whether to hire a new landscaping service. Then an old woman with frizzy hair on a horse and wagon came out of a little trail in the woods across the road. She stopped right in front of the house and gave us the evil eye. My mother ran over to talk to her. My father didn’t go anywhere near that shrivelled old lunatic who kept waving her arms at me and yelling “corruption, beware,” and stuff like that.

My father whispered it was my mother’s distant cousin who lived alone on the north side of the Mountain near the bay in an old house on the Flying Squirrel Road. Poor old Lucretia had troubles, he said. She had been in jail for a long time. It was the bad side of the family. It was a pity, he said. But even as a kid I knew he didn’t care about a crazy old person. My mother was wringing her hands together. The old lady went bumpity bump away over the road, staring at me the whole time. What a freaky bitch. I wasn’t scared of her and stuck out my tongue when my parents turned away. I knew she was a witch of some kind. A real witch.

We had this great thing all year, Sergei coming over and him doing whatever chores my father wanted done, and getting high and having sex in my bedroom until we were in the store and she came by, that girl. Lulu. What a stupid name. Sergei says it’s short for Lucille. Nicknames are for freaks. No one has ever called me anything but Isabella. Once a teacher called me Izzy and I stared at her until I thought I had frozen her to ice. “Isabella,” I said. “We don’t shorten it. Ever.” The teacher bit her lip. She never called me anything else again.

Lulu and Sergei never really went out, he said. He just really liked her but it was a couple of years ago. He had to do community service work at the senior citizens’ home as a part of his sentence for some crime he committed when he was fifteen, and she volunteered there, taking the old drooling people out for a bit of fresh air. He had to work in the gardens and so she’d go by pushing some old vegetable in a wheelchair, I bet winking her stupid eye at him while he killed all those weeds.