When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  I don’t want to be alone. I don’t ever want to be alone again. But I figure I don’t exactly have the right to make anything else about me tonight.

  I sneak back down the hall to the bathroom and climb into the tub to take my dress off, hoping to contain the inevitable glitter explosion that will come when I step out of it. It’s not a bad strategy, although I’m not totally sure what to do with the dress once I’ve got it off. I lean out of the tub and reach for the trash can, then pull out the plastic bag that’s lining it and stuff my dress inside. Thankfully, the bag is empty—no ear swabs or wadded-up pads or used tissues to stick to my dress. But once I’ve got the dress in the bag, I know that it wouldn’t matter anyway. It may not have any blood on it anymore, but I’m still going to throw it away as soon as I can.

  I’m never wearing that dress again.

  When I turn the water on, it’s freezing. I stand under it, shivering and covering my chest with my arms, and wait for it to warm up. The cold is punishing, but I don’t move.

  I don’t move because Josh is dead.

  Once the water gets warm, I drop my arms and shove my face into the spray. It’s hot enough that it doesn’t remind me of the way his blood felt when it hit my skin, but the comparison still comes to mind and I gag. I brace myself against the wall and let the water get hotter, hotter, scalding. The horror I’ve been pushing away all night rises around me like threads of magic, if they were made of barbed wire. I shiver once, and then again, and then I can’t stop shaking.

  Josh is dead. Josh is dead because of me. Because I killed him. Somehow, I killed him.

  I don’t know how it happened. I know I said that already, but I mean I really don’t know how it happened. I didn’t just not-do-it-on-purpose—I didn’t know it was possible. To explode someone. To kill someone, just like that, just because of a slip of magic. It’s like if I tripped and fell and accidentally levitated. Except that I have accidentally levitated before, and that’s how magic has always felt—floaty and personal and friendly. Harmless. I’ve never seen Iris get hurt this way before. I’ve never hurt anyone this way before.

  I’ve also never tried to use anyone the way I tried to use Josh. I push the thought aside before I can really get my teeth into it, though. It’s not what I want to be thinking about right now.

  What happened tonight was something dark and different. That’s what matters. It’s new, and it terrifies me. And my friends are going to help me get out of this; they won’t let me do it all on my own, and that terrifies me even more.

  The water is really hot now. Steam is rising up around me, and my skin is turning pink. There’s a mirror suction-cupped to the tile inside the shower—Marcelina’s dad uses it to shave, I think—and I wish it would fog over, because I don’t want to see myself right now. I lather soap between my hands and spread it across the surface of the mirror.

  I grab Marcelina’s mom’s fancy apricot scrub and start scouring my body. Iris’s spell took all of Josh’s blood off me, but I can still feel the burn of every drop. I can feel it all, lingering there like flecks of glitter. I scrub until it hurts. I wish I had just had sex with him. I wish I had never tried to have sex with him. I wish I had done whatever I needed to do to keep from killing him.

  Josh is dead because of a horrible kind of magic that is apparently inside me. I scrub as if I can get to that magic and wash it out. My skin is a bright, livid red, and I make myself stop before I draw blood.

  Before I draw more blood. There’s been so much blood tonight. Oh god, it was in my mouth.

  I stand under the water until the heat makes me dizzy. After I turn it off, I lean my head against the tile and finally, finally, I let myself cry.

  * * *

  When I get back to Marcelina’s room, she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. She’s wearing black sweats and a black tank top. Her hair is in a messy topknot, and she’s taken all her makeup off.

  She looks a little naked without makeup. People always talk about how wearing makeup isn’t natural, how “real” women look better, but that’s bullshit. Marcelina is perfectly lovely with or without makeup, but the “real” Marcelina likes wearing a ton of eyeliner and dark lipstick and sometimes does really incredible things with eyeshadow that I don’t fully understand. She and Maryam spend hours experimenting on each other’s faces, turning each other into mermaids and vampires and starlets. She’s good at makeup and she loves it and if that’s not “real,” I don’t want real.

  Anyway.

  She’s sitting on the floor, and there are two piles in front of her on a piece of spread-out newspaper. It looks like the classified ads—the paper, not the piles. I lean my head to one side and scrunch a towel through my hair as I watch her work.

  She’s holding a vertebra in one hand. There are maybe ten or twelve of them in a pile in front of her left knee. In front of her right knee, on the newspaper, is a pile of white powder.

  I don’t ask what she’s doing, because she’s doing magic, and watching Marcelina do magic is just amazing. I mean, everyone looks amazing when they do magic, because it’s magic, but Marcelina is especially cool to watch at it. She lifts the bone to her lips and starts whispering to it, a steady stream of suggestions and secrets. I can’t hear everything she’s saying, but I catch the words “together” and “dark” and “settle.” The vertebra starts to glow blue from within, like a flickering fire is burning in the bone. Marcelina breathes over it, a breath that’s heavy with magic and meaning, and then she’s not holding a bone anymore—she’s holding a handful of white powder. She adds it to the pile and picks up another vertebra.

  This is her magic: the magic of quiet moments. Where Iris’s magic is showy and enormous and awe-inspiring, Marcelina’s magic is soft and subtle and works its way into everything. Where Paulie’s magic is experimental, Marcelina’s magic is certain. Watching her work is like watching a time-lapse video of a river’s course changing.

  “Do you want help?” I ask softly, not wanting to disturb her. She shakes her head and looks up at me. Her face has gone soft and peaceful, and her lips are tinged with a faint glow, like the magic she’s whispering has left her with a Popsicle stain.

  “Okay,” I say, and I sit beside her to watch her work. She raises the bone to eye level and starts whispering to it, and I don’t say another word until after she’s done.

  * * *

  There are a million stars. It’s one of the nice things about living so far outside the city—we get stars here. I look up at them as often as I can, because when I go to college in the fall, there probably won’t be that many stars.

  I try not to think about it too much. I’m going to miss the stars. I’m going to miss a lot of things. But Maryam and Roya and I are all going to State together, so at least I won’t be alone in the dark of the city.

  Marcelina is walking in front of me, a teardrop-shaped silhouette against the tree line. The trees rustle a little as she passes them. They don’t bend toward her, but they notice her. I’m carrying a shovel. Handsome—the shaggier of the two farm dogs—lopes along beside me, his nose skimming the ground as he tries to take in every new smell in the grass. He whined when we snuck out, but once I told him that he could come with us, he shut up.

  Yeah, I know. I’m a sucker.

  Marcelina stops in front of the black oak she touched before. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s the same one—I don’t recognize individual trees the way she does, but there’s a big knot in the trunk that looks familiar. Marcelina confirms my guess when she puts her hand on the trunk and says, “I told you I’d come back.”

  She’s holding the sheet of newspaper from her bedroom in one hand. It’s wrapped around the bone dust and twisted at either end, like a huge hard candy. She sets it down next to the tree, then looks back at me and holds her hand out.

  “Let me,” I say, and she hesitates for only a moment before nodding.

  “Okay,” she replies, “but you have to dig where I tell you to, or you’ll hit her root
s.”

  I pat Handsome on the butt and tell him to go have fun. He’s off before I finish telling him to come back within an hour, vanished into the trees to chase some sound or smell or dog-adventure that I’m sure he’ll spend the whole morning telling me about.

  “You told him to come back, right?” Marcelina asks, peering into the trees.

  “Yeah, but he’ll come back anyway,” I answer. “He doesn’t want to sleep outside anymore. His hips are bothering him.”

  Marcelina frowns into the trees but doesn’t ask any other questions. She knows that Handsome is getting older, and that I’ll tell her if he has any serious problems. He’s doing okay for now. His hips hurt, and his vision isn’t so good, but he’s old and he’s pretty much all right.

  “Here,” she says, pointing at the ground between her feet. “Dig straight down, three feet. Don’t go to either side, though. There’s a root there and a gopher tunnel on this side.”

  “Got it,” I say, and she backs away a few feet so I can dig.

  It feels good. The night air is warm, and the soil is soft, and there’s something satisfying about the sense that I’m doing work. That I’m fixing something.

  When the hole is dug, Marcelina kneels in the soil and pushes the newspaper down into it. With both of her hands in the earth, she tears the paper open. She scoops a few handfuls of soil back into the hole, then kneads the bone dust into it. She hesitates. But not for long. Marcelina never hesitates for long. She pushes her fingers down into the loose mixture, and threads of blue shoot through the soil like an electric current. They disappear into the walls of the hole I dug almost as quickly as they appear.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper, but either it’s too quiet for Marcelina to hear or she’s ignoring me. The question is answered within the next heartbeat as tiny tendrils creep out of the soil and brush against her fingertips. Marcelina breathes on them, and they shiver.

  She glances up at me with a moon-bright Marcelina-smile and says, “Roots.”

  The tendrils dive down into the bone-and-soil combination as Marcelina nudges the rest of the dirt back into the hole. I tamp it down gently with the back of the shovel—there’s a tiny mound left, but Marcelina puts a hand on my arm before I compress it all the way. “Leave some room,” she says. “She’ll need to breathe.”

  We sit in the grass and wait for Handsome to come back from the woods. It’s probably one in the morning, and the dew is starting to gather. The seat of my pants gets damp, but I don’t stand up.

  “So that’s what you needed it for?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says, running her fingers through the grass.

  “Why?”

  “Minerals,” she says. “She’s been depleted because she’s been sending minerals to her friend. The bone dust should help a little.”

  “Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Then: “Should we put the liver in there too?”

  “No,” she says. “It would screw up the balance of the soil. We’ll deal with it later. Besides, I kind of think we should do the different parts separately, don’t you? So each one gets our attention? I wouldn’t want to get rid of anything without thinking about it.”

  I swallow hard. I know exactly what she means. I don’t want any part of Josh to disappear without me knowing. I don’t want to look away from any part of this, no matter how hard it is for me to see what I’ve done. What we’re doing. “Sure,” I whisper, digging my fingers into my thighs. “Totally. I’ll talk to the other girls about it too, yeah?”

  Marcelina nods, then goes quiet. She’s really good at comfortable silences—it never feels awkward to just be together, not talking about anything, looking up at the moon. After a while, Handsome comes loping out of the forest and sits next to me. I pick pine needles out of his fur and he pants happily, occasionally twisting around to aim a lick at my arm.

  “What were you doing with Josh?” Marcelina asks after a few minutes. “I mean, I don’t care who you sleep with, it’s just … I didn’t even think you knew Josh.”

  I glance over at her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s staring down at the clover next to her, gently brushing her palm across the tops of the leaves. I can’t tell what they’re saying to her, or what she’s saying to them. Or maybe it’s neither—maybe they’re just sitting there in a companionable silence, like she and I were until a second ago.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I guess I just wanted tonight to be special.”

  The lie is as obvious as Handsome’s dog-smell. Marcelina is quiet, waiting for me to tell the truth. Giving me a chance. I keep picking pine needles out of Handsome’s fur. After a long time—long enough that I start to feel guilt creeping up the back of my neck—Marcelina stands up and brushes grass off her butt.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” she says. “I know it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna be okay, but it is.”

  “But what if it’s not?” I ask, burying my face in Handsome’s fur. He smells like pine and dog and wind. I feel Marcelina’s footsteps behind me, soft and patient in the grass.

  “Then you won’t be alone with it,” she says. “We’ll all be not-okay with you.”

  I stand up and Handsome stands with me, his tail already wagging. He looks back toward the house.

  “Come on,” Marcelina says. “The rest of it will still be there in the morning. We’ll do the liver another day.”

  We walk back to the house together, me and Marcelina and Handsome, and for the time it takes us to get there, I believe her. Maybe things will be okay.

  4.

  WHEN I WAKE UP ON the floor of Marcelina’s bedroom, I don’t remember right away. I lie in the early-morning grayness under a pile of lap blankets stolen from the living room. My mouth is dry and my shoulders ache a little, but I don’t have that sense of oh-shit-where-am-I that happens sometimes when I wake up someplace that isn’t my own bed. I’m not hungover, because honestly, I was too nervous to drink at the party. I just feel sleepy. That’s all. Just sleepy.

  I reach up a hand to rub my face, and a flicker of something crosses my brain. You should be feeling bad about something.

  Then I remember.

  Josh. Blood everywhere—on my cheeks and burning and coppery in my mouth and sprayed across posters of cars. Maryam leaving. Roya’s incredulous glare. My fault. My fault. My fault.

  Before I can think about it, my hand shoots out. My fingertips find canvas, a zipper, a solid lump. My stomach turns.

  It was all real.

  There is no part of me that thinks, Maybe this is all a terrible dream. It hurts to realize that Josh exploding is just a nightmare was a safe psychological harbor I passed by without docking.

  “Marcelina?” I whisper. She doesn’t answer. I poke my head up and can see the small hill that is her and her million tangled blankets. She’s motionless in the bed, sleeping so soundly that I’d be worried she was dead if I hadn’t seen her sleep a hundred times before. Still, I wait to see the slow rise of her breathing before I trust that she’s really just asleep. I get up as quietly as I can, gathering my own nest of blankets in one arm and slinging the backpack across my shoulder with the other. I close her bedroom door behind me, holding the latch back with my thumb until the last possible second.

  I dump the blankets into the basket next to her parents’ couch. I sneak into her kitchen and grab a roll of duct tape from the junk drawer. I rip off a five-inch strip and slap it over the place on Josh’s backpack where his name is scrawled in Sharpie. For good measure, I put another piece on top of that one. It’s bad enough that I’m coming home from prom with no dress and a strange bag; I can’t have a boy’s name on the bag. A dead boy’s name. No, I remind myself, a missing boy’s name. As far as everyone else knows, Josh is missing. Nothing more.

  I ease the bag open just a little and reach in, my fingertips finding the smooth, glassy surface of the heart. It feels a little warmer than it did last night—still hard, still wrong, but just a tiny bit warm. I press gently wit
h my fingers, trying to figure out if it’s softened, if it’s really warmer or if I’m just imagining things. Why would it be different?

  “How was prom?” The voice comes from right behind me. I jump a mile and whip around to glare at him—Uncle Trev is there, and he holds two hands up, lifting his shoulders in a whoa-don’t-kill-me stance. “Sorry,” he says, aiming an awkward grin at me. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Well, you did,” I say, breathless, my heart pounding. I adjust the backpack onto both of my shoulders. Oh god, I’m talking to Trev and there’s a head in my bag. “Prom was fine. What are you doing awake?”

  “I’ve got a workout this morning,” he says. “Just ‘fine’?” he asks, leaning a shoulder against the wall and crossing his arms. His biceps swell a little with the motion. Trev took up weightlifting after he lost his job, and I’m never sure if he’s showing off his muscles on purpose or if that’s just what happens when you train for three hours a day. He looks like what I imagine Josh would look like if he grew up, stayed sober, got divorced, and did a lot of CrossFit. Tall, blond, trying a little too hard but not in an irritating way. “Did something happen?” he asks.

  I’ve always liked Uncle Trev, but right now I really hate how interested and engaged he is all the time. “Um, nothing big,” I say. “Just some drama.” That’s normally a foolproof way to get adults to mind their own business—explanations of drama are usually drawn-out, expansive diagrams of high school social politics. The only people who hate high school social politics more than actual high schoolers are adults who are pretending to be interested.

  “Did you and Roya have a fight?” he asks, tipping his head to one side.

  “What? No. What? We didn’t—why would you think that?” I’m talking too fast and my ears feel hot. Trev laughs.

  “Okay, well, if you ever want to talk about it, you know where to find me,” he says.

  “Thanks, Trev,” I say awkwardly. He shrugs and walks out of the kitchen.