When We Were Magic Read online

  It’s just a lot, is all. So yeah, sometimes I hide, or pretend to be totally absorbed in my phone, or whatever. Because sometimes I don’t want to have to know where I’ll be in ten years and how I’ll get there. Sometimes I don’t want to be experiencing the Fullness of Teendom.

  Sometimes I just want to be able to exist as I am without having to worry about anything bigger than how I’ll dispose of Josh Harper’s head and heart.

  I check the group text and, apparently, a million things have happened since the last time I looked at it. Roya is hungover, and Iris is in trouble with her parents as always, and one of Maryam’s prom makeup tutorials got picked up by some big clickbait website. Everyone is trying not to talk about what happened; they’re all acting like everything’s fine, like our normal problems matter. It’s an enormous relief. While I’m composing my response, three dots appear at the bottom of the screen, the indicator that someone is typing.

  I wait. I want to see what someone else says before I hit send. I wouldn’t want my response to interrupt someone else’s thought. I wonder sometimes if everyone else thinks this way too—if they’re also always trying to make sure that they’re not taking up too much space.

  I don’t have to wait long. It’s only a few seconds before Maryam’s message comes through.

  We have to talk about last night

  The air feels humid and close and suffocating.

  Sure thing but not in text, comes Roya’s reply. She and Marcelina negotiate a time and place for all of us to meet: Marcelina’s house at dawn. Paulie protests, because of course she does, but agrees to the plan after a single message from Maryam:

  Please. It’s an emergency.

  I haven’t sent a reply yet. I can’t find a reply that fits, so after a minute, I send a thumbs-up emoji. It looks wrong, so I follow it with the word Thanks, then Sorry, then Thanks again. Nothing feels right, and I start to think that maybe nothing ever will.

  I lean against the bleachers so that I can feel the vibrations of footsteps against my back. I can hear Pop yelling “Go Nico!” as loud as he can, even though he doesn’t understand the game.

  Then I hear Dad’s voice, much closer than Pop’s.

  “Yeah, sorry, I just had to get away from the field,” he’s saying. “It’s loud as heck out here. What were you asking?”

  He walks around the corner of the bleachers, his shoulders sagging with relief as he steps into the shade. His face is already shining with sweat from standing in the sun—it’s beading in his five-o’clock shadow and making his hair foof up into curls. He must have pulled a late night last night to have skipped shaving this morning. He’ll have a sunburn later, and Pop will nag him for not wearing sunscreen—you can count on it. He squints around in the shadows while his eyes adjust, and then he spots me and does a combination oh-hi-you’re-here and sorry-I’m-on-the-phone pantomime. I smile and wave him off. It’s the same exchange we go through every time he tries to sneak away to take a work call during family time, only to run into me in one of my hiding places.

  I’m not paying him any attention—I’ve spent my whole life learning how to tune out his meandering conversations with clients and colleagues—but some part of my brain must be listening, because I snap to attention when I hear the name “Josh.”

  “… wasn’t at a friend’s house?” Dad is saying, and a sick kind of heat rises in my chest. “Well, I don’t know. He definitely wasn’t with us.” He pauses, and I’m not even trying to pretend that I’m not listening. I know that if I tried to act disinterested, I’d fail, so I let him see that he’s caught my attention, that I’m worried. I hope that he only sees “worried,” and not “pissing myself with fear.” He holds up a finger, frowning—the other person on the line is still talking.

  “Hang on,” he says after a long time. “I have Alexis right here. I’ll ask her.” He covers the mouthpiece and looks up at me. “Hey, bug, did you see Josh Harper last night?”

  Let me take a moment to explain why I say what I say next. I’ve grown up with two lawyer dads. Trial lawyer dads. They both work defense cases, which means they could find a loophole in a mountainside and turn it into a tunnel big enough for a steam engine to pass through. They’re also both great at spotting lies. They trust me a lot, and they let me get away with a lot, but they expect the truth from me, and most of the time, I give it to them.

  On my very best, sneakiest day, when Pop and Dad are both way overwhelmed and barely have time for me, I can maybe get away with “I’m staying over at Marcelina’s house tonight” when really I mean “I’m going to lose my virginity to whatever boy is nearby tonight.”

  Today? With Dad looking straight at me, worry draped across his brow like a flower crown? Not a chance.

  So I say yes.

  “I saw him at prom,” I say. “And … at the after-party.” I let myself look a little guilty about the after-party, and Dad’s eyebrows go up in a decent imitation of Pop’s surprised-face. He gives me a we’ll talk about that later look, then uncovers the phone.

  “Yeah, she saw him,” he says. “He was at a party. Whose house?” He looks at me.

  “His house,” I whisper. Dad’s eyebrows go down into a furrow.

  “Your house,” he says, and the person on the other end talks a lot. I wave my hands and shake my head. “Hold on,” he says into the phone. “Maybe I misunderst—hold on, okay?”

  “Sorry,” I say, “it was at his dad’s house, not, uh. Not his mom’s house.”

  “I see,” Dad says. “And I take it his father was out of town?”

  I bite my lip and nod. Dad’s lips tighten into a thin line, and I know that there will be a Long Conversation about this in my future.

  He relays the information into the phone, then says, “I’m sure he’s fine,” and “Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.” Then he hangs up.

  “What’s up?” I ask. “Is everything okay?” There’s fear in my voice, and I hope to god that Dad thinks it’s just fear of the consequences of having gone to the party.

  “I’m sure everything’s fine,” he says, crossing his arms. “That was Mrs. Harper. Apparently, Josh didn’t come home last night, and he isn’t answering his phone.”

  “Oh,” I say, looking at the ground. I wonder if Iris’s spell got rid of his phone, or if it’s in his bloodless bedroom at his dad’s house, ringing and ringing and ringing.

  “Hey,” he says, walking toward me and putting his phone into the pocket of his cargo shorts, which Pop calls his “soccer dad” shorts. “I’m not thrilled about this party, but you know I trust you, right?” He ducks his head to look into my face. My eyes are stinging with guilty tears.

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “I know.”

  “Then all I need to know is, were you safe there? Were you with your friends, and did you all keep an eye on each other and get home safely and responsibly?”

  The tears spill over, and I hiccup once. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, we were all together. And we were safe.”

  Dad puts an arm around me and pulls me into a hug. I lean my face into his shirt. He smells like deodorant and bar soap, and I cry for everything that I can’t tell him.

  “Hey, bug, hey, it’s okay,” he says, rubbing my back like he did when I was a little kid. “I’m sure Josh is fine. He probably just overslept and forgot to charge his phone or something. He’ll turn up.”

  I don’t answer, because I can’t. The tears won’t stop coming. I cry until I’m tired and drained. I cry until I feel as empty as the duffel bags that Josh abandoned at the bottom of his closet. I cry until I hear Pop shouting for one of Nico’s goals, and then I pull away from Dad, and wipe my face, and give him a weak smile.

  “It’ll be okay, bug,” he says, trying to look comforting but really just looking worried.

  “I know,” I say. But I don’t know.

  I don’t know at all.

  5.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WAKE up while the stars are still out. I sneak out of the house w
ithout turning any lights on, leaving a note on my door that says I caught a ride to school with Paulie. I walk to Marcelina’s woods and listen to the way the world sounds different before dawn. I wonder why I don’t wake up this early more often—it’s kind of beautiful, the way everything is still and silent. The way the world feels half-finished in the almost-light.

  My backpack is heavy. I’ve still got Marcelina’s shovel, plus all my school stuff.

  Plus the head and the heart.

  I checked on them before I left the house. Nothing about the head has changed. Something about Iris’s spell preserved the flesh, held it in a state of suspended animation. The heart, though—I wasn’t imagining things the other day. It’s just the slightest bit warm. As if someone was holding it right before me and their skin left a trace of heat on its glassy surface. I turn the beginning of an idea over in my head as I walk, but it’s loose, ill-formed, and I lose track of it too quickly.

  When I get to Marcelina’s house, I’m the last one there. Everyone else is standing around, silently watching their shoes soak up the morning dew. They stand at the edge of the woods, barefaced and sleepy-eyed. Marcelina’s got her palm pressed to the trunk of a tree, and when I look down at her feet, they’re on either side of a mound of fresh-turned earth. This is where we buried the spine, then—this is the tree that Josh’s bones helped.

  “How’s she doing?” I whisper to her, lifting my chin toward the tree.

  She smiles and nods. “Better.”

  “This is everyone,” Roya says, her voice a little too loud. Paulie catches my eye and her lips tighten.

  “Thank you all for coming.” Maryam is stiff, oddly formal. Her hands are tucked into the big front pocket of her hoodie. “I’m really sorry, but I just—I needed to talk to you all about what happened, and what you’re going to do about it.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be part of this,” Iris hisses. Her eyes are mean.

  “I don’t want to be part of it,” Maryam snaps back. “But I love you all, so I want to talk to you about it because I’m worried, okay?”

  “We’ve got it under control.” Roya’s too loud again, and Marcelina glances back toward the house. No lights come on, but Roya notices and closes her mouth pointedly.

  I clear my throat. “What do you want to talk about, Maryam? I think that if we tell you what we’re going to do with the body, that kind of makes you part of it, right? So we probably shouldn’t do that.”

  Maryam flinches at the word “body.” She folds her arms across her chest, then thinks better of it and unfolds them, shoving her fists back into her pocket. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “But I think this is wrong, you getting rid of the body. It’s not just that I can’t be a part of it. None of you should be a part of it. This kind of thing, it stays with a person’s soul.”

  Iris starts to say something, but Marcelina gets there first. “I think you’re right,” she says. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. But … but what else are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to explain it?”

  “We don’t even have the whole body,” Roya says. “It’s all in pieces now, and the pieces are—”

  “They’re weird,” Iris interrupts. “They’re preserved and weird and if we brought them to the cops, there wouldn’t be any way to explain why they’re like this. We don’t have a choice. We have to get rid of the pieces.” She sounds certain, like she always does.

  “Did you even try to bring him back?” Maryam asks. She asks it softly, gently. She already knows the answer. Iris folds her arms and looks away.

  “Iris?” Paulie whispers. She’s being painfully gentle. “Did you try to come up with a way to bring him back? Or did it feel too impossible?”

  Iris doesn’t look back at any of us. She’s staring into the tree line as if she’s watching the woods for something. Everyone is so still that I can hear Paulie breathing next to me, slow and even, the way she breathes when she’s trying to stay calm.

  “I didn’t … It didn’t occur to me to bring him back until Alexis asked about it,” Iris says at last. “I mean, it would have been impossible, right? I didn’t try to come up with a way to do it because it just felt so outrageous to even consider it.”

  “Even just getting rid of him seemed too hard,” Roya says. “Hell, it was too hard. We didn’t even pull that off. How are we supposed to try to bring him back?”

  Paulie wraps her arms around herself. “What if something even worse happens?”

  “I get it,” Maryam murmurs. “But we have to at least make an effort. I think we have to try to do the right thing, before we can find excuses for having done the wrong thing.”

  What she’s said settles over us. It’s heavy with truth.

  Roya swears, then lets out a noise that’s between a sigh and a growl. “You said ‘we.’ Does that mean you’re with us?”

  Maryam nods. “I still can’t help you get rid of a body, but if there’s something I can do to help you bring him back, I will.”

  We all look to Iris. She’s still staring at the woods. It’s light out enough now that I can make out her face pretty clearly. She’s chewing hard on her lip, fighting an internal battle. I think I can guess the conflict.

  “Iris?” I venture. “I don’t think you did anything wrong. You were trying to help. But maybe—maybe this can help too?”

  She shakes her head, then shrugs and says, “Fine. Do you all have your parts? Let’s get them together. Maybe we can make it work.”

  Everyone except for Marcelina drops a duffel bag or a backpack to the ground. Marcelina has to go back to the house to get hers. She asks me if I’ll come with her, and I hand my backpack to Roya, relieved. I know that she won’t hesitate to pull out the heart and the head while I’m gone.

  I won’t have to do it.

  It’s not that I’m grossed out. It’s not that I can’t face what I did. It’s just that I don’t want anyone to see. I don’t want them to see me cradling Josh’s head in my hands, my fingers in his hair. I don’t want them to see me with my thumbs over his eyelids or my palm on his cheek. I don’t want them to see his face and remember that he was a person, and that he might deserve more than having his head in a backpack.

  I keep Fritz and Handsome quiet while Marcelina sneaks into the house. When she comes back out, she’s carrying a dark bundle—the liver, wrapped in a T-shirt I don’t recognize. We walk back to the rest of the girls in silence, our feet swishing through the grass. Just before we reach the group, Marcelina pauses.

  “Are you doing okay?” she whispers.

  “Yeah,” I reply, because it’s the only answer that feels allowed. I’m the reason everyone is in this mess—what right do I have to be anything less than okay? Marcelina nods, and I think she understands that yeah is all I’ve got right now.

  We get back to the group as the sun crests the horizon. It had felt like morning already, with the sky growing light and the air getting warmer, but now the first tendrils of light are touching the tops of the trees, and it feels like dawn. Iris is flipping through her big journal of How Magic Works. It’s thick and worn, full of extra pages that she’s stapled in, bursting with her notes and charts and theories. She hasn’t cracked the Why or How of our magic yet, but she hasn’t given up either. I don’t think Iris knows how to give up.

  I join the circle as Marcelina crouches, gently placing Josh’s liver near the middle of the odd arrangement of his limbs. Every part of Josh that we have is placed in an approximation of a boy-shape: arms, legs, hands, feet, head, heart, liver.

  “Oh,” Maryam says, looking at his heart. “That’s not right, is it?”

  I shake my head. Not right is an understatement.

  “Where’s the spine?” Iris asks.

  “I already got rid of it,” Marcelina replies. “It was buried there.” She points to the little hill of soil just behind Josh’s head.

  “Shit,” Roya hisses. She laces her fingers behind her head and breathes in long and deep, her
chest steadily rising.

  “Yeah, shit,” Paulie says. “Should we dig it up?”

  Marcelina shakes her head. “It’s powder. I ground it into powder.”

  Roya releases the deep breath in one shocked gust. “You—what? Powder? What the fuck, Marcelina?”

  “It’s fine,” Iris interrupts. “We’ll just have to hope it’s enough.”

  We stand in a loose circle—Paulie is on my right, near Josh’s feet, and Marcelina is on my left. Roya is across from me, next to Maryam. Iris stands just above the head. She closes her notebook with a decisive slap, slips it into her bag, and tucks her hair behind her ears. She takes Marcelina’s and Maryam’s hands and holds them in a white-knuckled grip.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Paulie mutters.

  I reach out and squeeze her hand. “Yeah,” I whisper back. “I really do.” It’s the second time I’ve lied today, and the sun hasn’t even finished coming up.

  The spell starts out like it did the last time: all of us spinning loose magic up for Iris to work with, her fists in the air gathering spools of raw power. The air feels tight on my skin. The magic doesn’t make a sound, but it feels like it’s crackling. It builds and it builds and it builds and it builds and then—

  It breaks.

  Iris falls sideways into Marcelina, her arms falling limp by her sides. The spools of magic around her fists fall too, landing on the pieces of Josh in huge bright sheets. We all scramble, kicking up loam and running into each other. Paulie shouts, and then her hand is on my arm, pulling me away from the body. My feet slip out from under me, but Paulie keeps yanking on me and I don’t get a chance to fall, and by the time I’ve got my balance, we’re fifty feet away.

  Roya grabs my hand tight, looking across me at Paulie’s wide eyes. Iris is pale, leaning heavily on Marcelina. Maryam is covering her face with both hands, staring at the smoke that rises from the place where she was standing just a few moments before.

  “What are those?” Roya asks in a hoarse whisper. Her fingers twitch in mine. They’re thin and cool and soft, and I do not trace the shape of her first knuckle with the pad of my thumb. How could I even think of that, at a time like this one?