When We Were Magic

by Sarah Gailey

  Maryam has fallen asleep on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in her lap. She’s been planning nonstop, putting together mood boards for the apartment she and Roya and I will share, mapping the neighborhood we’ll be living in. She’s really excited about the mosque a few blocks away from our school—she keeps talking about finally finding an imam, someone she can talk to about faith and magic, so she can decide which rules she wants to keep living by and what she believes in. Iris’s head rests on her shoulder. Paulie and Gina are in Marcelina’s room, and none of us have checked on them, but I’m pretty sure that they’re asleep together. Marcelina is softly stroking the leaves of a deep purple basil plant she grew.

  Roya is watching me.

  I ease my way out from under Handsome and Fritz and head for the front door. The dogs, exhausted by the amount of attention they’ve gotten, don’t stir. Roya follows me—I can hear her soft footfalls on the thick, ancient carpet of Marcelina’s hallway. I don’t look back. Not because I’m scared that she won’t be there, but because I know that she will be.

  “What’s up?” she whispers as we step outside. Her hands finds my hips and she presses her lips to my temple as she finishes the p in “up.”

  “I have to do something,” I whisper back.

  “Do you want company?” She draws lines on my shoulders with her fingertips, and the way the moonlight reflects off her cheekbones is transcendent, and I want to say yes. Yes, Roya, yes, I always want company, your company, you, yes, you, us, yes.

  But.

  “I have to do this alone,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m sorry. But I’ll be back soon and then maybe we can watch the sunrise?”

  “Perfect.” She gives me a squeeze and pulls away and then changes her mind and kisses me. She kisses me like it’s the first day of summer. She kisses me like a patch of blue sky breaking through a gray morning. She kisses me like she’s saying yes.

  I could kiss her forever.

  I would kiss her forever.

  But I have to do this alone.

  “I love you,” I whisper, and she whispers it back, and then she kisses me again and then she’s gone. The door closes with the softest of clicks and I’m alone outside.

  Alone doesn’t feel the same now as it used to feel. Before prom—before Josh—alone felt scary. It felt like maybe if I wasn’t careful, alone would be permanent. But as I walk across Marcelina’s lawn and into the trees, alone feels temporary. It feels like a gift that the morning is sharing with me: a moment with myself and the waking-up forest and the taste of heat already on the air.

  I walk without direction. I know that when the time comes to find my way back, I’ll be able to. I can ask a bird or a colony of beetles the way home. And more than that, I can feel it. I can feel the pull of the sleeping magic girls in that house. I can feel Roya waiting to kiss me and fall asleep together. I can feel the path I’m cutting through the forest, the broken leaves and bothered mice.

  It doesn’t take long for me to reach the lightning-struck tree. I step around the place where I buried Josh’s head—the earth is still a little rounded there, and I give it a wide berth. I walk around the tree in a circle, looking up at the branches. The long black scar is still there. I wonder if it’ll ever fade. And a lot of the leaves are still brown. But at the very tips of some of the branches, in the graying light of the predawn sky, I can just make out a few buds of bright green. New leaves.

  I lay a palm on the trunk and press until the bark hurts the tender parts of my skin. I close my eyes and I try. I know that I’m not Marcelina, and I can’t tell this tree anything or hear anything back from it, but I try to tell it that I’m happy it’s doing better. I hope it knows. I hope it understands.

  This is what I needed to see. I needed to see the place where I dug a hole for a boy’s head. I needed to see the tree that his bones fed.

  I’m startled by a noise—a whistle of wind, a heavy wingbeat. I look up to see a hawk dropping from the branches of the lightning-struck tree. Her wings don’t flutter, she’s not a fluttering kind of bird, but she’s not diving for prey, either. She lands on a gnarled tree root and cocks her head at me.

  She looks so different from the hawks that fell out of the sky the day we failed to bring Josh back to life with our magic. She’s just like them, the same species, probably the same size. But with all that life in her—she looks bigger.

  “Hey,” I whisper. She doesn’t respond, because hawks don’t talk, but she watches me with one yellow eye. I can’t make out her markings, but I can see that eye, and I can see that she’s staring right at me. I sink to the ground slowly—not slowly enough, as she still ruffles her wings at me, but slow as I can go. As I sit, the hawk hops down off the tree branch. It’s light enough out that I can just barely make out the spots on her wings. She steps toward me, walking with broad, bold steps. She’s not afraid of me.

  I’m afraid of her. More afraid than I thought I would be. Her beak is huge and hooked and dangerous, and her talons sink into the soft soil as she approaches me. She’s a predator. She’s made to destroy soft things.

  She’s perfect.

  My heart is beating hard and fast, and some part of my brain is screaming at me to run run run from this thing that is born to be danger.

  But then, some part of me is born to danger too.

  I lift my wrist until it’s parallel to the ground. She looks. Hesitates. Takes another step forward.

  And then, with a flutter and a terrifying lurch, she’s on my arm.

  She’s heavier than I expected her to be. She smells like meat and feathers and something that I can’t put my finger on but that makes the run run run part of my brain scream. Her talons dig into my skin. I feel blood running down the length of my arm, curling into tight spirals in the air around me. I don’t look away from the hawk, but there’s something feathery about the red rising next to my shoulders.

  She studies my face, the one pupil I can see contracting. She shakes her feathers once, squeezes my arm in a heart-clenching grip of her talons.

  And then she’s gone, and my arm is burning, and it’s over. I’m alone. I stand up, my legs trembling with fear and relief and fatigue.

  I turn back the way I came and head for the house. Roya’s waiting for me, and I’ve got a sunrise to watch with her. I wind my way between the trees, feeling unbearably light, the flesh of my arm knitting itself back together. I trail spirals of crystallized blood that will melt away as the dew evaporates at dawn.

  I breathe in the first day of summer.

  I breathe out magic.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the friends and family that hold us together. It’s about uncertainty. It’s about learning to accept love and support. It’s about how scary that can be, and how hard a skill it is to learn. It’s a book about doing hard things unalone.

  To DongWon Song, my agent and friend, who has seen me through the good times and the grieving times;

  To Liesa Abrams, my brilliant editor and champion of this project;

  To Ryan and Christina, who let me be strange;

  To Mom and Dad and Katie and Scott and Rachel and Mathew and Becca and Amy;

  To Mark Oshiro, who helped me to find the person I needed to be in order to write this book;

  To all my early readers, including Sarah, Sharon, Ashley, Melanie, Charis, Hilary, and Mark;

  To Kaye, for helping me get it right and for telling me where I got it wrong, with kindness and patience;

  To Mallory O’Meara and Elisabeth Fillmore, both of whom have given me real talk and shown me real kindness;

  To all my communities—PQ, MF, the coven, the squad, the group text, the group chat—I know I will never have to hide a body alone as long as I have all of you;

  To Team DongWon (all of you are magic);

  To Tinkerbell, who is not allowed on the bed and who is an outlaw;

  To everyone who saw me through the writing of this book and all the other ones, who congratulated and consoled
me, who held my hand during bad news and hugged me after good news, who made me eat and sleep and hydrate and go outside, who showed me around new cities and kept me from getting lost;

  To everyone who believed in me and to everyone who didn’t;

  To you, for reading this book:

  Thank you.

  About the Author

  Hugo Award winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor for Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Their fiction credits include Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and the Atlantic. Their novels have been published by Simon & Schuster and Tor Books, and their novellas have been published by Tor.com. You can find more about their work at sarahgailey.com. You can also find them on social media @gaileyfrey.

  Simon Pulse

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Sarah-Gailey

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition March 2020

  Text copyright © 2020 by Sarah Gailey

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Amalia Alvarez

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.

  For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Jacket designed by Sarah Creech

  Interior designed by Mike Rosamilia

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Amalia Alvarez

  Author photograph copyright © 2020 by Allan Amato

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gailey, Sarah, author.

  Title: When we were magic / by Sarah Gailey.

  Description: First Simon Pulse hardcover edition. | New York : Simon Pulse, 2020. | Summary: When Alexis accidentally kills a classmate on prom night using magic, her best friends

  Roya, Iris, Paulie, Marcelina, and Maryam join in using their powers to try to set things right. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019001195 (print) | LCCN 2019002854 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534432871 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534432895 (eBook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Witchcraft—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G3453 (eBook) | LCC PZ7.1.G3453 Whe 2020 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001195