When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I haven’t really been looking, though. I’ve kind of been thinking about …” Roya, Josh, body parts, the monster I might secretly be.

  “Well. Start paying attention,” she says. She shakes her head at me. “I’m not just being mysterious and annoying,” she says. I’d think she was reading my mind, but irritation is probably written all over my face. “I just … I’m not totally sure what it is, but I think I have an idea.”

  “What is it?” I say, and I can hear how brusque I sound, but I can’t be bothered to apologize. It’s been a long morning.

  “There’s a pull on the spell I cast on prom night,” she says softly, pushing open the cafeteria door. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just like … a little tug on the threads of the magic.”

  My annoyance at her information-hoarding evaporates. “You can feel the spells you cast?” I ask, incredulous. She’s cast so many over the years, while we were all experimenting with our magic and learning what we can do. I can’t imagine having to be aware of all those spells, all the time.

  “Not forever,” she says. “And not all of them. But this one was really big, and I’m kind of … aware of it.” She shrugs and pulls out a chair at one of the little round cafeteria tables. I sit across from her and rest my head on my arms. I’m so tired already. “My connection to the spell is going away, but it’s not fading evenly like it usually does,” she continues. “It’s like it’s getting split off, one chunk at a time. And I think something weird is happening when you guys do whatever you do to make that split happen.” I stare at her, my chin digging into my arms, and try to do a mental inventory to see if I’ve felt anything “weird.” I can’t figure out what’s weird enough to stand out and what’s insignificant. “Try not to worry about it,” she says, all business. “Stay focused on … on trying to bring Josh back.”

  A flash of irritation—does she think I’m not focused enough on bringing Josh back? Does she think that’s the problem, my focus? I clench a fist and then immediately force myself to relax, because I’m afraid to get angry. Because I don’t know what I’m capable of anymore. I can’t let myself hurt anyone else.

  I’m enough of a problem already.

  She doesn’t notice my anger or my fear, or any of it. She’s in her own world, trying to fit all of our problems into boxes. “Just let me know if you notice anything, okay?”

  “Sure,” I say. “If I notice anything abnormal about any part of my life, I’ll definitely tell you. There is one thing, though, and I don’t know if they go together or—”

  “What?” She’s staring at me with intense focus, and the part of me that’s worried about her strobes again. I ignore it.

  “The heart,” I mutter. “You know how it’s wrong?”

  “Yeah, and then that thing where it—” She flexes her fingers in a pulsing cardiac rhythm.

  “Right.” I nod. “It’s beating. Just a little bit right now, but it happens more every time someone … splits off a chunk.”

  She grimaces. “Yeah, we should find a better way to phrase that. So, you think the heart is, what? Coming back to life?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “We should talk to everyone about it, right?” The truth is, that’s exactly what I think. I think that the heart is coming a little bit back to life every time we get rid of a piece of Josh.

  Which would mean … what? Roya was panicking about it when we tried to bring Josh back to life, when all those hawks fell to the ground around us. She was afraid that we would be able to bring him back to life bit by bit, but that we wouldn’t be able to put him back together, and that we would make everything worse with whatever we tried.

  I don’t know if his heart beating is making things better or worse. I don’t know if we’re solving the problem or if we’re just hurting ourselves in order to put unearned life into a dead organ.

  I don’t want to be the one to say that Josh’s heart is coming back. I want to throw it out there as an idea and let someone else pin it down, lay claim to it as a fact.

  “Sure. We can all talk it over.” Iris nudges my foot with hers. “Hey, do you want a bagel? I’m going to go grab one. I’ll see if I can eat half of it before Roya gets to school.”

  My stomach growls. I unzip my backpack to grab my wallet. “Yeah,” I say, digging through the things that didn’t get blindly shoved into my locker, “let me give you some cash—” I freeze as my hand comes into contact with something that isn’t a book, a binder, or a thousand loose pens. It crinkles under my fingers. “Actually, I’m good,” I say. Iris nods and walks over to the tiny window in the side of the cafeteria kitchen where you can buy chips and bagels and uncooked instant noodles. As she walks away, I pull the brown paper bag out of my backpack. I’d meant to stow it in my locker, but between Gina’s detective work and Iris turning into some kind of magic supervillain, I guess I got distracted.

  I run my thumb across Dad’s blue handwriting. Alexis! it says, exclamation point and all. I remember hugging him in the hall. Warmth fills my chest, and I eat a ham sandwich for breakfast as the rest of the girls arrive at school. For all that I didn’t want it in the first place, it’s actually a pretty good sandwich.

  Guilt gnaws at me, because in spite of how I know I should feel, I’m actually … happy. I should feel like everything is falling apart, and I should be terrified for Gina, and a little scared of Iris, and worried about everyone else. But as I eat that sandwich with my sleepy-eyed friends, as we all talk about whether or not our magic is bringing a dead boy’s heart back to life, I can’t help feeling overwhelmed by how lucky I am.

  I love my friends, and I love my life, and even though I know how easy it would be for all of it to go away—for my life to end for no reason at all, other than a little slip of someone’s magical fingers—in that moment, I feel unbreakable.

  10.

  I AVOID GINA FOR THE rest of the day on Tuesday, or maybe she avoids me. I skip study hall so I won’t have to see her. I stop thinking about how she looked in the half-dark hallway right after Iris finished casting that spell on her, though. Hunched, and weak, and afraid. So afraid.

  Afraid of me.

  There’s a little part of me that wants to feel powerful because of that fear. It’s a part I don’t like, a part I don’t trust. A part I can’t listen to. But it’s there, saying, So what if she’s afraid? If she’s afraid of you, she can’t hurt you. If you can make people afraid of you, then maybe you don’t have to be special. You wouldn’t have to earn their love if you had their fear.

  I can’t listen to that part, though. That’s not the person I am. What happened to Josh was an accident. The little ways that people around me seem to keep getting hurt—those aren’t about me. They aren’t my fault. I don’t want those things to happen.

  I’m not the kind of person who wants people to be scared of her.

  That’s a fact that’s driven home when I get to school on Wednesday morning. Gina is standing by my locker. She’s wearing jeans and a worn T-shirt, and she looks like she didn’t sleep last night. She’s staring at the ground with her brow all scrunched up, like she’s trying to decide something hard. I hesitate, because I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I know I have to talk to her. I have to apologize, to tell her that we’re going to find a way to fix it. I move toward her—but when she sees me, she spooks like a cat and walks away fast.

  That’s when I know for sure that I’m not the kind of person who wants Gina scared of me. Because in that moment, all I want is to tell her how sorry I am. All I want is to make things right. I don’t want to see her scurrying around with her head down, trying not to get hurt by something that I can’t even control.

  I’m not the person she’s afraid I am. But I have no idea how to show her that.

  * * *

  When I walk into the cafeteria at lunch, everyone’s at the usual table. I keep glancing over at them as I buy food. Roya is stealing something from Maryam’s lunch, and
Marcelina is doodling on her arm with a felt-tip pen. Paulie and Iris have their heads bent together. Iris is gesturing wildly, her long pale fingers describing patterns I can’t follow. Paulie looks totally absorbed in whatever they’re talking about—but then, as I bring my burrito over to our table, I catch her eye. She says something to cut Iris off. They both look up at me: Paulie expectant, Iris guilty.

  “I can’t figure out how to take the spell off Gina,” Iris says without preamble when I arrive at the table. From the way nobody else reacts to this statement, I guess she’s filled them all in, and I guess they’ve been listening to her try to figure it out for a while. “Not without getting her to hold still for at least thirty seconds, and she bolts whenever I get near her.”

  Now it makes sense, why Iris and Paulie would be so sucked into their conversation. They don’t usually ignore everyone else at the table, but this is a Paulie-and-Iris situation. Paulie is the only one of us who could really help Iris with this problem: while the rest of us more or less stick to the magic we’re good at and only occasionally branch out, Paulie is a great experimentalist. She tries new things constantly. She approaches magic with a kind of courage I’ll never have. She’s not afraid of failure, not afraid of embarrassment.

  “I still think that we wouldn’t be in this situation if we’d all put a little more effort into figuring out how this all works,” Iris says. Her tone tells me that the argument has been going on for a while, and she’s hoping I’ll take her side, now that I’ve arrived.

  Paulie rolls her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We should just try something out and see how it goes.”

  She’s like Roya running off the rocks at the reservoir, except half the time, Paulie doesn’t know where she’ll land. But she jumps anyway. She’s always figuring out new things that she can or can’t do, new ways that her magic can move and change and create and destroy. A month before prom, she showed up at my house and showed me that she’d figured out how to make soap bubbles turn into glass. She does stuff like that all the time: hey, check it out, I tried this thing and it worked.

  She’s pretty amazing. Iris is more driven, and has more book smarts, but she doesn’t know how to take risks the same way Paulie does. I would have thought that the two of them together could unravel any problem. So it’s kind of scary to think that even with both of them working at it, there’s still not a solution.

  I stall by taking a bite of my burrito. If I were Roya, I’d snap at them to figure it out. If I were Maryam, I’d pat Iris’s arm and tell her that I believe in her. If I were Marcelina, I’d ask what ideas they already had, and then I’d help them put something together. If I were Iris or Paulie, I’d … well. I guess I would come up with something brilliant and dangerous and say go.

  But I’m not any of them, and I have to figure out for myself what to say.

  It’s so much easier to think about my friends than it is to think about myself. It’s so much easier to predict them than it is to predict me. What does Alexis say? What’s the right answer? What does Iris need to hear right now? She and Paulie are both staring at me. Iris has a waiting-face on. Paulie is looking at my mouth and I wipe it with my thumb, thinking I must have rice sticking to my chin or something. I realize that the table has gone quiet: everyone is looking at me, waiting. I swallow my mouthful of burrito and clear my throat.

  “We’ll all help you however we can.” I say it without thinking, and once I’ve said it, I know it’s the right answer. I reach out and grab Iris’s hand, giving it a firm squeeze. Relief floods her features. “You’re not alone,” I add, and I’m surprised at the tears that fill her eyes. “You know that, right? You know you’re not all by yourself in this?”

  “Yeah,” she whispers, but I wonder. I think back to what she said yesterday, about being the one who’s supposed to have all the big ideas. Iris has always put a ton of pressure on herself, but I wonder if maybe we’ve been putting some pressure on her too—making her feel like she has to be the smartest, the most put-together out of all of us. I squeeze her hand again. She looks away.

  “I mean it,” I murmur, low enough that it’s just between the two of us. “You don’t have to have all the answers.”

  “I don’t really have any of the answers,” she says. She taps twice on my knuckle with her thumb, and then she lets go of my hand and pretends to rummage in her backpack. “I mean, I still haven’t figured out why we can all do what we do, and I’ve been doing research for years now. Besides, I’m not the one who figured out about the heart,” she says, not looking up.

  “You—did you tell everyone about … ?” Everyone’s eyes are still on me.

  “I think it’s worth a shot,” Roya says.

  “What’s worth a shot?” I ask. My burrito suddenly feels strange in my hands. I pass it to Roya.

  “Getting rid of the pieces to bring back the heart,” Maryam says softly. “Your idea.”

  I shake my head and look to Iris as if she’ll give me answers, but she’s still pretending to rummage through her backpack. This doesn’t sound like what I said—but it makes sense, sort of. As much as anything does. “So, you guys think that if we get rid of all the pieces of Josh—”

  “Maybe his heart will come all the way back, and then we can bring him back to life from there,” Paulie finishes. “Yeah.”

  “We should try, right?” Maryam says. “I mean … it’s still worth trying to make it right, obviously. This method is better than nothing.” She’s got her hands folded neatly on top of the table, and everything about her looks carefully constructed to seem calm.

  I wait for Iris to look up. When she does, I catch her eye, and she frowns.

  “It makes the most sense,” she whispers. “And every time you guys get rid of a piece, except for when Roya did the arm—I feel better every time. Like the thing that’s wrong in that spell is slowly easing off.”

  “It feels like we’re setting things back where they’re supposed to go,” Roya says through half a mouthful of my burrito. “So, yeah. Let’s go with it, huh?”

  “What about the arm?” I ask, and Iris shakes her head.

  “She didn’t actually get rid of it. She just hid it,” Iris says. “She’s gotta go back and get it out of there, get rid of it the right way.” The way she says it, I can tell that they already talked about this part. Without me. They figured it all out already.

  Roya rolls her eyes. “Fine, yeah,” she says. “I’ll do it again. Alexis Rules: we have to get rid of the piece all the way, for keeps, before the heart comes back to life. Right?”

  Alexis Rules? I’m not used to being the one credited with the big plans, and I’m so afraid that someone will be angry with me if this goes wrong too. “What if it doesn’t work?” I ask.

  Maryam unfolds her hands to drape an arm across my shoulder. “Then we’ll figure it out. Together. But we have to try.”

  “Maryam’s right,” Marcelina says. “This keeps getting harder and more complicated, and you all know I’d rather run away, but … I don’t think this is a thing we can run away from, and either way, I can’t live the rest of my life knowing I didn’t at least try to do the right thing.”

  “You’re not alone either, you know,” Paulie says with a smile. Before I can say anything, the lunch bell rings.

  We all get up to head to class, but Paulie grabs my arm. “Hang on a minute,” she says, running her free hand through her hair. It’s a femme day for her, and she’s wearing her hair long and loose. It falls past her shoulders in perfect waves. She sees me looking and winks. “Maryam helped me out with it this morning,” she says. “She’s been practicing on me. I told her that I’d let her if she promised to stop feeling bad about how she can’t really help with the Josh project.” She tosses it back and forth in a goofy parody of a Baywatch babe. “I think it came out pretty great, yeah?”

  Pretty great is an understatement. She looks like something out of a shampoo commercial. “It’s amazing,” I say. “She’s so incredible.
Damn.” I feel myself smile, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve smiled today. I love seeing the things my friends can do. I love being impressed by them. “I didn’t know Maryam was doing hair … stuff,” I say. I glance around to see if anyone is listening to us.

  “It took her like thirty seconds,” Paulie whispers. “She grew it longer, even. This morning it only came to here.” She holds her hand flat about four inches above the ends of her hair.

  “Wow,” I breathe.

  “Yeah,” Paulie says. She reaches out and touches my wrist with one hand. “So, I was thinking of going for a drive. Do you want to come with?”

  “Uh, sure,” I say, distracted by the way her fingers are brushing mine.

  “Cool,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  “What, now?” She laughs and starts walking. I stand where I am, confused for a couple of seconds, before jogging to catch up with her. “What about fifth period?” I ask, like a total square.

  “What, do you have a test or something?” she asks, pushing open an emergency exit door. No alarm goes off—they never do. I wish I could credit Paulie’s magic for that, but it’s really just that the school deactivated all of them because they were tired of alarms going off all day.

  “No, I just have study hall,” I say, blinking in the sunlight. “But …” I trail off. But what? It’s a gorgeous day, and there’s hardly any school left, and Paulie wants to go for a drive. What am I gonna miss? A bored teacher trying to get through their grading so that they can actually have a night at home without piles of half-assed essays to mark up? A room full of seniors trying to decide if they can get away with napping?

  Besides, if I leave now, I won’t have to spend study hall trying not to make eye contact with Gina. I know I should face her, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to do it just yet.