HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

she’s, like, chronically ugly.”
    â€œShe isn’t a friggin’ fairy-tale character,” Burak said. “She’s a supernatural phenomenon.”
    â€œHell yeah she is. Witches only appear in fairy tales. So she’s a fairy-tale character.”
    â€œDafuq? What stone did your mother get knocked up under? That still doesn’t make her a fairy-tale character. They’re not real, anyway.”
    â€œSo what if Little Red Riding Hood appeared in front of you?” Justin said with a gravity that couldn’t be denied, let alone ridiculed. “Would she suddenly be a supernatural phenomenon? Or a fairy-tale character?”
    â€œNo, just a chick with a sick Kotex fetish,” Jaydon said.
    Burak snorted his cappuccino all over his shirt and Lawrence almost laughed himself into a coma. A tad too much credit, Tyler thought. “Aw, fuck!” Burak dabbed the stain with a stack of napkins. “Dude, you’re sick.”
    â€œBy the way,” Lawrence said after he got himself back under control, “the Blair Witch wasn’t a fairy-tale character, either.”
    That was an argument Justin couldn’t refute, and it more or less ended the debate.
    A car approached St. Mary’s Church. The elderly volunteers at the fountain stuck their necks out and looked at it, but the car stopped at the roadblock and turned left. The ladies relaxed. Probably someone from town. If any Outsiders had been spotted, the old ladies would already have gathered around Gramma to walk with her, busily chattering among themselves. And if she stopped, Tyler knew (and this, more than anything else, was what truly made him ashamed of being a Black Spring boy), they’d huddle around her and start practicing church hymns like a kind of Glee for the near dead. The deeper meaning behind this was beyond him, but it was a brilliant example of reverse psychology: No one would ever notice the gaunt women with the chains standing in their midst if they didn’t know she was there already. And no one could stomach an old folks’ choir long enough to find out.
    The woman with the sewn-shut eyes went past the patio right in front of them and advanced to the square, watched closely by the ladies at the fountain. Tyler turned the GoPro. It was essential for the success of their experiment that no Outsiders be there. Just as he was about to bask in the luck of their good fortune, Sue came out and stood in the doorway as if suddenly struck by this public-spirited and hitherto unseen sense of responsibility for her underage guests.
    â€œGot any pesticide?” Jaydon asked.
    Sue laughed and said, “If that worked, we would have tried it long ago, Jaydon,” not realizing that it was her they needed it for, not the other witch. But Burak got the hint; he walked up to her with some lame excuse about planning his work schedule, and they both went inside together.
    Justin grinned. “That woman would let you screw her even sideways, Jaydon.”
    â€œFuck off.”
    â€œGuys, shut up,” Tyler said. “It’s gonna happen.” He took the GoPro out from under the menu and shielded it with his body from the security cam that was mounted on The Point to Point Inn’s façade across the intersection. To their hilarity, the camera was still hanging at a low, crooked angle, just as Jaydon had left it last night after hitting it with a long stick. Jaydon was like a living ordnance map when it came to the square and its surroundings, since he and his mom lived behind the butcher shop on the other side. He had said there were two other cameras that had a view of the lamppost on the eastern side of the cemetery. One was located in the bushes at the highest corner of Temple Hill, which they had neutralized by hanging a pine branch in front of it. The second camera was inaccessible. It was hidden in a window casing of Crystal Meth Church, but they had decided there were too many