White Is for Witching

Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide, self-harm, and disordered eating. It also includes racist and xenophobic content, including offensive terms for Black people and undocumented citizens, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotation of the source material.

Chapter 8 opens with Miranda in a trance, clutching Ore and imprisoning her with her body. Miranda claims the house wants her, and tries to climb out of Ore’s window from four stories. Ore pulls Miranda back in, and traps her until she awakens, giddy at Ore’s “silliness.”

Ore spends afternoons reading to a shaken Miranda, and Miranda most enjoys her imitating the djinns and sorceresses of The Arabian Nights. Miranda’s condition improves, and she once again finds sunlight bearable. She stops taking her prescribed medicine. She misses her brother, but Eliot continues to ignore her calls. Miranda kicks Ore in the shins when the latter suggests that Eliot is self-absorbed.

Miranda and Ore go to a 1950s-themed dance together, and Ore watches as Miranda dances well, exhausting the couples around them. After the dance, Ore and Miranda try to have sex, but Miranda asks Ore to stop—a repetition of Ore and Tijana’s earlier encounter. They apologize to each other, and Miranda confesses that she’s struggled with her mental health, culminating in “Splinter Night”—when she sat wordless before the fireplace at home, wrists tied with her own hair. Miranda questions if she’s alive and Ore asks questions, before dousing her with the bottle of purple holy water that Tijana gave her.

Ore prepares to go home during the last weekend of the term, but before she leaves, she meets Tijana in the mailroom with the boy who tried to initiate a drinking game with them (Chapter 6). She asks if they’re a couple, and Tijana responds aggressively, pointing out how much weight Ore’s lost.

The narration cuts to Eliot and his life in South Africa. Away from Miranda, his reference point, Eliot can no longer assume anything about his mental health. One of his roommates complains about his moving furniture at night. Eliot misses Miranda and tries to write to her, but struggles to find the words. He continues to move furniture and learns to make Mormon funeral potatoes, fried in cornflake batter.

Eliot returns to Dover a day before Miranda, and Luc has decorated the house with a Christmas tree, a first for the family. Sade’s submission to the house is complete, as Eliot finds her, wide-eyed, listening to a phone receiver. Luc responds that she’s been prescribed medicine, but that she sees visions and has extrasensory perception.

Before Miranda arrives, Luc hammers all her drawers and cabinets shut, determined to expedite her recovery from pica. Miranda must take a medical leave from college, as her weight has plummeted and her mouth has produced sores from her stomach acid (as it has no food to digest); her vision has dimmed, and she appears doll-like. Eliot and Miranda reconnect, while Anna and Lily talk to and about Miranda in her room. Miranda straddles the boundary between the living and the dead, listening to Anna and Lily and responding to Eliot.

Ore returns home, and her father picks her up in his cab outside of Faversham station; her mother notices she’s lost weight, like a model or a posh person. Teasing Ore, her mother calls her Cecily-Laura and imitates an upper-class English accent, before laughing at her own joke. Ore’s parents make her a cake, and Ore eats too much to avoid their judgment.

Later, Ore’s family holds Christmas dinner at their house, inviting all their family—including Ore’s cousins. Ore’s cousin Sean torments her with a xenophobic flier from an English nationalist party.

Saved by a phone call from Miranda, Ore breaks away from Sean’s antics and soon travels to Dover at Miranda’s invitation. Ore meets Luc, who seems relieved that she eats everything and doesn’t have food allergies. Going to her allotted room, she finds a red-and-white apple on her pillow, a gift from the house. Tossing it in the trash, she leaves her room and hears voices in the attic. Ore enters the attic to find Sade, dressed in silver and red, with a presence behind her. Sade tells her to go home.

After Ore meets up with Miranda and Eliot, they joke about the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Sade interrupts their discussion of the Germanic tribes of England and apologizes to Ore about their earlier encounter. As they get to know each other, Sade warns Ore to keep quiet about certain things. Ore tells Sade about the soucouyant, and the two speak in quasi-riddles about community, and Ore is offended when she assumes Sade speaks of their race. Ore eventually asks why Sade works at the house, and if there’s something wrong with the house. Sade says the house is a monster.

Later, Ore feels a shadow behind her and, feeling threatened, runs a knife through salt. As the shadow grows, Ore suddenly sees her knife pointed at Miranda, and Miranda’s scissors are pointed at Ore’s chest. They both think the other is the soucouyant. Eliot later tries to kiss Ore and she permits him at first, but ultimately denies him. Sensing her time at the house is ending, Ore gets new batteries for Miranda’s watch (originally Lily’s watch) and leaves. She promises to see Miranda back at college.