Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  I went on, relishing the moment—I was about to solve a murder. “And then, when she still didn’t give in? When she still said the potion was too dangerous for Courtney to take that late in her pregnancy? What did you do then, Alexandria?”

  Alexandria’s eyes flicked again to Tabitha, to the posters in the far corner of the room that were outweighing the tape holding them to the wall. She took a long sip of water. She was calculating. How are you going to get out of this one?

  “I didn’t do anything,” she whispered. She looked incredibly small. The room was thick with her manipulation; my head buzzed with no no no no no no no no no look away go away. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.”

  I leaned my elbows on the table and ducked my head to catch her eye. “I don’t think that’s true,” I whispered back. “I think you killed her.”

  Alexandria dropped the water bottle, spilling most of the contents. Tabitha picked it up, then flicked a hand at the puddle. It hissed away into steam. She was looking at Alexandria like she’d never seen the girl before.

  “What?” Alexandria was shaking her head, hard. “I didn’t kill her. What? I wouldn’t—I couldn’t even—how would I—”

  “Come on, Alexandria,” I said. “You can play like you didn’t, but don’t try to pretend that you couldn’t.”

  Alexandria laughed desperately. “She was cut in half! I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do that! Are you crazy?”

  I stared at her. “Let’s not play this game,” I said. “You may have everyone else here fooled, but not me.”

  “What are you talking about?” She said it loud, not quite yelling, but close to it.

  “You’re not just a queen bee, are you, Alexandria? You’re not just a master manipulator or a mean girl, oh no. You’re more than that. You’re more than any of them realize.” I was talking fast, too fast. “How did you keep them all from noticing? Is that what the hair is for? The makeup? Does it make them underestimate you? How do you make them see you the way you want them to?” She opened her mouth to say something, but I didn’t let her. I couldn’t let her. “You’re the most powerful mage here, aren’t you? You’re more powerful than any of them. They all think that theoretical dynism—”

  “Dynamism,” Tabitha murmured, her eyes locked on Alexandria.

  “—Dynamism,” I continued, “right, they all think it’s impossible. But it’s not, not for you. You’re bigger than any of them know. You could probably cut someone in half with your eyes closed.”

  Alexandria had her head in her hands. I realized that I’d been yelling too. “What the fuck,” she growled, “is theoretical dynism?”

  “Dynamism,” I said. “And don’t try to pretend that you don’t know. Don’t try to pretend that you’re not playing all of these people for fools, pushing them around with your powers.” I was standing now, pressing both hands against the cool surface of the lab table and leaning toward her. “Don’t try to pretend that you don’t know you’re the Chosen—”

  “No!”

  We all jumped out of our skins as Dylan DeCambray appeared in the far corner of the room. He stood on top of one of the fallen posters, half-invisible, waving his hands in front of his face like he was clearing away cobwebs. With every swipe of his long fingers, more of him emerged from thin air.

  “She is not the Chosen One,” he choked. His face was pink, blotchy; there were wet streaks running down his cheeks. His chin buckled as he stalked toward us, still fighting through tears. “She is not, she’s just a popular bitch!” He punched the surface of the lab table with all the force his high-school-boy rage could generate. The tendons in his neck stood out as he pointed a finger at her. “She might be able to keep everyone scared of her. She might be able to terrify Courtney into keeping us a secret, but that doesn’t mean—she’s not worthy of the Prophecy!”

  “What do you mean, keep you a secret?” Alexandria said. “Wait—were you—”

  “Dylan,” Tabitha said, holding her hands out toward him, “let’s calm down—”

  “I will not calm down,” he shouted, pacing back and forth with long, loping steps, and the windows rattled with the force of his voice and his fury. “The Prophecy says that the Chosen One will be the most powerful mage of our time, and it’s not her! The Chosen One wouldn’t waste his power on hair and makeup and keeping people who are in love from being together!”

  Alexandria laughed. “In love? What are you talking about?”

  He wheeled around, his praying-mantis elbows swinging. “We were in love, Alexandria. Courtney and I were in love!” A fleck of spittle flew from his mouth—he was literally frothing. His eyes were wild and white. “And you ruined it!”

  “What are you even talking about?” Alexandria had gone half-shrill. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid or not. I certainly was. “When did you two even date? Wait—no way.” There was a hysterical edge to her laughter. “Was it you? You were the father?”

  “I was the father,” he said, and he almost sounded calm. But then Alexandria laughed again, and rage exploded out of him.

  “I’ve worked my entire life for this! She’s not the Chosen One! It’s not her! It can’t be her!”

  He crossed the room in a few long strides. None of us could have known what he was going to do to Alexandria when he got to her—none of us could have predicted what his intentions were—but his face was dark with rage. I stood up, knocking my chair over, and took a step toward him. Next to me, Tabitha’s hands flared with electricity, making the hair on the backs of my arms stand on end. Alexandria stumbled backward over her chair, landing on the floor with her hands up, trying to protect herself from the rage and violence that was barreling toward her.

  But it was too late.

  Dylan had already exploded.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MY EARS RANG WITH PANIC. I’d closed my eyes, bracing myself for an arc of blood to catch me across the face, but the hot wet splash never came. I opened my eyes and uncurled my hunched body.

  Like the volume being turned up on a radio, Alexandria’s scream appeared on the horizon of my awareness. It was a long, sustained, movie-star shriek. She was staring at the nebula of flesh that was suspended in front of her.

  It spun slowly, a long pink streak of mist and foam and jellyfish-like hunks. I swallowed bile as I stood up and walked in a wide arc around the Dylan-cloud. There were a few recognizable spots. A toenail floated like a translucent seashell caught up in the froth of a wave. An eyeball dangled, ripe and whole, in the center of a fog of blood. I made my way to Alexandria and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She stopped screaming, and in the vacuum left by the absence of her scream, I heard the slam of doors up and down the hall outside.

  “Alexandria?” I whispered. “Alexandria. Hey.”

  She turned her head toward me without taking her eyes off the tendrils of Dylan that hovered nearest her face. “Y—yeah?” Her voice was shaking.

  “You need to put him back together, Alexandria. Can you do that? Please?” Some distant corner of my mind congratulated itself on the steadiness of my voice.

  She shook her head, and tears spilled from both her eyes. She didn’t seem to notice them. “I don’t—I didn’t—what?”

  I gestured to the exploded boy. He took up most of the center of the classroom. “It’s okay. You’re not in trouble.” That probably wasn’t true, but this wasn’t the time for honesty. “I just need you to put him back together, and everything will be okay. Okay?”

  She shook her head hard, kept shaking it for too long. She started rocking back and forth. I gently cupped a hand along the back of her head, and she went still. She whispered, “I didn’t do this, I don’t know how to do this, I couldn’t—Miss Gamble, she—can you do it?”

  Voices in the hall. Footsteps. Far, but not far enough.

  Can you do it?

  But of course, I couldn’t. I tried for less than a second, the way I always had, the way I’d alway
s told myself I wasn’t trying—I tried to reach out with something that wasn’t my mind, with that something that Tabitha and Alexandria and Rahul and everyone here but me seemed to know how to access. It was a habit that I pretended not to have, and yet I did it then. I tried to reach out, and I failed like always. I couldn’t do it. I would never be able to do it.

  I snapped my fingers next to Alexandria’s face. “Hey,” I said, my voice sharp. “This one’s on you. Put him back. Come on. We don’t have much time, now.”

  She finally turned to look at me, turned all the way, and I caught my breath. All of the magic was gone from her face. Her hair was still blond, but next to her scalp was an inch of dark brown roots. Her eyes were smaller, closer together, and she had a pimple on her chin. I would have been willing to bet that when she opened her mouth, I’d see crooked eyeteeth.

  She didn’t look all that different, though. Other than the stark terror in her eyes. “I don’t know how,” she pleaded, and I believed her.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s just … let’s try.” She grabbed my hand, gripping it so hard I felt the bones grind together. “Let’s try this. Imagine…” I scanned my memory for something, anything from the journal, but there was nothing. All of that was so abstract and recursive and self-referential—but then I landed on a memory of Tabitha, nine years old, trying to help me understand how she’d made a daisy grow super-fast. How she’d explained it. “Imagine that your magic is a swimming pool, okay? Now hold your breath.” Alexandria nodded, her eyes locked on mine, and took a deep breath. She didn’t exhale. “Okay,” I said. “Now … now freeze the water, and then dive in.”

  It hadn’t made any sense at all when Tabitha said it that day in our parents’ backyard. She’d said that, and I’d been so frustrated, so furious, that I’d stomped on the daisy and run inside. I’d locked myself in the bathroom and filled up the sink and spent an hour staring at the water, willing it to ice over.

  It still didn’t make any sense to me, but Alexandria’s face grew determined. Her eyes unfocused, the same way Tabitha’s had the time she’d turned all the salt in Mom’s saltcellar to quartz.

  The Dylan-cloud began to spin faster. The toenail and the eye drifted close to each other, and I had a wild urge to shout Don’t scratch yourself. I held my breath as the pink fog picked up speed, whirling—not into a funnel, although I kept watching the bottom of the cloud, expecting it to narrow. Rahul’s voice echoed in my memory: Alexandria always seems to be right in the eye of the hurricane, though. Which I guess would make Dylan the hurricane. And yet, the cloud didn’t tighten at the bottom as it spun; instead it drew into itself, thickening in places. As I watched—as Alexandria stood beside me, as still as a cat—the cloud formed a tight sphere. Mountains formed on the surface, then separated themselves away from the loose planet of flesh, revealing their substance. I fought down bile as a long spool of intestine spun out into a Saturnine ring. Three flat planes of dark purple rested like lakes before tremoring and sliding together into a beating heart, which hovered like a spasmodic moon. It clenched and unclenched around nothing for the space of a minute before a fine flow of red and yellowish motes fizzed up from the surface of the sphere and began to flow through it, pulsing in time with the movements of the heart and sketching a wide ellipse.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered.

  Bones formed, marrow first. Half of a brain branched backward from each of the eyes. Two crystalline networks of nerves, fine as spiderwebs, sketched the shape of a body in two pieces. Long meaty muscles began to group themselves together, looking disconcertingly like pork hanging in a butcher-shop window. I wondered if Alexandria would be able to assemble it all, or if Dylan would fall to the ground in pieces. The spinning slowed, and I let out a little of the breath I’d been holding, in an attempt to lessen my dizziness.

  I tore my eyes away from Dylan’s liver to look at his sister. She was sweating profusely—her hair had gone limp and wet, and she was reaching up to wipe at her eyes. Her lips were white.

  “Alexandria,” I whispered, not knowing what I would say, not sure if I should put a hand on her shoulder or if touching her would ruin all of this, would leave Dylan dead. She shook her head without taking her eyes from her work, and bit her lip so hard that I saw a thin line of blood appear under her tooth.

  I looked back to Dylan just in time to see skin sheathing each half of his body. His eyes had eyelids now, and they were closed, but I could see his heart beating in the left half of his chest. It was worse, somehow, seeing him almost put together—it was harder than it had been to see him in pieces. The two halves drifted toward each other, spinning as slowly as the mobile over a baby’s crib. They pressed against each other, and the seam in his skin began to heal over. It was like watching a sped-up video of a flower blooming—his skin formed a scab, and then a scar, and then it was smooth, and then I wouldn’t have known that there had ever been a fissure there at all.

  Alexandria made a small sound from the back of her throat, a sound like a weightlifter gripping a school bus by the bumper, and then Dylan began to float across the room. He drifted down to a lab table on the other side of the room, landing as gently as a leaf falling from one of the black oak trees that lined the school campus.

  She collapsed, then retched. I didn’t look back at Alexandria as I ran to Dylan, weaving between chairs. He was unconscious, but breathing. I pressed two fingers to his throat and felt the strong, rapid thud of his heartbeat pushing back. A sound exploded out of me without my permission—half sob, half laughter.

  “He’s alive,” I said.

  Someone in the hall outside the classroom let out a ragged scream. I looked up from Dylan just in time to see Courtney shove her way through a crowd of students that had gathered outside of the classroom to watch through the windows. She burst into the room, still screaming.

  “Dylan! OhmygodDylan!” She ran toward the spot where I stood over Dylan’s still body. She ran through a fine blue-gray powder that littered the floor—the remains of Dylan’s clothes, if I had to guess. Her foot slid through the thick dust, and she tripped, sprawling headlong across the front of the classroom. There was a thick, wet crunch when her face hit the linoleum.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, looking frantically around for Tabitha—I couldn’t handle this on my own anymore, there was just too much. But my sister was nowhere to be seen, so I went to Courtney and helped her up. Blood poured from her rapidly swelling nose.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered, freezing up with my hands six inches from Courtney’s shoulders—until Alexandria appeared in my periphery. I turned to look at her. She still wasn’t wearing her magical enhancements, but she looked steadier than she had just a moment before.

  “I think I can help?” She said it like a question, and before I’d taken even a split second to think it through, I was nodding. She reached out and took Courtney’s hand, threading their fingers together. Courtney flinched away, but Alexandria held fast to it, biting her lip.

  “Imagine your magic is a tree,” she murmured, and I could picture fourteen-year-old Tabitha clear as day, trying to help me understand how she made a feather levitate. It’s like if magic is a tree, but all the leaves are made of taffy, and you just … pull it.

  Courtney cried out, and there was a smell in the air like strawberry lemonade, and then we all looked at her nose. It was still swollen, but it had stopped bleeding. Courtney backed slowly away from Alexandria. Her foot slipped in the blood that had dripped onto the floor. She was shaking hard, too hard to call it trembling.

  I glanced at the window that looked out into the hallway. There was a massive crowd out there, just … watching. Silent. I had never seen so many eyes before, so many stunned faces.

  The clock above Tabitha’s desk ticked five times. It felt like hours.

  The door to the classroom burst open, and Rahul ran in, followed closely by Torres. Mrs. Webb eased in a few steps behind them, then waved her hand at the windows. They went dark, but t
he afterimage of all those faces burned in my vision. From outside, I could hear voices—Toff and another teacher, trying to break up the crowd.

  “What is going on in here?” Torres said in a voice that felt inappropriately calm. I tried to figure out where to start, but before I could say anything, Courtney interrupted.

  “She did what she did to me, she did it, she did what Miss Gamble did, and I—she did it to him, is he dead? Did he die? What did you do?” With this last word, she lunged toward Alexandria. Rahul caught her by the shoulders and held her in place even as she kicked and screamed nonsense panic-sounds like a cat trapped under a fallen branch.

  “Mrs. Webb?” Torres said sharply, and Mrs. Webb stepped forward. She placed her palm against Courtney’s forehead, and the girl slumped over, unconscious. “Thank you.”

  Rahul scooped the girl up and gently placed her on Tabitha’s desk. He hadn’t looked at me once since he came into the room.

  “Now, Ms. Gamble,” Torres said, leveling a cool stare at me. “What exactly happened in here? And why,” she added crisply, “is there so much blood everywhere?”

  “Excuse me, um, sorry,” Alexandria said, and it didn’t sound like her at all. She was quiet—almost timid. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but … Miss Gamble. I mean, Ivy. She didn’t do anything.”

  Torres looked at her with the same removed stare, evaluating, then nodded. “What did happen, then?”

  “Well,” Alexandria started, stammering, “we were talking. Ivy—can I just call her Ivy instead of Miss Gamble? It’s confusing because there’s like, two of them? Okay, well, Ivy was, was asking me some questions. And then it, um, it turned out Dylan had snuck in and was doing his invisible thing to spy on us.” Torres sighed, then nodded: this was an everyday occurrence. “He was really upset because, um.” She flushed. “Because Ivy said I was the Chosen One. And then my hands got hot and then Dylan … exploded.”