When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  “Yeah,” Roya says, but she sounds distracted and I’m not sure if she actually heard me. She’s got a duffel slung over her shoulder, and she’s staring into the trees in a far-off way I’m not used to. “Let’s go?”

  “Sure,” I say, and I follow her into the trees. They’re spaced far enough apart that it almost feels like a set piece in a movie, a fake forest, but then I turn to look behind me and realize that I can’t see the road anymore. Without Roya, I know I’d never find my way back. That’s the mark of a real forest: you can get lost before you realize that you should be trying to stay found.

  I follow her through the trees, only occasionally having to step around the sparse undergrowth. Her hair is up in a high bun. The back of her shirt is dark with sweat. I watch the way her calves move with each step, the way the backs of her knees turn pink in the heat. We don’t speak. She’s not looking back at me. Whatever our destination is, she’s entirely focused on it. Whatever our destination is, I’ll follow her there.

  The clearing comes upon us suddenly. Or maybe it seems that way to me. I’m not sure how long we’ve been walking, and I have no idea where the road is, but without warning, the trees fall away. I nearly run into Roya’s back. She’s standing with her arms by her sides, her eyes closed, her chin tipped back. She’s breathing slowly, and every time she exhales: magic.

  It’s nothing I’ve ever seen her do before. Roya is frenetic energy, hunger, anger. But in this place, she’s still and calm. Every time she exhales, a bare hush of a breeze stirs the leaves that are littered across the grass of the meadow. A loose tendril of hair plays across her forehead in the breeze, and a whisper of light suffuses her skin.

  It’s not that she’s more beautiful than usual. She’s always beautiful. But she’s still, and I get to look at her without reservation, without worrying that she’ll think it’s weird of me to stare. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was, but now I’m offered the opportunity to drink her in. And I take it.

  When she opens her eyes, I don’t look away. She looks right at me, and I’m certain that she sees the longing on my face. I don’t try to hide it. For the first time ever, I don’t try to hide it. My hands are shaking. My heart is shaking.

  She smiles.

  She bites her lip.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I just … I like to take a minute when I first get here. To be present.”

  “No worries,” I say, my voice rough. “Take all the time you need.”

  “I’m good,” she says. And then she holds out her hand.

  I look at it. She’s wearing the gold bangle with the dark green stones. The lines of her palm are dark. The skin of her wrist trembles with the force of the pulse beneath the surface. She twitches her fingers, and I realize she’s waiting for me. I reach out my hand and put it in hers.

  Her fingers curl around mine, and she leads me toward the center of the clearing.

  “I like to come here sometimes,” she says. Her thumb is tracing the curve of my knuckle. I can’t breathe. “When things get tough. It’s where I first did magic, did you know that?”

  “I thought the first time you did magic was at a family thing? The barbecue with the dropped cake … ?” I hear myself say the words as though from a distance.

  “I always say that, but this is really the first place.” I realize that she isn’t looking at me. She stops in the middle of the clearing, and she doesn’t look at me, and she traces the line of my thumb. “I got separated from my parents on a camping trip, and I wound up here. I could hear them looking for me, but I stayed quiet. I remember being scared that if they found me, they’d get mad and send me away.”

  “Oh.” It’s all I can think to say. Roya sinks to the grass and sits, still holding my hand. I sit across from her. Our knees are less than one inch apart, but there’s no way for me to scoot forward without it being obvious that I just want her to touch me. I just want her to touch me.

  “Yeah,” she says. She’s still not looking at me. “Anyway. I fell and skinned my knee on the way here, and it was bleeding like crazy, but by the time they found me, it was totally healed. No blood, no scar. Nothing. I remember trying to tell my mom about it, and she was sure that I had just gotten scared and imagined it, but I know it happened. That was the first time I did magic.”

  “How did you get lost?” I ask. My knees feel warm and I look down and realize that somehow, she has come closer. We are touching. Our knees are touching, and our hands are touching, and she’s grabbing my other hand too. Holding it. And she finally looks at me. My breath catches when our eyes meet.

  “I walked off,” she says. “I was looking for my mom.”

  “Where was she?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” she says, shaking her head and looking at me intently. “I was looking for my birth mom. I dreamed that she was in the woods, and I wandered off to find her. It was the middle of the night.”

  “How old were you?” I ask. The first time Roya did magic in front of me, we were eight and she still needed two nightlights. I can’t imagine her in the woods by herself, in the dark. No moonlight would be enough to keep the shadows from looking like monsters.

  “Four,” she whispers. “I was so scared of the dark, but I wanted to find her. I wanted to find my birth mom. And I stayed here because I thought she was going to come get me.” She squeezes both of my hands, and I squeeze hers back. She’s looking back and forth between my eyes like there’s something there, some answer to a question she hasn’t asked yet. “I come here sometimes to think about stuff, or to be alone. I’ve never brought anyone here before.”

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why she’s showing me. All I can say is “Thank you.” I run the pad of my thumb across the palm of her hand, and she bites her lip. I’m stuck between absolute certainty that I’m imagining something between us and absolute certainty that I’m not imagining it at all.

  “It’s a magic place,” she says. She lifts one of my hands to her mouth and presses her lips to my thumb, still staring directly into my eyes. My breath is loud in my ears. “Of course I wanted to show you,” she whispers to the curve of my palm.

  “Roya,” I start to say, but I don’t know what should come after.

  Or, I do know what should come after, but I don’t know how to say it. I’ve been biting back the words for so long now that I don’t know how to push them past my lips.

  But it doesn’t matter.

  It doesn’t matter, because she’s kissing me.

  * * *

  How can I explain what it’s like?

  It’s like soft grass under your back on a hot day.

  It’s like the first ripe strawberry from the garden.

  It’s like watching someone fall asleep with their head on your shoulder, and knowing that you could brush the hair away from their eyes without waking them.

  It’s like coming home.

  * * *

  When Roya stops kissing me, she rests her forehead against mine and laughs.

  “What?” I breathe.

  “Look,” she says, her mouth so close to mine that I can taste the letter L tumbling from her lips.

  I look. I don’t want to, because it means moving my head away from hers, but I look. “Oh,” I say, and then “oh” again, because the first time wasn’t quite enough.

  The clearing is carpeted in flowers. All except for the place where we’re sitting. Tiny purple flowers and huge, spreading yellow ones, and a fine tracery of white clover blossoms. The air is fragrant, and Roya is laughing and running a hand over the tops of the flowers closest to her. She flings herself backward and lands hard, but she keeps laughing as she sprawls her arms out on the flowers. Petals fly up around her like a snowdrift.

  “That looked like it hurt,” I say.

  “It did,” she says. “Try it.”

  I fling myself down next to her, and she’s right, it hurts. And I’m glad I did it. I watch as flower petals spiral up in the air over our heads, and I listen to Roya laughing
, and I can feel myself bleeding magic too. A swarm of butterflies circles overhead and settles in the branches of the birch trees, their yellow wings fluttering like autumn leaves.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” Roya says.

  “Would you like to do it again?” I ask, then laugh at how slick I sound. I’m still laughing as her mouth finds mine, and then I’m not laughing anymore because she’s not what I thought she would be. She’s more. Her lips are soft, and her hands are both tangled in my hair, and she’s straddling my hips and making a soft noise that means I’m more than she thought I would be too.

  When we stop for air, her hair is loose around her shoulders, falling into my face. It’s not dusk yet, but the light outside has taken on a long-shadow quality that means it will start getting dark before too long.

  “Wow,” I breathe.

  “Yeah,” she says. She touches her nose to the soft skin behind my ear and I pull up two fistfuls of flowers. “We should go soon.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I don’t sit up. She stays with me for the space of three slow breaths; then she stands up and extends a hand to me.

  “Come on.” She’s smiling. Her lips are a little swollen. The word “bee-stung” springs into my mind, unbidden. “We have to take care of Josh before we go.”

  In the place where we were sitting before, there’s a circle of grass. Roya digs her fingers into the soft soil and pulls up sod. She sinks her hands into the earth and turns it up as easily as she might pull fistfuls of cotton out of a torn-open teddy bear. I watch her, and she catches me watching her, and she grins at me. “Magic,” she says, and I realize that she’s not just pushing her hands into the dirt; she’s pushing threads of magic, too, and the earth is moving for her.

  “I wish I’d thought of that before I did all that damn digging,” I mutter. She laughs at me.

  “Can you grab the bag?”

  “Sure.” I pick up the duffel, which is half-hidden in a sudden profusion of bluebells. She takes it from me, and our fingers brush, and a flock of birds erupts from a nearby tree.

  She doesn’t say anything. She just unzips the duffel and overturns it, letting the arm inside fall into the hole. She shakes the bag, and a few bits of trash fall out—gum wrappers, pencil lead, eraser crumbs. She starts pushing soil back into the hole, over the arm. “What should we do with the bag?” she asks.

  “I guess … leave it in the woods? Or maybe drop it in a dumpster somewhere?” I realize that we should all probably dispose of the bags as quickly as we can.

  “I’ll toss it on the highway,” she says.

  “That’s littering.”

  She gives me a long look. “You’re worried about littering? Really?” I shrug and she shakes her head. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Come here.”

  I sit beside her as she pats the last of the earth down over Josh’s arm. She fishes in one pocket of her shorts with two fingers and withdraws something small and smooth. She drops it into my hand.

  “An acorn?” I ask, turning it over between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Yeah,” she says. “To keep animals from getting at the arm.” She plucks the acorn from my grasp and shoves it down into the soil.

  “We can’t make it grow, though,” I say slowly. “That’s a Marcelina thing.”

  “Alexis. We can do whatever we want,” she says. She leans over and brushes her lips against my earlobe. “We’re magic.”

  She grabs my hand and presses it down under hers, into the soil. She kisses me, and something new happens between us. Magic that feels like nothing I’ve ever done before. Something hot and vibrant. Something urgent and immediate. I feel the soil shift under my fingers, and then under my feet, and then we’re both toppling backward. Roya pulls me up by my wrist, yanking me away from—

  A tree.

  An oak tree.

  A small one, twisting up out of the ground. Five narrow, trembling branches reaching up like fingers. Leaves bud and unfurl as we watch, our hands clenched together tight. Gray bark hardens and cracks and splits and grows again. A gash opens in one side of the trunk; it oozes sap and then heals over within a few seconds.

  “Holy shit,” Roya says.

  “Holy shit,” I repeat, because there’s nothing else that either of us can say. With a rustle and a shake of acorn-heavy branches, the oak stops growing. It’s easily fifteen feet tall, with a huge, full canopy. It’s beautiful.

  It’s ours.

  “We did that,” Roya breathes.

  “Are you scared?” I ask.

  “Of what?”

  “Of what might happen next. Of what you might lose.”

  She shakes her head. “It’ll happen how it happens, and you’ll be with me for it, so why would I be scared?”

  I don’t say anything at all. I just grab her by the shoulders, push her back against the trunk of our new tree, and kiss her.

  We make a pile of our clothes in the grass as the sun goes down.

  Roya presses me down into the flowers as the crickets start to sing.

  I gasp her name as the first few stars appear in the dusky sky.

  I kiss her, and I kiss her, and I kiss her. And she kisses me back.

  20.

  THE DRIVE HOME FROM ROYA’S meadow is soft-focus: she drives with one hand and gives me the other hand, and I kiss her palm, and we don’t say a word to each other. The windows are down and the crickets are singing so loudly that we can hear them even over the sound of the road passing underneath us.

  By daylight the next morning, though, I wonder if maybe we should have talked. Maybe I should have asked her if what happened in the meadow meant the same thing to her as it did to me. Even though all I want is to see her and the way she laughs and the way she smiles and the way she messes with her hair when she’s thinking hard about something and the way she gasps when I kiss the hollow of her hip—even then, I don’t want to see her because I’m afraid she won’t meet my eyes. What if she’s embarrassed around me? What if she says that it was just a joke, or a fling, or—worst of all—a mistake?

  I check my phone for messages from her while I try to figure out what a girl is supposed to wear to a search party. The announcement said to wear comfortable shoes and included dire warnings about ticks and dehydration. I decide on jeans and a tank top: it’s hot as hell, but I’m pretty sure that I heard once that long pants are good to wear when there are ticks around. I dig under my bed for my hiking boots, pushing aside the backpack with Josh’s name on it.

  My hand freezes.

  I do a mental tally.

  The head. The arms. The legs. The spine. The liver. The hands. The feet.

  All those parts are gone. I had gotten so used to the feeling of knowing that we had more pieces to get rid of—so used to the guilt and uncertainty and pressure—that I hadn’t realized we were done.

  I tug the bag out from under my bed, and there’s no heft to it at all, no weight. Before I even finish unzipping it, I know what I’ll find. But I still have to see for myself.

  I pull at the zipper tabs, and the loose piece of duct tape covering Josh’s name falls to my bed. My palm covers the J in Josh as I pull the backpack open and look inside.

  I was right. I try to exhale, but I can’t seem to remember how. I was right. There’s nothing in there. I was right, and I have no idea what will happen next.

  The backpack is empty.

  The heart is gone.

  * * *

  The search party is up on the overlook where Paulie kissed me. I catch a ride with Maryam, who passes me a mason jar of something she calls an iced marshmallow latte. It tastes like powdered sugar and toasted breadcrumbs. I tell her to give her dad a C-minus from me. She laughs, and then she tells me about all of his recent culinary adventures. His attempt at homemade cocoa puffs. His basil obsession. I realize, halfway to the overlook, that she’s talking nonstop. It’s not like her—she’s big into listening and leaving room for conversation. I think she’s doing it so I don’t hav
e to talk, and I’m unspeakably grateful.

  When she pulls into one of the last open parking spaces at the overlook, I unbuckle my seat belt and turn to her. She waits for me with big, serious eyes. Her makeup is light, glowy, natural. She’s here to work today, and she’s here for me.

  I finally get it. I trust her. I trust her with my secrets, and I trust her with my friendship, and I trust her with my gratitude. I don’t need to apologize for being thankful for her. I don’t owe her an apology—just gratitude.

  “Hey, before we go out there. I just wanted to say thanks. I know that none of this is yours to deal with, and it means a lot that you’ve been here for me.”

  She rests her fingertip on my chin and stares into my eyes, just like she did on prom night. “Always,” she says. “I’m always here for you. No matter what.”

  I nod. “I know,” I answer. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  There are a ton of people at the tree line, getting instructions. The cop from school is there. I try to move away from her, but she waves me over. My heart pounds as I approach her. She’s watching me with those hawk-eyes. I try to keep my face still and calm, try to focus on the way that my breath moves through my lungs the way Iris always says. I try not to be scared.

  And then I get to the cop, and her eyes pass right over me as she waves over the next girl. My breathing settles a little. Maybe things will be okay.

  The cop assigns each of us to sections of a grid, telling us to stay arm’s-length apart and keep our eyes on the ground. “Watch out for wildlife and tripping hazards,” she says. “Don’t touch anything you find. Just stop where you are and put your hand in the air, and someone will come find you.” Her eyes settle on me again. “Just wait for someone to find you.”

  Or maybe things won’t be okay.

  A hundred feet away, Roya’s mother is talking to another group of people, probably telling them the same thing. Roya is in that group, but it’s like she feels me watching her. She turns and her eyes meet mine and she says something to her mother, who waves her off. She walks over to our group just as we’re lining up and stands next to me. She’s in her old beat-up uniform from when she was on the intramural basketball team in sophomore year. I guess she isn’t worried about ticks. The shirt is a little too small and the shorts are a little tighter than they were then. I remember yesterday, when I was too busy checking Roya out to notice how tired and worried she was, and I reprimand myself. I look at the ground. Don’t be a jerk, Alexis.