When We Were Magic Read online

  He played lacrosse. When I think about it, I have a hazy memory of him wearing a jersey to school one day, but I don’t really follow school sports except for swimming, and our lacrosse team is nothing to pay attention to, so I didn’t really put it together. But he definitely played lacrosse—his stick is leaning against the side of his headboard, and a ball rests in the weird net thing on the end of it. They’re drenched in blood too.

  He liked to read. A low bookshelf is next to his bed, on the other side of the lacrosse stick. It has a water glass on top—I guess he used the shelf as a nightstand. The books are spattered with red. The glass has three inches of blood-pink water in it.

  Somewhere downstairs, someone screams. We all jump. Laughter rises from the party like ripples in the wake of the scream, which repeats with a definite note of delight.

  “Okay,” Marcelina says. The thick layer of black and silver around her eyes makes her look even more intense than usual. “So. What are we going to do?”

  “We need a spell,” Roya says. Some of the drunken fuzz is gone from her voice. She comes over to stand next to me, and her arm brushes against mine, and my skin jumps like I’m a cat she’s petted the wrong direction.

  “Yeah,” I say, because it’s true. There’s only one way to fix this, to bring Josh back and make everything the way it was before. “We need a spell that will make this right.”

  We all look to Iris. She’s shaking her head at us, but I can see the gears turning. She closes her eyes and we wait. The glow of her magic shines through her eyelids, illuminating a delicate leaflike tracery of pink veins. We all look away.

  * * *

  Iris’s eyes glow when she comes up with spells. It’s a whole thing she does. She’s the only one of us who can do it—everyone else just kind of Does Magic and whatever happens happens, but Iris can gather our magic together and give it structure if she works on it really hard. But the working-on-it-really-hard makes her eyes glow. She gets so embarrassed about it. We don’t tell her that the glow is still totally visible even when her eyes are closed. It’s not a big deal to anyone other than her, but we know she would be self-conscious. It’s just better if we don’t tell her.

  * * *

  We look at each other to keep ourselves from looking at Josh or at Iris. I keep accidentally catching Roya’s eyes and then looking away from her. Paulie bumps her shoulder against mine and whispers “You okay?” and I shake my head. I am absolutely not okay. I’m overwhelmed and terrified and oddly ashamed. And I’m mad that Roya had a prom date to ditch at all, even though that’s not what I should be thinking about right now. It’s too hot in the room, too crowded with the five of us plus Josh plus all the blood. Paulie grabs my hand and squeezes it. Her palm is dry and cool and I resist the urge to press it to my forehead.

  After a few minutes, the magic glow from Iris’s eyes dies away. She looks at me and nods, the motion knocking one red curl into her face. “Okay,” she says. “I think I’ve got it. Let’s go.”

  2.

  WE STAND IN A SEMICIRCLE that arcs out from Josh’s bed. We’re staring at our shoes because it’s getting harder and harder not to look at Josh. We’re all holding hands. Marcelina is next to me. Her hand is soft and warm and it feels like more than I deserve right now. Usually, Iris would be at the end of the line, opposite me—but I think that Paulie, Iris, and Marcelina arranged themselves to stay between Roya and me. It’s probably for the best, but it still makes me a little sad.

  Here’s what you need to know about Roya: She’s my best friend. She’s on the swim team and she eats more pasta than anyone I’ve ever met in my life. She talks a lot about macros and carb-loading. She’s Afghani. Her mom is the chief of police and her dad is some kind of fancy accountant, but I can never remember what makes him fancier than a regular accountant. Roya’s parents adopted her when she was six and then gave birth to her little brother six years later. Being adopted was the first thing we bonded over—there was a thing where everyone was supposed to bring in baby pictures and tell the stories of our families, and we were the only two who didn’t know our birth dads’ names.

  When Roya is really happy and not paying attention, she makes flowers grow. She has this long thick black hair that’s always loose in beachy waves, unless she’s at a swim meet, in which case it’s tucked up under her swim cap and you can see the back of her neck, which is long and slim and covered in these fine hairs that look like they’d be really soft under your fingertips.

  Anyway.

  Roya’s always mad at someone. Right now, the person she’s mad at is me.

  I thought I wanted this.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re doing,” Iris says. Her voice has taken on this businesslike tone that she uses whenever she’s being bossy. She’s bossy a lot. It’s great. Seriously, we all love it—she takes charge like nobody else I know. She’s going to run the world someday.

  “The spell should clean everything up. And then it’ll get rid of the body.” She frowns a little. “I think.”

  “You think?” Marcelina mirrors Iris’s frown.

  “I’m not sure. It’s kind of vague.”

  “Wait,” I say. “That’s not what I meant when I said ‘make it right.’ ”

  “Oh?” Iris looks at me sharply. Her eyes are flashing, and I know what she’s thinking: that I’m the one asking for a huge favor, here, and can I really afford to be picky? Still, I press.

  “We have to … we have to fix it,” I say, hating the whine in my voice. “We have to make it right, we have to bring him back. There has to be a way to bring him back.”

  Iris laughs. Her laugh is only a little cold, not mean, but she’s in that mood she gets sometimes, where she knows best and we’re all just failing to keep up. “If you think we can bring people back from the dead … That’s ridiculous, Alexis,” she says. “We aren’t miracle-workers. It’s going to be hard enough just to get rid of him.”

  It stings when she talks to me that way. And it stings even more because what she’s saying is that I’ve done something that can’t be undone. I feel stupid for ever having hoped that things could go back to the way they were before.

  I feel so small, and I’m so afraid that they’ll leave me all alone with this thing I’ve done if I ask them for too much help. So I don’t argue.

  “It’s not like we can make it any worse,” Roya mutters. Someone knocks on the door, and we all jump. Roya shouts that the room is occupied, suddenly sounding a lot more sober than she did a few seconds before.

  “Can we please, please get this over with?” Paulie growls, and everyone nods, and I can’t argue with them anymore. I can’t ask them for more help than I already have, and I certainly can’t ask them to risk getting caught with a dead body with me.

  Besides, Iris is really smart. Like … really smart. If she says this is the only option, I believe her.

  “Are you ready?” Iris asks. We all say yes, and then—

  * * *

  Magic.

  * * *

  How can I explain what it’s like?

  It’s like that feeling when you’ve been cooped up inside all day and then you finally go outside and remember what fresh air tastes like.

  It’s like when you get up in the middle of the night and your mouth is gross and dry and you take a drink of water and the water is sweet.

  It’s like watching someone dive into a pool without leaving a ripple.

  It’s like waking up.

  * * *

  Threads of light swirl up around each of us like spun sugar rising up out of a cotton candy machine. We all do different things with our magic, and we all usually look different when we do it. It’s always kind of like light, and kind of like thread, and kind of like neither of those things at all. But when Iris is in control, we all make magic that looks similar. It looks like raw material. Pure. When we work together, Iris’s magic is white, and Roya’s is pink, and Marcelina’s and Paulie’s are both blue. I can’t see my own. I can see when my ha
nds glow a little, but I can never see the magic coming out of them. Almost none of us can see our own, except for Iris. So, I don’t know what mine looks like, but Roya told me once that it’s a bright dark purple. I asked how it could be dark when it’s bright, and she shrugged and said she didn’t make the rules.

  She also said it was really pretty. Not that it matters, but she said it, is all. She thinks it’s pretty.

  A cloud of power roils overhead as we all give ourselves over to Iris. We’ll be exhausted after this, but it’s worth it to see what she can do. To see the shape of her plan. She reaches up and swirls her hand through the light that’s filling the room. She pulls at it and pushes it and wraps her light around ours and clenches her fist tight and then she says “NOW” and we all stop.

  * * *

  Stopping feels like holding your breath—awful and suffocating and a little dizzying after the first minute. But you get used to feeling like that.

  * * *

  Iris lets go of the gathered light she’s holding. It settles over Josh’s body in a big sheet. We all slump a little as the magic leaves us. The light flares, and as it does, time slows. This doesn’t happen with every spell, but this is a big one, and I guess things are different with magic this size. Or maybe it’s just adrenaline making me see every single detail of what happens—I don’t know. All I know is, his blood shimmers like oil on water. I can feel it growing hot on my face, on my lips, on the tip of my tongue where I didn’t even notice it until now, which seems wrong. You should notice when a boy’s blood is on your tongue.

  I feel his blood get hot, and I watch it shine on every surface in the room. The pink water lets off a few wisps of steam. The blood that’s on my skin hurts. It hurts so much, but I don’t let myself cry out and I don’t let myself flinch because I know in my heart that I deserve so much more than this taste of pain.

  I did this. It’s my fault. I deserve worse than what I’m getting.

  And then, faster than should be possible, the light of the spell fades, and he’s gone. Josh is gone. One second he was there, and everything was covered in blood, and the next—he’s not there anymore. All the blood is gone. The strange rush that comes with pain suddenly disappearing washes over me.

  It totally worked. I smile, even though I don’t really feel happy. It’s over. I can pretend that it was all a bad dream.

  He’s gone.

  And then Iris yells and her knees buckle and it’s not over after all.

  Marcelina grabs Iris before she falls. Her eyes are glowing again, brighter than they usually do—they’re blue-white and painful to look at. She’s biting her lip hard, making a sound like a held-in scream. Her skin is so pale that her freckles stand out like ink spatters across her cheeks. She clutches at Marcelina’s black dress. I hear the fabric rip, and then a louder ripping-fabric sound that can’t be Marcelina’s dress, it’s so loud. It’s too loud.

  There’s a flare of light on the bed. At the exact same moment, Iris faints.

  Her dress is pooled around her, a puddle of white satin and gold sequins. Marcelina and Roya drop to the floor beside her without hesitating. They both know CPR—Roya from being on the swim team, Marcelina from when she used to be a Girl Scout—and they’re checking her pulse and looking inside her mouth and saying things quietly to each other that I don’t really understand.

  “She’s okay, I think,” Roya says.

  “She … doesn’t look okay,” Paulie replies.

  Roya ignores Paulie. She puts her hands on Iris’s temples. A soft pink glow shines out from under her palms. Her jaw clenches—she should be drained of magic right now. She must be drawing on some deep reserve. Iris’s eyes flutter open, and she looks at Roya with a dreamy kind of smile.

  I look away.

  That’s when I notice Josh.

  “Um, guys?” I say it too quietly at first and nobody notices me. “Guys,” I say again. “We’ve got a problem.”

  They all look up at me, and I point at the bed.

  “No way,” Paulie says.

  Marcelina looks up at the bed. “Way,” she responds quietly.

  “What is it?” Iris says from the floor. Her words are a little slurred. She tries to sit up, and Roya puts a hand on her chest, gently pushing her back to the floor.

  “Josh is back,” I say.

  “Well. Sort of,” Paulie adds.

  Sort of.

  * * *

  I took biology in my freshman year of high school. It’s where I met Paulie. At first, I thought she was just another pretty, preppy blond cheerleader-type. I was kind of a shallow, judgy freshman, and I thought high school was going to be all about cliques and groups. So, when I sat down on my first day of class and the girl next to me was a shiny-haired Taylor Swift lookalike in a cheer uniform, I rolled my eyes. I braced myself for a whole year of stupid questions and conversations about diets and boy drama and … well. I was kind of a dick to Paulie for the first month of school.

  But then we got paired together for a dissection. It was a cow eye—we were supposed to cut it open and find the lens, and draw diagrams of the sclera and the retina and the optic nerve. The teacher came around to our lab tables with a big bucket and dropped an eyeball onto each of our dissection trays.

  “Whoa,” Paulie said when the eyeball splatted onto our tray. “Cool.”

  I remember being surprised at her reaction. “Cool?” I repeated. “It’s pretty gross.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and she looked up at me with this kind of wild, excited smile. “It’s totally gross. And it’s also cool.”

  We dissected our cow eye and then we talked about other cool, gross things. I realized how wrong I’d been about Paulie. We became friends in that immediate way that happens when you find someone amazing and don’t want to let go of them for anything, and it only took a month for us to realize that we were both keeping the same secret. I’d always thought I was weird for being magic. I’d known I wasn’t the only one, because of Roya and Maryam, but I thought we were freaks. I tried to love our magic then, but I couldn’t help feeling like something was wrong with us. Paulie thought she was weird too, but she thought it was cool. “Like a cow eye?” I’d asked the first time she told me so.

  “Exactly like a cow eye,” she’d said.

  * * *

  “Okay, so, it didn’t work,” Marcelina says. She’s staring at the bed and fidgeting with a curl that’s come loose from her prom updo.

  “It kind of worked,” Paulie says.

  “What happened?” Iris asks.

  * * *

  Here is what happened:

  Josh came back. But not all of him. And not all in one piece.

  His head is there. His spine is there, although it takes me a minute to realize that’s what the little pile of round bones is. A big purple cushion-looking thing is there, which I will later figure out is his liver. His hands are piled one on top of the other, and his feet are at either end of the bed. They are not attached to his arms and legs, which are stacked like firewood at the foot of the bed.

  His heart is there. It’s sinking into the bed, like it’s heavy, heavier than any of the other parts of him that are there. It’s translucent and shiny and it looks … cold.

  All of the parts are clean and really pale. There’s no oozing blood. The sheets look cleaner than they did when I came into the room the first time, and they’d looked clean enough then that I’d been willing to lose my virginity on them.

  It’s helpful. It makes everything look kind of fake, like drawings in a textbook. Although there is a smell. A sweet, cooked-meat kind of smell.

  It’s not a nice smell.

  * * *

  When Iris sees what’s on the bed, she covers her mouth with her hand. Her voice shakes. “I’m really sorry,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” Roya says. She’s kneeling behind Iris, helping her sit up.

  “No,” Iris says. “It’s not okay, it’s not—we have to try again. Let’s try again.”

  R
oya looks up at the rest of us with alarm on her face. “We can’t, guys.” Her hands are resting on Iris’s shoulders, and I notice that her palms are still glowing pink. I give her an is-she-okay look, and she responds with a minute shake of her head.

  “We have to try again,” Iris repeats, and her voice is getting high and shaky the way it does before she has a panic attack. Her breathing is fast and shallow. I sit down on the floor in front of her and grab her hand in both of mine, then let it go, because I don’t know what will happen if I hold someone’s hand. Because I don’t know how much I might hurt someone. I can’t believe I did magic with them without thinking of it—of what might be inside me, waiting to come out. Of how I might have hurt all of them.

  I can’t believe I did that.

  What’s wrong with me?

  I push back a wave of shame and fear because now isn’t the time. Iris needs me. She needs someone to help anchor her, to keep her from spinning out. I sit on my hands, trying to stay solid for her.

  “It’s okay,” I say. Her eyes are shot with the dark red of burst blood vessels. “It’s okay. We can deal with this.” Paulie and Marcelina settle on either side of me, and they make soothing noises too.

  “We can totally deal with this,” Marcelina says.

  “Piece of cake,” Paulie adds.

  “Piece of Josh,” Roya says, and we all laugh desperately. Iris cracks a smile.

  “Too soon,” she whispers. She’s still breathing a little fast, but it seems like we’ve successfully derailed her anxiety spiral before she went into a full-on panic attack. “We could try again, though,” she says.

  Sometimes Iris says things that she doesn’t mean just so one of us will reply with the thing she knows to be true. Like, she’ll say, “What if nobody likes me?” so that someone outside of her brain can respond, “Lots of people like you.” It’s a coping mechanism we’ve all developed together. It’s not manipulative, and it’s not fake. It’s just that sometimes she needs to hear someone else confirm reality.