Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  TABITHA AND I FINISHED OUR first two rounds with the efficiency of people who drink when they don’t know what to say. The bar she’d chosen for us was dimly lit and still had a musty jukebox in one corner and a condom vending machine in the ladies’ room, but the menu revealed that there was a budding mixologist behind the bar and the drinks were strong, which was good enough for me. Tabitha was a half round ahead by the time I showed up. I was late, but at least I wasn’t hearing phantom whispers anymore. She wasn’t angry at me for my tardiness, but somewhere a score was being kept and I certainly wasn’t in the lead.

  Tabitha ordered spicy, smoky cocktails—habanero and mezcal. I favored lime and ginger and whatever clear liquor the bartender wanted to pour. We picked our way through the kind of conversation you’re supposed to have with someone you haven’t seen in a while and don’t particularly understand. Lots of small talk and avoidance; the occasional reference to experiences we’d shared a long time ago, back when we still shared things. I kept wanting to explain that I was a different person than the Ivy she remembered, but then I’d catch myself thinking that she was the exact same Tabitha I remembered, and so I’d doubt myself. Maybe I hadn’t changed. Maybe I wasn’t different. Maybe I just liked to tell myself that I’d come a long way—a convenient fiction to make it easier to keep going home to the same empty apartment every night.

  Finally, after we’d ordered a third round of drinks and a basket of popcorn to share (“sea salt and pink peppercorn,” nine dollars a basket), we started to really talk. She leaned across the table with a sparkle in her eyes, and she laughed at something I said. A good laugh, a real one. I leaned forward too, trying not to let myself get too hungry, but caught in the pull of possibility.

  The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them—I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go. But all it took was three drinks, and there was the sparkle in Tabitha’s eyes and we were leaning toward each other and she was laughing, and maybe, maybe, maybe this could be something that I could keep. We were sisters, after all. I thought of how it would feel to end our estrangement and patch things up, and my heart ached with a hope that I hadn’t let myself feel for a long time.

  Maybe this could work.

  If I didn’t manage to ruin it first.

  “So, are you seeing anyone?” I asked. She looked surprised. “Well, I just remember Dad mentioned last Thanksgiving that you’d met some new girl, right? He seemed to think you were pretty excited about—”

  She cut me off. “It didn’t work out.” She smiled like a door slamming, and frost spread across the surface of her drink.

  That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have reminded her of the way Dad gave us updates on each other. I shouldn’t have reminded her that we traded off holidays so as not to have to sit across from each other. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  “Ivy,” she said, stabbing her straw through the layer of ice in her glass with a savage crunch. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but come on. We don’t have to try to make this into something it’s not. Let’s just talk about what we need to talk about. It’s not like we’re here to become best friends, right?”

  Oh.

  My chair suddenly felt too small. “Sure, of course. I’ll just be right back,” I said, and walked to the restroom without waiting for her reply.

  I shut myself in a stall and rested my forehead against the scarred door. Clenched my fists. Wished I was more drunk. Wished I was less drunk. I dug my nails into my palms and stared at my shoes—sensible boots with a professional-enough-looking toe that I could pass for a grown-up in the company of people who wore blazers. Had Tabitha noticed them? What did she think of them? What did she think of me, after all these years? It’s not like we’re here to become best friends.

  I stood at the sink running my hands under the water until long after the watered-down liquid hand soap had rinsed away. It was the same kind that I kept at my office, just as ineffective. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. Fucking Tabitha. She still did that thing to her eyes, the thing that made them look bigger and more open, more alive. Not makeup, something else. Something fucking magic. I didn’t like looking at myself, seeing my eyes, and knowing that she had them, the exact same ones, and had decided that they needed to be better.

  I pushed my shoulders back as I walked to the table and tried to look like I hadn’t just been giving myself a pep talk in a bathroom that had phone numbers written on the walls. I don’t know why I bothered—Tabitha wasn’t paying attention. She was playing with the cocktail napkin that had come with my third drink, flipping it between her fingers while condensation from my glass pooled on the table. She flicked it with her index finger once every second or so. As I got closer, I could see what she was doing: turning it into water, then tree bark, then clear plastic, then something that looked like bone.

  When I sat down, she flicked the napkin one more time, and it reappeared under my glass, a neat square of copper mesh.

  “That’ll leave green spots on the table,” I pointed out.

  “You’re thinking of brass,” she replied, sipping her drink. I looked back down, and my copper napkin was a shade browner than it had been before. When I looked up at Tabitha again, the light from a streetlamp outside was falling across her hair at just exactly the right angle to make it glimmer.

  I clenched my teeth together until I could hear them creaking.

  “Sooo?” She stared at me over the top of her drink, her eyebrows arched. “You want to know about theoretical magic, right?”

  I stared at the metal mesh under my glass. No. I didn’t want to know about magic. I wanted to get up and walk away and continue pretending I didn’t know anything about it. I rolled the words over my tongue like a butterscotch candy: Never mind. I’m not taking the case. Goodbye.

  I pictured the relief that would settle over her face as she realized that she didn’t actually have to try to teach me about magic. That she didn’t actually have to talk to me at all. I pictured us finishing our drinks, paying the tab, and parting ways. I pictured returning the barely touched retainer to Torres and going back to taking pictures of adulterers and insurance scammers. I pictured myself burrowing back down into my cozy nest of petty fraud and adultery, and it was so tempting.

  But then I watched the brass coaster under my glass as it turned green so fast that it couldn’t have just been the water and the air doing it. A different picture clicked together in my mind. I envisioned the murder of Sylvia Capley spreading across Osthorne, oxidizing it, rotting it. I imagined my father at Christmas, watching Tabitha turn pine boughs into ice sculptures, and I pictured a glimmer of doubt in his eyes. His magical daughter couldn’t fix everything, after all.

  Two sides of a coin that I would only have one chance to flip. Learn about magic and solve this case, or run back to the comfort of my basement office. Talk to my sister, or give up the chance to solve a murder.

  Stay or go.

  I looked at Tabitha. “Yes,” I said. “Tell me about magic.”

  * * *

  Four hours, several more cocktails, and three more baskets of overpriced popcorn later, we were evicted from the closing bar. We wheedled two compostable potato-starch-foam takeout cups of water from the bartender and walked out into the damp night air. They locked the door behind us, flicking the switch on the neon OPEN sign and leaving the window dark and empty.

  “I think I get it,” I said, leaning against the wall outside the bar and watching a fine mist of almost-rain drift through the light of the streetlamps. “I think I really get it.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tabitha said, sitting down at my feet. “But that’s okay. You’re not supposed to. That’s the whole point! It’s theory.”

  I slid down the wall until I was sitting next to her, both of us tucked under the awning outside the bar. The canvas didn’t keep the drizzle from getting to
us, but it wasn’t coming down hard enough to be a bother. Not really. I bumped Tabitha’s foot with mine. “We haven’t talked this long since grade school.”

  Her head lolled. “Not since I turned your strawberry barrette green. You were so mad at me.” Her chin tucked in as she frowned. “You’re still so mad at me.”

  I didn’t say anything. The sound of the bartender and the waiter flirting drifted out to us—what are you doing after this what are you doing tomorrow morning what about spending them both at my place. Tabitha gave a wet sniffle, and I realized she was pretty drunk. I realized I was pretty drunk. Impulsively, I grabbed her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Tabbie. I’m sorry I’m such a bitter asshole.”

  She gave another loud sniff. “When are you going to forgive me for being magic?”

  I squeezed her hand, leaning my head back and thumping it against the bricks. “Probably never,” I said.

  She laughed lightly, squeezed my hand back. “When did you start? Hating me, I mean?”

  It was the kind of question I would normally have dodged, but the mist was making the streetlamps into fairy lights and Tabitha was holding my hand and there was something between us that I would have called magic if I didn’t know about real magic. “Six months after you left for Headley,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” I tapped her thumb with mine. “When you came home from spring break the first time.”

  “Was it the thing with my hair?” So she remembered that, too. We’d had a screaming fight about it—the way her hair was a different color. She’d offered to make mine “better” too, and I’d been furious that she wouldn’t just change hers back.

  “No. That wasn’t it.” I chewed on my lip. “It was the mirror.”

  “The—?… Oh.”

  I could hear it, the way she almost didn’t remember. “Yeah. You gave me that mirror before you left for school, and you told me it was a magic mirror. Like I could leave you—”

  “—magical voicemails,” she breathed. It was coming back to her. “Oh my god, I did, I told you that, and then—”

  “I didn’t figure it out for months,” I said. “I kept sending you messages and waiting to get one back, and I never did. It took me until Christmas to figure it out. And then you came home and I asked you about it, and you laughed at me.”

  “Jesus, Ivy, I was such a shit.” She sounded sorry. I could have rubbed it in, could have told her more. About how I’d spent hours talking into that mirror, never once questioning that I was telling my sister about my life. About boys and girls and my first period and being scared of my math teacher and worried about her and missing her so, so much.

  I could have told her about how I couldn’t look in mirrors anymore without remembering the sound of her laughter when I asked her about it, the way she’d talked to me with a scorn I’d never heard in her voice before she left for Headley. I can’t believe you thought that was real, Ivy. We’re not little kids anymore. Grow up.

  I could have ground it into her face, made her feel the kind of bewildered and hurt she’d made me feel. But then she was holding my hand.

  “It’s fine. It was a long time ago. I barely think about it anymore. And anyway, I was probably a shit to you, too.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, probably. I hardly remember.”

  It was more honest communication than we’d had in decades. I couldn’t take much more. I felt like her laugh was wrapped around my rib cage, crushing the air out of my lungs. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to enjoy her company. I fought down a swell of something like panic.

  “Ivy? I should tell you something—”

  She said it in an almost-whisper, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t hear whatever it was, couldn’t handle the possibility of intimacy. I should have, but I couldn’t. It was too much too fast, and if she kept going I was going to have to admit how much I wanted it, how much I wanted her to be my sister again, how much it hurt that we had gone so long without talking—so instead, I pretended not to hear.

  “So who’s your favorite student?” I blurted, too fast, too eager.

  She paused. When we were kids, she’d take that pause every now and then while we were playing, deciding whether she was going to let me make up a new rule or not. She almost never played along—but this time, she did.

  “Probably Miranda Yao.” She said it and I was almost convinced that I hadn’t derailed her at all. I let myself believe it.

  “That name’s familiar.” I thought back to the study group, tried to picture the girls who had crowded around that phone in the library.

  She shrugged. “Runs with Alexandria DeCambray? You mentioned that you’d seen her, and seeing her without her posse is pretty rare.” Tabitha leaned her head on my shoulder. “She’s sporty. All-American type,” she murmured, and I remembered the Chinese girl in the baggy basketball shorts, with her square jaw set in a scowl. “But she’s stealth-brilliant. Gives Brea Teymourni a run for her money.”

  “Stealth-brilliant?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “She’s smart but she keeps it on the down low.” She had pitched her voice deep when she said “down low,” and dissolved into a fit of giggles. They were contagious—I started giggling too, and it was strange, hearing our laughter together. We had the same laugh.

  After a few minutes we caught our breath—both of us went “hooooo” at the same time, which got us laughing again—and I asked why Miranda would keep her intelligence a secret.

  “Ah, well, Brea was there first,” she said.

  “Brea—what?” I wondered if maybe she was more drunk than I’d thought.

  “Brea was there first,” she repeated. “She was friends with Alexandria first, and she’s the smart one. When she brought Miranda into the group, something had to give.” She missed her straw a couple of times before successfully taking a long drink of water.

  “I think I’m missing something,” I said.

  Tabitha set down her cup and scooted away from me by a few inches. “See, check it out,” she said, and I turned to find her staring at me, her eyes flashing under the streetlight. I’d forgotten how intense she could get. “Alexandria, she curates people. She puts together her group of friends, but—” she hiccupped, took another sip of water. “But they’re only allowed to have one thing.”

  I laughed. “What does that mean? ‘One thing’?”

  Tabitha nodded. “Yeah. One thing each. See, right now, there’s three of them.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Brea, she’s super-smart. Miranda is the sporty one. And then there’s Courtney.” She cleared her throat. “She’s artsy.”

  “So what’s Alexandria?”

  “Powerful. In charge? She’s the boss.”

  “Wait, no, this doesn’t add up. Aren’t two of them gay? But that’s allowed, there’s allowed to be two lesbians in the posse? They don’t have to be different?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not really how it works? ‘Being gay’ isn’t their thing. It’s just who they are. Although it probably doesn’t hurt that only Brea is gay. Miranda is, um.” She waved her hands. “Whaddayacallit. All of it. Pansexual?”

  I stared at her. “How on earth do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “They’re out. Miranda’s pretty vocal about it. Brea, less so. They’ve been together since sophomore year. I think they’re going to the same college, even. They’re really good together.”

  “Huh.” We shared a quiet minute, thinking about how things had changed and hadn’t changed since we were kids.

  “Yeah,” she said after a long drink of water. “They’re braver than I was at that age. I couldn’t have committed to a girl that way back then.”

  I didn’t mention that, as far as I knew, she’d still never really committed more than a few months at a time to any one girl. “So, wait,” I said, “what happens if someone tries to be two things? Or tries to be something that’s taken?”

  Tabitha smiled then, rueful. “Ask Samantha Crabtree
. One day, she was in the Arty Friend spot. Then she went out for track.” Tabitha slid a finger across her throat; her fingernail left the ghost of a white line behind it. “Next thing you know, she’s in the headmaster’s office. Rumors of an inappropriate relationship with a teacher.”

  “Yeaugh, what?” I grimaced at her, but she waved me off, leaning her head back against the wall again and peering out of one half-open eye.

  “Nah, there was nothing to the rumors. I mean … none of us would really put it past Toff? The English teacher?” She held a fist on top of her head. “Man bun, MFA, novel that’s dead in the water. He’s kinda … icky.”

  I snorted, raised an eyebrow. “‘Icky’?”

  She scowled. “I get a weird vibe off him. Sylvia hated him. Said he made a pass at her in the teachers’ lounge. Apparently he told her that she was an eight, but that if she wore makeup she could be a nine?”

  “Oh, god, he sounds gross,” I said.

  “Yeah. But we investigated pretty thoroughly and there wasn’t anything gross going on with Toff and Samantha.” She closed the half-mast eye, and I realized it was easier to look at her when her eyes were closed. Tiny beads of mist clung to her eyelashes, to the tiny hairs of her eyebrows. “The rumors were enough, though. Samantha was pretty emotionally wrecked for all of last year. She almost didn’t come back this semester. Her parents said she’s not all that stable these days. Sylvia kept an eye out for her, though. I think … she’ll be okay,” she added, “but not until after she graduates, I think. That whole deal really traumatized her.” She poked me hard with an index finger. “And don’t you think for a minute we didn’t know where the rumors started.”