Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Seven fucking days ago,” I said. “Seven fucking days ago this was sliced open by a knife that probably had botulism on it.”

  She kept looking at my shoulder. Her lost eyes infuriated me.

  “I don’t understand,” she said in that same small voice. I sat in the chair across from her, leaning my elbows on my knees and gripping fistfuls of my hair. I stared at the wrinkles in the duvet so I wouldn’t have to look at her sad, puffy eyes.

  “The goddamned school secretary fixed it,” I growled at her. “She blew up my shoulder and zapped the infection and made it better in ten fucking seconds. And yet, in four months, you couldn’t find time to help Mom.” She opened her mouth as if to say something, but I had finally taken the lid off seventeen years of anger and there was nothing she could do—nothing she could say—to stop me. “You knew how much pain she was in, Tabitha. You knew how much she was hurting, you knew she was fucking dying, and you didn’t even come home, you just kept sending home emails about how great you were doing, how awesome the magic you were learning was. Emails about your fucking grades.” I knew I was shouting, but I couldn’t figure out how to calm my voice. I couldn’t remember getting to my feet. I was jabbing a finger at Tabitha. Silent tears streamed down her face as she watched me with wide, unblinking eyes.

  “Do you know what happened to my grades?” I asked, undiluted venom in my voice. “I nearly failed junior year, while you were off learning magic. I only passed because the vice principal knew Mom, knew what was happening to her.” I laughed cruelly. “She probably knew more about what was happening to Mom than you ever did.” I sniffed hard—my nose had started running, was I crying? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t stop. “Did you know she used to ask for you?” Tabitha let out a small sound, not quite a whimper. “That’s right,” I hissed. “She used to ask where you were, when the pain was so bad that she couldn’t remember you’d gone off to magic school. She used to ask where you were, and I was the one who had to lie to her about it. Do you want to know what I told her?”

  I waited, every muscle in my body coiled tight. When she finally answered, she didn’t manage to make any sound—her mouth moved, wordlessly, her lips forming the word “What?”

  “I said you were on the way,” I answered.

  Somehow, when I said that, all the anger slid out of me. I collapsed back onto the chair, feeling like the full weight of those seventeen years had settled onto my shoulders. “I told her you’d be there soon,” I whispered, more to myself than to Tabitha. “She kept asking, right up until the end. And I kept lying to her. You made me a liar.”

  I closed my eyes as fat, hot tears rushed to blur my vision. I heard Tabitha stand up and go into the bathroom. She closed the door and was gone for a mercifully long time.

  By the time she came back, I’d wrestled down the tears and the anger. I felt like I had vomited something poisonous. She looked like she had splashed water on her face—her eyes were clearer than they had been when I got home. She settled across from me, her hands in her lap, and looked at me steadily.

  “I understand why you feel the way you do.” She spoke carefully, as though the words were broken glass she had to pick her way around. “But there’s a lot you don’t understand.” I curled my lip, ready to fling some snide barb at her, but she held up her hand. “Please, Ivy. Please let me explain.” She looked right into my eyes as she asked, and something made me decide to listen to what she had to say. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later to wonder what made me decide to listen—whether it was the look in her eyes, or something more. Something magic.

  “What Mrs. Webb did for your shoulder … that was huge magic. She’s one of the best healing mages in the world, Ivy. When Mom was sick, I was just a kid. I was doing a great job in school, but asking me to heal her would be like asking a first-year med student to perform a heart transplant.” She swallowed hard, closed her eyes. “I’m telling you that now because it’s what I told Dad, when he asked. Back when we first found out Mom was sick.”

  My fingers tightened on the arms of my chair. I hadn’t known that Dad had asked Tabitha to heal Mom—couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine her, seventeen years old, having to tell him what Mom’s doctor hadn’t been willing to: There’s nothing I can do.

  “And even if I had been more advanced,” she continued, “I still probably couldn’t have helped her. That’s not something we can just fix. The risks involved … they’re enormous, Ivy. That type of healing, to that degree? I’d need to take her entire body apart and hold it that way for … for days.” Another tear slipped down her cheek. She didn’t seem to notice it. “And then I’d have to put her back together again, alive, all in the right order. Can you imagine how impossible that is?” She laughed bitterly. “I’ve been studying for half my life to try to figure it all out, and I can’t even explain the risks.”

  I put my head in my hands. “God, Tabitha. I had no idea.”

  “I know.” She said it gently—more gently than I deserved by a long shot. “That’s probably my fault. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  When I looked up, the naked vulnerability on her face was too much for me to handle. I got up and sat on the couch next to her. I told myself to be brave, and I grabbed her hand. Her fingers felt impossibly small. “Can you tell me now?”

  Tabitha swallowed hard again, more tears welling in her eyes. She nodded.

  We talked for hours. The anger had seeped away out of the room, and with it, the fear that had been between us. We talked about all of the things we’d spent half a lifetime not talking about. Mom, and what it had been like to lose her. Dad, and what it had been like to see him wade through the depths of his grief. What it had been like to see him slowly, slowly claw his way out of it.

  At some point, she leaned her head on my shoulder. We’d sat this way a hundred times before she’d left for the Headley Method Preparatory School—our feet propped on the coffee table, arms linked, shoulders touching. I wasn’t sure when her voice started to fade, but at some point she stopped answering me. I looked down and saw that her eyes were closed. While I was talking about the summer Dad tried gardening (with disastrous results), she’d fallen asleep.

  I eased myself out from under Tabitha’s head and tucked a blanket around her shoulders. I did the good-person thing and left a glass of water on the coffee table, even though I could have left her to stumble around in the dark and find one for herself when she woke up, puffy-eyed and headachy. As I brought the half-full glass back from the kitchen, I stopped to look at her.

  She was smaller asleep. There was a crooked crease between her eyebrows, like she was worrying. The line that never appeared when she was staring at a hard math problem, but that I had occasionally seen when she looked at Dad.

  An ache gripped my chest, sudden and overwhelming. That’s my sister. Even after everything—even with everything that was still between us, that would probably always be between us—she was my sister. I was born reaching for her.

  I covered her with the duvet, feeling that strange tenderness that comes with putting a blanket over someone else when they’re sleeping. She was going to get the couch, which meant I had to sleep in the bedroom. I hesitated before leaving her alone—in the end, I grabbed my laptop from the floor beside the couch. It wasn’t that I thought she’d look through it. She’d never do something like that. It wasn’t that.

  It was just a matter of professional discretion. That’s all.

  I turned the living room lamp off and walked down the hall to the bedroom, feeling like a trespasser. I eased the door open. The bare white mattress looked too big, too cold. I curled up in the center of it and tried not to look at the wall of letters just beyond the foot of the bed, but my ears still pricked, listening for whispers from the pages. I looked at my phone for the first time since before I’d sat down with Rahul, hoping for a distraction. The blue glow of the screen was blinding-bright. I squinted against the too-harsh light, sighing when I saw the tim
e, which was well after midnight.

  There were three text messages waiting for me. The first was a brunch invitation from a woman I’d been trying to become friends with. The second text was from Rahul; the third was from an unknown number.

  I should have responded to the brunch invitation. I should have. But that was an invitation to leave this Ivy behind, this temporary, impossible Ivy I was losing myself in. And I’ve never been good at friends. People don’t stick.

  So I didn’t reply.

  And then, like ordering a third drink even though I knew I should stop at two, I opened the one from Rahul.

  I think I’m supposed to wait for a day after the first date to send a text, it said, but I can’t stop smiling.

  Warmth spread up my neck as I remembered his strong, sure hands. I could still feel the warmth of his breath against my throat as he whispered “Is this okay?,” waiting for my “yes” before pressing his mouth against my collarbone. Just the memory made my stomach jump, like I was in an elevator that had started a too-fast ascent.

  Maybe after a few hours’ sleep, I’d be able to string together a sentence without my heartbeat climbing up into my throat. As I started to close my eyes, I caught a blue flash: the notification LED on my phone, still blinking at me. For one wild second, I thought maybe Rahul—but then I remembered.

  There had been a third text message.

  It was a multimedia message from a blocked number; when I opened it, I realized that it was from the same person who had sent the photo of me and Tabitha sitting outside the bar. The new message was another photo. This one showed Tabitha standing outside my apartment, her hand on my doorknob. She was looking over her shoulder. The photo wasn’t an amazing one, but I could make out her expression. She looked hunted.

  As I studied the picture, another message came in from the same number. This one was a text message, a question, just three words long. It made my skin jump, but not the same way that the feathery brush of Rahul’s eyelashes against my jawline had. I suddenly felt very cold and very small, as I realized I didn’t know the answer to the question posed.

  Are you safe?

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  I WOKE UP TO MY phone buzzing. It was still in my hand from the night before. I opened one eye and peered at the screen—it was the same woman who wanted me to get brunch, probably calling to follow up on the three invitations she’d sent me. I watched the green ANSWER button pulse twice before thumbing the red REJECT button.

  I put the phone down and closed my eyes, letting my cheek fall onto the bare mattress. She would stop trying soon enough.

  “Good morning.”

  My eyes snapped open again, my heart pounding. She was standing at the foot of the bed with her back to me. Tabitha.

  My sister, Tabitha.

  “You’re still here,” I mumbled. She turned just enough that I could see her profile. She was smiling.

  “I came in to see if you wanted some coffee and I got caught up in your crazy-wall.”

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “It’s not a crazy-wall. It’s evidence.”

  “Mmmm.” She took a sip of coffee, turned back to the wall. “What is all this?”

  Something was different. It wasn’t like we’d become friends. I wasn’t fooling myself on that score: a few shared tears hadn’t undone everything that was between us. But something had moved. And she was still there.

  My phone gave a short buzz, the sound of a waiting message. I dismissed the notification without listening to the voicemail.

  Tabitha was still here.

  “They’re letters,” I said. “I’m still figuring them out, but I think I’ve got them in the right order.”

  She sipped her coffee again without responding. I slipped out, splashed water on my face, got a cup of coffee from the pot Tabitha had brewed. As I poured it, I realized that she probably knew this apartment better than I did. She’d spent nights here before, woken up and brewed coffee, padded around barefoot in the quiet hours of the morning. When I returned to the bedroom, she was still standing there, reading the notes.

  “This is just one side,” she murmured.

  “Yeah. They’re all from one person,” I said. “Although a few of them go back and forth.” I pointed at the notes that had two different kinds of penmanship on them. The creases on those ones were deepest—they’d been folded and refolded, softened by pockets, passed back and forth throughout a day or two. “This is just half of the exchange, though. One person’s stash, at least for this part of the correspondence.” The notes spanned ten months or so: the first one mentioned the upcoming Winter Break, and they continued through the summer. The last one was dated shortly before Sylvia’s murder.

  “These are from students, right? Why wouldn’t they just text each other?” Tabitha asked, tapping her fingernails against the side of her mug. “This seems like a lot of work.”

  I tapped the sixth note in the exchange. Most of it was about how someone—referred to only as “X” within the text—couldn’t find out about the relationship because if she did, she’d freak out and ruin everything.

  “So it was a secret,” she said slowly, her eyes flicking over the text. “Can’t risk cell phones. Can’t risk getting caught.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Aren’t you glad you aren’t in high school anymore?” she muttered.

  “You think that’s drama? Wait’ll you get a load of the next one.”

  The ghost of a smile creased one corner of her mouth as she skimmed the first letter in the next row down. “Valentine’s Day?”

  “That’s the one. From what I’m piecing together, they couldn’t be seen at the Valentine’s Dance together, so they both played sick and spent the night together at … I’m not sure. I’m thinking her parents have a vacation home or something? Or maybe his do? It mentions ‘the cabin’ a few times.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Okay, so, they sneak off and … what, have a bunch of teenage sex, right?”

  “You know it. And then, they keep having a bunch of teenage sex.”

  “Yikes.” She grimaced. “Since when do kids call it ‘making love’?”

  “These two’ve got it bad.” I pointed out phrases with my free hand, feeling … impressive. I was showing my sister my job. I was showing off my research. And she looked fascinated. She was listening to me. “They’ve never felt this way before. And if you look down here, they start saying ‘I love you’ pretty soon after the cabin thing. They spend a lot of time together over the summer, sneaking away, talking about what they’re going to do after senior year. Then, right around the middle of the summer—before they start talking about classes but after they’ve finished talking about how great summer’s going to be—something changes.” I pointed to a note that was low on the wall, late in the exchange. I didn’t say anything, suddenly nervous. Had I been talking for too long?

  Tabitha scanned the page. “Holy shit,” she breathed.

  “Yeah,” I murmured. “That’s what I said.” It was a holy-shit kind of note. It was tear-stained, the ink smudged in places. There was terror between the lines—I don’t know what to do was repeated several times, and the words it was positive had been traced over until they were thick and uneven. They screamed fear from the center of the page. It was positive.

  “Shit,” she said, drumming her nails faster against her mug. “Baby on board.”

  “I know, right? High drama.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting.”

  I tore my eyes from it was positive and looked at Tabitha. She was staring at the note with the same intense focus she’d slipped into when we were kids trying to stay patient enough to finish a jigsaw puzzle. “What’s interesting?”

  “Well, it seems like she’s scared of what X will say. She’s scared of what will happen to her. But … she doesn’t seem scared of what A will say. She doesn’t seem worried that he’ll freak out or leave her.”

  “Well spotted,” I said. “Check out the l
ast one. It’s kind of amazing.” The last note, all the way on the bottom corner of what Tabitha had called my crazy-wall, was crowded with both sets of handwriting. It was a few sentences at a time, probably passed back and forth in class. I missed you and you look great and I can’t even tell that you’re … you know. “Check out the bottom of the page,” I murmured, and she looked. I felt giddy—I was sharing something with her, my sister, my twin sister Tabitha, the way I hadn’t let myself imagine doing for years.

  Her lips moved slightly as she read the lines at the bottom of the page, and I could hear her just barely breathing the words out loud. Don’t worry, the note said. I’ll get into the library + find the spell if you can’t get the potion from Capley.

  The response, in B’s handwriting, was at the top of the next sheet. What if we can’t do anything about it?

  Then we’ll get married, and we’ll be the best parents in the world, the response assured.

  She didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, I ventured commentary. “These two were pretty desperate. They had a big secret, and then they had an even bigger secret, and they thought Capley was the answer. I think they thought she could set them up with a solution.” She still didn’t say anything. Her face was as still as a held breath. I kept going, wanting to see her eyes flicker with interest again, holding too tight to the thing that had been there just a minute before. “So, I figure, what if A tried to get his hands on that potion, and Capley said no? I’d call that a motive. Crime of passion. So, who is A, and where was he the night of the murder?”

  Tabitha remained quiet, staring at the letters on the wall. It was positive seemed to throb, heavy and immediate in the uneasy silence. The rest of the room faded into grayscale. All I could think was, Look, look, look, it’s right there, it’s right in front of you, if you just look—

  “I have to get ready for work.” Tabitha’s voice was smooth, calm. Empty. She walked past me, brushing my shoulder with a hand. “It sounds like you’re really on to something here, though. Thanks for showing me.”