When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  What if I’m a monster?

  I scream into the pillow.

  I’ve never screamed into a pillow before. It always kind of seemed like a cliché. But now that I’m doing it … it’s pretty satisfying. I scream into it again, so hard that my throat burns, and then again, and I’m just gearing up for another scream when I hear the door to my bedroom open.

  “Did you impale an eyeball on something?” Pop asks, pulling the pillow off my face. “You know this thing doesn’t actually muffle you that much, right?”

  “Oh, um. Sorry,” I mumble. “I didn’t realize. Hey, that was fast.” I scramble up to a sitting position and sit with my back against the wall, my legs stretched across the mattress. “Is Nico off the hook?”

  “Far from it,” Pop says with a wry shake of his head. “But Dad took over so I could come talk to you. Once we heard the wailing, we figured we should probably divide our efforts. And I thought you might want this back.” He lifts his arm, and I realize for the first time that he’s got my bag.

  “Thanks.” I grab the bag and drop it on the pillows next to me, trying to get that exposed J facedown. I want to shove the whole thing back under the bed, but that would look suspicious. Or maybe not doing it looks suspicious? I don’t know what to do with my hands.

  “So, we need to talk.” Pop leans against the wall next to the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. He ducks his head, giving himself a little double chin. He’s staring at the bag. I resist the urge to push it behind the pillows. “You’re not in any trouble,” he says quickly, probably seeing the blood drain from my face. “But Dad and I are worried about you.”

  “What? Why?” My palms tingle with a bloom of sweat. Worried is way worse than mad. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not yourself lately. Skipping classes was one thing, but shouting at your brother? What’s that about?” He shakes his head. “You know we’re not—”

  “—not a shouting family, I know.” I can’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. Maybe I’m not trying very hard. Pop’s eyebrows unify at the interruption, but he doesn’t stop me. “You didn’t see what he was doing, though, Pop. He was under my bed.”

  “It’s not just about yelling, bug,” he says gently. “You’ve been giving everyone a whole lot of bad attitude lately. Not just Nico. Me and Dad, too. What’s that about?”

  Oh, great. So this is a you’re-a-huge-jerk-and-nobody-likes-you talk. I clench my jaw. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m not trying to beat up on you here.”

  “Could have fooled me,” I mutter.

  “I just want to know what’s going on with you. This behavior isn’t like you at all—”

  “Well, maybe you just think that because you don’t know me.” I let my hands drop to my sides, and one of them lands on the bag with the heart in it. “You think I’m not being myself because you have no idea who I am!” Pop takes a deep calming breath of his own, and for some reason, it infuriates me. The words pour out before I can stop them, my volume creeping up with every word. “You think I’m still some little kid that you can control, but I’m not, and I haven’t been for a long time! And I’m dealing with all of this shit on my own and you have no idea what it’s like, okay?! You have no idea.”

  My cheeks and palms are both burning. When I touch my face, my fingers come away wet. I tuck my hands under my thighs just in case they’re glowing. They feel like they are, and for the hundredth time, I wish that I could see my own magic. I dig my fingernails into my palms hard.

  I’m losing control.

  Shit.

  “I’m sorry I yelled,” I whisper.

  “Oh, sweetie,” he says, and then he’s sitting next to me with his arm around my shoulder. He’s soft, and his ratty old sweater feels the same way it did when I was little. “I can’t understand what’s going on if you don’t tell me. But I want to understand. I really do.”

  I want to lean on him and cry like a kid. I want to. But it just doesn’t feel right. I shake my head, sitting up stiffly, and he takes his arm off my shoulder. I wonder if I hurt his feelings by not wanting the hug. I wonder if I’m just destined to hurt everyone around me. I clench my fists even harder, and try to focus on the pain so I don’t lose control and ruin everything.

  “It’s just that I can’t be who you want me to be, okay? That’s not who I am anymore,” I tell him.

  “Okay,” Pop says.

  “I’m—wait, what?”

  “I said okay,” he repeats. “I believe you. But I want to know who you are. Your dad does too. Hell, I bet Nico even wants to know who you are, even if he doesn’t really know how to show it.” He shifts away so he can look at me, and maybe also to give me a little space. “Look, kiddo. Sorry, not ‘kiddo,’ I should stop calling you that.” My chest hurts. I don’t want him to stop calling me that. “Alexis. Whatever it is that you feel like you can’t tell us … I can’t force you to trust me, but I’m here to listen, okay? And no matter what’s going on, I’ll love you. I promise.”

  I look at my kneecaps, my nightstand, the pattern on my bedspread. Anywhere but at him. I take a few more deep breaths. I’m going to do something stupid. “Are you sure?” I whisper.

  He hesitates. “Have I ever told you about what it was like when I came out to my mom?”

  I shake my head. Grandma died when I was too little to remember her, and Pop barely ever talks about her.

  “I wasn’t that much younger than you are now,” he says. “I felt a lot of the things you’re feeling—like I wasn’t the person who she thought I was. Like I was lying to her, but also like it was her fault that I couldn’t tell her the truth.”

  I open my mouth to say that I don’t think it’s his fault I can’t tell him, but then I close it. Because he’s right. I do think it’s his fault. I don’t know why, but it’s true—some part of me blames my dads for the fact that I’ve kept my magic a secret.

  “When I told her,” he continues, “she didn’t say all the right things. In fact, she said a lot of things that really hurt. The very first thing she said was, ‘I still love you, no matter what.’ ” He shakes his head. “That kind of hurt the worst, you know? It felt like she was saying she loved me in spite of something. It felt like she was saying it was hard to love me, now that she knew who I really was.” He clears his throat. “She grew a lot over the years. By the time I met your dad, she’d figured out how to say things a little better. We adopted you. She got to be a grandmother for a couple of years before she passed. It was really amazing to see the way our family changed—but I never forgot how ‘I love you anyway’ felt.”

  “Wow,” I whisper. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But then, you remember when you were really little and she passed? I had to go away for a couple of weeks to clear out her house?”

  “Kind of?” I remember my dad’s friend Patricia coming over to hang out with me a lot, and I remember eating macaroni and cheese for breakfast a couple of days in a row because we ran out of cereal and Dad kept forgetting to go to the store.

  “I found her old journals while I was there.” His voice is far away now, like he’s completely lost in the memory. “I kept going back and forth on whether I should read them, but one night I cracked open a bottle of whiskey and went for it. I read all of them in one sitting. And I realized I had it completely backward that whole time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wrote pages and pages about how she could tell she was getting things wrong, and how she wanted to say the right things but didn’t know how to. She kept writing about how she hoped I knew she loved me, even when she messed up.” He smiles. “She wasn’t saying ‘I love you in spite of who you are.’ She was saying ‘I might screw this up a lot, but the biggest thing is that I love you. The most important thing in my heart is that I love you.’ Does that make sense?”

  “I think so,” I say, although I’m not really sure if it does.

 
“The point is, whatever it is you think you can’t tell me about, bug? I might not know how to say the right thing about it, and I might have questions. I might not understand right away. But I love you, and that doesn’t change. That’s the biggest, most important part of this.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask again.

  “I’m sure,” he says back.

  My heart is pounding so hard that I can see the front of my shirt fluttering just a little. My breathing is too loud. I’m going to throw up. I’m going to black out. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t—

  “This is who I am.”

  I take my hands out from under my thighs and hold them out in front of me, palms up.

  Magic.

  I can’t see the threads of my magic, but I can feel them. I can feel the power spiraling out of me. It feels like I’m exhaling a held breath. And there’s at least one thing that Pop and I can both see.

  Blood.

  There are crescent-moon divots in each of my palms, dents from my fingernails. They open up slow, like sleepy eyes. Blood curls up out of the wounds. A tiny stream of red from each little crescent-wound, coiling together to form slender vines. Four delicate orchids bud and bloom along the lengths of them, each thumbnail-sized flower unfolding in perfect stop-motion synchrony with the others.

  It lasts for only a few seconds. Then, realizing what I’ve done, I gasp and clench my fists. My fingertips sting the places where my palms are wounded. I squeeze my eyes shut against the pain. When I open them again, I peek at my hands to see how bad the cuts are.

  They’re gone.

  My skin is smooth, completely intact. There’s blood threaded into the creases of my palms, though, and four impossibly small, impossibly perfect dark-red orchids rest in each of my cupped hands. The petals, each the size of the white crescent at the tip of my smallest fingernail, curve across each other like the panels of a spread fan. I gently stroke one with my thumb. It feels like warm glass.

  I made this. I made it with a tiny bit of blood, and then I healed myself. It didn’t feel like it does when Roya heals me, though—it felt like something different. It felt like the blood was trying to come to me for a purpose, for a reason, and once that was finished, the healing happened by itself.

  I look up at Pop.

  He isn’t doing so good. His lips are white and his eyes are wide and I’m not sure if he’s going to pass out or not. Beads of sweat stand out on his scalp. He opens his mouth once like he’s going to talk, and his jaw trembles and then snaps shut again. I’ve never seen his nostrils flared so wide. He glances up at me, then back down at my hand, and I wonder if he’s about to say that he loves me anyway.

  After a long silence, he opens his mouth again. “This … um. This is who you are?” he asks tentatively, reaching out to touch one of the orchids and hesitating with his fingertip an inch away from it.

  “Well. I didn’t know I could do that,” I whisper. “But yeah. I guess this is who I am.” He doesn’t touch the orchid. He curls his finger back away from it. When I look up, he’s got an expression on his face that I can’t read. He’s still wide-eyed and pale, and I can’t tell if he’s scared or angry or sad or … what. “Pop?”

  “Yeah, bug?”

  “Say something.”

  He starts nodding as if he’s agreeing with something I didn’t say. “We’ve got to show your dad,” he says. My eyes fill with tears again. It’s not a bad answer, but it’s not a good one either. He looks up at me, and I see that his eyes are shining too. “We’ve got to show him,” he says, “because, damn, kiddo. This is the most amazing, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  I blink back the tears hard. “Really?”

  “Can I hug you? Is that okay? I’m sorry I called you ‘kiddo’ again, I just.” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and he doesn’t blink back his tears. They start streaming down his cheeks one at a time, sliding along his jaw and dropping off his chin with loud plops.

  “Yeah,” I say, “that’s okay.” And Pop wraps his arms around me, and I finally let myself lean into him. The neck of his sweater is damp with tears. It’s been a long time since I’ve let either of my dads hug me for longer than a few seconds, and it doesn’t feel the same as it used to. When I was little, it felt like the only safe place in the whole world. Now it’s nice, but also kind of awkward, like trying to fit into clothes that are just a little too small.

  I’m so glad he didn’t say that he loves me anyway. And as he hugs me and cries, something occurs to me that should have occurred to me a long time ago. That should have occurred to me while he was telling me the story about his mom.

  The thing he was probably expecting me to tell him.

  “Pop?”

  “Yeah?” His voice is strained.

  I clear my throat. “You, um. You know I’m not straight, right? I know we’ve never really talked about it, and I kind of assumed that you guys knew, but. In case I have to tell you. I don’t totally know what the right word is for what I am, but … I’m definitely not straight.”

  He laughs in that way that you do when you’re crying and overwhelmed and so, so, so thankful that there’s something, anything, to laugh about. “Yeah, bug.” He kisses me on top of the head. “I know.”

  “Is it okay that I don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Sure,” he says. “But if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or any kind of partner-person, I’d like to know.”

  I hold back a smile. “I don’t. Yet.”

  “Are you going to soon?”

  “I don’t know.” I laugh, sitting up. “I don’t even know if I should ask her out or not.”

  “Well, when you’re ready to, know that you have my blessing,” he says. “Roya’s always welcome in our family.”

  “Wait, what did you—”

  “Yeah,” he says. He wipes his face on the hem of his sweater, then slaps his knees with both palms. “Now, come on. We’ve got to go find your dad and blow his mind.”

  18.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU TOLD them.” Marcelina cups her hands around the pile of kindling she’s crafted. “After all those years of arguing about whether or not any of us should tell any of our parents, I can’t believe you’re the one who broke first.” Her fingernails are dark with dirt, and the smell of turned earth lingers in the air around us. The kindling forms a perfect pyramid, rising out of the hole we’ve dug in a far corner of her family’s sprawling yard. I’m half lying down in the grass, damp with sweat from the digging.

  I’m digging so much these days.

  “Me either,” I say. “It feels like a dream.” I flinch as the words leave my mouth—I shouldn’t use the word “dream” so lightly anymore. Just like the word “explode.” They both have a new flavor now. A bitterness.

  Smoke spirals up from the kindling. Marcelina doesn’t move her hands, but her forehead creases with focus. “Bad dream or good dream?”

  “I’m not sure. I mean, they took it better than I could have hoped. But at the same time …”

  “Yeah,” she says, nodding. I don’t say anything for a few minutes, letting her concentrate on heating the kindling enough to get a fire started.

  It’s true—Pop and Dad both took the whole “I’m magic” thing shockingly well. They had a lot of questions, and what Pop said was right: sometimes, the questions kind of hurt to hear and none of them were easy to answer. Questions like “Did you do anything illegal to get this power?” and “Does it hurt you to do the things you’re doing?” and “Have you ever used this power to hurt anyone?” That last one was really tough to answer, because before prom night, the answer would have been “no.”

  I didn’t tell them about Josh. I told them about other stuff, like cheating on a test once (disappointed Dad-glares) and fucking with Nico by getting birds to chase him (poorly smothered laughter). I told them about how there are things I can do and things I can’t do, and I don’t know what all of those things are yet.

  And, after a lot of thin
king and a lot of hesitation, I told them that I’m not the only one. I didn’t tell them who else is magic—I couldn’t betray the girls like that. I told them that there are a ton of people in town who can do what I can do, and I told them that I bet there are also a ton of people out there in the world who can do it too. I told them that I don’t think there’s something about this town that made me the way I am, but that really, I don’t know. None of us do. We don’t know if it’s genetic, or environmental, or just a fluke. We don’t know if we’re evolution or radiation or … or anything. We could be anything.

  I didn’t tell them who’s magic, but I told them that I’m not alone. I told them that I found people like me, and that we support each other, and that I’d trust those people with my life. I told them about recognizing something different in each other, something special. Something magic.

  I think they knew who I meant, but they told me not to tell them any names. They said that I shouldn’t ever share someone else’s secrets without their permission. They said that they were proud of me for honoring other people’s identities.

  My dads listened to me in a way that I don’t think they’ve ever listened to me before—it didn’t feel like they were waiting to give me advice or instructions, and it didn’t feel like they were humoring me. It felt like they respected me. They took in everything I was telling them, and they asked questions as if I were teaching them things they’d never even imagined before. Which I guess I was.

  Really, it couldn’t possibly have gone better. Except that they talked to me like an equal, which means that they didn’t really talk to me like they were talking to their daughter. They talked to me like they were getting to know me, which means that they didn’t act like they’d known me my whole life.

  I felt like a stranger. A stranger they respected, but still—a stranger.

  “Okay,” Marcelina says. She sits back on her heels, and when I look into the shallow pit we dug, there’s a little fire going. It’s small, but it’s crackling and growing every second. It climbs quickly up the twigs and paper curls, and before long, it’s leaping at the larger sticks she’s stacked onto the outside of the pyramid of kindling.