Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Oh, I see. Too hard to explain.” I said it mildly, trying not to be too obvious about pushing the big flashing red insecurity button. It was like stealing candy from a big bowl of free candy surrounded by helpful multilingual signposts.

  “It’s in a Prophecy,” he huffed, leading me through a set of double doors. He said “Prophecy” with a capital P. “My family Prophecy. It’s a huge deal. It’s been passed down for like, centuries. It got smuggled out of Dalmatia, okay? It got saved from the Prophecy purges in the sixties, too, back when people decided that prognostication was a False Magic. So you know it’s one of the really important Prophecies.” He took a deep breath. “My generation is supposed to have a Chosen One.”

  Jesus, this kid speaks in a lot of Proper Nouns. “And that’s you?”

  “Well, nobody else is right for it. My half sister Alexandria and I are the only ones who were born at the right time, and all she cares about is eyeliner and who’s friends with who and popularity.” This was a sore point too, then—or maybe he was just broody by default. “So it’s not like she could be the most powerful mage of our time.”

  “And what’s the Chosen One supposed to do?” I asked.

  Dylan pulled up short; we’d reached the main office, and he’d stopped just out of sight of the windows that looked in on Mrs. Webb. When I glanced back at him, his eyes were intense; sixteen-year-old me would probably have described them to her diary as “burning.”

  “I’m supposed to change the world,” he said.

  The door to the office opened behind me. I startled as a student walked out—a girl, holding a pink hall pass and a small white pharmacy bag. I turned back to ask Dylan how he was supposed to change the world, but he was already gone.

  I bit back the old, familiar anger. Get it together, Ivy, I reminded myself. These people love to disappear.

  * * *

  I sat in Torres’s office and we reviewed the facts in the file: Sylvia Capley, thirty-five years old, health and wellness teacher. Split down the middle by … what?

  When I mentioned the spell-gone-wrong theory, Torres closed her eyes, fighting some internal battle I couldn’t identify. She took a slow anger-management breath.

  “I’m not qualified to comment on it. As the ’miz reminded me several times.”

  “The—sorry, the ’miz?”

  “Oh, yes—the National Mage Investigative Service. Nobody wants to say ‘NMIS,’ so it usually gets shortened to ‘MIS,’ or—”

  I nodded. “Right, got it. So, what’s your unofficial opinion, then?”

  She picked up a letter opener, twisted the point of it against the pad of one thumb. It wasn’t sharp enough to draw blood, but I watched the place where her skin dented with a wary eye. My shoulder prickled.

  “My very unofficial opinion, which I am not even giving, which we are not discussing, which you are not writing down or recording: Sylvia didn’t screw around with theoretical magic. She was too smart and too … wary.”

  “Wary?”

  Torres leaned back in her chair, still pressing the top of the letter opener against her thumb. “Sylvia was a cautious person. And reliable—until the week of her death, she hadn’t taken so much as a sick day.”

  “What happened the week of her death?”

  Torres shrugged. “She took a sick day. Three, actually. Right before she died. Normally I would have been angry at a staff member taking days off during the first week of school, but there was a rash of food poisoning that week—five teachers and a student got sick. And besides, even if Sylvia had been the only one out, I wouldn’t have held it against her. Like I said, she was easily my most reliable staff member. She wasn’t the type to play with fire. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “‘Fire’ meaning theoretical magic.”

  “Right.” She pursed her lips. “You’ve never taken a TM class, so you may not understand—but it’s a very dangerous field even at the entry levels. It’s a lot like sticking your hand into a black box that may or may not have cobras in it.”

  I blinked. “That’s the most coherent explanation of magic I’ve ever heard.”

  “Ah, yes, well.” The corners of her lips pinched in an ironic almost-smile. “I imagine the only person who’s ever explained magic to you is Tabitha? And she’s … well. She lives in the black box.”

  “That’s apt. I’ll have to ask if she’s a cobra or not.” I couldn’t help watching Torres’s face for a sign of something, anything, that might allow me to avoid stepping into the black box alongside my maybe-snake sister. Anything to keep from having to go in there alongside her. But Torres just laughed.

  “I’ll learn what I can from Tabitha,” I continued, “although I don’t know how germane theoretical magic is to my investigation—I really just need to rule it out. I’m honestly more interested in the people.” Torres was kind enough not to comment on the obvious lie. Of course I needed to learn about theoretical magic for this investigation. But I wasn’t ready to face talking to Tabitha. Not yet. I flipped through the folder, past the photographs, and landed on a list of names I’d compiled while reading the NMIS report. “I’ll want to interview the people who were spoken with last time, if you don’t mind. Is that okay with you? It looks like there’s a lot of staff on this list.”

  Torres flinched. “Of course. Officially speaking, there was nothing suspicious about Sylvia’s death, and Osthorne is and shall remain a safe haven for students and staff alike.” Her words had the practiced rhythm of a letter sent to worried, angry, tuition-paying parents. “But unofficially … do whatever you need to do. Talk to whomever you need to. Solve this case.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, then looked at her narrowing eyes and revised. “I’ll solve the case. I will.” I shouldn’t have made a promise—that’s a rookie mistake if ever there was one—but I couldn’t help it. Marion Torres needed to hear a promise.

  She nodded, then put on a pair of reading glasses and began tackling a pile of papers that was waiting on her desk blotter. I knew a dismissal when I saw one. I stood, let my hand rest on the doorknob. Then I turned back as though I were just remembering something—something small, unimportant, oh-by-the-way.

  “I almost forgot to ask—where’s Sylvia’s medical record?” I asked. Torres looked over the top of her glasses at me.

  “It’s in the file, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s funny—the coroner’s report is in there, and it refers to ‘attached medical records.’” I pulled out the report and read her a short section. “‘No anomalies found excepting sagittal bisection. Anomalies noted in medical records, Appendix B, not found.’” I held up the report for her to see—two pages, no appendices. “So, where’s Appendix B?”

  “I gave you everything I had,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t send it over?”

  I thumbed the staple on the report. There was a tiny shred of paper stuck to the backside of the staple—the top corner of a sheet of paper. “Maybe,” I said, watching Torres closely. “Can you give the ’miz a call and see if we can get a copy?”

  She nodded absently as she looked back down at her paperwork. I watched her for a few more seconds, then accepted the dismissal. I closed the door behind me as softly as I could, and went in search of a box with a cobra in it.

  * * *

  Tabitha stood at the front of her classroom. Her stance was commanding; behind her on a whiteboard, a series of diagrams showed—well, I have no idea what they showed. Arcs and angles and a few symbols that I thought I recognized from the five or six calculus classes I’d actually showed up for, back when I was doing my best to flunk out of high school. I stood in the doorway, watching my sister speak about a theorem I’d never heard of, and tried to recognize the girl I remembered in the woman she’d become.

  She looked exactly the same as I remembered, but I still wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d passed her on the street. So much was different—the line of her back, the timbre of her voice. She commanded attention, resp
ect, authority. You’d never believe that she’d cried for hours over a squashed frog in our parents’ backyard. I couldn’t connect the woman I was seeing with the girl I’d been so angry at for so long. The double vision that had been plaguing me since my arrival at Osthorne returned—I could see the Tabitha that was, and a Tabitha that might have been. Someone I could get drinks with after work. Someone I could make eye contact with at holidays. Someone I could trust.

  But that wasn’t this Tabitha. Not by a long shot.

  My head throbbed. A sound like a whipcrack filled the room, and electricity arced between her palms. All of the students in the classroom jumped—it took me a moment to be sure my heart hadn’t stopped. Tabitha spread her hands wider—the electricity fizzed between them, too bright to watch. I couldn’t see her face, but I was willing to bet that the sparks were lighting her from below, ghost-story shadows making her eyes look hollow.

  Then she closed her fists, and the light was gone.

  “Alright, everyone. You’ve got the concept—now, pair up and try it for yourselves. Take notes! I’ll expect your lab report on Monday!” Her voice rose as students started to rustle and fidget, eager to pair off with their preferred partners before they wound up stuck with that other kid. “One person at a time—you try, and your partner will have a Suresh Stick to disrupt the arc as needed. Then switch. I want to see everyone take a turn.” She clapped her hands, and the kids flitted to each other.

  The room brimmed with the scraping of chairs and murmuring of Do you want to be my partner? and Okay um who goes first? Tabitha turned to walk back to her desk; when she spotted me standing in the doorway, she smiled. It was a broad smile, one that would greet a stranger; I could see the exact instant when her mind processed me. Ivy Gamble, her sister. Standing here, in this context, where I had no business at all.

  “Ivy? Oh my gosh, what on earth are you doing here?”

  I returned her fixed smile. Surely Torres would have told her that I was going to be here. Surely. “I’m on a case. I’m supposed to come talk to you about”—I waved my hand around her classroom, gesturing toward the kids who were sending anemic sparks flying between their palms—“this, I guess. Theoretical magic.”

  Tabitha cocked her head to one side. Her eyes were even brighter than I remembered, like shards of glass under a streetlight. “What are you—? You know what, this isn’t a great time.” She blinked at me hard—she couldn’t reconcile seeing me here, now, in this place where I didn’t belong. “Maybe we should get drinks after work? This isn’t a great time. I know a nice cocktail bar downtown. It’s hipstery, but usually pretty mellow. We’ll be able to hear each other.”

  “Wh— Drinks?” My head throbbed again, reminding me that drinks were a bad idea I’d had the night before. I also didn’t relish the idea of getting into a situation where I had to linger with Tabitha long enough to settle a bill. But I knew that if I didn’t rule out her involvement that night, I’d just have to do it some other time. I didn’t have a choice, not really. “Okay, drinks,” I said, edging toward the door. “Come find me after the last period of the day?”

  “Sure,” she said, watching me. “Sure, that’s fine. I normally wouldn’t go out, but tomorrow’s Saturday, so…” She trailed off. Tabitha had never liked saying things that she thought were obvious. “You’ll be here all day, then?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to be doing some interviews. Well. Not really interviews, just meeting some people.” I was holding the doorframe like it could keep me steady. “And I’m going to be here all day … every day, I guess. I’m kind of staying on campus, in the empty apartment?”

  She cocked her head. “Empty apartment?”

  “Yeah, in staff housing? Torres is putting me in it so I can be here doing the investigation.” There I went, overexplaining. Tabitha would have just said yes and left me to wonder whatever she didn’t happen to disclose.

  “An empty—oh. Oh,” she said, some understanding dawning across her face. “Okay.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess it’s kind of spooky, right? But I don’t get haunted vibes or anything.” I tried a smile, but she didn’t return it.

  “Drinks tonight,” she said, closing off so suddenly that I wondered if I’d imagined that weighty oh. “I’ll text you the address of the place, you’ll meet me there. Yeah?”

  I was about to suggest that we just open a bottle of wine at my place or hers—that we catch up, linger. I was caught in that double vision. It felt like there was a second Tabitha there, a possible-Tabitha, and if I just reached for her, I could slip into the world where that sister lived. The world where we were friends. The world where I wasn’t alone.

  But then there was a smell like burning hair and one of the girls in the classroom shrieked. Tabitha whipped around just as the girl’s partner whacked her hands with a rubber rod, disrupting the stream of electricity. My sister turned her back to me as though I had never been there at all. The emergency was over, but she was gone—talking to the class about safety measures and how to properly protect each other. Midway through a sentence I didn’t understand, she looked over her shoulder. Her eyes glanced off me like I was furniture, and I realized that to her, I wasn’t there anymore. Plans for the evening had been made. I’d been contained.

  I eased out of the room as quietly as I’d left Torres’s office, and when I shut the door, there weren’t two Tabithas on the other side. There was only the real Tabitha, my real sister. And she was a stranger.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  WHEN THE FIRST STUDENT FOUND me, I was camped out at one of the long study tables in the library. The table I’d picked was tucked to one side, but had a clear view of the window to the hallway. I had feathered my nest with file folders, nonspecific glossy photographs of blurred figures, sticky notes. A legal pad covered in vague notes with circles around randomly chosen words, arrows pointing to question marks. Detective stuff.

  Between the diorama I’d set up and the students who had seen a stranger wandering their halls, I hoped to become hot gossip. I figured that those kids would see my setup and latch on to me like stray cats following a fishmonger. They wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of a real live detective. A real mystery. They wouldn’t be able to resist the story, because they were all trying desperately to find the Thing, the elusive Something that would make every adult’s prediction come true: These are the best years of your life.

  I couldn’t blame the kids for searching so hard. I remembered what it was like, walking through my high school and feeling like everyone else’s lives had already started. There was the girl who was an amazing singer and played guitar outside at lunch, the academic kid who won an award at the national level for some kind of algae farm, the young artists who sat and moodily sketched their friends. I remembered looking at them, and then looking at myself, and wondering when the hell my thing would turn up.

  My friends and I, we had all been looking for it. What would make us crystallize? Anything could be the Thing that started it all, that started our stories. But the only stories we had to work with—the only stories these kids at Osthorne had to work with—were the ones we’d seen a million times already. It was why prom was so huge. It all fit into a story we knew by heart. Nervous proposal, careful planning, once-in-a-lifetime dress, incredible night, everything changes. It was why prom was so disappointing: because afterward, everything would be the same.

  I wanted these kids to see me with the same hopeful glow I remember seeing my peers wearing in the weeks leading up to the prom that I had skipped. I wanted them wondering: What if this is it? What if this is the big change that shakes everything into place? What if this is the turning point? I wanted them to come to me and tell me what they knew, and I wanted them to feel like if they didn’t tell me what they knew, they’d be missing out on their one chance to change their lives. So I presented them with a familiar narrative, something they’d seen on TV and in movies a million times. A Private Investigator is on the case, stirrin
g things up, anything could happen, who’s the killer, who’s a witness, who’s important, who has the biggest secrets? I gave them a story to slip into, to try out. Maybe this time things could be different.

  Maybe this time, something would happen.

  It wasn’t all for show—I truly was working at that gum-bottomed lab table. Strictly speaking, the official NMIS report was a write-off: a lot of we-did-the-legwork-and-found-nothing-of-consequence. Still, there was a dense thicket of starting points for me to work through. The report listed five staff members and four students as “persons of interest.” All of them had verified alibis and all of them sounded perfectly innocent, which meant that the report was a sham. I was willing to wager that none of these people had actually been interviewed for more than a minute or two each. I’d seen it before with burglaries—that kind of thing happens when the investigating officers think they already know all the answers. The NMIS officers had clearly decided early on that the death was an accident, and had gone through the motions to ensure that their conclusion wouldn’t be questioned.

  But even a sham report has clues in it if you know where to look. If there aren’t clues, there are at least a couple of footholds. I took notes on each person mentioned in the file, including pertinent details from the perfunctory interview transcriptions appended to the report. I was in the middle of reading about Rahul Chaudhary (Osthorne staff member, teacher of physical magic, well-documented passion for theoretical magic) when I noticed a blond shimmer in my peripheral vision.

  I was being watched.

  I didn’t look up. I had a feeling I knew who this was going to turn out to be, and I knew I had to play my cards right if I wanted to really get the Osthorne gossip machine churning. I started flipping through photographs, tapping my lower lip with my pen; shook my head, flipped to a fresh page on my legal pad. Every movement designed to signify that I was doing a whole lot of very important detective work. Clever Ivy.