When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  14.

  “I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M sorry I’m sorry—” I hear Iris long before I see her. It’s after school and I’m sitting in the grass at the edge of the soccer field, watching the endless practices. Boys’ JV, Boys’ Varsity, Girls’ JV, Girls’ Varsity, and Junior Leaguers all practice on various parts of our high school’s gigantic field. I can never tell which team is which—unless my brother’s one of the people kicking the ball. He’s not at practice today, because of something to do with a chemistry project he’s trying to finish at the last minute. As a result, I’m watching the various soccer practices with a kind of removed disinterest. It feels a little like watching waves crashing at the beach: there’s movement and noise and things I don’t quite understand, but I can spot patterns and pretend I get it.

  Iris skids onto the grass next to me, still apologizing, and there it is again—that uncertainty. I know what the right way to respond is, and I also know how I could respond. I could give her the cold shoulder, make her explain. I could yell at her that sorry isn’t good enough. I could do it, and then I wouldn’t have to face my mistake. I could blame her.

  But then I look up and see her stricken face, and my conscience kicks me hard in the gut. She doesn’t deserve that shit from me.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I say, and I wrap my arms around her. “I’m not mad.”

  “Really?” She pulls back and wipes at her eyes, smearing mascara stripes across her freckled cheeks, and my conscience kicks me again for even considering lashing out at her.

  “Yeah, really,” I say, smiling. She smiles back, her relief palpable. “I get it. You were worried. It’s okay. I didn’t even get in that much trouble.”

  “I just … I didn’t know where you were,” she says, “and with the police around and everything. I was scared that maybe they were talking to you, or maybe …” She looks around and closes her mouth abruptly.

  “I get it,” I say. She’s doing that thing where she’s been going over what she should say all day, and my saying that I don’t need to hear an explanation doesn’t change the fact that she needs to explain. She doesn’t need to do it for me, but for herself.

  “Can we go somewhere else?” she asks. I raise my eyebrows, and she stands up, brushing grass off her butt. “I want to talk about stuff, but I don’t want to talk about it here.” Her voice is soft—she’s not being the bossy Iris I know and love. She’s being hesitant. She’s still worried that she did something to make me angry with her, so she’s being something less than what she usually is. I hate it. I hate that she thinks she can’t be everything she always is, just because she thinks I might be mad.

  And then I follow her eyeline, because even if she’s being gentle with me, it’s not like her to avoid eye contact. She’s usually aggressive as hell about eye contact. I turn to look where she’s looking, and I see what she’s seeing, and then I want to leave too. Because it’s the cop—the one with the short gray hair and the long nose. She’s standing at the edge of the soccer field, maybe halfway across the grass from us. The sun glints off her handcuffs. She’s got her arms folded, and I can’t tell if she’s watching the players or if she’s watching us.

  Either way, she’s too close for us to talk about what we need to talk about. She’s way too close.

  We walk together, looking over our shoulders the whole time, and wind up behind the school in one of those spots that seems built for skulking. There are no windows looking out into this little alley between the classrooms and the chain-link fence that marks the boundary of the campus. Cigarette butts litter the ground, and there’s a used condom just on the other side of the fence. I look away from the condom, but it lingers in my mind, bumping up against memories that I’d rather not relive.

  “What’s up?” I ask Iris. She lets her backpack thud to the ground.

  “Okay,” she says, and then she takes a deep breath and says it again. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, so, something’s going on.”

  I lean against the fence, bouncing against the chain link. “I know,” I say. Iris gives me a confused look. “I mean, I know about one thing that’s going on. Maybe it’s not the same thing you mean? But I know about Paulie and Marcelina.”

  “And Roya,” Iris adds, and now it’s my turn to be confused. She looks uncertain. “Did she not tell you?”

  “Um, no?” There’s my asshole-voice again. I don’t know where this is coming from, this anger. I could let it trip me up, but instead, I cross my arms and just try not to feel embarrassed at my ignorance. I try not to wonder why Roya didn’t talk to me about whatever’s going on. I try not to wonder why she talked to Iris instead.

  “Well, anyway, I figured it out this morning,” Iris continues, blatantly ignoring the uncomfortable moment. She’s not going to tell me what’s happening with Roya, then. I usually really admire how Iris and Maryam both refuse to gossip, but right now, it’s the most annoying thing about either of them. I just want to know what’s going on.

  “I went over some of my notes and I realized that there’s a correlation between some of the—well, okay, let me back up. See, after I cast the spell on the, um.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “The body? I felt like I was being pulled in a bunch of different directions. It’s gotten a little better every day, and at first I thought that I was just getting used to it. You know, like. Getting stronger or something.” She looks uncomfortable. “I guess I wanted to believe that I was growing, somehow. Getting more powerful. But then I started talking to everyone and I realized that every time I was feeling better, someone else was feeling worse.” She clenches her fist as she talks, but her voice stays low. “And then last night, I got a text from Paulie right after you guys got rid of the leg, and I realized that I wasn’t just getting used to feeling bad. I really was feeling better. Because you got rid of one of the parts.”

  I shake my head at her. Poor Iris—she’s so ambitious. The idea that she thought she was getting better when she really wasn’t is kind of heartbreaking. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I whisper.

  “It does, though,” she says. “See, my magic is what’s holding all the pieces of Josh separate. And it’s a lot, you know? That spell was a lot. I’d never done anything like that before. It’s … it’s all of us, all bound together, stretching one spell to its breaking point to try to make someone disappear.” She rolls her wrist across her hip, pushing a rubber band from her wrist onto her fingers. She stretches it out tight. “Like this but a million times more complicated.”

  “Okay, that makes sense,” I lie.

  “Shut up, no it doesn’t, but just. Listen.” She holds the rubber band up and stretches it as far as she can. “Here’s what I think is happening. When you get rid of one of the body parts, my part of the spell is over, and the magic kind of … breaks. I can feel it. It pulls really tight, and then it snaps. And then the recoil hits us.” She flicks her thumb, and the rubber band snaps against her palm. Her pale skin reddens immediately. “This is a really powerful spell, and it’s connected to all of us, and it’s super volatile. When one of us gets rid of a body part, I think we sever our connection to it. The magic breaks, and snaps back on us. I think we’re all losing things because the spell is doing something to each of us every time we break part of it.”

  I shake my head. “That’s never happened before,” I say.

  “We’ve never done anything like this before,” she answers. “We’ve never … we’ve never killed anyone before.” She can’t look into my eyes, and I know what she isn’t saying.

  It’s not that we killed someone. It’s that I killed someone.

  I used someone. I lied to him. I pretended that I was ready for something I wasn’t, and I pretended to be someone I’m not. I took the part of me that knew I was only going to hurt myself by making myself do something I didn’t want to, and I pushed it so far down that it turned into this. It turned into Josh being dead.

  I used him, and I lied to him, and I killed
him, and now all of my friends are dealing with the consequences. An awful thought occurs to me: What if my friends weren’t helping deal with the consequences? What if all the losses weren’t distributed across our group? If I had tried to use magic to get rid of the body all by myself … would that magic snap right back and kill me, too?

  And is it worth it to risk that recoil if it means saving my friends?

  I decide to think about that later. I can’t put that on Iris. It’s a decision I’ll have to make on my own. But there is one thing I should tell her about, no matter what I decide. “There’s something else that’s been going on,” I say, and she waits while I figure out how to explain it. “I think I’ve been … hurting people?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tell her about the girl with the nosebleed in the cafeteria, and my bruise at the reservoir, and the blood that oozed from Gina’s eye. I tell her about a half dozen other moments I’ve noticed—moments when I’m not sure if someone is just having an accident near me, or if I’m causing them injury somehow. “I’m not doing any of it on purpose. It’s just kind of happening,” I explain.

  “Okay,” she says. She tugs on one ginger curl. “Well, that makes sense, with all the tension.”

  “You think it’s stress-induced?” I ask doubtfully.

  “No, no, not like that. The magical tension. Maybe because you did the original, uh … thing?” I’m grateful that she doesn’t say “murder.” Iris doesn’t usually mince words, but she’s being gentle with me. She’s being careful. “All of the magic that’s being used to hold the body in pieces is pulling on me, right? Well, it’s got to be pulling on you, too. And that recoil is probably hitting you really hard.”

  She pulls on the rubber band around her wrist again, harder this time than before. I flinch as it snaps against her skin. The place it strikes her turns red, but then she pulls the whole thing off and shows me the red mark it left on the opposite side of her wrist, where it dug into the skin as she pulled on it. She continues with her explanation, running a finger across the red welt the rubber band has left. “The tension and the recoil are both going to be hard on you, and something in that has to be making you do stuff by accident. I mean. That’s all just a theory, but you’ve definitely got a lot of”—she gestures vaguely—“a lot of residual magic pulling on you. It looks like you’re getting yanked in a bunch of directions all at once. Have you been hurting anyone on purpose, or is it like, when you’re stressed and not paying attention?”

  I remember how I tripped before hurting Gina. I remember giving myself the bruise while I was thinking about Roya, and watching the cop when that poor freshman got the nosebleed. “Stressed and not paying attention,” I answer. “Definitely that one.”

  “Well, there you go,” she says authoritatively. “The parts of the spell that are tangled up around you are tense as hell. It’s snapping when you get stressed out, and it’s hurting people around you by accident.” I would be skeptical—after all, we don’t really know how any of this works—but then, it’s Iris. She’s bossy and overbearing sometimes, but she’s brilliant and she understands magic better than I do. And I trust her, and she sounds certain.

  “I don’t want you to feel like you have to have all the answers,” I say, hesitant. “But we should try to figure out how to fix this.”

  Thankfully, she nods. “I don’t think we can prevent everyone from losing things as they get rid of pieces. But we can keep your problem from escalating. For that, it just stands to reason that we have to get rid of all the pieces as fast as we can. There’ll be consequences for the rest of us, but there were always going to be consequences for us. At least this way you won’t, you know. Slip up.” She nods, and I nod back, and with that, we agree to stick with the crappy answer for now.

  “So what do we do?” I ask softly.

  With a grim smile, Iris unzips her backpack and pulls out two gallon-sized ziplock bags. Each one contains one of Josh Harper’s hands.

  “What do we do?” she repeats. She drops the ziplock bags to the ground and then looks back up at me. “We make sure.”

  * * *

  When Pop and Dad met, Pop was trying to make it as a musician. He was the lead singer for a prog-rock band called WYLDFYR2. I guess they were supposed to be called WYLDFYR3, but the guy who printed their T-shirts messed up and they stuck with it. I’ve never known him to be anything but bald, but before I was born, he had long wavy hair down to his butt and these big hair-sprayed bangs. He wore eyeliner and stuck his tongue out a lot in photos. Dad met Pop after a show and told him that when you say “WYLDFYR2” out loud, it sounds like “wildfart” and Pop couldn’t stop laughing and I guess the rest was history. Even though there are tons of pictures, I still have a pretty hard time imagining Dad at a show or Pop onstage.

  Even harder to imagine? Pop drove a van. Technically, he lived in the van, although he also talks a lot about crashing on people’s couches and doesn’t like it when I say, “Pop lived in a van.” The van had this amazing airbrushed mural on the side—it was a wizard standing on top of a mountain, doing battle with a dragon, and a half-naked Viking-god was riding the dragon. It was awesome. In the pictures I’ve seen of the mural, the wizard has his arms over his head and lightning is shooting out of his staff and one of his hands is holding a big fireball.

  That’s kind of how Iris looks now. She looks like the wizard, except instead of fire and lightning, she’s got a thousand threads of magic. Honestly, I think she’d beat the wizard. I love it when she does this. Her magic is always really showy, so she doesn’t do it all that often. She’s the only one of us who can see her own magic, and I think it embarrasses her to use it in front of people. It doesn’t really bother the rest of us to use ours, because we can’t see how flashy it is, so it feels small and subtle and private more often than not. But Iris gets flustered. She sees something huge inside herself, and instead of embracing it, she looks away.

  But when she does embrace it—man, it’s awesome. Literally awesome. Not awesome like “cool” or “big” or “loud,” but awesome as in, it puts me into a state of awe. Wonder. She circles her hands over her head and as she does it, blazing threads of white gather around her spread fingers like cotton candy. They cling to her arms too, sliding up around her shoulders like a bright mantle. Her eyes are bright white, and she watches her hands with her lower lip between her teeth as a fat spool of crackling white builds between them. When she’s got exactly enough for whatever she has in mind, she lowers her arms in front of her like she’s about to throw the spool of white power at the ground. But she doesn’t throw it; she holds it there, like a ball of lightning between her fists. The magic is still, static. The air feels heavy. She twists her fingers just so, and the threads shift into some subtly different configuration. She nods, satisfied.

  I wonder what it would be like if I could see my magic. Would I be able to do the amazing things Iris can? She has so much control, so much strategy, whereas I just kind of feel things out as I go. She can fine-tune so many little details, all because she can watch what the threads are doing before she uses them. But she’s also obsessed, because she can see everything she makes.

  Still, I can’t help admiring both her obsession and her control. If I could see my own power, what could I achieve? What would I become?

  Iris interrupts my train of thought by swinging both of her arms in a shallow arc, stretching her magic wide. Then she aims her power at the hands that are spread out on the ground in front of her, and she lets go.

  Her magic falls onto the hands in a deluge of electric white. A wintry smell fills the air, like snow and ice and lightning. As I watch, the pink flesh of Josh Harper’s fingers turns pale, then gray, then black. Goose bumps rise on my arms as cracks spiderweb across Josh’s palms. Frost spreads across the ground between us. Iris doesn’t stop until the hands are unrecognizable.

  “Whoa,” she says, staring down at the fruits of her labor. A sheen of sweat has broken out across her forehead
.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, and she nods. “Do you feel … different?”

  “Not yet,” she says. “But I’m not really done yet, am I?” She wipes her forehead and gestures to her backpack, which is closer to me than it is to her. I grab it and reach inside.

  Textbooks. Notebooks. Her journal. Graphing calculator. A loose pen.

  A hammer.

  I haul it out. There’s tape across the handle. Iris’s last name is written on it in blue marker. “Is this yours?” I ask.

  “It’s my dad’s,” she answers. She holds out her hand, and I give her the hammer. She stares at it for a moment. “Well,” she says to the hammer. “Here goes.”

  She crouches in front of the hands, lifts the hammer, and lets it drop. The super-frozen flesh of one hand shatters into a million pieces. She smashes the other hand, one finger at a time, and then she falls backward onto her butt with an oof.

  “How do you feel?” I ask, and she takes stock before answering.

  “Normal?” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Better than I did a few minutes ago, to be honest.”

  I gingerly step over the pile of Josh-shards and sit next to her. We stare at the shattered flesh on the ground for a few minutes before I break the silence. “I’m sorry to have gotten you mixed up in all this,” I say.

  She shrugs again. “You’re my best friend. I mean, you all are. I know every one of you would do the same thing for me.” She looks up at me. “Hey, what about you? Have you noticed anything different? Missing?”

  I nudge a half fingernail with the edge of my shoe. “Kind of,” I say hesitantly. “I wasn’t sure if it was anything. I mean, I’m still not. It might just be a coincidence. But …” I hesitate, and she nudges me, and I just say it. “I haven’t had any dreams.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I buried his head in the woods. So … three days ago?”