All Redheads Think They’re Evil

By Rebecca van Laer

Almost immediately, Emma noticed the girl in the transparent pink dress standing next to the champagne tower, her red bra completely visible underneath frothy frills and folds. Emma snuck one glance as her boyfriend, Leonard, helped her out of her coat, then another as they hugged their hosts, Shelly and Adrienne. The e-vites had required cocktail attire, and glancing around the apartment, everyone else had taken this to mean black. With her copper-red curls piled high on her head, the girl by the tower looked like the Strawberry Shortcake dolls Emma played with as a child, utterly out of place.

Emma exclaimed “Happy New Year” and told their hosts that they looked great, that it was a thrill they’d finally moved back from Boston. Then, Shelly took the couple on a brief tour of the new co-op, introducing them to few other guests—mostly Adrienne’s friends from college—while pointing out the new sectional and the teak dining table, each piece almost as large as the living room of the apartment Shelly and Emma once shared. It was an intimate affair, but it felt even smaller once Leonard suggested they sit on the bench beneath the window that looked out on the park. Shelly pulled up a chair, and through their first two mezcal Manhattans, they talked like that together about their hopes for the coming year while Emma kept one eye on the clump of revelers in the kitchen, looking for a flash of pink.

Shelly was hoping to renovate the guest bathroom, she told them. And maybe they’d think about having a baby—whether to buy sperm or ask a friend, all those questions—although that was a lot to consider right after the move.

Leonard was hoping to get a promotion.

Emma had wanted to start a full-time job this time last year, and that hadn’t turned out so well. Now, her boss made her feel terrible, and she spent her time off watching Netflix rather than making art. She was done asking for material things, maybe, she said. She just wanted to feel less anxious about the life she already had.

Shelly asked for the latest update about the bad boss. She was shocked to hear that Emma had been scolded over dry cleaner delays and “sent from my iPhone” email signatures. 

Emma was already overqualified to be an executive assistant; why did she put up with it? Shelly knew, she knew, it was for the health insurance, and since Emma had it now, maybe she could at least see a psychiatrist who could help with the stress. “Zoloft saved me,” Shelly told her for the thousandth time. As Leonard started talking about his own history with Adderall, Prozac, Abilify—also for the thousandth time—the girl in the pink dress sat down on the floor between the sofa and the window, spreading her garment out like a Christmas tree skirt. A man with a black turtleneck and little round glasses joined her on its border. She got out a deck of cards, and Emma recognized the package.

“How did you get off them?” Shelly was asking Leonard.

“Vipassana meditation,” he told her, and then they were onto that, another method for accepting that life would always be miserable, while the redhead shuffled the cards. Emma stood up from the window seat and walked towards the woman just as she turned an oracle card over and told the man, “Cry.”

He chuckled.

“No laughing! Cry. Letting go is your theme for the year. My recommendation for you would be to masturbate and cry. That can be a powerful way to grieve a lost love.”

Emma’s sheath dress was too tight to sit in, so she bent her knees and leaned over at the waist. “Are you doing readings?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m trying to help midwife my friend here through a breakup. You should join us.” She patted the patch of pink fabric to her left. Emma lowered herself the rest of the way to the floor, sticking her legs straight out in front of her. The two women inspected each other. Emma’s waves were several shades darker than the other’s bright curls; her eyes were brown where the other’s were blue. Finally, the copper-haired oracle introduced herself—“I’m Heidi”—and grabbed Emma’s hand, her touch transmitting a quick static shock. 

Emma shivered and blinked. For a second, the apartment went quiet. Everything receded besides Heidi’s sparkling eyes, which rippled from cobalt to teal like the surface of a river. Emma could almost hear the sound of running water. To clear her head, she blinked again, and the world came back, the noise came back, chatter and music and shattering glass, someone yelping “oh shit.” The man in the black turtleneck was getting up from the floor. “Nice to meet you,” he said, and Emma gave a little wave in parting. Had he told her his name? Was she already drunk? She took a deep breath to steady herself. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I just got a little shock.”

“Sorry, I do that.” Heidi gave a sly smile, then asked Emma if she had a theme for the coming year.

She exhaled again, tilted her head. “Well, I usually choose a word. I’m thinking maybe possibility?”

“A word is a good place to start,” Heidi said. “But if you really want to manifest your desires, you’ll need to get a lot more specific than that.”

“What’s yours?”

“Last year was ‘Thirty-Four: Divine Amour.’” But before she could explain, Leonard and Shelly interrupted. Having been left without a common link, they’d walked over to ask Emma if she wanted another drink. She offered up her empty glass to Leonard, who dutifully took it. After handing off hers, too, Shelly sat down on the other side of Heidi’s skirt and oracle cards. “What are we doing?” She asked.

“Manifesting,” Heidi said. “Do you have any hopes for the new year?”

Shelly repeated her desires—she definitely planned to remodel the bathroom, and she possibly wanted to get pregnant, but there were so many doubts about finding the right donor, negotiating a contract, and going through the implantation procedure.

“Right. Well, you need to do the bathroom first, or you’ll never get clear,” Heidi said.

“Why?”

“You need to free up the literal space in your home for new life to take root. The remodel will create room in your heart, and then, your heart will guide you to the right answers. The remodel isn’t just to your bathroom, it’s to yourself.”

“Of course.” 

“Let’s bless her,” Heidi said just as Leonard sat down with the cocktails. “In my coven, we put the intention out into the universe, and then we say, ‘and so shall it be.’”

Emma was a little disappointed by the commonplace incantation, but some rituals were popular because they worked. She grabbed Leonard and Shelly’s hands, and then Heidi spoke the wish aloud. “May Shelly’s bathroom remodel purify the physical and mental space to make room for the next step forward in family planning.”

“And so shall it be,” the group said, for the most part. Emma wasn’t sure Leonard had actually participated.

“Uh, can I ask a question?” He scratched his nose. “You mentioned your coven. Do you identify as a witch?”

“Absolutely,” Heidi said.

“And do you like, worship Satan?”

Emma felt embarrassed for him and for herself. “Of course not,” she scolded him.

“No, no, I don’t mind the question,” Heidi said, patting Emma’s stockinged knee. She felt another jolt of thrill at the contact. “While some witches do choose to call on those darker energies, I work with light.” And then, she started explaining ‘Divine Amour’ in more detail. Exactly a year ago tomorrow, she’d turned thirty-four. Yes, she was a New Year’s baby, and most people were surprised to find out she was a Capricorn, but she was obviously a Pisces rising. In any case, she’d hosted a party where all her friends dressed as angels to celebrate ‘Thirty-Four: Divine Amour.’ At first, the theme had seemed almost too cheesy. A rhyme? But it was a message from the universe that she needed to love every part of herself—to stop seeing herself as evil, as dirty, as anything less than a perfect manifestation of goddess energy.

“What’s your theme for this year?” Shelly asked her.

“I’m not sure yet. I’m hoping it will come to me by midnight. Until then, I’ll try to be of service. The fairy granting other people’s wishes. Who’s next?” 

Emma was disappointed when she looked right at Leonard, who tried to demur: “Oh, no, I’m good.”

“But you were just talking about wanting a promotion!” Shelly reminded him.

As he tilted his head back and forth, his strawberry blonde hair fell across his brow. Emma knew this gesture was meant to look like consideration, but it was actually a screen for politeness.

Heidi saw it and asked him to dig deeper. “So you want a promotion. But what about it? More power? More money? More recognition from others?” 

Emma wanted to push him on, to make him play the game, even to speak for him, but Heidi told him, “Take your time.” And after a minute of silence, Emma could see his expression shift from faux-interest to genuine concentration. His smile fell, and he bit his bottom lip, shifted his jaw back and forth. While he thought, Shelly tried to whisper to Emma, asking about her Christmas. She was pretty drunk now, so it was a loud whisper, and Heidi leaned forward to scold her. “Excuse me. Let’s give Leonard space to think. We need to honor the work.”

Shelly nodded her head theatrically. “So sorry,” she said, slurring a little, “my apologies.” Emma smiled and looked sideways at her friend, subtly raising her eyebrows. They both knew this kind of person—someone who has to be the center of attention. And what a center Heidi was; she had managed to get even Leonard interested if not on-board. He told the group that it wasn’t about the money or the power. Rather, he had long felt he had to make it professionally before he could give any time to his hobbies. He and Emma had met in a ceramics class two years prior. He’d been working on a series of miniatures—foods and tools, mostly. But he’d only fired a handful of the pieces, and since then, he hadn’t done anything creative. As a kid, he’d loved to draw, but now he felt there could be no room for his creative side to express itself ever again until he had realized personal success.

Heidi nodded her head and thanked him for sharing and asked why, even in art, he focused on making something small.

“I just thought it was cute,” Leonard said. 

“Do you mind if I draw a card?”

Leonard shrugged, and Heidi turned over FEAR, which showed a skeleton reaching out across a cloud. “Does that speak to you?” She asked.

“Fear’s what will kill you, I guess it says.”

“I personally think it means that fear is an illusion,” Heidi explained. “The whole thing is that it can’t. What makes you afraid of drawing? Of embracing the child within?”

“I don’t know if I’m afraid.” He had all but broken the spell. “I just don’t have time.”

“Maybe you need to think on the card some more to see how it speaks to you. Do you want to take a picture?”

“I’m good.”

“Should we bless your art, then?”

“Sure.”

And then she mandated his theme for the year—to create with a child’s innocence—and the group blessed it, so shall it be.

Emma was next in the circle, and she didn’t want to echo Leonard with her intention to ‘work on anxiety’ or ‘make art again.’ She aimed for something a bit grander: “I want to stop believing in lack and scarcity,” she told Heidi. “I want to cultivate abundance.”

Heidi smiled and nodded. “It’s so hard to believe that we can truly have everything we desire. But we can.”

“How, though?”

This time, Heidi drew ASK, a drawing of a wide-open eye or third eye. Emma, unlike Leonard, took a photo immediately. She added it to her Instagram stories, looking into her phone and feeling a mixture of dread and disappointment. She had asked the universe for a job and a partner, all the things she was supposed to desire, did desire, but she couldn’t help but feel that she’d somehow been off the mark in her requests. Heidi didn’t ask any questions or give her the chance to elaborate. When she looked up, the group had already joined hands. They blessed Heidi’s request that Emma receive from the universe all that she had the courage to ask for. 

Shelly had been impatient, tapping her finger on the hardwood floor through all of Emma’s session. Now, the readings concluded, she sprang up. “I need to get back to my hostessing duties,” she said. Emma passed Leonard her glass, and he headed off behind Shelly. Now on the floor alone with Heidi, Emma felt a single tear fall down her face. She could feel Heidi looking at her, but she kept her eyes on the ground, where Heidi was rifling through the folds of her dress. Apparently, it had pockets.

“Here,” she said, holding out a bag of mushrooms.

“I don’t know.”

“Please. It’s medicine.”

So she took a single cap and chewed it up as another tear fell.

“What is it?” Heidi said. “Hey. Look at me.”

Emma raised her eyes to the other woman’s, now sky blue and bright. “When it comes to asking, I feel blocked. Like I can’t request what I really want.”

“What stops you?”

“Maybe I feel like I don’t deserve those things.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I feel like there’s something wrong with me.”

“Well, you know all redheads think they’re evil.”

“Is that true?” Emma’s red hair was much darker than Heidi’s or Leonard’s, almost brown in the dim light of the apartment, but the ridge of freckles across her nose would always out her to other discerning redheads.

“Yes,” Heidi grabbed Emma’s hand. “Since the Middle Ages, the genetic rarity of red hair has been associated with evil, just like left handedness. We don’t think of it consciously now, but our culture is steeped in it. I’m here to tell you tonight that we are not evil. We are divine.”

The two hugged a tight, hard hug, and Emma felt both embarrassed at how vulnerable she’d been and in awe of the woman beside her. Heidi had complete confidence in everything she said and did—and why wouldn’t she? She was gorgeous, she was magnetic, she could get other people to believe her, too. This was a kind of lunacy, but the kind that Emma could love. But, their hug concluded, it was clearly time to rejoin the fray. Most of the guests were clustered around the champagne tower, the cheese board, the liquor cart. Emma stood up, wiped her eyes, and joined Leonard and the man in the black turtleneck in a conversation about the stock market. Happily, it was just a few minutes before Shelly whisked Emma into the second bedroom to have a longer conversation about her job.

“Seriously,” Shelly said, “If you’re worried about money, why don’t you just move in with Leonard?”

“I’m just not sure I’m ready for that.”

“But aren’t you sick of living with roommates?”

“God. Duh. But at least I know I could pay the rent for a few months if I got fired. It would be so much worse if I had to split it with Leonard in his apartment. Do you know what he pays?”

“You don’t have to split it 50/50, you know. Adrienne and I do 60/40, and she’s going to pay the co-op fees for the first year.”

“Yeah, but you guys are married.”

“Don’t you want to be?”

“I never pictured getting married to a man.”

Shelly laughed. “Fair enough. But you don’t really want to start dating again, do you?”

“God, no. No. I would only leave him if something better just naturally came along.”

“And that’s a good enough reason to live with two people in their twenties and put up with an abusive boss?”

“That’s not the reason,” Emma said. “I’d probably move in with him if he offered again, alright? But we haven’t talked about it since I renewed my lease in August. I don’t think he even thinks it’s on the table.”

“A lot has changed since August,” Shelly said.

And it had, in a sense. Not as much as it had for Shelly, who had once been a freelance graphic designer and was now a partner in a Manhattan co-op and a full-time employee of her mother-in-law’s magazine. Or perhaps it had changed just as much but in the opposite direction. Emma had wanted a ‘normal’ job so badly a year before. It was time to get health insurance and a 401k, she had thought; it was time to plan for the future. But what she would give to return to her gig as a charter school art teacher. She had tried to get the job back, actually, after the first time she’d cried at her new office, but the budget for the position had already been eliminated.

Suddenly, though, all of that seemed beside the point, not even worth talking about. Just like Heidi had said, she deserved more—she deserved whatever she wanted. There was nothing wrong with her, nothing to be ashamed of, no good reason why she should suffer the abuse, no good reason why she couldn’t quit and look for something new, with or without Leonard’s help.

“On another note, what’s up with Heidi?” She asked her friend.

“Who?”

“The redhead.”

“Oh my God, right. What a trip. I guess she went to college with Adrienne? I’ll have to ask if she was always like this.”

“You don’t get that mystical overnight.” 

Shelly giggled. “You can if you shop at the right botanica.”

When Emma emerged back into the living room, Leonard and Heidi were together on the couch, very clearly exchanging phone numbers. As Emma approached, the other woman stood up and asked her, “Are you feeling good?” 

“I don’t know,” she said, and she didn’t.

“Well, you will soon enough.” Then, she gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as if they were the best of friends.

Emma sat down next to her boyfriend and asked what that was about.

“She said that I’m her other half.”

Emma started to laugh and laugh. Leonard was a FinTech professional in a suit and tie, and Heidi was a manic pixie dream girl. What could they possibly have in common?

“Like her soul mate?”

“Sort of.” Leonard tried to retell Heidi’s story. She was a spoken word performer, she had told him, and she’d come up with an entire piece based on a strange experience she had in a motel room in Hollywood. She’d been on a film shoot—yes, she was an actress too, apparently—and they’d put her up in the dingiest place. She was having insomnia, thanks to the malevolent energies in the room. It was clear a prior guest had suffered there, but of course someone has cried in just about every motel room on earth. In any case, the only way she could fall asleep was by masturbating. She told Leonard that she “wanted to combat darkness with pleasure.” And, late at night, using her vibrator right across from the mirror, she’d seen an apparition in the mirror. It had been a man, a thin redheaded man who’d looked at her out from the other side and made it known that he was the one who was fucking her; she was no longer fucking herself. She’d had a life-quaking orgasm. Afterward, she lay right back on the bed and fell asleep. But in her dreams, it had become clear that the figure wasn’t a ghost. It was another part of herself, one that she heretofore hadn’t listened to or recognized. His name was Leo, and he was an artist. As Leonard wrapped up the tale, he grinned and shook his head.

Emma could barely believe it. She glanced into the room, looking for the pink dress. “That’s the most bizarre come-on I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, no,” Leonard told her. “She wasn’t flirting. She’s a lesbian.” 

“She just casually told you she had a sex dream about you for no reason?”

“She actually told me that it was a relief to find me, because now that she knew that she truly had a twin, she didn’t have to worry about finding a way to let Leo express himself.”

Despite his eye rolls, the real Leonard was clearly delighted, and Emma saw again that Heidi was the sort of person who found a way to seduce everyone. “So why did she want your phone number?”

“She said she wanted to see my miniatures.”

Midnight was fast approaching. Adrienne poured champagne into the top cup of the tower, and it streamed into the glasses row by row, getting the rim of each just a bit wet. The guests grasped them with sticky fingers, and Emma approached their host.

“How do you know Heidi?” She whispered to Adrienne.

“We used to date,” Adrienne said. “She’s just here looking for a new benefactor.”

Shelly had gotten the projector going, and now the blank wall across from their sectional had a low-resolution ball-drop underway. Emma shimmied past the other guests back towards Leonard, once again in the corner by the window. She held his hand and the revelers counted down three, two, one. Then came the clinking and kissing. Leonard kept his mouth clasped to hers, going in for kiss after kiss as she tried to pull away, probing her mouth as if they had something to prove to the other guests. She took a step back and gave him a smile before scanning the room for Heidi. Who had she kissed?

She was by the door putting on a huge mink coat, but she made eye contact with Emma and walked back over.

“It was so nice to meet you two. And before I leave, can I get a picture with Leo?”

Emma took her phone, which had a selfie as the background. In it, Heidi was naked inside a giant seashell—was it a prop or photoshopped? Her bare flesh was dotted by apps. Emma snapped half a dozen photos of her boyfriend next to his supposed other half.

“I’ll text them to you,” Heidi told Leonard, and then she hugged them both. “Our paths will cross again,” she whispered in Emma’s ear.

Emma and Leonard stayed for another hour. He drank a martini, and she found a bottle of coconut water at the back of the fridge. The guests had begun to dance in the living room, 

Rihanna and Robyn playing from the small stereo system. People were drunk, now, their limbs looser, their mascara migrating down their faces, their bodies pressing closer together under the illumination of the mini disco lights. Shelly pulled Leonard and Emma onto the dancefloor, and they stomped and sang half-heartedly for a song and a half. But now that Heidi was gone, the magic had seeped out of the apartment, out of the evening, out of their lives.

The couple took the train the two stops back to Leonard’s where he got into bed while she began to take her makeup off in the bathroom. Underneath the fluorescent light, she noticed a kiss in Heidi’s red lipstick. She closed her eyes and thought of the other woman, asking the universe for what her heart most desired. Then she got into bed with Leonard, who was already asleep.

Early in the morning, the sun barely streaming in through the window, Emma heard a skittering to the right of the bed. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed something moving on the floor. She sat up and grabbed her phone, using its illumination to peek at the cause.

Stretched out over the carpet was Heidi’s Glenda the Good Witch dress. Emma startled, suddenly self-conscious in her spandex shorts and tattered t-shirt. How did she get there? Where was she now? The door to the bathroom was shut, and no light seeped from behind it.

Emma got out of bed, crouched down over the dress, then froze again. There was something moving underneath it. Was it a rat? A mouse? A trick of the light?

No. It was Heidi, now small.

She emerged from the neck hole on her hands and knee, then rose to her full height—three inches or so. She was naked, her gumdrop breasts and toothpick-sized curls bouncing as she jumped up and down, waving her little arms in the air. Emma put out her hand and Heidi crawled into it. Together, they went into the bathroom, where Emma inspected her under the bright light. Heidi stayed seated in Emma’s palm until she’d uncurled her fingers on the counter. Then, the Thumbelina took crouching steps onto the granite. Turning around to Emma, she tried to talk, but her vocal cords were too delicate to make an audible sound. And when Emma tried to whisper to her, Heidi didn’t seem to understand either. She just kept shaking her head back and forth and smiling. 

It didn’t matter, Emma decided. She got swiftly dressed to take Heidi back to her own apartment. Riding the subway with her new charge tucked inside her bag, Emma felt her throat swell first with fear—how would she care for this tiny, exquisite being?—and then with joy. She knew what there was to know about devotion. She’d stop by the dollar store on the way home to buy a few dolls and strip them for clothes. In time, she could find a nicer, non-polyester solution. But right away, she would make Heidi a bed in an abalone shell; she would line it with her cashmere gloves. And today was Heidi’s birthday. She deserved a whole forest of flowers to roam through. 

A week later, Emma and Leonard were celebrating his promotion over dinner.

“I have news, too,” she told him, “I quit my job.”

“Really? I mean, congratulations. But did something happen?”

“No, nothing in particular. I just have a feeling that the world has other things in store for me this year.”

Leonard inspected Emma’s pink dress. “That redhead made an impression on you, huh?”

“You could say that,” she said, and it was true—one impression that night, and many more as she lay curled up on Emma’s chest, or clutched her shoulder with her tiny hands while they walked around the bedroom together.

“You know, she never texted me. What do you think was up with her?”

“Oh, Heidi lives in a different universe than us,” Emma said, not bothering to explain that Heidi couldn’t text him even if she wanted to. She’d tried giving Heidi her cell phone, but her little fingers couldn’t produce enough pressure to affect the screen. They had been experimenting with using her feet, but for now, hopping between the letters produced only garbled lines of text that Emma couldn’t quite decipher. Yet Emma knew Heidi was still a witch, even if now a diminutive one. She’d told Emma that all this was possible, and she had been right. Eventually, if Heidi wanted to, she’d figure out how to make her thoughts known—if not to Emma, then to the forces beyond them both. Someone, something must be listening. Until that day, Emma would keep writing her love notes, keep feeding her pine nuts and currants and thimbles of wine, keep replacing the flowers in her shoebox to ensure her world was ever in bloom.

About the author:

Rebecca van Laer is a writer based in Kingston, NY. Her work has appeared in Joyland, TriQuarterly, HAD, Electric Literature, BOMB, Salamander, and elsewhere. Her novella How to Adjust to the Dark is forthcoming from Long Day Press in 2022. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University.