The Coven

Emily Myers is eighteen years old, a first-year photography student, and standing on the cracked front step of the Arts Building with a Pentax pressed to her chest like a shield and a plan.

The plan is three years long. Big jumpers. Long skirts. Opaque tights. A seat in the back corner. A life conducted in the margins. Six years of grammar school taught her how to be invisible, and eighteen years of living in a body she has never quite forgiven have taught her why she has to be. She is going to get her degree. She is going to go home. She is never going to tell anyone the quiet, careful truth about herself that she has been folding smaller every year since she was twelve.

At nine twenty-three on a Monday morning in late September, the Arts Building door bangs open and two girls walk straight into her life.

Jess is tall. Black hair to the small of her back, sharp jaw, grey eyes, a leather jacket and a grin that takes up her whole face. Mel is small. Honey-brown hair, huge brown eyes, a pouting mouth, dusty pink nails, and a way of touching people as naturally as breathing. They crash into Emily on the step. Mel catches her camera before it hits the concrete. Jess decides, within four minutes, that Emily is theirs.

Emily does not know yet that she is about to fall in love with both of them.

She does not know about the group chat they will make her that morning, or the lunches that will appear in front of her without her having to ask, or the first sleepover at Mel's where fairy lights cast her in gold and two girls cradle her in a double bed and give her something in her sleep that she has never, in eighteen years, been brave enough to ask for while awake. She does not know about the Friday at Jess's with the bottle of wine and the grey sofa and the two soft mouths asking is this okay, is this okay, is this okay. She does not know about the darkroom, the red safelight, the way an image of her own smiling face will emerge from a chemical bath and make her cry.

She does not know what word to use for the three of them yet. She will learn one. She will pick a better one.

The Coven is a warm, tender, filthy story about a shy girl who came to university to disappear, the two girls who refused to let her, and the autumn term that gives her back a body she has spent her whole life apologising for. It is about first kisses and first mornings and first times, and about the particular way two pairs of eyes can look at you until you understand, finally, that you were never too much.