When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  “It’s like a Ship of Theseus,” Iris whispers.

  “A what?” Roya asks.

  “Yeah,” Marcelina says, nodding fast, excited. “Yeah, it’s totally like that.”

  “What is that?” Paulie asks.

  “It’s this thing,” Iris says, looking at Marcelina for confirmation that it is indeed a thing, “where you have a ship, right? And you replace the sails, but it’s still the same ship. And then you replace some of the planks, but it’s still the same ship. And then you replace all the oars, but it’s still the same ship. And then you replace some of the other planks …”

  “But it’s still the same ship?” Paulie interjects dryly.

  “Is it?” Marcelina asks, grinning. Paulie’s brow furrows. “It’s like a thought experiment. When does the ship stop being the original ship and turn into a whole new ship? Is it when there’s just one old plank left? Or two? Or three? Or is it the second you replace the sails?”

  “I think I get it,” Roya says. “So … we’re all still us, even though we lost things. But maybe if Alexis took this all on herself like a big stupid idiot, she’d lose too many things, and then she wouldn’t be herself anymore.”

  “Okay,” I say, half-annoyed. “I get it, you think I’m wrong.”

  “We think you had the worst idea in the history of ideas,” Marcelina corrects me. “We think you’re the most wrong that anyone has ever been.”

  “But we still love you,” Roya adds. “And we still want you to be you. Not whatever might be left of you after you try to take this whole thing on by yourself.” She bumps her shoulder against mine, and I feel heat climbing my neck.

  “This sucks and it’s really hard, but we’re in it together,” Iris says, and her voice carries a firm finality that settles over the group like a thick fog. “Right?”

  “Right,” we all say, sort of together. I feel like I’m going to cry, so I reach out my hands and let a tiny spark of my magic go out to each of the girls in turn. It’s not much, but it should give them a little bit of energy, a little bit of joy, a little bit of warmth. They each smile at me as they feel it.

  “Besides,” Iris says, “we’re going to bring him back, right? Once we’ve gotten rid of all the pieces and the heart is beating again, we can bring Josh back, and then maybe we’ll all get the things we lost back too.”

  “Oh shit, yeah,” Paulie breathes. “That might work, huh?”

  “I don’t know, guys,” Maryam says, her brow furrowing. “It’s not like bringing him back is going to undo what you did. It’s just going to—you know what?” She interrupts herself, shaking her head. “Never mind. It could work. It could totally work.”

  “It could totally work,” Marcelina whispers.

  “It could totally work,” Roya echoes. “And then we can all go back to normal. Now, do you think I have time to get another burrito from the burrito-lady before the bell rings?” As if to answer her, the lunch bell drones, and the cafeteria is filled with the sound of scraping chairs and sneaker-squeaks and voices shouting about where to meet after school. “Damn it,” she mutters.

  We all say goodbye, and a moment like this should feel fraught and tense, but it doesn’t. It feels comfortable. It feels like things are going to be okay. Like they’re really, actually going to be okay.

  Although, I have to admit, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to feeling normal again.

  Roya gives me a hug before she goes, and I can smell her hair and her body wash, vanilla and mint. My fingertips tingle. I squeeze her close, and she doesn’t let go of me either, and for the space of a caught breath I wonder if maybe she wants to hang on as badly as I do. I wonder if maybe—

  But then she pulls away, and she says “See you tomorrow,” and then she’s stepping past me, and her hair is brushing my shoulder, and something in my chest aches.

  “See you,” I call. I don’t turn to see her go, because even though things feel okay—even though I know I’m not alone—I don’t know if she’s going to look back at me. I’m so scared that she won’t look back.

  * * *

  When I get out of my last class of the day, Paulie is waiting for me. She’s leaning against a locker with sunglasses on and a lollipop stick between her teeth, and she looks so much like Danny Zuko that I stop dead in my tracks and start laughing. She grins, which makes it even worse, and then she looks over her sunglasses and winks at me, and there are tears streaming down my cheeks by the time I manage to catch my breath.

  “Are you grounded?” she asks once I’ve regained my composure.

  “No, why?”

  “Because I want to finish what we started the other day,” she says. “Vis-à-vis the thing in my trunk.”

  “I can probably go. Let me text my dads,” I answer, even as I’m trailing her out of the school and to her car. We stand outside the car with the doors open, letting the oven-hot interior air out for a couple of minutes. By the time it’s cool enough to get inside without melting, I’ve already gotten a reply. Have fun, thanks for checking in, love you! from Pop, and Be home by ten from Dad. I send them a string of kissy-face emojis and we get into the car. Paulie blasts the air-conditioning, and I buckle up and brace myself for another traumatizing ride.

  “How’d today feel?” I ask, and she shrugs.

  “Good,” she says. “Comfortable.”

  “Think you’ll do this one again?”

  She shakes her head, hesitates, then nods. “Probably. I mean, I look handsome as hell.” She waggles her eyebrows. “Don’t pretend you didn’t notice.”

  “How could I miss it?” I laugh, and she gives me another wolfish grin.

  We talk about college, and about New York, and about whether she’ll stick with female pronouns when she leaves our little town. We talk about State, and about the apartment I’m going to share with Roya and Maryam, and about how hard it is to believe that there are only three weeks left until summer.

  “I meant what I said last time we talked about this. I’m going to miss you a lot, you know,” she says, no grin this time. I put my hand on her shoulder and she clears her throat. “All of you guys.”

  “We’re going to miss you too. But we’ll come visit you in New York, and you’ll show us Times Square and all the best restaurants and clubs and stuff.”

  “Yeah,” she says with a small smile. “Yeah, that’ll be great.”

  We spend the rest of the drive talking about how scary all of this is—how awful it is to be losing pieces of ourselves as we get rid of the pieces of Josh. It feels like we all just started really understanding who we are, and now that’s all changing, and it’s awful.

  Talking about it doesn’t make it better. But it’s good to tell someone I’m scared. It makes it easier, knowing that I’m not alone.

  We get to Barclay Rock and lapse into a heavy silence. Paulie pops the trunk and hands me Josh’s arm. We walk into the trees and find the tree trunk we sat on last time. Paulie casts a net of magic out into the tree line, and then she spreads out a little blanket on the ground, and we sit on it and pick at the crunchy grass and wait.

  “Do you think I can touch her this time?” Paulie asks.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea,” I answer. “She’s a coyote.”

  “You touched her,” Paulie mutters. I glare at her and she holds her palms up. “Okay, okay, I was just asking.”

  When the coyote finally shows up, she pauses and smells the air for a full minute before approaching us. She looks a little less ragged than she did last time we saw her. A little less bony.

  She sits near the edge of our picnic blanket and cocks her head. Her muzzle is brown, muddy-looking, and I wonder if it’s dirt or dried blood I’m looking at. I hold out a hand and she growls, a low rumble in her throat, but she lowers her head and shoves it against my palm.

  More meat for you and your pups, I tell her.

  Why what smell who meat smell good meat why

  I point to the arm, and she smells the full length of it be
fore grabbing the wrist in her teeth and using it like a handle to tug the arm.

  Wait, I tell her. Come back?

  She looks up at me with golden eyes and drops the arm. She steps toward me and waits, her body tense.

  I grab Paulie’s hand. Her fingers shift under mine, trying to lace into the spaces between my knuckles, but I turn her hand over so her palm faces down. Out of the corner of my eye I see her look at me, but I don’t take my gaze away from the coyote.

  Slowly.

  Slowly.

  Easy now.

  Careful.

  I lift Paulie’s hand to the top of the coyote’s head.

  As her fingertips land on fur, I let my thumb brush against the coyote’s head. Still, stay still, it’s okay, she’s good, I say, as quietly as I know how to talk in this language that isn’t talking. The coyote is unmoving, but rigid. Her ears twitch. Thank you thank you thank you, I say, and the coyote licks her chops, and I pull Paulie’s hand away. Her fingers twine between mine, and I can feel her trembling.

  The coyote is gone before we can say anything else. She takes the arm with her. Paulie lets out a long, slow exhalation. She’s still got my hand in hers, and she’s staring at the tree line with a look on her face that I’ve never seen before. She looks scared, and excited, and full.

  “It’s amazing, right?” I say.

  “Yeah,” Paulie answers. “It’s totally amazing. I tried to talk to her the way that you do, but I couldn’t figure it out. It’s—her fur was softer than I thought it would be?”

  “Yeah, she’s been shedding her undercoat a lot lately, and probably hanging out with her pups a lot, so she hasn’t been out roaming around. But I didn’t know she’d feel like that either,” I admit. “I didn’t know she’d be so small.”

  “I can’t believe I just pet a coyote,” Paulie says, and then she doubles over laughing, the kind of breathless laughter that comes after you do something incredibly stupid.

  “You did it, kiddo,” I say, laughing with her. She sits up and looks at me, and the laughter on her face changes. The I-can’t-believe-we-did-that grin softens. It turns into something that’s still a smile, but different. It’s between the two of us. It’s a smile that’s only for me.

  I realize that she’s still got my hand. Her thumb is tracing an arc from the back of my wrist to the inside of my palm. Her gaze flicks from my mouth to my eyes, and she bites her lip hard enough that if I were Maryam, I’d yell at her.

  Part of me knows what’s coming. And part of me wants it. We’ve been flirting for years, even during times when I’ve had a girlfriend and she’s had a boyfriend, or the other way around. Part of me knows that it would be so easy, so nice. Part of me wants to make Paulie happy. Part of me thinks I could be happy too. Maybe I could.

  She leans forward and lifts her free hand to my cheek. Her fingers slide back across my cheekbone, along my neck, her thumb brushing my earlobe.

  And then she’s kissing me.

  Her hand is in my hair, and her mouth is on mine, and our eyes are closed and I can taste the tip of her tongue, soft and a little sweet. She’s kissing me, Paulie is kissing me, and I’m kissing her back, and she shifts her weight a little and drops my hand and grips my waist and it’s good, it’s so good but—

  It’s wrong.

  I pull back and keep my eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. It’s the worst thing I could say, but it’s also the only thing I could say.

  “I’m not,” Paulie whispers. I open my eyes and she’s a few inches from my face, smiling like she can’t help but smile. She leans forward to kiss me again and I let her because I’m a bad person, because it feels good and because I like it a lot when she kisses me. I let her kiss my mouth, and I let her trail kisses along my jaw to my throat, and I press my lips to her collarbone. Because I’m weak. Because it’s easy to give in when someone makes you feel good. And oh god, she feels good, and her hands and her mouth feel good, and her thigh is sliding between mine and her hair is in my hands—

  But then my back is against the blanket Paulie brought, and I have to stop because it’s wrong. What I’m doing is wrong.

  “I can’t do this,” I whisper against Paulie’s hair.

  “Yes you can,” she whispers against the bent-back cup of my bra.

  “No, I mean—I can’t do this,” I say again. “I’m sorry. This is—”

  She looks up at me, her thumb pausing just below the undone-button of my jeans, her hair tousled in a way that makes my breath catch in my throat. “Please,” she says. “I know I’m not the one you want, but—I need this right now.”

  I take a deep slow breath, and my conscience battles with the feeling of her breath against me. I could do it. I could make this decision with Paulie, a choice we both know is a bad one. Not bad because of what it is, but bad because of who it is. Her eyes search mine, and in that frozen moment, I can feel the tug of the wrong decision, pulling at me like a tide.

  I could do it. I could sleep with Paulie, and it would be great, and I wouldn’t even start to feel guilty until the next time I saw the person I really wanted.

  I could do it.

  But I won’t. She deserves better than that from me.

  I scoot out from under her. She sighs and sits up, leaning her back against the tree stump and scrubbing her hands across her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I start to say, but she holds up a hand.

  “Don’t,” she says. “I know.”

  “No, I—it’s not you,” I say, and I feel like a cliché, like an idiot. “Honestly. You’re amazing, and I would totally—I would be so into this. I really would. But it wouldn’t be right. I made this mistake with Josh.” I bite my lip too hard, flinch, keep talking. The words come fast. “I think that using him like that, and lying to him about being okay with it, I think that’s what made my magic go all crazy. I think that’s why he died. And I wouldn’t feel right about using you the way I was using him. I don’t know if you would get hurt the same way, I mean. I don’t know if you would get hurt physically? But it was wrong, the way I used him. Even if you would survive it, I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “Yeah,” Paulie says. “I get it. I’m great, but I’m not her. This isn’t news.”

  The words take a second to sink in. “Wait, what?”

  “I’m not Roya,” Paulie says. She runs her hands through her hair and grimaces at the pomade that comes away on her palms. She wipes them on the dry grass at the edge of the blanket. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

  I half smile. “It was a pretty decent position to be in,” I say, and she lets out a grim laugh. “Wait, so—how do you know about me and … ? I mean, not that there is a me and Roya, but how did you know that I—”

  “That you’re fucking crazy about her?” Paulie asks. “Are you looking for a reason other than ‘It’s the most obvious thing in the goddamn world’?”

  “Yes … ?” I fidget with the blanket. “But we don’t have to talk about it. Paulie, I’m really sorry if I gave you the idea that—”

  “You didn’t,” she says sharply. “I just … Things are really fucked up right now and I needed an outlet, okay? It didn’t mean anything.” I flinch, stung, and she revises quickly. “I don’t mean it that way. I just mean—look, I’m not heartbroken that you said no, okay?”

  I can’t tell if I believe her or not. It would be so egotistical to think that she was desperately in love with me or whatever, but also, I don’t want to go the easy route and take her at her word. I want to trust her, but I don’t want to do the wrong thing if she doesn’t really mean what she said. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I hate this.

  “Really,” she adds, scooting closer to me and draping an arm around my shoulder. “I just thought you looked really hot and I was getting a little bit of a vibe and the coyote thing was awesome and I thought maybe we’d have fun. But I don’t want to do anything that will leave you feeling guilty or messed up. And our friendsh
ip is more important than how great of a kisser I am.” She plants a very wet kiss on my cheek, and I wipe it off on my sleeve, laughing.

  “Are we okay?” I ask.

  “I think so,” she says. “Are you sure you don’t want to make out just a little, now that we both know where we stand?”

  I look over at her with no idea how to say yes I want that a lot but I can’t because it would be wrong but I want to do that a LOT—and I see the wolf grin waiting for me. She cackles at the look on my face, and I shove her over. “You’re an asshole,” I laugh.

  “You’re fucking smitten.” She cackles. “Holy crap, Alexis, you’ve got it really bad. I knew you liked Roya, but yikes.” She wipes her eyes and props herself up on her elbow. “If I’d known you were this crazy about her, I would never have tried anything,” she says more seriously. “I promise.”

  “I know.” I stand up and hold out my hand. “Thanks for understanding.”

  “Of course,” she says, taking my hand and pulling herself up. “And hey—Roya’s going to be a lucky gal once you two finally make out. You’re a damn good kisser, Alexis.”

  I blush so hard that she starts laughing again. She cracks jokes until we’re a few blocks from my house. At the driveway, she puts the car in park and rubs the back of her neck awkwardly.

  “Would, um … would you mind not telling the gang about what happened tonight?” she asks softly. “It was awesome and I’m not embarrassed or anything, but I don’t want them to think I’m pining after you or anything.”

  “Of course not,” I answer. “And … no weirdness. Between us, I mean. At least, not on my side of things.”

  Paulie cups my chin in one hand and presses a gentle kiss against the tip of my nose. “I know,” she says. “I might be sad for a minute or two, but … no weirdness.”

  “Hey, Paulie?” I ask.

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you think you lost this time?”

  She looks blank for a second before she remembers. She forgot. I did too—we both got so caught up that we almost forgot about what we’ve been losing of ourselves. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll find out, though.”