Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Why not?”

  It wasn’t like a punch to the gut, not anymore. Not after so many years. More like a sneeze the day after too many sit-ups, or the seat belt tightening after a too-fast stop, or a sudden wave of nausea at the tail end of a hangover.

  I shrugged. “Who knows?” I took a long, hard pull of my drink. When I set the glass down it clinked against the table too loudly. “I’m not magic. I’m just … not. And she is. She went to a magic school and I went to … to regular school.”

  He wiped his hands on a towel—he was already halfway through the limes—and opened a fresh beer, the same one I’d been drinking. He set it in front of me, and I didn’t pretend to hesitate before taking a sip right from the bottle. “She went to Oxthorne?”

  “Osthorne, and no,” I answered, grateful to get away from the why-not-you. “She went to a place called Headley. It was a boarding school up near Portland. Prestigious as hell. I think she was glad to get away from home.” Home had been Woodland, near Sacramento, small and hot and stucco, strip malls and air-conditioned minivans. We had both hated it in that way some kids are just required to hate their hometowns, spent all of our time fantasizing about how we’d get out of there. And then she did. And then, a couple of years later, so did I.

  “So you guys aren’t close?”

  I frowned. “I don’t talk to her if I can help it. And most of the time I can help it.”

  “Okay,” he said, and I could see him deciding to give me a reprieve. “So how does it work? Magic.”

  I shook my head, relieved. “Fuck if I know. I guess you have to be magic to understand it. Every time I tried to ask Tabitha when we were kids, she would make an analogy that’s like … ‘imagine if your heartbeat was a cloud and you could make it rain whenever you had a nightmare,’ or ‘imagine you’re a candle, and your wick is made of glass,’ or something. I’m no good at koans.”

  “Well, what’s it look like?” He was in a groove, having fun, getting me to spin him a story. He wanted me to tell him about this. Not that it mattered if a bartender wanted to talk to me—just, it was nice, realizing that he might be disappointed if I left.

  “Anything.” I pointed at one of the lime slices. “If I was a mage, I could probably make that blossom, or like … turn orange, or grow a fish tail.”

  “Who’s magic?”

  “What do you mean? Lots of people are—”

  “Who that I’ve heard of? Who’s the most famous magic person in history?”

  “Winston Churchill.” I didn’t miss a beat, and felt oddly proud of myself for it.

  “No, really.”

  “Really,” I answered over the top of my beer bottle. “He was a racist murderous fuck, but he was magic as all get-out.”

  The bartender gave me a skeptical eyebrow. “But if he was magic, why didn’t he—I don’t know. Strike Hitler with lightning or something?”

  “Reasons, probably?” I shrugged. “Tabitha could tell you, but the explanation would involve a whole set of theories and committees and treaties you’ve never heard of, and by the end of the explanation you’d be so bored you’d be gouging your own eyes out to stay awake. Trust me, it’s not interesting.”

  “Okay.” He chewed on his lip. He was trying to think of a way to keep this thing from losing steam. “Okay. So. How do you know if you’re magic, then?”

  I thought about it, picking at the label on my beer bottle. “I guess you just … you do magic, and then you know. Lots of kids keep their magic a secret, because they know they’re not supposed to be able to do things. Like, Tabitha found out when she was little, because she kept changing another girl’s markers into butter.”

  He squinted at the lime in his hand. “What?”

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “I mean, there were other things too, but this was the first obvious one. She didn’t like this other girl because I guess the other girl wouldn’t share stickers? So she turned all the girl’s markers into butter.” I shook my head. “The teacher figured out what was going on and sent a note home, and my parents came into the school, and the teacher said that Tabitha was magic. She said that Tabby had probably been doing stuff like this for years, but that most magic kids don’t get caught until they have a mage for a teacher. So anyway, she gave my mom and dad a pamphlet and the number of a special tutor who could help Tabitha out. And then…” I fluttered my fingers. “That was that. So I guess that’s how you find out. You just do magic, and then someone tells you that you’re magic.”

  “So your parents know about it.”

  Again, that little snag in my gut. “Dad does. Mom did, before she died. It’s okay,” I said, preemptively answering the oh-god-what-land-mine-have-I-stepped-on panic in his face. “I mean, it’s not okay, but it’s fine. It was a long time ago.”

  The bartender looked at me with way too much sincerity. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I wanted to spit because I hate that. I hate it when people say that.

  “It’s fine, really. It happened when I was in high school. Tabitha was at Headley and I was at home.” I anticipated the questions he was waiting to ask, the questions everyone always asks. The questions that I stopped wanting to answer the moment they became questions I could answer. The questions that made me into a person who didn’t ever talk about my past. “It was cancer. In her stomach. Or at least, I guess that’s where it started.”

  That’s all he needed to know.

  He didn’t need to know about how we hadn’t realized anything was wrong for a while, when she was just tired. And then she started to have pain in her neck, and she went to the doctor and they found cancer. It was everywhere by then. It was fast. She was sick for a month, and then she stopped treatment, and then she died a month later. He didn’t need to know that part. “It was sad, or whatever. But it was a long time ago. I’m okay. Everyone’s okay.”

  Well. Sort of okay. I had almost failed out of high school—graduated by the grace of an iron-fisted guidance counselor who just wanted to get a diploma in my hands and get me out, for Mom’s sake. For the sake of her memory. The day top-of-her-class Tabitha had come home from Headley for the funeral, her eyes de-puffed with the help of some charm she’d learned in the dorms there, I’d said hello without hugging her. After that, the only time I hugged her was for Dad and his camera, and even then, the camera hadn’t been pointed at us for five years or so. And Dad didn’t notice the time passing because he’d lost the person he had planned his entire life around.

  But other than that, everyone was okay.

  The bartender sliced the last lime, grabbed the empty bucket. “I’ll be right back, okay?” He pointed at me and smiled. “I’ve got lemons to do, too.”

  I smiled back and gave him a thumbs-up. As soon as he was out of sight, I downed what was left of my beer and slid off the barstool. I tucked a few bills under the empty bottle—enough to cover the bill, plus a decent tip. I walked out fast, furious at myself. I’d said too much. He’d gotten that look on his face, that pity look. I was supposed to disappear in that bar. Another round, and he’d be asking my name, giving me advice. Acting like he knew me.

  I walked back to my office, just off the edge of sober and just past angry. Just drunk enough to dig into my pocket for my phone, open a social media app I never used. In my dad’s profile picture, he was standing on a beach with his arm around a woman I didn’t recognize.

  I scrolled back through his pictures, through a few rounds of barbecues and birthday dinners with friends I’d never met. I kept going, back through years of posts until I found a photo with Tabitha and me both in it. In the photo, Tabitha had her arms wrapped around me. We were smiling in front of a Christmas tree—it was a for-the-camera smile, a for-Dad smile. He took a picture of us every year, because when we were little Mom had taken a picture every year. Until one year she wasn’t there anymore, and we were all looking at each other in front of the Christmas tree, wondering how we were supposed to celebrate her favorite holiday.

  In the picture we wore coordin
ating sweaters, reindeer and snowflakes and little knit x’s. It was from a few years before we stopped talking altogether—Tabitha’s bangs attested to that—but in the shot, my short black hair was already threaded with premature strands of gray. My scattering of freckles was cut through with the first few fine lines, laughter around the eyes and frown between the brows. We shared a sharp nose—nothing you’d call “aquiline,” but certainly nothing you’d call “pert,” either. She was a little slimmer than me. You could already see the wages of a PI’s life on my body and in the lines of my face: too much booze, too many late-night stakeouts with fast-food wrappers littering the floor of the car. No cigarettes—I’d quit the second I left home, since I’d only been smoking them to piss Dad off—but I looked like a smoker. I looked tired.

  Tabitha shone in the photo, like she did in every photo. Her long hair—used to be plain old “dark brown,” but after she came back from school it was something else, something richer like chestnut or umber or ocher—hung in soft waves, and her large brown eyes were the same as mine but more somehow, more sparkling, more alive. Better. Not a freckle on her, and the only lines were laugh lines, and there were exactly the right amount of them. She was using all the tricks that used to drive me to it’s-not-fair shouting back when we were teenagers. Back when the worst thing in my life was Tabitha, and the fact that she had come home from magic school knowing how to erase the hated freckles—but wouldn’t do mine.

  And now I was going to try to solve a murder at a place that was full of kids like that. Kids who were just like the person my sister had become while she was gone. I was going to take the case—I’d been trying to tell myself that I was conflicted about it, but really I was just getting ready to swallow a lot of bad medicine in order to do the job.

  Because I had to do this job. It was good money, but more than that, it was a murder case. It was real detective work, something more than just some paunchy forty-nine-year-old accountant revving his secretary’s engine in the Ramada near the freeway. I’d been following paunchy accountants for the better part of fourteen years. It’s what I was good at.

  But this? A real murder case? This was the kind of thing that private detectives didn’t do anymore. It was what had made me get my PI license in the first place—the possibility that I might get to do something big and real, something nobody else could do. I didn’t know the first thing about solving a murder, but this was my chance to find out if I could really do it. If I could be a real detective, instead of a halfway-there failure. If this part of my life could be different from all the other parts, all the parts where I was only ever almost enough.

  I won’t try to pinpoint the first lie I told myself over the course of this case. That’s not a useful thread to pull on. The point is, I really thought I was going to do things right this time. I wasn’t going to fuck it up and lose everything. That’s what I told myself as I stared at the old picture of me and Tabitha.

  This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  THE DRIVE THROUGH THE SUNOL hills was as beautiful as the novocaine that comes before the drill. Once I got off the high-walled freeways, the pockmarked city streets gave way to land that screamed green. Tall, gnarled oaks leaned over the narrow, winding road, casting it into dappled shade and obscuring signage that warned me to watch out for leaping deer. Tiny offshoots from the road appeared at intervals, marked with signs for Hollow Stone Ranch or Crystalbrook Farm. I’d gotten intentionally lost down there a few times before, and knew that if I followed any of those signs in search of roaming horses with warm-velvet noses I could stroke, I’d quickly encounter gates informing me that I was on private property and would be shot should I choose to venture any farther.

  Osthorne was no different—the sign by the road read OSTHORNE ACADEMY in dark debossed wood with white edging, and after I turned off the road, I started to see signs warning me of the dangers of trespassing. After nearly a mile of driveway featuring increasingly threatening signage, the rooftop of oaks thinned, then parted. The campus spread before me like a dream. As I pulled into a parking space, I peeked in my rearview at the wall of ancient, sprawling oaks behind me. Their branches twisted together, completely obscuring the school from view of the road. I wondered if the school had chosen this location for the camouflage, or if the mages who built the school had engineered the Sunol hills to suit their need for privacy.

  I wove through the cars in the tiny visitors’ parking lot, trying to look around without being too obvious a tourist. The mist was just thin enough for me to see the grounds in soft-focus. The drought-impossible velvety green lawn that surrounded the school looked like frosting waiting to have a finger run through it. The school itself was a long, low spread of brick and glass windows. It struck me as out of place, unfamiliar: there’s not a lot of brick in Northern California, not for a little more than a century. Lots of brick facades in San Francisco, but they’re different—glossy, and too even in color, and somehow thin-looking. It’s not too hard to tell when a building is trying to pretend that it survived the 1906 quake. Not Osthorne, though. This place was the real deal, pocked and resealed dozens of times. Even from the parking lot, I could see the waver in each windowpane, a testament to the age and survival of the glass. There was no flagpole, no clock tower, no football field with blazing white lights. It was a dignified building, a serious place.

  I had a moment of double vision. If things had been different for me—if I’d been born with whatever thing Tabitha had that I never got any of—I might have walked across that grass as a kid, with friends and a future all laid out for me. I might have been handed a totally different life. This place might have been the setting for my teen memories. Not the bleachers at my underfunded public school, not the parking lot at the abandoned bowling alley in the wee hours of the morning. Not the hospice bed in my parents’ living room.

  I shook it off. That wasn’t the way things happened. There had never been any profit in wondering what might have been. People like me didn’t get to want things like Osthorne. And besides, I didn’t want it.

  I didn’t want it.

  I rolled my neck, stretched just enough to let the wound on my shoulder hit my brain with a bright flash of clarifying pain. I had a job to do.

  It was time to go to work.

  * * *

  “Ms. Torres should only be a few more minutes,” the school secretary rasped. Her voice was a sharp, painful wheeze. The nameplate on her desk read MRS. WEBB. I had a sense that I should not ask for a first name. She was one of those tiny, ancient women whose papery skin is stretched over steel scaffolding. She watched me with the cool eyes of the unimpressed. I tried not to fidget. I tried to summon the courage I imagined I’d have if this was a place I belonged. It didn’t help.

  The door to Torres’s office opened with a bang, and a tall boy with wild, dark-brown hair stormed out. His dark-blue school uniform was ill-fitting in the way of so many teenage boys—too short in the wrists, baggy through the shoulders. His blazer was wrinkled, and the angle of his gray-striped tie spoke to constant tugging. The teen paused, his eyes landing on me. He hit me with a long, intense stare, his protruding adam’s apple working up and down. I was startled by the frankness of his gaze. Then he heaved an enormous, head-shaking sigh before continuing on his way out of the office, leaving me feeling like Ophelia in her closet.

  It was totally beyond me, how a kid who’s been handed a winning lottery ticket could look so damn broke. I watched him through the safety-glass window that separated the office from the main hallway. He’d already pulled out his phone. His fingers moved over the screen with unnatural speed, and they didn’t slow down when he looked up from his phone to brood at me.

  “Is that a spell?” I asked. From just over my shoulder came a deep laugh.

  “Is what a spell? The texting? No—they’re all that fast.”

  I turned around to find Marion
Torres smiling at me. She was wearing jeans and a nice-but-not-too-nice blouse, and I felt simultaneously over- and underdressed. I’d spent hours over the weekend figuring out what to wear to a place like Osthorne. What would establish me as a professional, as someone who could solve a murder? What would keep me from sticking out like a splinter? I’d wound up digging out the clothes I’d worn to the only court case I’d ever been asked to testify in—an adultery job where the husband had followed up my findings by stabbing the wife with an ice pick. He’d cried more when I told him she was cheating than he did at the sentencing.

  Next to Torres, in my court clothes, I felt like a kid playing dress-up. A great start.

  We greeted each other: did-you-find-the-place-okay, so-glad-you-can-help-us, did-you-get-the-contract. She handed me a satisfyingly fat envelope of cash, which I didn’t count, so she’d feel like we had a good relationship from the start. I glanced back at Mrs. Webb. She was watching us with the same flat, unimpressed stare with which she’d greeted me. I was already dreading interviewing her.

  “I’m going to show Ivy the Theoretical Magic section,” Torres said. “Would you like to accompany us?”

  Mrs. Webb shook her head with a look of regret that did not extend to the uneasy creases around her mouth. “I’m afraid I’ve just got far too much to do here,” she said in that grating voice. “Perhaps another time.”

  Torres led the way out of the office. Her heels clicked on the gray linoleum tiles that floored the hallway. As we passed, I glanced back into the office through the safety-glass window. Mrs. Webb didn’t see me—her eyes were on the blank pages of a ruled notebook. She stared at the paper intently. As I watched, she lifted two fingers and pinched herself hard on the arm, hard enough to bruise. Hard enough that I winced to watch her. The older woman’s face remained still as sea glass as she squeezed at her skin. I shivered, and a whisper twined its way through my thoughts. Wake up.

  “Is she ill?” I asked, jogging to catch up with Torres’s brisk pace.