O.M. Goddess. My little house has spun around and landed in a glorious rush of Technicolor. I’m still processing.

Here’s the play-by-play from where I left off:

James gets out of his car and goes in the house. I get dressed and wash my hands in the outdoor shower behind the studio. Almost 11 months, to the day, since I’ve seen his face: Last August, right around my 17^th birthday, I helped him pack to go off-Island. It was so…intimate, then, touching his stuff like that. His awkward — embarrassed, really — smile of thanks had made me want to cry.

Last summer, James’s father was sick at their summer home, and James had come in from Seattle, where he’d moved a couple of years ago, to help out. But he couldn’t deal living with his parents, so my parents took him in. He and Mommy really hit it off as housemates, so well that I was big-time jealous of her, and frankly I think Daddy was even more jealous. James was a tragic young hero in our house, always worried about global warming and the “endless conflicts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism” and all the other -isms you can think of, no matter how bad off his father was.

As soon as I’m dressed I want to run as fast as possible into the house, to see him. But I haven’t had a decade of training at Island Children’s Theatre and Chilmark Yard dancers’ colony for nothing. So instead of acting like an immature bobblehead, I walk slowly, elegantly, the two hundred feet to the front door, imagining that James is watching each step through the tinted picture windows.

He’s not. Instead, he’s lounging in the kitchen with Mommy, his back to the running dishwasher, holding a freshly blended glass of wheat grass juice. His golden ponytail is a little longer than it was last year, plus now he’s grown this tiny, scrubby goatee that looks silly on his narrow face. Plus even that, he’s wearing a pair of glasses perched on his head like a middle-aged woman. He drops them onto his nose as I stroll nonchalantly into the kitchen and the aura of his sublime presence.

“Nice to see you, Xanna.” James bends way down and gives me this perfunctory peck on the cheekbone. For some reason I suspect that he’s kissed me for Mommy’s benefit only, but oh, his lips barely brushing my skin, his breath soft and fruit-flavored, and I don’t even care. I can smell him.

But after 10 seconds of pleasantries, James launches in on the Issue: “Emily’s been telling me how you got into Harvard,” he says. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, James,” I say blandly, thinking of how I can divert his attention from the Issue. “Actually, I’m just the Vineyard kid who wins a trip to Harvard every year. Plus I’m legacy on both sides. By the way, I’m really glad to see you, too.” I grab a glass from the cabinet and run some water from the filtered tap, so I can stand next to him. “How’s Seattle? How’s the job at Microsoft?” Get James away from the Issue. He might ask about my motives, and he’s about the last person on the planet who needs to know about them.

“They’re all fine. I don’t want to bore you with my work.” He frowns. “Xanna, Emily just told me you took a deferment, and you’re not going to Harvard until next fall. It’s not my business, but why wait a year? You’ve always been so academic! Xanna, my parents are really impressed with you. They said you’re one of the smartest kids they ever met. What are you going to do instead? Get a job on-Island?”

James takes things so damn literally. Maybe it’s a computer person thing, or maybe his profession plus his excruciating moral rectitude. But he has no sense of ambiguity. And pretty much no sense of humor either, now that I think about it.

I take a refined sip of water. “I have a lot of stuff going on here. I’m teaching this class at the dance studio…Mommy? Can you help me out here? James is looking at me like he thinks I’m crazy.”

Mommy plays with the beads tied at the ends of my hair. We’ve had this mother-and-daughter-with-the-same-long-black-curly-hair-wearing-juvenile-hair-ornaments pseudo-bonding thing going on this summer. “Jimmy, it’s not like she turned Harvard down! It’s only a year. We’ve always thought Susanna should make her own decisions. Besides, you know perfectly well that Skip and I aren’t Puritans. We hope that Susanna’s deferment wasn’t a mistake, but even if it were, Skip and I made plenty of mistakes when we were younger, and we’re doing fine! It’s no moral lapse to defer.

“Frankly, though, Skip and I were a little confused at first. But if Xanna wants to take some time off before college, who are we to question? Instead, we should be proud of her for being admitted to Harvard in the first place.” She puts her skinny tanned arm with the gold watch around my shoulder and squeezes.

I’ve officially had my fill of the Issue and feeling a little reckless to change the subject. “I don’t think the Island has much to recommend it currently, what with the wicked high day-tourist population. Two weeks ago we had these fat-ass people drive up to our house — up our driveway — on their rented motor scooters and ask us: ‘You have a “Private Property” sign on the road, do you know where any celebrities live?’ I was, like, ‘Hello? Losers, those two concepts are orthogonal...’ Actually, I told them that the Clintons were summering at the Kennedy compound, with Princess Diana as their special guest. And then I gave them directions to the West Tisbury dump.”

Silence.

“We’re going to be attending a big Democratic Party fundraiser in Edgartown this coming weekend and the Clintons will be there!” says Mommy, by way of conversation. “Jimmy, do you want to come with us?”

“Unlike you, Mommy, maybe James’s life does not revolve around other rich liberals wearing Bermuda shorts and getting drunk.”

“I’m not on-Island for fun,” James continues. (What did I tell you?) “The summer tenants will be here in a couple of weeks and I didn’t want to pay a handyman to check my own house, so I’m doing it myself. Also, I’ve got the Corolla from my mother, and when I’m done here I’m going to drive it cross-country, back to Puget Sound.”

“James has something to ask you, Xanna,” says Mommy.

James clears his throat. “Xanna, how would you like to drive out to Seattle with me?”

At the time, I didn’t consider that maybe James had been coached into asking me this question. Not that I’m considering it now, exactly, but I’ve had a couple more hours’ perspective on it. What if Mommy and Daddy had conned him into asking me so he could take me off their hands? No. I’m not even going to speculate.

But here’s me, squealing like the worshipful devotee that I am: “Go to Seattle with you, James? I can’t think of anything better!” And because stress makes people babyish, I look up at Mommy, feeling all young and desperate, pulling on her hand, practically. “Mommy, James is asking me to go to Seattle with him! What do you think?”

Mommy and James keep looking at one another, like they’re sending some oblique code through glances and blinks. I am sure they were sleeping together last summer and might be planning on it again.

“Why Jimmy, that’s a magnificent idea,” says Mommy finally. She glides over to the white vaulted staircase and calls up the stairs: “Skip! Where are you? James is going to take Susanna with him to Seattle! Skippie, get out of your greenhouse and come down here right now!”

James gives me a look that ordinarily I would associate with extreme distaste for my person. I ignore it.

“You know, James,” I say, 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,” says James, with tight lips.

“Well, James, this is a fine thing,” says Daddy, walking down the stairs. He’s wearing safari shorts with garden tools stuck in all the pockets, and his fingers are covered with loam.

He was a minor diplomat with the State Department, once, stationed in Jamaica. But now he’s a gardener with a trust fund. He so wins the Vineyard downward-mobility contest. They didn’t even think about filling out financial aid forms for me.

Anyway, I’m guessing that Daddy kept the dirt on his hands so he wouldn’t have to shake James’s. Skip doesn’t like him too much.

Daddy wipes his fingers on a hand towel. James holds his hands behind his back. “Greetings, James. 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. You guys went out of your way for me last summer, and it’s my duty to return the favor. But I thought Xanna would spend this school year working on-Island? I don’t want to take her away from that.”

“Stop talking about me as if I wasn’t there, please.”

Now that I think about it, James was dropping these heavy hints that he didn’t want to take me: He was mentioning the size of the Toyota vs. all the stuff he needed to pack into it; the amount of hard driving that had to be done; my plans for a job I arrived in Seattle, etc. But my parents were enthusiastic about the whole deal, and there were two of them and only one of James, and frankly, James is afraid of my father.

And then. Then they start questioning my spiritual beliefs:

“...It’s not that we disapprove of Xanna’s Paganism thing, but we think it’s getting a little out of control,” Daddy says.

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

“Do you belong to the witches’ Circle on the Island?” asks James. James is a gen-u-ine Pagan and one of the reasons I got interested in Wicca in the first place.

“The what on the Island?” I say, stupidly.

“Don’t call yourself a witch without joining a real Circle first. They don’t like little wannabes who get their ideas about Wicca from the World Wide Web.”

“We don’t have Internet out in Chilmark yet.”

James looks at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about.

I plunge further into stupidity: “I like Wiccans because they’re nice. They don’t make fun of me.”

“It’s not a matter of niceness,” says James. “It’s a matter of correctness. What ritual did you perform for the Solstice last month? What about a ritual for May Day?”

“I was, um, busy. Finals and stuff. So I, um, acknowledged their existence.”

“In any case,” Daddy puts in, “I’m not sure how I feel 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, 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 James. I’ll get a crappy job there. I don’t care.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Xanna?” asks Daddy, like he didn’t hear me the first time.

“You’re not listening to me. Yes!”

“And what does your mother say?”

“I’m not the one who encouraged her to stay on-Island, Skip.”

“How about you, James?” says Daddy. “We haven’t heard much from you. You’ll have to listen to Xanna’s chatter in the car for a week.”

James looks desperately uncomfortable, and noble, and handsome. “If Xanna wants to do it,” he says awkwardly. “I can’t put her up, but Emily’s asked Mollie to hold on to her at least until Xanna finds a job.”

Mollie? Who’s that? Never mind. I’ll ask later.

Mommy claps her hands together. Her mother-and-daughter-bonding juvenile hair beads bounce around her skinny brown shoulders. “Then it’s done!”

Everything is spinning. Maybe I’ll pee my pants or something.

“I’m only going to be here for a few days,” James says, sounding wretched. “I don’t think that’s enough time for you to get everything together. Is it, Xanna?”

“Please take her, Jimmy,” says Mommy.

Desperation makes you bold, and I am desperate: I deferred because I’m not mature enough to go to college and live in a dorm and interact with other kids and be independent. And any other excuse is a big fat lie. But my love for James is an even more pressing secret than that.

“Please take me to Seattle,” I say. “I want to go.”

Thanks for reading the latest installment of my first novel, The Celestial Virgin. I wrote it during the year that Sascha and I lived in Seattle after shutting down Deus Ex Machina Software, Inc.,

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You can also read The Celestial Virgin from the beginning.

— Sara

I was still naked when James Merriwether’s rusty blue Toyota plowed unsteadily up the sandy driveway to our house.

I was still standing — did I already say naked? — in the open doorway of my little dance studio, consecrating myself to the deities Artemis, Demeter, and Hecate, in James’s name.

Love incantations and whatnot work better in the buff. But to be precise I wasn’t 100% naked: I had sacred amulets festooned around my neck and two sticks of incense burning in my hands like leftover Fourth of July sparklers. I was right in the middle of his welcoming ritual and he showed up at the exact wrong moment and ruined it.

Goddess damn. This bodes wicked ill.

James Merriwether is 27 years old, too old for me for sure. But he has been the great aching love of my life since I started high school. He doesn’t know this. Yet.

While we’re at it, let me provide you with some data about Yours Truly: I will turn 18 years old on August 21, one month and eleven days from now. I’ve just graduated with the Very Highest Honors from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, which is not saying much when the region is an island seven miles off the Massachusetts coast and most of the people with houses there leave in the winter. I have lived my entire life on my parents’ mini-estate outside the town of Chilmark. I am an only child, a dancer and theatre kid, a self-imposed social outcast, and I follow the path of the Goddess. I would rather be admired than liked, which goes much further with adults, I’ve found, than other kids. I am five feet one half inch tall, hovering around 105 lbs., and everybody recognizes me from a distance because I have thick black curly hair that goes down almost to my waist.

I’m not a writer, either, but I journal obsessively because I have hardly anybody to talk to and I am screamingly bored. My little black leather-bound diary goes where I do.

James must have taken an earlier ferry to the Island than I’d expected. Yes, of course I want him to see me naked, just not under these circumstances. I plunged the incense sticks into the sand to snuff them out, ran into the studio, locked the door behind me, and crouched underneath the windowsill. I surreptitiously watched him get out of his car. Plus I had enough room to stick my fingers into myself if necessary. That necessity would be, if I were counting, something like Episode #2472 of “Xanna Daniels Tries Unsuccessfully to Get Her Rocks Off.” But, I figured, maybe the actual sight of my James, not just my pathetic fantasy of him, would do the trick.

Did I mention before how bored and desperate I am, in addition to being unbearably horny? Life moves very slowly in lovely Chilmark, otherwise known as “Up-Island,” even though it’s down at the bottom of the map. Life trickles like water torture on our three glowingly green, solar-powered acres, a sandy turnoff from Middle Road on an island where all the roads circle and meet again, like some cutesy labyrinth. It’s been stunningly blue, warm, and sunny here, with sweet-smelling sea breezes, for 22 straight days.

Of course, my desperation makes that little matter with the Harvard University Admissions Committee all the less explicable. And of course, stupidly, I’m hoping that Mommy hadn’t, and wouldn’t, tell James about it. Because James wouldn’t make a catastrophic mistake like I might be making, oh, no. James does everything right.

A Couple of Notes on James, and Me, and Sex.

Mr. and Mrs. Merriwether, James’s parents, were summer neighbors of ours for years. I saw James every summer and always thought he was so handsome and morally upright. But since I’ve gotten interested in sex, I’ve wanted, desperately, to lose my virginity to him.

Island boys call me a “dyke” because I don’t hook up with them. Or they say I’m wasting my “blow job lips” on like, well, nothing. But how can I even kiss boys I practically potty-trained with? Now I just tell them I’m saving myself for James, and I refuse even their invitations to go behind the Cumberland Farms convenience store for a cigarette.

I’m cheerfully heterosexual, thanks much. But would I lower myself to discuss anything about my private life with Island boys? No. I’d rather stay quiet and practice doing it to myself.

Signing off now. Will write more after I’ve had some contact with my Beloved.

Thanks for reading the latest installment of my first novel, The Celestial Virgin. I wrote it during the year that Sascha and I lived in Seattle after shutting down Deus Ex Machina Software, Inc.,

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You can also read The Celestial Virgin from the beginning.

— Sara

Start here — This is the start of The Celestial Virgin, my first novel.

8/22/1997
The day after my 18th birthday.
In which I discuss the strangest late night and early morning of my short life.

Just twelve hours ago it was 1am Friday and raining, outside a nightclub called The Shadowbox, somewhere near the intersection of 2nd and Pike in Seattle, Washington. I was huddled alone under The Shadowbox’s dripping maroon and black awning. Needly raindrops clung to my black leather jacket and my hair, which was now looking and feeling like heavy black topiary. Departing clubgoers jostled me from behind. All around me the late-night restaurants and clubs slammed their metal grates to the wet ground in coldhearted syncopation.

Never in my life had I felt so small, young, and alone. At barely five feet tall, feeling small and young is not an uncommon event, and feeling alone and abandoned is increasingly common too. How large and bleak the darkened high-rise office buildings, I observed; how cold the rainy night, even in August; and how fast the taxis were hailed and then disappearing down the one-way street as I stood frozen and dripping with self-pity.

Shit. I snuffled, wiped my nose with the back of my wet hand, and raised it to hail a taxi. I’m just a baby. I don’t belong in a big city. Everybody in Seattle hates me and wishes I wasn’t here...I can’t even pick up a goddamn taxi...

Finally, finally: A grungy black cab squealed to a stop in front of me. Rain trickled from a big white Egyptian-hieroglyph eye painted on the trunk. I ran for the back door and let myself in.

Someone had been smoking way, way too many cigarettes in here. And as I slammed the door behind me and crawled wetly to the middle of the back seat, I considered a cardinal rule of city survival: Make sure the cab you get into is legitimate. You fool, I lectured myself. You’re going to be dead in 15 minutes.

The driver was hidden behind a black hat, a military surplus beret from some unknown country. He was also playing Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” with the bass very much up: “I want to fuck you like an animal! I want to feel you from the inside!”

“Where’re you going, my lady?” he asked. “Where can my chariot take you?” SCREEEEEECH!

That’s not the sound of the taxi tearing away from the curb, although it really could be, because the driver of said taxi, a bombastic and oversexed individual who claims to be named Michael F. Dobyns and who has been my companion these last 12 hours, is a terrible, terrible driver and shouldn’t be allowed to operate a bicycle let alone be provided with a taxi medallion. In fact, the screeching noise is me putting on my narrative emergency brakes because, trust me, you have no idea what’s going on. And at this point I may have no idea what’s going on either.

By the way, people call me Xanna, but my legal name is Susanna Claire Daniels. Now. Let me take you back in time, to about six weeks ago, when I believed I was the princess of the world and the heroine of my own personal erotic paranormal romance. Ha. Ha ha ha.

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