by Sarah Gailey
As soon as Roya’s mom picks up, I start talking. “We found him, we found Josh, we’re doing CPR, he’s here—”
“Where?” she interrupts.
“Where?” I repeat, realizing I have no fucking clue where we are. “Um, we’re—it’s a little off the path, it’s—”
“Are you with people? Do they know where the trail is?” Her voice is calm, direct, and I want to lean into it. She knows what to do. Someone knows what to do.
“Yeah, hang on, let me—” I look to Marcelina, who’s standing frozen, gripping Paulie’s arm. “Do you know where the trail is from here?” She nods. “Yeah, okay, Marcelina knows where it is.”
“Give her the phone,” Roya’s mom says, and I do. Marcelina doesn’t take her eyes off Josh as they talk. I watch her because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what to do.
She hangs up and gives me back the phone. “She told me to go find the trail, and then call her and tell her, uh.” She pauses, staring at Josh, until I snap my fingers at her. “Right. I’m supposed to call and tell her what marker we’re at, and she’ll come meet us.”
“I’ll go with you,” Maryam says softly, and Paulie doesn’t say anything, but together they all disappear into the trees, back the way we came.
“Fuck,” Iris whispers. “I don’t think this is working.”
“One more round,” Roya says.
“Can I help?” I ask, and Iris nods.
She grabs me and pulls me to where she’s kneeling, behind Josh’s head, and she shows me how to hold his head in place. His hair is so soft, the way it was when I buried his head in Marcelina’s woods near that broken tree. “Just like that,” she says. “Hold him still just like that. You’re keeping his airway clear so he can breathe if—if that’s something that can happen again.”
His body jolts every time Roya shoves the heels of her hands into his chest. I stare into his face, a face I kissed. This boy who would be alive if it wasn’t for me. I try to hold his head steady enough. If I just hold his head the right way, maybe he’ll breathe.
Please let this work, I think. Please let us save him. Please please please—
There’s crashing in the trees, and voices, and then everyone is everywhere. I hold Josh’s head as Roya and Iris stand up, as hands grip my shoulders to try to pull me away. If I hold his head, he might breathe, and they don’t understand, and they’re trying to pull me away. I open my mouth to yell at them—but then there’s a hand on my shoulder, and Paulie’s sending a sharp spark of magic into me, enough to jolt me away from Josh. She puts her hands under my armpits and hauls me up and away from him.
“Let them help,” she whispers in my ear, pulling me away from the body. “We’ve done what we can do.”
I look up. Everyone is here—Paulie and Roya and Marcelina and Maryam and Iris, and Roya’s mom, and the gray-haired cop from the school, and a half dozen others, all crowding around and doing things to help. They’re all helping, and I’m just … here. Useless.
I can’t fix it.
Paulie leads me to where our friends stand, half-huddled in a circle, leaning on each other. They look exhausted. Roya is flushed and sweating, and her eyes have taken on the same don’t-talk-to-me distance that they get after a swim meet. Iris is staring at the palms of her hands. Behind me, I can hear people loading Josh onto a stretcher. The sound of sirens is a rising howl in the distance.
“We did what we could,” Maryam whispers, wrapping her arms tight around Marcelina. Paulie squeezes my shoulder. “You did everything you could.”
She’s right. I did everything I could.
It just wasn’t enough.
23.
ROYA’S MOM PUTS OUR NAMES into a report, then tells us that we can go home. She says she’ll call us later, take our statements when our parents can be nearby for them. We leave together, even though she dismisses us separately.
We’re quiet for the entire walk back to the parking lot. No one really knows what to say. We bump into each other. I tangle my fingers loosely with Roya’s for a few paces, then drop them. It doesn’t feel right. Nothing feels right.
When we get back to the cars, we stand together awkwardly, not wanting to say goodbye but not wanting to stay here either. After a little bit of uncomfortable shuffling, Maryam looks up at me, visibly reluctant to say whatever’s on her mind.
“The arm,” she says.
“Yeah?” I ask.
Paulie clears her throat. “Did you … Where did it go? The arm that was cut off?”
It takes me a moment to catch up to what she’s asking. “I didn’t—no, I didn’t rip his arm off,” I say, trying to make it sound like a joke. Like something ridiculous.
Everyone looks at me.
“Do you really think I’d do that?” I ask.
“No,” Marcelina says quickly. “Of course not. Not on purpose. It’s just … maybe you did it by accident.”
Roya takes my hand again. “It’s okay,” she murmurs.
I shake my head. “No, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do that. He was like that when I found him.” It sounds like I’m lying, and I catch Iris looking out of the corner of her eye at Paulie. I don’t know how to make them believe me, so instead of saying anything else, I hold out my pinky finger.
After a second, Marcelina links her pinky with mine. “Okay,” she says.
“Right,” Maryam agrees. She adds her pinky to ours. One by one, so do the rest of them. It’s awkward—Roya has to bend her elbow at an angle that makes me cringe—but we all shake on it.
“No secrets,” I say.
“No secrets,” they repeat.
That awkward silence returns. Roya slips her arm around my waist and I lean into her. She’s warm.
She’s alive.
All of us are alive.
Iris clears her throat. “Can one of you drive me home? I, uh. I hurt myself while I was doing compressions on Josh.” She holds up her hands. There are crescent-moon cuts there, fingernail wounds. The blood that’s run across her palms and down her fingers is dry, but the wounds look deep and painful. “I held my hands wrong, I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking. They tell you not to make fists, but …” She trails off helplessly. “I must have made fists.”
A pull flickers deep in my belly.
I couldn’t help with Josh. But I can help with this.
I take a deep breath, deep enough that white spots flare in my vision, and then I reach out and grab Iris’s fingers. Everyone gathers in close to look at her hands, to see what I’m doing. I grip them hard, look her in the eye, and whisper, “Hold still.”
And I give in to the pull.
No surprises this time. It’s just like it was in my bedroom when I showed Pop my magic—tiny spirals of blood rise out of the crescents in Iris’s palms, curling into themselves and freezing into vines. Snugly furled buds form at the tips of impossibly delicate stalks of blood, and they stay that way, curled up tight as a promise. By the time the vines drop into Iris’s hands, her skin is healed.
“What the fuck?” Paulie gapes, her eyes moving between the vines and my face. “What did you—what the fuck? You can—what?!”
“Yeah.” I feel awkward, trapped. Everyone is pressed together around me, and they’re all looking at me, curious and excited. I don’t know how to say I guess I can do blood magic. “I, um. Yeah. I can do that now.”
“Is it healing magic?” Iris asks, her eyes lighting up. “Like Roya?”
“No, I think it’s … I think this is its own thing. Its own kind of magic. The first time it happened was, uh. Prom night.”
I hear Gina before I see her. “I fucking knew it. I knew you were magic.” I turn and there she is, right behind me, tall enough to have seen between my shoulder and Paulie’s. Everyone was so busy staring at Iris’s palms, at the little flowers there, that we didn’t see her.
How long has she been there?
Gina’s eyes flick to Iris, and then to me. I realize, suddenly and without understanding why it took
me so long, that I’m done fighting. It’s too much, and I’m too tired, and Gina—Gina doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve to be so scared. She shouldn’t have to carry something this big just so I’ll feel safe.
She’s looking at me, and I’m looking at her, and I give her a nod. Go on, I think. Do what you have to do. Tell whoever you have to tell.
But she doesn’t say anything. She looks back at Paulie, her brows drawing together, and she shakes her head. Then she looks at Iris and shakes her head again. And then she makes a low humming noise, and her eyes start to fill with panic, and I understand what’s happened.
Iris. The consequence.
Her, uh, mouth will seal over. That’s what Iris had said.
But I can help with this. I know I can.
It feels like kissing Roya did: I can’t tell you how I knew where her mouth would be even when my eyes were closed. I don’t know how I knew that biting her lower lip would make her sigh like the fluttering of new spring leaves. I will never understand how I knew the shape of her hip under my palm before I ever touched her. But I did.
It’s like that. It’s the pull in my belly that’s been there since the moment I saw the dried blood on Iris’s hands. The pull that, if I’m honest with myself, has been there since the moment Iris cast that spell in Josh Harper’s bedroom. The pull that I gave in to when I showed Pop my magic, and turned my blood into something beautiful and dark.
I don’t know how I know how to give in to that pull. I don’t know how I know that it’s the right thing to do. But I do it anyway.
I flip Iris’s hand over and squeeze it hard in mine, feel the beautiful little flowers of her blood turn back to liquid between our palms. Then I clap my palm over Gina’s mouth, leaving a bloody handprint behind, and I reach for my magic, and I—
twist
—and her mouth falls open.
She gasps like she’s coming up for air. She staggers and puts a hand on my shoulder, and as she does, I feel something shift in my bones.
I can do this.
“I hope you don’t tell anyone what we can do,” I tell Gina. “I hope you just … come talk to us about it. But if you do decide to tell someone about us, nothing bad will happen to you. It’s up to you what you do.”
Gina shakes her head, touches her lips. “I knew it,” she whispers. “I knew it.” She walks away fast, looking over her shoulder more than once on her way to her car. She’s looking at me.
I can’t tell what she’s feeling. She looks curious, and excited, and afraid.
No matter what happens, I can’t undo that fear. I can’t ever make her forget the feeling of not being able to open her mouth. I can’t make her believe that I won’t hurt her, any more than I can bring Josh back to life.
But I can try to do things the right way. Even if it doesn’t work out, Maryam is right—it’s worth the attempt.
I take Roya’s hand and we head to her car, which is parked in the shade of a big twisting oak. She leans against the back bumper and pulls me in close.
“You okay?” she whispers against my temple, her lips brushing my hairline.
“I’m trying to be,” I answer, and it feels like the truth.
I’m trying. And I’m going to keep trying.
24.
I’M THE LAST ONE TO show up at Marcelina’s house. I know because they text me:
We’re all here, where are you?
We’re going to make s’mores, where are you?
Alexis get here already, before Roya explodes.
I’m late because I’m walking. I could have asked for a ride, but I’d rather walk. Tonight is the last night before the evenings will start to get really hot—I can smell the way the air is singed at the edges, and I know that tomorrow night, summer will be here. Not just because we graduated today, but because the heat is going to get thick and slow and heavy.
Right. I almost forgot. We graduated today.
It was fine. It lasted too long and none of the speeches were nearly as touching as they were supposed to be. Josh’s parents talked about wishing they could have seen him walk across the stage, and there was a big pile of flowers on an empty chair that was supposed to represent him but really just looked small and cheap. Roya held my hand during the moment of silence. Everyone else bowed their heads, but I couldn’t stop looking at the pile of drugstore carnations on that chair. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t cry for a boy I didn’t know and didn’t miss, but I ached for the goodbye he should have gotten and didn’t. For the life he should have had.
For the thing inside me that took it away from him.
And then it was over. I got a piece of paper that represented my diploma but that wasn’t really my diploma because they mail those to your house. I shook my principal’s hand. I stumbled as I stepped off the stage, but nobody started bleeding because of it. I threw my hat in the air and hugged my friends and cried because even though it was all a bit stale and a bit overdone, it was ours.
That’s why we’re having the sleepover at Marcelina’s house—we’re celebrating. The school year is over. Tomorrow afternoon, Paulie is going to get into her car and drive for hours and hours until she’s in New York City, where she’ll learn how to be who she wants to be. Tonight is the last night that we get to be students, the last night we get to be kids. We all know that there are people who will still think of us as kids for the rest of our lives, but really, this is the last of it. So we’re having the last slumber party that we’ll all be able to have together. We’re going to stay up late and talk and eat and watch movies and probably wind up telling early-morning secrets because we’re too tired to not share them.
And that will be the end of it.
So I’m walking. I’m running my fingers over leaves as I pass, smelling the rosemary from Marcelina’s neighbor’s hedge stirring into the warm air. My feet hurt from standing forever at graduation, but that’s okay. I’m walking through my neighborhood for the last time as the person I am now, and when I leave Marcelina’s house to go home tomorrow morning, I’ll be walking past this same hedge as someone else. As the person I’m supposed to start becoming.
I don’t know if that person I’ll become will have anything in common with the person I was a month ago. I don’t know if I’m a whole new ship, now that all my sails and all my planks have been replaced. But I know that I’ll keep sailing either way.
It’s not fair that Josh died. It’s not right, and I would give anything to bring him back. But I can’t bring him back, and I owe it to him to be better than the version of me that killed him. So there are some things I definitely know about the person I’m going to become. I know I won’t lie to myself as often as I used to, now that I understand how those lies I tell myself hurt other people whether I mean them to or not. I know I’ll try to let my friends love me as much as I love them, no matter how hard that is.
I know I won’t pretend to be any less powerful than I really am. Because now I know for sure: the worst part of me isn’t the strongest part of me.
And the strongest part of me is so, so much stronger than I ever realized.
* * *
I can hear them as I walk across the grass to Marcelina’s front door. I can hear Paulie loudly telling some story or other, and I can hear Maryam interrupting her to add parts. I can’t hear Roya, but I know she’s sitting there hugging a pillow and grinning at both of them and waiting for the moment that she can drop some joke that will make the entire thing brighter for everyone. I can’t hear Iris, but I know that she’s sipping on something—probably Uncle Trev’s super-sour lemonade, maybe with some of Roya’s mom’s stolen vodka mixed in—and enjoying being quiet for a minute or two. She does that more now, after whatever broke inside her at the edge of the woods that day we tried to bring Josh back.
We all do things a little differently now. None of us have gotten back the things we lost. I suppose it’s only fair—Josh didn’t get back what he lost either.
I pause with my hand on the doorknob
and breathe in the not-quite-summer air and try to figure out how I can hang on to this moment, the moment before, the music-swelling importance of it.
But then the doorknob turns under my hand and the door falls open and Gina says, “Finally!”
* * *
Oh yeah. Gina’s here.
She didn’t tell anyone about us. But she did ask us questions. She wanted to know how, and for how long, and who could do what. And then, once we’d been honest with her about everything we could do, she showed us what she could do. She opened up her hands and held two little flames steady in her palms, and she cried and we cried because we’d found each other. Because she didn’t have to be alone anymore, and because we had a new member of our weird little magic family.
And then Iris cried even more, because Gina pulled out a notebook of her own research and asked if we knew anything about how this all worked.
She’s been helping Iris study us, trying to understand the roots and rules of our magic. They’ve gotten really close, and they balance each other. She’s helped Iris to accept that sometimes, it’s okay to not have all the answers. Sometimes, not having the answers means hurting people, and that part is terrible. But a lot of the time, not having the answers means letting things be what they are.
Because whatever this thing is, it’s beautiful. And whatever it is, it’s ours.
* * *
The sleepover is everything we all hoped it would be. It’s perfect. We throw things at each other and make a mess and at midnight Roya says she wants some cookies, so we make cookies out of whatever we can find in the kitchen. Gina and Paulie draw closer and closer to each other over the course of the night, until finally, they disappear into the backyard, arms around each other. When the door shuts behind them, Maryam and I share a smile, and nobody says anything because it’s insane that it’s taken three whole weeks for Gina and Paulie to hook up.
Around four, I’m snuggled up with Handsome and Fritz. Handsome is breathing deep and heavy, and Fritz’s paws are twitching with some kind of dog-dream. I lay a hand on his wide flat head and try to figure out what he’s dreaming about, but all I can get is a sense of wind making his ears flap. Listening in on his dream isn’t as good as having my own, but I sink into it all the same, trying to remember what it’s like.
