by Sarah Gailey
“And you’re sure that you’re not just forgetting them?” She grimaces as she says it, knowing the answer already.
“I’m positive,” I confirm. “It almost doesn’t even feel like I’m sleeping. I just close my eyes and then when I open them again, hours have gone by.”
“Roya can’t cry,” she whispers. I look up in surprise. “And you can’t dream, and Marcelina can’t forget.”
I’m about to ask her about Roya—what does that mean? She can’t cry? But my breath catches in my throat. I’m looking at Iris, but she looks … different.
“Iris.” My voice breaks on her name. “Your freckles.”
“What?” She frowns at me. “What about them?”
I swallow hard. I don’t want to tell her. But she’s going to see for herself soon enough. “They’re gone.”
Her face goes pale, and it’s so much more drastic than usual because there’s nothing, nothing at all, covering her cheeks. She grabs at her backpack and roots around inside it until she finds a compact. She opens it up and looks at her face in the palm-sized mirror.
She drops the mirror and uses her fist to muffle her own scream. “No,” she says, “no, no, no, they can’t—no, they can’t be gone?!”
I’ll admit it: my first thought is that she should calm down. I get that her freckles are important to her, that she’s spent a long time learning how to love them. I get that they’re basically her defining feature, and that her face looks completely different now and that’s scary. I get it. But I can’t help thinking that it’s kind of a mercy, that she’s only losing freckles when everyone else has lost things that are so much bigger. I immediately regret the thought: if my entire face changed, I would be freaked out too. But whether the thought is right or wrong, I still think that she’s lost something smaller than everyone else.
But then she lifts a hand to her face. She’s still looking in the mirror. Her hand starts to glow, and power sparks between her fingers wildly. She looks between the mirror and her hand, shakes her fingers. The magic grows until it’s almost too bright to look at.
“What are you doing?” I ask her.
“I’m trying to fix it,” she snaps. “But I must have drained myself freezing the hands. I can’t get my … you know. I can’t get it to go.”
I squint at the bright nimbus of her hand. It’s blinding. When I look away, spots dance in my vision. “Iris, what are you talking about? You’re holding the freaking sun over there. Can’t you—oh.”
For the first time in our friendship, I figure something out before Iris does.
She can’t see it.
She can’t see it, and she’s spent so long relying on seeing it that she doesn’t know how to just feel it.
“Iris, stop pushing,” I say softly. “You’ve got a lot of magic around you right now, and you’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t stop.”
“No,” she says, her voice cracking. “No, I’m—there isn’t any—I’m not. I can’t.” She won’t look at me. She’s surrounded by a bright halo of magic, and she’s pushing more out around herself every second, and not a single freckle has reappeared.
I reach over and gently, carefully, gingerly wrap my hands around hers. I close her fingers into fists and force myself to look into her starbright eyes. “You have to stop,” I whisper.
Her magic fades, and she stares at me with wide, desperate eyes. I can’t believe I thought, even for that brief moment, that she hadn’t lost all that much. Even if she could still see her magic—even then, she would have lost something that tells her who she is, that helps her anchor herself.
Iris leans forward and her head drops onto my shoulder. I’m still holding both of her fists as she lets out the first sob. She shudders against me. She weeps on me with a desperate kind of loss I don’t know how to contain; the only thing I can do is be there for her to lean against, so that’s what I do. I hold her as she chokes on her own tears, and I watch over her shoulder as the pieces of Josh start to melt away.
15.
ROYA SLIDES INTO THE SEAT next to me on Friday at lunch as if everything isn’t broken. Her eyes are on the door to the cafeteria, where the gray-haired police officer is standing, watching the room. She makes a disgusted noise in the officer’s direction, then grabs my burrito with one hand and a few of Iris’s fries with the other. “I’m starving,” she says through a mouthful of rice and beans.
“Me too,” I say, and take the burrito back. She makes puppy-dog eyes at me, and I hiss at her like a pissed-off cat. “Eat your own lunch first, you vulture.”
“Come on,” she whines, half-serious. “I’m starving. I’m a starving athlete. I need your carbs.”
“Get your own carbs,” I say, holding my lunch out of her reach.
“She’s desperate. Coach has been brutal lately,” Iris says, dousing her fries in ketchup and getting some on Roya’s reaching fingers. Her voice is flat in a way that sounds like more than just exhaustion. I search her face, which is heavy with foundation. She won’t look at me.
“It’s your last meet tomorrow, right?” Maryam asks, and they both nod. Iris looks a little sad about it, but Roya looks thrilled. She’s an amazing swimmer, but she kind of hates being on the team. I think she’d like it if she were a little more passionate about it or if the coach were a little less passionate about it—but as it stands, she’s ready to be out of the water. Still, it’s her last meet, and we shouldn’t miss it. “I’ll be there,” Maryam says. “Alexis, want me to give you a ride?”
“Sure,” I say, even though I had been planning to walk. I know how to drive, but I don’t have a car and I’m not allowed to drive the family car since an incident involving a closed garage door that I thought was open. I’m at the mercy of my friends to get me from A to B. It sucks, but also, it’s nice to ride around with them. It’s nice to have time together like that.
“Me too, me too, me too,” Paulie sings as she tosses her salad onto the table. Maryam rolls her eyes and throws up her hands.
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll drive both of you. But, Paulie, you gotta be at Alexis’s house when I get there. I’m not playing bus driver, okay?”
“Sure thing, Mom,” Paulie says sweetly, sliding into the last empty chair at the table and giving Maryam a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. She’s giving off greaser vibes today with her slicked-back hair, white tee, and boyfriend jeans; the moment her butt lands in a chair, Maryam leans forward and starts touching up her brows, muttering about how they need to be darker and fuller to complete the look. Paulie sits patiently, but she peeks at me out of the corner of one eye and gives me a wink.
“I wish I could go,” Marcelina mutters.
“It’s okay,” Roya says, wiping her ketchup-fingers on a napkin with a grimace. “We’ll come by the Crispy Chicken after to give you the play-by-play.” Marcelina smiles at her, even though missing the meet isn’t exactly what’s bothering her about having to work a Saturday-morning shift at the Crispy Chicken while the rest of us are cheering by the pool.
“I’ll hook you guys up with curly fries,” Marcelina promises. Her eyes slide from Roya to Iris, and they linger. Roya and I follow her gaze. Paulie’s eyes strain even as she tries to hold still for Maryam’s brow touch-ups.
Usually, we let Iris be. When something’s wrong, we let her decide when and if she wants to talk about it. We don’t push her the same way we push each other, because she’s got so many different levels of thinking and feeling and analyzing going on below the surface, and she has to sort them all out before she can talk about things. Most of the time, we let her come to us.
But this is bigger than the usual stuff she goes through. And we’ve all been exchanging glances and hoping that someone else would bring it up first. Marcelina is watching Iris eat french fries, and we’re all watching Marcelina watch Iris, and nobody says anything for a long beat. Marcelina purses her lips and I can see her deciding that enough’s enough.
She clears her throat. “So. Iris.” She trails off awkwardly, the
n gestures to Iris’s face. The foundation there is matte, thick, and heavy. She’s not wearing any other makeup. She’s just … hiding.
“We gotta talk about it,” Roya says bluntly.
Iris picks up five french fries and shoves them all into her mouth, then makes a helpless series of gestures that translate to alas-I-can’t-talk-my-mouth-is-full. It’s a blatant Roya move to get out of answering, one that doesn’t fit right on Iris. Roya can get away with using gross humor to deflect us, because it’s kind of her thing. On Iris, it seems like a grotesque masquerade. Roya’s brow furrows. She chews on her lower lip for a moment, then catches Maryam’s glare and switches to chewing on a fingernail.
“We gotta talk about it,” Paulie echoes. Her voice is muted because Maryam still has a grip on her chin, but everyone hears her loud and clear. I try very hard to be invisible.
“I think so too,” Marcelina says softly. “I think we have to talk about it because if we don’t, I don’t know what will happen, but I’m pretty sure I’ll explode.”
The bite of burrito in my mouth turns to cement. I swallow hard and pass the rest of my lunch to Roya. I know Marcelina didn’t mean “explode” like how Josh exploded, but still. My appetite is gone.
And they’re right. We have to talk about this.
Maryam releases Paulie and raps her knuckles on the table. “Out with it, all of you. Enough of this. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
“Fine,” Iris says, her voice taut. “Fine. We’ll talk about it.”
She steeples her fingers on the table, not looking directly at anyone. She goes into tutor mode, neatly sidestepping the question of what’s going on with her face. She explains the whiplash effect that she told me about the day before—the way that the magic is moving, taking things. Finally, when she can’t talk around it anymore, she holds a hand out to Roya.
“Roya, take it off,” she says. She grits her teeth as Roya grabs her hand. A glow suffuses their clasped hands, and then the thick foundation on Iris’s face is thinning, thinner, vanished.
The other girls gasp. She doesn’t look that different from how she looked with the foundation—maybe a little less orangey—but still. I don’t think any of them really realized what she looked like without her freckles. I know I didn’t, not until I saw it for myself.
She’s blank. She’s still gorgeous, but she looks empty—not just in that her skin is an unbroken expanse of cream. There’s something missing in her eyes, too. She looks miserable, like she knows that the thing she loves most about herself is so far out of reach that there’s simply no hope of retrieving it.
“Oh no,” Roya whispers. “Oh god, Iris, I’m so sorry.”
My fault.
The tears fall, but Iris holds her chin high, and when she speaks, her voice is steady. “It’s fine,” she says. “It’s not fine, that was a lie, but … it’ll be okay.”
Paulie looks at Maryam. “Can you … ?”
Maryam shakes her head. “I tried. I can’t put them back. I can make them show up, but they fade right away.”
Iris squeezes Roya’s hand, then lets it go. “I, um. I should tell you guys about the rest of it too.”
And then she looks at me. She’s not saying anything, but her lips are white and her eyes are wide and her nostrils are flaring and I can see it, I can see the cost of saying it out loud. I can see the toll it will take on her. I raise my eyebrows and hesitate because maybe I’m misunderstanding—but then she nods at me.
“Please,” she whispers.
I look around the table. “She can’t see her magic anymore,” I say. My voice is shaking. I make myself meet all of their eyes, make myself see their horror at Iris’s loss.
“I’m going to have to relearn it all,” Iris says. Her hands are knotted together in front of her, the knuckles stark white. “I’m going to have to figure out how to do it all without looking. I can’t do anything right now, hardly. Last night I figured out how to warm up my hands, but I burned myself a little.” She shows us a red patch on her palm.
Paulie takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I lost my memories of Andrew,” she says. She doesn’t say that she’ll be fine, and I’m oddly grateful that she’s not trying to pretend it’s okay. Roya and Marcelina look surprised. Maryam doesn’t.
“I can’t forget anything anymore,” Marcelina whispers. “My head is so full. I’m learning how to deal with it, but … it’s so much, you know?”
My fault, all my fault.
“I can’t cry,” Roya says. She says it casually as she’s finishing my burrito, but she won’t make eye contact with anyone. “I went back to the reservoir like we talked about, and I dove down and got the bag with the arm, and I got rid of it for real. With my magic. And then afterward, I was fighting with my mom because I got home after curfew, and I felt like crying, and I wanted to cry, and I couldn’t. So I went online and found one of those videos that always makes me cry? And I couldn’t. I felt all the feelings, but I couldn’t cry.” Her voice breaks and I wonder if she wants to cry now. “This sounds stupid. It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but it feels like a big deal.”
“I mean, if anything sounds like not a big deal, it’s fucking freckles,” Iris says, and everyone laughs, but Marcelina and Maryam both shake their heads at the same time.
“It’s a big deal,” Maryam says. “It’s all a big deal. You all lost things.” She looks at me. “What about you, Alexis?”
I shake my head. “It’s not important.”
“It’s important,” Roya says, and when I look at her, she’s staring at me with eyes that would be crying.
“I think, um. I think I can’t dream.” I say it to everyone, but I’m looking at Roya. She closes her eyes for a second, and when she opens them again, they’re still dry, and she looks stricken by it. “I go to sleep and it’s like I close my eyes for a few seconds and then open them again and it’s morning. And I can’t tell if I’m tired or not? I don’t know,” I finish awkwardly. “I—I don’t know.”
We sit under the weight of all the things we’ve lost. We look at our hands and we look at our food and we look at the scratched surface of the table. We look at those little things, because it’s too much to look at each other and see the magnitude of what’s happening to us.
“This is so fucked up,” Paulie whispers. “This is really bad.”
My fault, my fault, my fault.
“So what do we do?” Marcelina asks.
I straighten my back like Iris does before she says hard things. I clench my jaw like Roya does when she’s being brave. I summon the certainty that Marcelina brings to every word she says. I imagine that I have even a tenth of Paulie’s courage and confidence. I will myself to speak with Maryam’s quiet authority. If I can be anything like my friends, I can do this.
I can do this.
“Here’s what you do,” I say. “You give it all back to me. I know that I can’t fix what you’ve all already lost, but I swear to god I wouldn’t have let any of you help me if I’d known this would happen, and I can stop it from happening more, so. Give it all back to me, and I’ll get rid of all the … pieces. On my own.” I look each of them in the eye, making sure that they’re listening. “I’ll deal with whatever happens as a result. It’s my mess, and I really appreciate you guys trying to help me clean it up, but it’s hurting you. And I’m not going to let it hurt you any more than it already has.”
They look at each other, then back at me. Maryam’s got her hands folded in front of her on the table, neutral but still present, ready to be here for us. Her fingernails are silver today, and so is her eyeliner, and I know she must have been up late perfecting her technique to make them match so perfectly. It’s comforting to see something beautiful that she did with her magic, just because she loves it.
That’s what I think, instead of thinking about the thing I just committed to doing. I think of Maryam’s fingernails. I can’t be scared as long as I’m thinking of her fingernails.
Paulie cle
ars her throat. “No.”
“ ‘No’ what?” I ask, still watching the light play over the shining silver of Maryam’s nails. There are little sparkles in the polish that I didn’t notice before.
“No, I’m not giving you my piece,” Paulie says. Behind her, someone drops their lunch tray. People laugh and do the whole sarcastic-clapping thing, but none of us look. “It’s mine. I took it and I don’t have to give it back just because you say so.”
“Me either,” Roya says sharply. I look up to find her glaring at me.
“Same,” Marcelina says. She pops a french fry into her mouth and levels a challenging stare at me.
“Yeah,” Iris says. “I mean … I already did mine, but I wouldn’t give them back if I still had them.”
“You guys, come on.” I try to make my voice sound like Pop’s voice does when he’s being lawyer-y, but it doesn’t quite work. “This is hurting you. It’s hurting you all so much, and it’s not going to hurt you anymore. It’s time for me to handle my mistake on my own.”
“Fuck that,” Paulie spits. “We aren’t going to let you kill yourself to protect us.”
“I don’t think—”
“Yeah, and screw you for thinking we would,” Roya says, and she sounds just as mad as Paulie.
“You idiot,” Marcelina says. She gets up and stands behind my chair, wrapping her arms around me. She feels soft and strong and furious. “You big stupid jerk, why the hell would you even say something like that?”
I awkwardly squeeze her elbows, then extricate myself. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad,” I say, and they look at each other like I’m being willfully ignorant.
“It would probably be that bad,” Maryam says. “I mean, look at the combined effects so far. Imagine if just one person lost what you’ve all lost. Their old memories, their dreams, their tears, their ability to forget new things, and the person who they’ve come to understand themselves to be.” She looks at Iris on this last note, and Iris’s eyes turn glassy. “And that’s only half of the changes,” Maryam continues. “Whatever else happens … all of it together would turn you into a completely new person, wouldn’t it?”