When We Were Magic Read online

  She points to the ground where we had been standing. Our circle has been replaced by six little hills. From where we are, they look like piles of earth. I squeeze Roya’s hand gently, then let it go and take a cautious step toward the body. There’s smoke there, but no fire. The air feels thick, humid. Close.

  “Alexis, don’t—”

  “Don’t what?” I look over my shoulder, but Maryam just shakes her head. I give her what I hope is a reassuring smile.

  “Don’t touch them,” she says.

  I’m not sure what she means. Not until I get a little closer. My breath catches in my throat at what I see.

  Six hawks. Gorgeous, full-feathered ones. Harris hawks, I think, although I’ve never seen one this close before and my eyes catch on so many little details that I can’t be sure. They’re huge, with hooked yellow beaks and tawny wings and white-tipped tails, and they’re beautiful, and they’re dead.

  Six hawks, right where we were standing.

  “They fell out of the sky,” Paulie whispers, and I turn to find her standing next to me. She sinks her teeth into her bloodless lower lip briefly before clearing her throat. “One almost—it almost hit you, when it fell.”

  “His feet,” Marcelina says. “They’re gone.” Her eyes are on the lingering smoke that curls up from the place where Josh’s feet had been.

  “Fuck,” Iris croaks. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t—”

  “It’s okay,” Maryam says, laying her fingers gently across Iris’s forehead. “You did your best.”

  I step between two hawks, trying not to look at them. It feels like my feet are sinking into the earth a little too deep—the soil isn’t steady beneath me. I stare at the heart.

  It throbs once. I watch it, unable to make myself so much as blink. The other girls notice and look over to see what I see, and they see it too: after a few seconds, it throbs again.

  It’s beating.

  * * *

  The soil in Marcelina’s woods is still soft from the heavy rain we got all spring. I find a spot that’s far enough from the tree line to feel private. As I dig, I wonder if the trees will report back to Marcelina the next time she checks in. There was a girl in the woods.

  It didn’t work. Iris tried her best, but it didn’t work.

  Josh is still dead.

  I’m the only one who stayed. Everyone else is gone, doing the things that come between dawn and the first class of the day. We were all freaked out about how things went down—about the heart and about the hawks, and about how badly our attempt to set things right hurt Iris. Roya started asking if the heart was coming back to life, if that meant we could bring every piece back to life but couldn’t put them back together, and Maryam had to calm her down before she hyperventilated. And Iris … Iris was in bad shape, pale and unsteady on her feet.

  Even after everyone had calmed down, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had just happened. About our failure, and about what would come next. I told them to go ahead without me.

  So instead, I’m burying the head.

  I dig as the sun comes up. The shovel crunches through the top layer of dirt and into soft soil, well churned by industrious worms. All I hear as the sky lightens overhead is my own steady breathing and the rhythm of the shovel shifting mound after mound of earth. School starts in a couple of hours—the first day of the last month of classes—and I need enough time to bury the head, go to school, shower, change, and buy a crappy day-old bagel from the cafeteria. The ground is much softer than I anticipated. The digging is easy, and before I know it, I’ve got a pretty deep hole.

  I jump down into it and keep going. I dig until the top of the hole is over my head, until I’m surrounded on all four sides by close walls of loose, crumbling earth. Josh is still dead. The hole is only just wide enough for me to stick my elbows out and turn around in a circle. I can’t see anything but hole anymore, and my breath catches in my throat. Josh is still dead. I make an unintentional ragged sound as my lungs clench with the certainty that I’ve dug too deep, that I’m trapped, that someone will find me here in a hole with a head in a backpack next to it.

  Josh is still dead. And the only thing we can do is try to hide the evidence.

  I take deep breaths. I imagine that I’m coaching Iris through a panic attack. I imagine that I’m floating in a tropical sea, staring up at the moon. None of it works, though, because every time I open my eyes, I’m still in a grave. I have to get out of here.

  I toss up the shovel and try to jump. When I bend my knees, I find that there’s barely room for even that—my butt bumps against one side of the hole and my knees bump against the other. I push off and get maybe a foot of height, and when I grab at the edge of the hole, I succeed only in pulling dirt down into my face. I spit mud and try again, keeping my arms over my head this time. I get a little higher and grab at fistfuls of grass near the sides of the hole. Painfully, bracing my feet on opposite sides of the too-small grave, I pull myself up. Soft soil rains down into my shirt and shoes and hair. I have my eyes scrunched shut to keep the dirt out of them, and I don’t open them again until I’m sprawled, panting, on the ground beside the hole I’ve made.

  The tree I’ve chosen to bury Josh’s head under is, I think, the lightning-struck tree that Marcelina was worrying about. It’s a huge, gnarled black oak with a squat trunk. Branches shoot up out of it like grasping fingers, and there’s a black scar that travels the entire length of the tree, from the tallest branch to the roots. It’s still alive, but it’s struggling—there are an awful lot of brown leaves, and I can’t see any tender new growth on the tips of the branches.

  I pull the head out of my backpack, trying not to touch his eyes or his lips. I drop it into the hole and start shoveling soil back over it. It takes longer than I thought it would—I figured I’d be able to just kind of push a whole pile of dirt into the hole, but it doesn’t quite work that way. I try to shove the pile, and it topples. I have to shovel the dirt in the same way I got it out—one scoop at a time. I’m thankful for the work, for the way my palms burn and my back starts to ache, because Josh is dead and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I’d let myself hope, and that was a mistake, because there’s nothing I can do but try not to get caught.

  I wanted to do the right thing. I tried to do the right thing.

  By the time I finish, I’m sweating hard, and the sun is already bright in the sky. I wipe my face off on the inside of my shirt, although both are so dirty that I’m sure I’m just smearing mud between the two.

  I can’t make this right, but at least I can make it useful. Before I drop in the last few fistfuls of soil, I crouch next to the little mound. I push my fingers into the loose dirt—the grave dirt—and close my eyes.

  I don’t have Marcelina’s focus when it comes to plants. Her ability to draw the other tree’s roots to the new nutrient-source is something I’d never even hope to achieve. But I can do something, in my own way, to help. I push magic out into the earth. All of my muscles relax as I let it flow through me and into the tiny tunnels and warrens and scent-trails of all the small eyeless underground creatures that live in the shelter of this tree. Come here, I tell them without words. The ground pulses faintly, all the dead leaves rustling wherever my magic flows. There is meat. There is a carcass here. Do your work.

  A thousand sightless consciousnesses turn to me, touched by the message that I’ve sent to them. Normally, they’d be drawn by the smells of decay, but not this time. This time, they’ll be the first to the meal.

  I snip off my magic like threads on a loom, leaving trails that can be followed. There’s a shudder beneath my feet, and I pull my fingers out of the dirt fast. An underground stampede is happening—an army of burrowing beetles and worms and mites are coming to see why I called them. I use the shovel to spread the last of the dirt in an even layer over the mound, and then I leave. I want to be gone before they try to thank me for the gift of Josh’s head.

  I walk away wi
thout looking back, because there’s nothing else for me to do.

  Against my back, through the thin canvas of my backpack, I can feel the way Josh’s glass heart starts to beat just a little harder.

  6.

  THE WALK TO SCHOOL IS strange. I keep expecting people to pull over and ask me why I’m covered in filth, but there are almost no cars on the road. I suppose it’s still too early for them—the sun is up, but only because it’s practically summer. An empty bus passes, and the driver lifts his hand to me without looking at me. I lift my hand back anyway. The back of it is covered in grime, and half of my sparkly prom-manicure has chipped off. My fingernails look like treasure maps.

  If Roya was here, she could will the dirt away from me. It’s something we figured out when we were kids, back when we were first realizing that the things we could do weren’t just in our imaginations—that I really could talk to her cat, that she really could kiss a bruise and make it disappear. We were alone at her house, playing. Roya’s parents were at a doctor’s appointment—they would come home with glowing smiles and a blurry black-and-white photo of Roya’s little brother. But all we knew then was that we had the run of the house, and we took full advantage of it. We poured tall glasses of grape soda and smeared our faces with Roya’s mother’s forbidden lipstick and pulled all of her father’s shirts out of the closet for some grand dress-up scheme.

  You can imagine what those shirts looked like by the time we’d finished with them. Each and every one, indelibly stained in ways that we somehow failed to notice while we were playing. I remember staring at one mark on the shirt I’d just taken off, then looking at all the others with increasing horror as the stains and lipstick-smears seemed to multiply. It was like that thing where you notice one ant, and then another, and then you realize that they’re everywhere.

  Roya squeezed her eyes shut and pushed her hands at the pile of ruined shirts, and the next thing either of us knew, they were back on their hangers, clean and pressed as if nothing had ever happened. Roya’s pupils were dilated for the rest of the day, and she was way too quiet, but her parents never knew what had happened.

  I always think of her magic as fixing-things magic. Roya can heal people, like she did when Iris was hurt on prom night, and she can clean things, like with her dad’s shirts. She has a lot of other magic—we all do—but she’s the only one of us who can do those particular things. She hates it. She says it’s regressive. But then, she can also start a car just by laying her hands on the engine block, and she set my arm with an audible crunch back when I broke it in fifth grade, so … I think she’s just looking for something to be mad about.

  Which isn’t all that surprising. It is Roya, after all.

  If she was here, she’d will me clean. But she’s not here.

  I come onto campus the back way and head for the gym lockers, which are in a low-ceilinged, temporary-looking building between the pool and the auditorium. There’s no proper door on either of the locker rooms, which has always seemed weird to me—just a curving wall at the entrance that hides the inside of the rooms from passersby, like at a rest-stop bathroom. The entire school is like that: built sometime in the late eighties to fulfill a design aesthetic that seems halfway between airplane hangar and National Park outbuilding. There are lots of low timbers and metal crossbeams, and everything needed to be power-washed about ten years ago. There’s new paint every year, covering up old graffiti and trying to make the place look fresh, but the stucco and cinderblock never really stops being outdated.

  I walk into the locker room, feeling furtive and victorious, and head for the showers. I drop my backpack on a bench without breaking stride. I strip off my shirt as I go, raining dirt that no one will notice onto the pebbly, never-mopped floor. Clean, I think, reaching back to unhook my bra. So close to being clean—

  “I don’t know.”

  I freeze with my fingers on the clasp of my bra. The echoes of a voice, distorted by the way the sound bounces around the locker room. No one is supposed to be here this early. Shit. I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, so I race toward the showers, hoping to duck behind a curtain before anyone sees me. Before anyone can ask what I’m doing here and why I look like a swamp creature.

  “Just ask her,” another voice answers just as I reach the showers. Too late, I realize that I’ve come closer to the voices, rather than farther from them. I duck behind a shower curtain and whip it closed just as the sound of shower shoes slapping wetly on the floor reaches me.

  “She won’t tell me,” the first voice answers, and I realize who it is I’m hearing.

  Roya.

  The footsteps stop just outside of my shower stall, and a locker swings open. The voice that answers Roya is unmistakable, now that it’s close enough not to echo off the metal lockers. It’s Iris. “Well, maybe if you didn’t—”

  Oh, thank god, I think, and I open the shower curtain again. Iris and Roya are right there, and they freeze at the sight of me. “You guys scared the shit out of me,” I say.

  They don’t answer. They’re staring at me. Iris is clutching the top of her towel, and Roya has frozen halfway through drying her mass of hair.

  “What the hell,” Iris breathes, and I realize what I must look like—hair in a half-fallen-out topknot, dirt caked into my every pore, shirtless, my bra hanging halfway off. I’m not sure if I look better or worse than I did on prom night. At least I’m not covered in blood this time.

  “Um,” I say.

  “Holy shit, Alexis,” Roya says, and then she starts cackling at me, a desperate kind of “oh thank god I can still find things funny” laugh. “It’s only been like … an hour and a half. What happened to you?” Roya gasps.

  “Lots,” I snap. “Lots of stuff happened to me.” I pull the shower curtain closed and strip, throwing my filthy clothes out past the vinyl. Every item I toss elicits a new round of laughter from Roya—I can hear Iris joining in, less enthusiastically, but she’s laughing all the same. “It’s been a long morning,” I say, turning on the water and tipping my head back to shake the dirt out of my hair.

  I do not think of the fact that I am in here, naked, and Roya is out there, wearing only a towel. I do not think about it, okay? Not at all. Not even a little.

  “Do you need soap?” Roya asks. Before I can answer, her hand thrusts through a gap in the shower curtain, holding a bottle of the mint body wash she loves. Her wrist brushes my stomach as she waves the bottle back and forth. I can’t breathe.

  “Yes, thanks,” I say, grabbing the bottle in a wet hand. Our fingers tangle for a moment before she lets go of the bottle.

  I shove my face into the spray. She’s my best friend. I don’t think about it.

  “What are you guys doing here so early?” I call. “I thought you’d go back to bed.”

  “Practice,” Iris answers, and that’s all she needs to say. They must have come straight here from Marcelina’s house. There’s a big meet coming up, but “practice” would have been the answer even if there hadn’t been a single meet on the calendar. With his two best swimmers about to leave, the swim coach has been driving the team hard all year. If I breathe deep enough, I can smell the chlorine still clinging to Roya’s hair and skin.

  And Iris. It’s also clinging to Iris. Not just Roya. Not just Roya’s skin.

  I lather, rinse, and inspect. Still dirty, although the first round got most of the loose dirt off.

  “Hey, do you want me to do your hair?” Roya calls. I start soaping up again, trying to get some of the more stubborn dirt off my hands and arms.

  “Why?” I ask as I rinse.

  “So you don’t have to wash it,” she says. “I should be able to get the dirt out without getting it wet.”

  “Too late,” I reply, turning off the water and wringing out my hair, and I hear her mutter an I told you so to Iris. “Um, speaking of which,” I add, but before I can finish, Roya’s arm thrusts back into the shower, this time clutching an only-slightly-damp towel. “Thanks,�
� I say sheepishly. After I take the towel, her arm hesitates for a moment.

  I stare at the soft inside of her wrist. It’s a lighter shade than the deep brown-gold of the rest of her, but still dark enough that my fingertips look ghostly against the backdrop of her skin. A bangle, gold with dark green stones, hangs just above the jut of bone at the base of her hand. It’s the bangle I gave her for her birthday last year.

  Her fingers flex. I don’t know what she’s waiting for. Slowly, slowly, I reach out and brush my fingers across her palm.

  A soap bubble drifts by. I snatch my hand back, my cheeks and throat and chest all burning. What was I thinking? The soap. Of course she’s waiting for the soap. I grab it and fumble it into her hand, then towel myself off roughly. My breath comes fast and shallow, and I want to smack my head into the wall until the embarrassment fades.

  Maybe she didn’t notice. Maybe she thought it was the towel or my hair or something, anything but my fingertips.

  “See you at lunch?” Iris calls, and I can hear them zipping up backpacks. “There’s some stuff I wanna run by you.”

  “Yeah, sure, perfect!” I call, my voice too bright and brassy.

  “Bye,” Roya says, and I know it’s just in my head, but there’s a softness to her voice. A waiting-ness. I know it’s all in my imagination, but it feels like she’s saying something more than just “bye.” It feels like years of longing are contained in those three letters.

  I shove my face into the towel and hold back a scream of frustration. Years of longing in three letters? God, I’m pathetic. She was just saying “bye.” Normal people say “bye” to each other all the time.

  I don’t come out of the shower until long after their footfalls fade from my hearing. I throw my filthy clothes into the trash on my way out the door, because I can’t bear the thought of carrying grave-dirt-covered clothes with me all day. I buy my day-old bagel from the cafeteria, and I make it to my first class just before the bell rings. All morning long, my fingertips sweetly ache where they brushed Roya’s palm. It feels just like it does when I’m pushing magic out of myself and into the world, and I can’t stop checking to see if they’re glowing.