When We Were Magic Read online

  “We can’t try again,” Roya says softly, and Iris closes her eyes and listens. “That spell not working was really bad for you. I don’t know what it did exactly, but …” She pulls her hands away, extinguishing the pink light, and Iris gasps with pain. “Yeah,” Roya says, returning her hands. Iris sighs as the pink light returns. “I don’t think you should do magic for a few days. Actually, I don’t think you should do anything for a few days.”

  “Okay,” Iris says. She looks up at Marcelina, then makes a dismayed sound. “Oh, Marcelina, oh no. I ripped your dress.”

  “I could probably try to fix it,” Roya says halfheartedly. “Later, when I’ve got a little more to give.” The muscle under her eye is twitching the longer she keeps her hands on Iris, though, and I can’t imagine that she’ll have anything left by the end of the night.

  Marcelina waves the apology away. “It’s fine,” she says, but her chin wobbles a little in that trying-not-to-cry way. We all know it’s not fine—she worked evening shifts at the Crispy Chicken for four months to save up for that dress. She cried when she finally bought it—she said it was the nicest thing she’d ever owned. It’s black, like all of Marcelina’s clothes, but it has little silver stars stitched into it. There’s a huge rip in the bodice now. It’s definitely ruined. “We’ve got more important things to worry about,” she says.

  It’s true. It’s not right, but it’s true.

  We help Iris stand up. Her legs are trembling. Her freckles are stark—something she’d love if she was doing it on purpose. Her freckles are her favorite part of herself, her best-beloved feature. She’s told me that they’re the thing that make her feel most beautiful. But right now, she just looks sick. She keeps muttering, “I don’t know what happened.” Roya keeps a hand on Iris’s shoulder, pouring that pink glow into her. We stand there, our arms around each other, staring at the body parts on the bed.

  “I have an idea,” Paulie says. She unthreads her arm from around my waist and goes to Josh’s closet.

  “Wait,” I say, “what are you doing?”

  “Trust me,” she calls back, rummaging. Downstairs at the party someone’s turned the music up, and the bass vibrates through the floor. Paulie emerges from the closet clutching a pile of bags.

  “Duffels,” she says, dropping them on the floor next to the bed.

  “Duffels?” Marcelina repeats blankly.

  “Knew he’d have a buttload of ’em,” Paulie says. “Lacrosse dudes love duffel bags.”

  I nod as if that’s a truth universally acknowledged. “Sure,” I say. “But what are we … ?” Paulie folds her arms and waits for the penny to drop. And then it does. “No. No way.”

  “Yeah,” Paulie says, looking uneasily at the bed. “We gotta get him out of here.”

  Roya is the first one to make a move. She gives Iris a squeeze, then steps toward the bed. Iris makes a small noise in the back of her throat and looks a little gray, but she stays standing under her own strength. Roya grabs a duffel and moves to the bed. In one brisk motion, she grabs an arm and a leg and stuffs them into the bag. She zips it up and takes two fast steps backward. Her lips are pressed together and her nostrils are white. She nods, staring straight ahead without seeming to see anything.

  “Right,” Marcelina says. “Sure.” She picks up a duffel and scoops the hands and feet into it. She looks at the floor and bobs the bag up and down, like she’s testing its weight.

  Paulie takes the arm and leg that Roya didn’t grab. She doesn’t say anything, and after she’s zipped up her duffel, she sits down on the floor, cradling it in her lap.

  “Okay,” Iris whispers over and over again. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” She grabs a drawstring backpack and yanks the top open, then rests it on the bed and starts to load the vertebrae into it one at a time. It takes a while. Her hands are shaking. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three,” she mutters. She shakes the bag a little to settle the bones in the bottom of it, then peers inside at the amount of room that’s left. After a moment of deliberation, she picks up the liver and jams it into the bag. She cinches the backpack shut and swings it onto her back, wincing at the rattle of the bones inside.

  Marcelina looks up, something dawning across her face. “Oh shit, actually. Iris?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I trade you?” She holds out her duffel, with the hands and feet inside. Iris stares at her and she shrugs. “I need the spine for something.”

  Iris shakes her head. “I don’t want to know.” She holds out her bag of bones and Marcelina takes it.

  “Thanks.” Marcelina passes over her bag of extremities and beams at Iris, who can’t help smiling back. Nobody can help smiling back when Marcelina turns up the wattage like that. Her cheeks go all round and dimply and everything feels brighter. It’s not magic, but it’s close.

  Once the exchange is done, they both turn and look at me. I look around the room. They’re all watching me. Waiting.

  “My turn, right?” I say. My voice seems too loud. Downstairs, the party is chanting something, and the chants dissolve into a general all-purpose party-yell.

  “Your turn,” Roya says. I look up at her, and she gives me an encouraging little smile. I feel some of the tension slip off my shoulders. Maybe she’s not mad at me after all.

  “My turn,” I repeat. I grab the last bag—a beat-up backpack with Josh’s name scrawled on it in Sharpie. It was probably his schoolbag last year. I look inside: a highlighter with no cap on it rolls around in the bottom, next to a crumpled Skittles wrapper and a few curly edges from torn-out notebook pages. I turn the bag over and let the trash fall to the floor. It doesn’t feel right to leave it in there.

  I step up to the bed feeling like a spotlight is on me. Gingerly, I pick up his head. The eyes are closed, and he would look like he was sleeping if it wasn’t for the blue tint of his lips and the deathly pallor of his skin. His head is lighter than I would have anticipated. I wonder if his brain is still inside.

  I hold the head in both of my hands. His hair is soft under my palm. There had been some sort of gel in it before, when we were making out, but now it’s just clean. I bite my lip and put his head into the backpack as gently as I can manage. Then, before I have time to hesitate, I grab his heart.

  I gasp without meaning to. “It’s wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” Iris asks.

  I shake my head. “Feel.” I hold the heart out to her, and she pokes it with a tentative fingertip.

  “Oh, fuck,” she whispers. “It’s … it’s so cold?”

  No one else wants to touch the heart, and I can’t blame them. It feels awful. It’s like glass, hard and smooth and cold and much too heavy. Warmth seeps out of my hand and into the heart by the second. I stare at it. It’s almost translucent, but not quite, and I feel sure that if I just moved into better light, I could see all the way to the center of it. I can feel something in me moving toward it—something stirring deep inside me, being pulled toward the thing at the core of the heart, the thing I can’t quite see—

  Roya grabs the heart out of my hands and drops it into my backpack. She zips it up without looking at where the heart has landed.

  “Maybe don’t hold that thing in your hands for too long, huh?” she says, dipping her head low to look into my eyes.

  “Yeah,” I say, shaking myself. “Thanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Wait,” Roya says. “How are we doing this?”

  “We each get rid of our pieces,” Iris replies in her bossy-voice.

  “I want to be with you guys,” I add quickly. “When you do it.”

  “What?” Paulie asks. “Why?”

  “I just … I did this,” I say. “And you guys don’t have to help me. But I know”—I hold up my hand to stem the tide of of-course-we’re-helping objections—“I know you’re going to help me. So I want to at least be there with you when you get rid of your … your parts. Okay?”

  Marcelina nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
<
br />   “Thanks,” I say. There’s an awkward moment where none of us knows what to say to each other. Roya breaks through it by opening the door to the bedroom. She walks out without another word. Iris smiles at me over her shoulder, then follows Roya out. Paulie goes after her.

  I look at Marcelina. “Um, this is awkward, but …”

  “What?” she asks.

  “I told my parents I was sleeping over at your house tonight,” I say.

  She narrows her eyes at me. Her smile is always luminous, but when she’s mad, she looks like a lioness. “Because you were going to stay here?”

  I shrug, trying not to look away. “I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay. Anyway, um. I can’t stay here tonight. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” she says. She hefts her duffel and purses her lips for a moment before shrugging, and I know I’ve been forgiven for using her in my lie. “Of course you can stay at my place tonight, Alex. Now let’s get the fuck out of here. This place is giving me the creeps.”

  I pick up my bag full of Josh Harper and turn off the desk lamp before we go. I shut the door behind me. I don’t look back.

  3.

  MARCELINA IS COMPLICATED.

  She’s this tiny, plump Filipina girl with the most perfectly round face you’ve ever seen. She’s small and soft and likes to tell people that she’s only four feet tall, just to see if they’ll call her bluff. She does the whole cute-goth thing really well: lots of black lipstick and eyeliner but also occasionally some silver glitter. Her hair is long and black and she piles it up tall most of the time. She wears high heels that she buys cheap, and then she paints them or glues studs and feathers to them until they look like something you’d have to get on a waitlist to buy.

  She doesn’t really seem like the type of girl who would live on a farm, but if you decide you’re going to tell Marcelina what kind of person she’s supposed to be? Well … good luck with that, is all I can say.

  Marcelina likes to say that her family is land-rich. They’re in a rambling one-story house with a lot of DIY additions tacked onto the sides. It sits on twenty acres of undeveloped land that butts up against the woods, and they kind of think of the woods as their property too. Marcelina especially, since her best magic is tree magic.

  We all have something like that. We can all do a lot of the same little things, like knocking over trash cans from across the room or drying each other’s hair or warming up our hands when it gets cold out. Some of us can do stuff that the others can’t, like how Marcelina can talk to trees and Paulie can make water into shapes. And each of us has something we’re best at—something we practice all the time, something that feels more right than any other magic we do. For Marcelina, it’s plants. Trees especially, but really, all plants. She understands them on a level that I can’t even comprehend, and a lot of the time it seems like they understand her back. I know how it sounds, but it’s true.

  We walk along the edge of the woods with our shoes in our hands, the grass soft and cold and already a little dewy between our toes. My dress is still shedding glitter, so my feet are shining everywhere that they’re not muddy. I wonder if, come morning, there will be a sparkling trail to mark where I walked. The idea gives me a brief spasm of desperate hope, like I could follow the trail back to the beginning of the night, before I decided to sleep with Josh.

  Before something broken and awful rose up inside me and killed him.

  Marcelina pauses and rests her free hand against the trunk of a twisting black oak. She looks like a storybook witch in her torn starry dress, with moonlight on her face and a gnarled old tree casting curlicue shadows across her cheeks. I tell her as much and she gives me one of her amazing Marcelina-smiles. It’s a high compliment to her aesthetic.

  “So what’s up?” I ask, nodding to the tree.

  Marcelina hands me her shoes so she can lay both palms on the bark. She leans her cheek against it too, and the leaves of the tree rustle as if there’s wind. Which there isn’t. “I’m just checking in on her,” she says. “It’s been a hard year. Remember that lightning storm we had in March?”

  I don’t remember, but I nod anyway, because I want to hear how the tree is doing.

  “Well, she didn’t get hit, but one of the trees she’s friends with did. It’s really hard on both of them. She’s been giving up a lot of minerals to help her friend recover.”

  I blink at her. “What?”

  She waves a hand at me. “It’s a whole thing with the root systems and fungal exchanges. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” She presses her forehead against the tree’s trunk and whispers something. Then we’re walking along the tree line again, toward the dark house. Josh’s backpack bumps against my back, and I suppress a shudder at the thought of his face mashed against the canvas.

  “I’m really sorry, Marcelina.” My voice is shaking and I try to take a deep breath, try to imagine that my lungs are big billowing sails and I’m filling them with wind. It’s something Iris taught me—a trick she uses to manage her anxiety. It works well enough that I’m able to look at Marcelina, who’s swinging the string backpack like a handbag. “I’m sorry that I got you into this.”

  Her face is still angled up at the trees, and the white light of the moon catches on a smear of glitter that I think is probably secondhand, shed from my dress onto hers. The rip in her gown gapes open, and the moonlight illuminates a stripe of bare skin. I wonder if Roya will ever be able to fix the dress. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make up its loss.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she says quietly, but her hand rises to that tear in the bodice of the dress she worked so hard for. And even if the dress was intact … Josh is dead and his head is in a backpack.

  “Um, I think it’s a pretty big deal,” I say. She just shakes her head.

  “It’s nothing you wouldn’t do for any of us,” she says, and we’re quiet until we get to the house. She lifts up the manual garage door with one hand, shuts it after us as we slip inside. It’s completely dark in the garage, and musty. It smells like cigarettes.

  “Did your dad start smoking again?” I whisper as we feel our way across the garage.

  “Him, or maybe Uncle Trev,” she says. Uncle Trev is her mom’s friend from college—he’s been staying with them for the past two months while his wife decides whether she’s going to divorce him or not. To hear him tell it, the only thing that went wrong in their marriage is that he lost his job. He never says anything bad about his wife, though, which makes me trust him a little more. Pop told me a long time ago to never trust guys who have a lot to say about how awful their exes are.

  “Oh.” I don’t know what else there is to say. Sometimes I don’t know what to say, and it never feels like it’s okay to not know. Roya would know what to say. It would probably go a little too far, but still. She wouldn’t be quiet in this moment.

  We get into the house and whisper-greet the two giant shaggy farm dogs that are sleeping in the mudroom. For anyone else, they’d do big deep fearsome woofs, but I hold out my hands and they stand there, wagging, until I pat their heads and tell them they’re good dogs.

  They shove wet noses against my palms and huff hot air against my wrists. They lean against my legs, trying to tell me about the grass and the cat and the one amazing smell they found and rolled in. I smile in the dark and tell them to go back to sleep, that I’ll hear all about it in the morning.

  I tell them without words. I tell them the same way that Marcelina tells the tree she’s going to help it however she can. It’s my thing, the thing that only I can really do as far as I know. Fritz and Handsome love me, because they can tell me all the dog-things that no other human seems to understand, and because I listen to them. I listen as much as I can, at least.

  We put on the house slippers that are lined up by size in a long row next to the inside-door. Then we sneak down the hall past Marcelina’s parents’ room, past the guest bedroom where Uncle Trev sleeps.

  We pass the kitchen. The whole house smell
s like Clorox wipes, except for the kitchen, which always smells like whatever Marcelina’s mom has been cooking. Her mom is an amazing cook. She’s left a huge disposable pan of something on the countertop, covered with foil. As we pass, I can smell something that smells like salt and vinegar and the color red, and my mouth waters until I remember how it felt when Josh’s blood was burned off my tongue. Marcelina lets out an exasperated sigh in front of me, and I know she’s rolling her eyes at her mom leaving out a whole pan of food for just her and whoever she happened to bring home. I don’t grab her and pull her into the kitchen to eat like I usually would, because I’m sure that I’ll throw up if I try to eat right now, but still. It smells fantastic in that kitchen. Almost good enough to make me hungry.

  Marcelina’s bedroom is exactly what you’d expect it to be—lots of black, lots of posters featuring bands where the guys wear more makeup than the girls and everyone’s hair is super long. But it’s also got a million plants in it, and a sunlamp, and a terrarium with a fat lizard inside.

  Marcelina walks around the room touching the plants, greeting each one by name. “Hey, Bert,” I say to the lizard, and he blinks a sleepy eye at me.

  She opens a drawer and tosses me a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that says “Haunt me Siouxsie Sioux” on the front in a cute font. “Go take a shower,” she says.

  “Do I smell?” I ask, trying to discreetly sniff-check my armpits.

  “No, but you’re fucking covered in glitter from that stupid dress,” she answers. “And I need a few minutes alone.”

  I nod. Marcelina’s not exactly an introvert, but sometimes she hits a wall and needs to just be alone with her plants. She’s had a hard night—it makes sense that she’d want to be alone right now.