When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  “You were amazing.” I remember how I said it breathlessly, even though I hadn’t been out of breath a second before. She looked at me like she didn’t recognize me. She’d apologize later—explain about the adrenaline, the oncoming energy-crash, needing time to shake off the intense focus of an event. It was a perfectly sensible boundary for her to set, but at the time, I was stung. It was the first time I’d felt such a strong urge to be seen by someone, and at the time, she didn’t seem to want to look at me.

  “So,” Maryam says as I sit back down.

  “She killed it,” I breathe.

  “Yeah,” she says. There’s a heavy silence between us.

  “Do you know when Iris is up?” I venture.

  “Not sure,” Maryam says. “I haven’t spotted her yet.” Her hands are shoved into the big pocket on the front of her hoodie, so I can’t see if they’re in fists or not, but her voice makes me think they probably are. I lean my shoulder against hers and try to decide if I should ask her what’s up or if I should just give her space.

  Before I can make up my mind, she huffs out a little breath and shoves me off her. I look over, startled. She’s taking off her sunglasses. Her eyes are narrowed and she’s looking at me like I’m an impossible derivation on a calc worksheet. “This week has been really hard on everyone,” she says.

  My stomach immediately clenches with guilt. “Yeah, I know,” I say, “and I’m really—”

  “No,” she says, slicing her hand through the air. It’s another of her mom’s gestures, one that means you’d better shut up before you get yourself in even worse trouble than you already are. “Don’t apologize. I’ve had enough.”

  “What do you—”

  “I’ve had enough of you sitting there and feeling bad because all your friends love you,” she snaps. “Just now, when you were cheering for Roya? It was the only time this whole week I’ve seen you look something other than guilty for your friendships.”

  “But—”

  “No!” She slices her hand through the air again, and I feel like I’ve been caught sneaking in past curfew with a hickey on my neck and a bottle in my pocket. “We all love you, okay? Your friends all love you, and it doesn’t matter if you think you deserve it or not because we love you anyway. You think it isn’t fair to let us love you and help you? I’ll tell you right now: the way you’ve been mooning around feeling bad about our friendship isn’t fair. It puts the onus on all of us to make you feel okay about the fact that we’re helping you and it isn’t fair. And it would be incredibly stupid and insensitive of you to turn yourself in. Doing that? After everything those girls have sacrificed to keep you safe? Just because you don’t think you deserve their friendship?” She shakes her head at me. “Honestly.”

  She huffs out a short, sharp breath. A couple of people near us have turned to stare. She got pretty loud by the end there. My eyes burn and my vision blurs and I feel my chin buckle in that little-kid way I hate. Maryam is still glaring at me. She’s quiet for long enough that I think I’m allowed to talk. “I’m really—”

  “And another thing,” she interrupts. “It’s really messed up that we all have to go around pretending that we don’t know you’re in love with Roya, and it’s really extra messed up that you don’t think you can tell me about it!”

  With that, she shoves her sunglasses back on, crosses her arms, and turns back to the meet. Tears spill down my cheeks, but they’re nowhere near as hot as the shame that roils in my gut. I look over at Maryam, then down at Roya, standing by the pool with a towel draped over her shoulders. “Did Paulie tell you?” I whisper.

  “What?” Maryam snaps.

  “Paulie—did she tell you about how I’m … how I … Roya.” I can’t look at Maryam, so I keep watching the way Roya’s long wet braid is dripping over her collarbone.

  “No. You talked to her about it, but you wouldn’t talk to me about it? Who else? Gina Tarlucci?” She sounds like a pot of water that’s on the edge of boiling over.

  “No—never Gina, I don’t—no. But Paulie talked to me about it,” I mutter. “The same way you did, pretty much. Although she was a little less mad at me.”

  Maryam sighs, a big exhausted kind of sigh. She takes her sunglasses off again, tucking them into her pocket this time. “Look,” she says, then goes quiet for a while. She seems so tired. Two whistles blow before she continues her sentence, but I don’t dare interrupt. “It’s just that there’s only a few weeks until the end of school, and then summer is going to go by really, really fast, and then we’re all moving in together at school, right?”

  “If you still want to.” I hate how petty and insecure I sound.

  “So, are you really going to bring all of this with us? The pining and the meaningful glances and the frankly unbearable chemistry between you two? Because I don’t want to have to clean up after the elephant.”

  “The what?”

  “The elephant that’s in the room any time you two sit next to each other,” she snaps. I laugh before I can stop myself. She tries to look stern, but she laughs too, then wraps an arm around me and squeezes my shoulders. “You gotta do something about it,” she says. “You can’t keep torturing all of us like this.”

  “I will,” I say, leaning into her. “I’ll do something about it. I promise.”

  Maryam spots Iris and we cheer for her in the 200-meter freestyle. She and one other swimmer finish at what looks to me like the exact same time, and there’s some seriously poor sportsmanship on display from the other team as the coaches argue. Iris pinches the bridge of her nose to wait it out. In the end, they call it a tie. Maryam and I both boo, earning another dirty look from swim-dad.

  I stifle a giggle, then nudge Maryam with my elbow. “So. Do you really think we have chemistry?”

  Maryam rolls her eyes. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

  “Yeah.” I bite my lip, then stop before Maryam can catch me at it. “She’s been kind of distant lately.”

  “Like, since prom?” She’s tapping her fingernails, idly changing them from green to pink to blue.

  “Yeah.”

  Maryam raises her eyebrows. Her mouth drops open into an O. She turns to me and lowers her voice to a barely audible whisper. “I wonder if … Do you think that could have anything to do with you trying to sleep with a boy you don’t even like and then her having to lie to her chief of police mom about the fact that she knows exactly what happened to him? While also losing pieces of herself for reasons she doesn’t understand and can’t predict?” She manages to maintain a straight face for long enough that I’m not sure she’s making fun of me until she starts chewing on her bottom lip and says, “I don’t know, maybe you’re right and she’s acting strange because she hates you.”

  “Okay, I get it.” I laugh. “I’ll talk to her.” The final whistle blows, marking the end of the last event, and the bleachers start to empty almost instantly.

  “You’d better,” she says. “Or else I’ll yell at you again.”

  “I don’t think I can survive another dose of Maryam Realness,” I say to her back as she starts off down the bleachers. I stay where I am for a minute longer, pretending to collect my bag.

  Really, I’m just standing there, watching as Maryam makes her way to where Iris and Roya are waiting.

  She passes the gray-haired cop on her way down. The cop is talking to someone who’s impossible not to recognize, even from a distance. She’s talking to Gina Tarlucci.

  As I look, Gina says something, and they both look up at the bleachers. They look right up at me.

  I force myself to look away. I dig my phone out of my pocket and pretend to be taking a picture of Roya and Iris, down by the pool. They’re both wrapped in towels, their goggles hanging around their necks. Iris still has her cap on. She looks so pale without her freckles that it takes me a moment to realize it’s her—but then she looks up at me, standing there in the bleachers, and she sends a single gossamer thread of magic up to me. I feel it brush against
my ear, cool as a drop of water, and I lift my hand to wave at her. I take the picture and put my phone away.

  When I look over, Gina is gone, but the gray-haired cop is staring at me. She’s looking from me to Iris and back. She starts lifting a hand to wave me over, and I pretend I don’t see. I busy myself grabbing my bag and extricating myself from the bleachers, and then I take the long way down to tell my friends how proud I am of them.

  Before we all leave, I look back at where the cop was standing. She’s still there, watching me. Watching us.

  She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t unfold her arms from across her chest.

  She just watches.

  And I have no idea what it is that she sees.

  17.

  WE TAKE ROYA AND IRIS out for lunch at the Crispy Chicken. True to their word, they fill Marcelina in on the meet, with stroke-by-stroke recaps of each of their events. They devour two Crispy Chandwiches each and share a huge carton of Crispy Fries. Roya actually growls at me when I reach for one. Marcelina takes her lunch break with us, her paper hat sitting in the middle of the chipped Formica table. Maryam asks her how she got her matte black lipstick not to crack even after a full morning of running the drive-thru window, and they do a deep-dive into a sponge technique that sounds to me like some kind of advanced alien technology.

  “So what’d you think?” Roya asks, sorting through the Crispy Fries to find the perfectly balanced soggy/crispy fry of legend.

  “Of what?”

  “Of my ’fly,” she says, a smile curling the corners of her lips up like burning paper. “Did I kick ass?”

  “You destroyed it,” I say, finishing the last of my strawberry shake. “You absolutely demolished it. The water looked scared by the time you were finished.”

  She cackles and throws a fry at me. “Hell yeah it did,” she says, then turns to Iris. “Can you believe that was it? That was the last meet we’re gonna do.” She sounds giddy.

  “I’m never gonna be this hungry again,” Iris says around a mouthful of Chandwich. “Or this tired. Or this chlorine-y.”

  “Okay, kids, I gotta go finish the shift,” Marcelina says. She pats each of us on the head like we’re her wayward ducklings, then pins her paper hat back over her shining black topknot. “Are my seams straight?” She turns around, flashing us the back of her red uniform pants, which are embroidered with a large rooster tail.

  “You look like a supermodel, mama.” Iris toasts Marcelina with her shake, and Marcelina gives her feathers a wiggle. Before she leaves, she turns and points at me.

  “By the way, my house, tomorrow afternoon? I gotta do the thing.”

  I spin my empty shake cup between my hands. “Sure,” I say, heat climbing my neck. I’m trying hard not to look like I feel bad about the thing I feel bad about. “I’ll be there.”

  She gives my head one more pat, then goes back to work. I look at Maryam to see if I did a good job of not being guilty and terrible, but she’s already busy experimenting with Iris’s new contouring possibilities. I watch her fingers trace the lines of Iris’s face, leaving behind different shades of pink and brown. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’ve got such fine bone structure already. I think adding anything at all might be overkill, to be honest.”

  “Well, feel free to keep trying,” Iris says. “I’ve never used that stuff before, so I’m a whole new canvas for you to play with. You win at long last. Go nuts.”

  “I’ve gotta do the thing too, soon,” Roya says to me. “Monday? After school?”

  “Yeah,” I say, still spinning my empty shake cup, watching Iris and Maryam so I don’t have to look at Roya and think about the elephant that Maryam was talking about. “Sure.”

  “Great,” Roya says, and I can see her watching me out of the corner of my eye. “Perfect.”

  * * *

  Maryam drops me off at home after lunch and I walk inside feeling slightly sun-dazzled. It takes my entire body a minute to adjust to the transition from the bright, hot afternoon to the cool darkness of the house. I feel instantly sleepy and hyperaware of the sweat drying on my arms and back. I head to my bedroom, torn between taking a nap or taking a shower.

  Thoughts of either leave my head the second I open the door.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” I shout. Nico scrambles out from under my bed, one hand clutching a file folder, the other holding a bag.

  The bag with the heart in it.

  “Why are you in my room?!” I demand as I storm in, reaching for the bag in his hand. A corner of the duct tape on the front is peeling back, and I can see the corner of the letter J peeking out.

  He jerks it out of my reach. “Chill, okay, I was just—”

  “Don’t tell me to chill! What are you doing in here? Why were you under my bed?” My fingers are burning and my palms are prickling and I clench my hands into fists to stop myself from doing something I’ll regret. Something I can’t control. I can’t keep the quaver out of my voice, though.

  “I’m trying to tell you, I was—”

  “You have no right to be—”

  “Oh my god just let me explain, you don’t have to be such a—”

  “Don’t you dare call me—”

  “WHAT IS GOING ON IN HERE?”

  We both turn to see Pop standing in the door, hands braced on the frame. His entire face is red, all the way up to the top of his scalp, and his eyebrows are a long, low furrow of what-the-hell. He’s wearing his worn-out college sweater and a pair of cargo shorts, which is his sitting-in-the-office-all-day-reviewing-depositions outfit. If he could hear us all the way back in his office, with the door closed and his white noise machine going—we were shouting at each other at top volume. I’m out of breath. Shit. Shit. This is really bad.

  Pop looks between me and Nico and the file folder in Nico’s hand and the bag in Nico’s other hand, which I’m still reaching for.

  “Um,” we both say, and Pop crosses his arms.

  “Nico was in my room,” I say.

  “Alexis was being a total—” Nico starts, then catches the look on Pop’s face and stops midsentence. He doesn’t finish what he was about to say.

  “Why were you in her room, Nico?” Pop asks, his voice strained with the extreme patience of a parent mediating between his kids. Nico’s ears flush and he mumbles something unintelligible. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I was looking for something,” Nico says, just loudly enough to hear this time.

  “What were you looking for?” I demand. “And why didn’t you just ask me for it?”

  “Because I knew you’d say no,” Nico says, not looking at me. He brandishes the file folder in his hand. “I was looking for your final essay from when you had Nichols for English in your sophomore year.”

  Pop’s brows were already low, but they drop even farther at hearing that. Nico looks like he wants to crawl under my bed and hide. “Why would you want her final essay?” Pop asks. I can’t imagine that he actually doesn’t know—maybe he’s just trying to give Nico an opportunity to defend himself.

  “He was going to copy from it,” I answer. Nico’s still holding the bag with the heart in it, and I’m trying to figure out how I can make sure he doesn’t get so distracted by being in trouble that he takes it with him. I reach for it again, but as I do, he turns to me with a look of shock and betrayal.

  “I wasn’t,” he says, but it’s for Pop’s benefit. “I just know how you save all that old crap, and I wanted to see what approach you took—”

  “Oh please,” I start to say. Pop cuts me off.

  “Nico,” he says in a level voice that’s trying very hard not to be lawyerish, “isn’t that essay due tomorrow?”

  Nico looks miserable. “Yes. That’s why I wanted help.”

  “I see. Let’s go talk about this somewhere else.” Pop gestures to Nico, who turns to trudge out of the room. They walk toward Nico’s bedroom to talk about how much trouble Nico’s in, and I hear Pop saying, “We both know that copying and ‘
getting help’ aren’t the same thing, young man,” as he half closes the door to my bedroom behind him. As the door swings shut, I catch a last glimpse of the bag still dangling from Nico’s hand.

  “No no no no no no no,” I moan, falling onto my bed and pulling a pillow over my head. Nico has Josh’s heart. He’s holding it. He’s going to forget that he took that bag out of my bedroom, and then he’s going to notice it and remember that he’s pissed at me, and then he’s going to decide to snoop. He’ll open it and see what’s inside, and how am I going to explain why there’s a heart that isn’t bleeding in there?

  What am I supposed to say?

  Sorry to leave you out of the loop, Nico, but your big sister is actually some kind of magical freak who accidentally killed a guy she barely knew because she was about to sleep with him for all the wrong reasons. Oh, and she keeps hurting people when she gets freaked out and she’s pretty sure she would have hurt you if Pop hadn’t interrupted that fight. Please don’t tell anyone?

  And then I realize that if I can’t get the heart back from him, I’ll probably hurt people even more. That’s what Iris said: the tension of the spell is what’s making me accidentally hurt people, including myself. What if I can’t get the heart back from Nico and then I lose control and kill someone else?

  What if I hurt him? Or Dad, or Pop? I know I should feel just as bad about hurting anyone, because hurting anyone at all is awful, but … what if it’s one of them? I’m already a murderer. What if I can’t stop killing people?