When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  “Why not?” Pop asks.

  Shit.

  I can’t tell him that I was with Paulie feeding a dead boy’s leg to a coyote. I scramble, and I come up with a very, very good lie.

  “I was with Iris,” I say. “Her boyfriend cheated on her again. She was really upset and needed someone to talk to about it.”

  This lie should smooth everything over. Iris does indeed have a boyfriend—or rather, she did until a few days before prom. A boyfriend who went to another school, and who the entire gang hates. He kissed another girl last year, and even though Iris forgave him, the rest of us were prepared to be forever suspicious of him. Our suspicions were confirmed, obviously.

  I’m pretty sure Dad and Pop don’t know that, though. As far as they know, Iris and her loser boyfriend are still together. And they’re always understanding of my need to support my friends. They don’t get mad if I have to go out late or if I’m on the phone at midnight when one of the girls is having a crisis. They’ve both told me a few times that they think it’s great that I have such a strong “support network,” whatever that means. This lie should make everything better, should make Pop’s heavy brows do a dance of sympathetic approval. But for some reason, they’re both looking at me like I just told them I skipped fifth period to enjoy a late picnic lunch on the surface of the moon.

  “Try again,” Pop says, and he holds up his phone. He angles the screen toward me, and I see a text message.

  From Iris.

  Hey sorry to bother you but is Alexis ok?

  My father’s response: Yeah, how come?

  Oh just haven’t seen her since lunch and didn’t know if she was sick or something, sorry, thanks

  “I called the school to find out if you’d been in class, and they said you were absent for fifth and sixth period.” Dad sits on the edge of my bed and I feel completely trapped. He runs a hand through his thick hair, leaving it all on end. “Why weren’t you in class?”

  I shrug, which is the direst mistake I could possibly make.

  “What does that mean?” Pop asks.

  “It means … I don’t know,” I say.

  “You don’t know what you were doing during fifth period?” Dad asks, leaning toward me. He’s close enough that I can see the patchy places where his new beard isn’t filling in yet. Pop rests a hand on his shoulder and he leans back again. I wonder if they’ve been talking about strategies for dealing with their wayward children.

  “I mean … I know what I was doing, I just don’t want to talk about it,” I mutter. This isn’t going well, and I don’t know how to fix it. I look up at Pop, desperately hoping that he’ll smooth things over somehow. He’s good at smoothing things over. But he looks concerned, and I realize that he’s not an avenue of rescue at all. Concerned-Pop is way more of a problem for me than Angry-Pop would have been. He never stays angry for long, but if he’s worried about me? He won’t let up until he’s figured out the problem and engineered a solution.

  “What’s going on here?” Dad asks. He fidgets with a loose thread on my comforter. “You know you can tell us anything, right? Even if you’re in some kind of trouble? But we can’t help you if we don’t know what the problem is.”

  Sudden anger flares in my chest—a pure, hot weightlessness that makes me feel like I’m ten feet tall. I don’t even know what I’m angry at—my dads aren’t saying anything that’s wrong. They’re trying their best. But I’m furious. It’s not fair, but I’m angry with them for not knowing me like they think they do. I want to yell, and slam doors, and kick things. I want to tell them that I can’t tell them everything because there are some things that are just too much to tell. I want to tell them that they can’t help, period.

  Instead, I take a deep breath. I let them see that I’m taking a deep breath. I let them see that I’m calming myself down, so that maybe they’ll give me a little room to exist before they start trying to fix my life for me.

  “Alexis,” Pop says softly, his hand still resting on Dad’s shoulder. “Your dad told me about the party you went to on prom night.”

  I feel my brow knit and try to smooth it out but fail. I’m not surprised that Dad told Pop. Not exactly. But part of me feels betrayed, like when Dad and I talked about the party, things were fine and it shouldn’t ever have come up again.

  “O … kay?” I say it in the shittiest teenager voice ever. I want to slap myself at the sound of my own voice. I don’t talk like this, especially not to my dads. They always do their best to listen to me, to let me be whoever I am and let me feel whatever I’m feeling, and in exchange I try not to be an asshole to them even when I’m feeling like an asshole. It’s a deal we’ve never discussed, but I know that’s the trade: I try not to be awful, and they try to let me figure myself out. But that weightless anger is still expanding in my chest, and it’s hard not to let it out. That snide tone I just used with him is the best I can do right now. Pop gives me a look that says he’s letting me get away with it this once. For a soft-faced bald guy, he’s really good at expressing “don’t try that again” with a single glance.

  “We know what kinds of things go on when you’re a teenager and you’re about to leave for college and … everything,” Dad says, reaching up to rest his long fingers over Pop’s short, blunt ones. My heart sinks. This isn’t the talk I was expecting. “And we get it. We do.”

  No you don’t, I don’t say.

  “But if you’re sneaking off with some boy—” Pop starts, and I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. Technically, I am sneaking off with some boy. Not a whole boy, but … some of him. My laughter comes out bright and mean. They both look startled, and I suck the laughter back in. “Or girl,” Pop adds slowly, an edge to his voice. “Either way. If you’re sneaking off with someone …” He trails off, and he and Dad both look at me expectantly.

  “If I’m sneaking off with someone, what?” I ask.

  “So you are?”

  “No, Dad, I’m—look, it was a nice day and I wanted to be outside, okay? It’s not a big deal, it’s not like I missed anything important.” I’m talking too loud and too fast. The balloon behind my sternum is still expanding, and I feel like I’m made of sharp edges and smooth, hot metal. I glance down at my hands to make sure that they aren’t glowing. Shit. My nail beds are luminous. I tuck my hands under my thighs and hope that I look natural. People sit like this all the time, right?

  “How do you know you didn’t miss anything?” Dad presses. “You weren’t there.”

  I roll my eyes. “I know because the last month of school doesn’t matter!” Pop’s eyebrows shoot up, but I act like I didn’t see the clear warning sign. Those eyebrows mean turn back, but I steam on ahead anyway. My palms are hot and tingling, but the more I talk, the less they burn. “It’s all worksheets and crap and we’re not learning anything anymore, and honestly, I’d be amazed if any of my teachers even noticed that I was gone. I’d be amazed if anyone even noticed that I was gone!”

  I exhale, feeling like the balloon in my chest has suddenly deflated. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears. Or at least, I hope it’s my heartbeat, and not Josh’s heart beating under my bed. I’m so tired. My hands hurt, and there’s a smell like cut grass in my room that wasn’t there before. I feel light, clean. Empty.

  I look up to find Dad and Pop watching me. Dad’s eyes are wide, but Pop—Pop is incandescent. His face and his bare scalp are both bright red, and he’s got one hand over his mouth like he’s holding himself back from screaming. His eyebrows are raised so high that his forehead is creased by bloodless white lines.

  Dad looks up at him and notices.

  “Bill, why don’t I take it from here?” he says softly.

  Pop shakes his head. His hand is still over his mouth, and he’s not looking at me. He’s staring through the wall. Not at the wall, not at anything on the wall—through it, like on the other side of it there’s something that requires his complete attention. He finally lowers his hand, crossing his arms. “I can’t belie
ve you,” he growls.

  “What?” It comes out as a whisper, and I look at Dad to see if he understands, but he’s watching Pop and I feel like there must be some mistake.

  “This is the most selfish goddamn thing you’ve ever done,” Pop says in that same low, furious voice. “We raised you to be more thoughtful than this, Alexis.” He’s holding his own elbow in a white-knuckled grip that looks like it will leave bruises in the morning.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, but some part of me must understand because my stomach lurches like I’m at the peak of a roller coaster hill, right before that first big drop. I want to throw up. I want to run away. I want to be anywhere but here.

  And then Pop looks at me, and the roller coaster drops. His eyes are shining and red, and he’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before. I’ve certainly never seen him like this before—furious, horrified, on the verge of tears. “One of your classmates is missing,” he hisses. “Nobody knows what happened to him, nobody knows if he’s even alive, and you think it’s okay to disappear for an afternoon without telling us where you are? Because you want to go outside?”

  “I just—”

  “No,” Pop says, “you don’t just anything! You have no idea what the hell it feels like to get a text message that says nobody knows where your daughter is, Alexis. You have no idea—” He doesn’t yell, just speaks at full volume, but I still flinch. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

  “Bill,” Dad murmurs, “we said we’d listen, right?”

  “I can’t, I’m sorry,” Pop says, running a hand over his scalp, his eyes still closed. “She’s sitting there laughing and talking about how none of it matters, and I can’t.” He opens his eyes and looks at Dad as he talks about me like I’m not here, and I realize his hands are shaking. “I can’t.”

  He walks out of the room without looking at me. Dad and I are sitting on the bed, and I feel like I should go after Pop, but I also don’t know how to pursue one of my parents when he’s too upset to see me. I look at Dad. He’s staring at the open door to my bedroom, and he’s rubbing his half-grown-in beard with one hand, and he looks small.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t think about it that way.”

  “I know you didn’t, bug,” Dad says. He runs his hands through his Nico-hair again, making it stick up in the opposite direction from where it was pointing before. “But maybe you should, next time. People care about you, you know? You can hurt them just by forgetting that.”

  “That’s not fair.” I chip at my nail polish, scarring one of the little hearts Maryam gave me.

  “It’s how it is, though,” he says. “You scared us. We love you, and you scared us. And that line about nobody noticing if you were gone?”

  “I didn’t mean it like—”

  “What you meant doesn’t matter,” he says. He’s being firm, but still gentle, and the gentleness stings more than it ought to. “What you said is what matters. Your impact matters more than your intentions, kiddo, and those words were maybe the worst ones you could have said to someone who spent his afternoon worrying about whether you were going to come home.”

  “If you were so worried, why didn’t you come in here sooner?” I mumble.

  “At first, we figured you just cut class. But then you didn’t get home until the sun was going down. You breezed in through that front door and headed to your room right when we were about to call your cell and tell you to get your ass home. By then we were too upset to come talk to you right away,” he says.

  “You mean Pop was too upset?”

  “No, I mean we were too upset,” Dad says. I look up at him, surprised. He smiles. “I’m still upset, bug. I’m angry and hurt and surprised. But I understand, too. You’re a good kid, and this is pretty minimal mischief compared to what you could get up to.” I flinch, thinking of all the things he doesn’t know. “But you’ve got to understand how frightening it is to think even for a second that you might be disappearing.” He nudges me with his shoulder. “Just don’t do that to us again, okay? We’re old guys. Our hearts can’t take the strain.”

  He’s not old. They’re not old. But they make jokes like that sometimes, and I know Dad is only doing it to make me feel better. I smile weakly and nod, feeling like a little kid. Feeling like an asshole. “What about Pop?” I ask.

  “Well, he’s pretty upset too. In some ways that I’m not. He’ll need a little space, I imagine,” Dad says. “Talk to him tomorrow. Apologize. He loves you more than he’s mad at you.” He gives me a squeeze and stands up. “I’m going to go check on him. It’ll be okay, though.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it,” he says in that same painfully gentle voice. “It’ll be okay.”

  He kisses the top of my head and walks out of my room, leaving the door open just a crack behind him. I wait until I hear his footsteps disappear down the hall before I close it the rest of the way.

  I’m a huge jerk. The other day, when Dad made bag lunches for Nico and me, I could tell that he and Pop were worrying because of the thing with Josh. I could tell, and I even said something to Nico about it—I told him not to hurt Dad’s feelings. And then I turned around and acted like I could do whatever I wanted without making my dads worry about me, even though it’s my classmate who’s missing.

  I didn’t even think about it. And I wouldn’t have thought about it at all, if not for Iris. I scroll way back in the group thread, and there it is: three texts from Iris asking where I am, and nobody answering her. No wonder she went to my dads.

  I text Roya, needing to talk about it, needing to hear that I’m not a terrible person—but she doesn’t answer. She hasn’t answered any of my messages all day. I mentally start scanning through our previous interactions, trying to figure out what I could have done to make her angry, what I could have done to drive her away and make her ignore me. I feel like I’m standing at the rim of a very deep hole, a hole too deep to climb out of. If I keep just thinking about Roya and my dads and Josh and everything, I’m going to fall in.

  I have to do something.

  I lean over the edge of my bed and reach under it, far as my arms can get. The lip of my bedframe digs into my armpit hard, and I press into it, savoring the pain for just a moment.

  Just before it starts to hurt too much, my fingers find fabric, and I’ve got the bag. I haul it back up onto my bed and tug at the zipper.

  Josh’s heart is inside. It’s warm, and it’s just a little soft under my fingertips. It’s heavy, still, heavier than it should be. It beats in my hands, hard brutal spasms, still slow but faster than before. I stare at it, willing it to be surrounded by a living boy.

  Nothing happens, of course. That pit yawns wider, the hole I mustn’t fall into, the place where I’ll lose hope and give up and stop trying to bring Josh back.

  Maryam is right. I can’t stop trying to fix this thing. No matter what I lose in the process—no matter how scary it is, not knowing how I’ll change—I can’t give up. Because giving up feels like admitting that the dark thing inside me, the thing that can use someone up and kill them by accident, is more powerful than the rest of me. That’s what’s at the bottom of the hole I’m trying to stay out of: the knowledge that the worst part of me is the strongest part of me.

  I stand at the edge of the hole, holding that slowly beating heart and wishing I knew how to fix it, and I feel myself starting to fall.

  Just before I topple over the edge, Paulie calls me.

  “You have perfect timing,” I say in lieu of hello. My voice is shaking. I press the phone between my shoulder and my ear as I slide the heart back into the bag.

  “I know,” Paulie says. “I’m pretty much perfect in every way.”

  I don’t quite smile, but I can feel the bottom of the hole getting farther away. “You’re also the humblest person I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m the best at being humble. No one on this earth is better at being humble than I am,” she says, and I laugh. It feels g
ood to laugh—some of the deflated, constricted feeling in my chest subsides. Paulie is always great that way.

  I tell Paulie about what happened with my dads, and with Iris. She’s immediately pissed on my behalf. “What the fuck?” she hisses. “Why would Iris snitch on you?”

  “I don’t think she thought she was snitching,” I say tentatively. Paulie doesn’t get angry easily the way Roya does—but unlike Roya, she doesn’t let things go easily either. Once she’s mad, it can be dangerous to get between her and the object of her ire. “I think she was just worried, you know? I mean … we did kind of vanish. And she’s been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo,” Paulie snaps. “We’ve all been under a lot of stress—that doesn’t mean we get to start tattling on each other. What if she feels the need to unburden herself further?”

  “Did you just say ‘unburden herself further?’ ”

  “Shut up,” Paulie says, but I hear the smile in her voice. “I’ve been studying for the ACTs for like … four hours.”

  “You dropped me off at home two hours ago,” I tease.

  “Okay, but it feels like four,” she says. “The point is, Iris shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry about your dads.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it isn’t, because it’s easier to say “It’s okay” than to keep trying to dance between mad at Iris and too mad at Iris and mad at myself and sad about hurting Pop. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I add, because that’s more true.

  “Okay. Anyway, it’s been a weird time over here. Want to hear about it?” Paulie asks, brightening.

  “Absolutely. Wait, I thought you’ve been studying?”

  “Well, yes, okay, but not the whole time I’ve been home.”

  “Oh my god, have you actually opened a study guide tonight at all?”

  “Shut up,” she says, and then “hang on,” and I hear rustling and a click as she gets up to close her bedroom door. “Okay, so, I got home and my mom was being totally bizarre,” she says in a soft voice. “I walked in the front door and she was sitting in the kitchen and drinking wine and looking through this photo album, right? But get this: I went to look in the album over her shoulder, and it was all pictures of me.”