Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “You’re that detective, right?”

  It was the girl from the day before—the blonde with the study group. The in-charge girl who had managed to make Torres back off without so much as a curl of her high-gloss lip. She didn’t wait for an answer before she seated herself in the chair across from me. She crossed her legs, tossed her hair back over one shoulder as she glanced around to make sure we were alone. I wasn’t the only one performing.

  I gave her the long, suspicious look she wanted. “Maybe I am. Who’s asking?”

  She looked over her shoulders again, arching her neck. I took mental notes: long blond hair with a pyrite glint to it, cheekbones that Hollywood hopefuls would have paid for with six months’ rent money. No makeup other than the lip gloss—or if there was, I was meant to think there was none. Her uniform didn’t show the look-at-me hallmarks that I would have expected: no rolled-up skirt, no unbuttoned blouse. It struck me that this girl looked exactly like she was supposed to, which meant that she knew what people were looking for, what people would latch on to as weakness. She didn’t want anyone thinking she needed their attention, their approval. Don’t underestimate this one, I thought.

  When she looked back at me, I could see her taking her own mental notes, but her face was too still to reveal what she took my measure to be.

  “I’m Alexandria DeCambray.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in fourth period, Alexandria?”

  She smiled. “I got a hall pass for a bathroom trip. I just thought I’d drop by on my way. Are you with the ’miz?” A twinkle in her eyes—Aren’t I clever?

  I put my hand out for her. “I work for myself. Ivy Gamble, PI.” She didn’t jump at the two letters the way I’d hoped, but I thought I saw a sheen of interest in her shark eyes. “DeCambray. You’re related to Dylan, then?”

  Wrong question. She rolled her eyes, sat back in her chair. “He’s my half brother or whatever. We have the same dad. Where did you go to school?”

  A small-talk opener from the kind of kid whose family throws galas—the what-do-you-do of the wealthy academic elite. She was trying to take my measure. I raised an eyebrow and dodged the question. “Half brother? Your moms must be … different. He’s a few muffins short of a basket, huh?”

  I saw her register my evasion, but the bait was too juicy. She pounced, her eyes glinting. “Um, yeah, our moms are pretty much opposites? His mom totally ran off when he was like three or whatever? And I guess our dad had to raise him totally solo, which sounds crazy, because our dad can be like … really intense.” Something shifted in her face, a flinch—she’d said too much. She veered back on course with all the skill of a speed skater recovering her lead. “He’s a total loser freak. I mean, I don’t want to talk bad about him?” Another elaborate look around to make sure we were alone. “But he’s like, totally weird.”

  I nodded, took a note, made sure to let her see me underlining Dylan’s name. “You’ve really got your finger on the pulse here, Alex. What can you tell me about Sylvia Capley?”

  Something dark and animal slid across her face. “It’s Alexandria.”

  “What? What did I say?”

  “You called me Alex. That’s not my name. My name is Alexandria.”

  She bit off the five syllables of her name. I ducked my head, apologetic, my mistake, so sorry, won’t happen again. “Of course. Sorry about that.”

  And just like that, the noir dame was back—the girl who’d snuck across enemy lines to get me information, all-cooperative, ready to trust me with what she knew. “It’s fine. Who were you asking about?”

  I slid the staff photo of Sylvia across the table to her and threw some chum on the water. “Sylvia? Ms. Capley, your health and wellness teacher. You know. The one who was mur—er, who died.”

  I saw her catch my slip of the tongue, saw her do the math. She’d come to find out why I was here and how I could become part of her story, and there it was: murder.

  “Ohmygod yeah, Ms. Capley. It’s so sad, what happened to her.” Gears turning; something clicked into place in her mind. “I mean. She was an amazing teacher. I considered her a mentor.” Calculated tears. Just enough to make her eyes glitter, not enough to spill over and make her eyes puffy.

  “You two were close?” I had a feeling I’d be asking that question a lot.

  “I mean, not like … inappropriately close.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Was she ever inappropriately close with anyone else?”

  I watched as Alexandria weighed it for a half second—the rumors she could launch, the investigations she could kick off—before discarding it. “No, never. I mean she was totally a lesbian? Not that it matters,” she added quickly. “I mean, like, I don’t care or anything. Brea and Miranda are totally lesbians too. But it was whatever, she was dating someone anyway.”

  “That wasn’t in the ’miz report,” I said, scribbling faster than necessary on my notepad. “The dating-someone part, I mean. Not the lesbian part.” Although that hadn’t been in the report either. Obviously. Get it together, Ivy. “Do you know who she was dating?”

  Footsteps in the hallway; Alexandria slid up out of the chair. “Yeah, I do. But I have to go before someone sees me.” She picked up one of my business cards from the table, suddenly overcome by the need to be a responsible member of the Osthorne student body. She whispered urgently. “It was supposed to be some big secret who she was dating. I don’t want to say here. Can I come to your office?”

  I whispered back, spooling out the intrigue. “My office? No—no, you might be seen coming to Oakland. I’ll tell you what—I’m staying on campus. You know where the good places are to meet without being noticed, right? We can have a cup of coffee, talk somewhere private.” It didn’t make a goddamn lick of sense. The chances of her being spotted on or near campus were about a billion times higher than the chances of anyone seeing her in Oakland. But she must have figured that the odds worked in her favor, because she grabbed the chance to be in charge of our meeting.

  “I’ll text you,” she said, tucking the card into her blazer pocket.

  “Wait—” I caught her attention, letting a thin thread of urgency into the conversation. “Before you go. Is there anything else I need to know about Ms. Capley?”

  She looked me up and down with a devastatingly quick flick of her eyes. In a millimeter of pupil movement, I’d been evaluated, quantified, categorized, and dismissed. “She was weak,” she whispered in a voice devoid of cruelty. She left without a glance back to make sure I was watching her go.

  I took some of the notes I hadn’t wanted her to see me taking—notes on her, what she really knew, what I thought she was lying about. I caught myself before I could finish writing “shark eyes.” I stayed in the library, let myself be seen during the passing period. Then, when the tardy bell for fifth period had rung and the hallways had emptied again, I tucked the notepad into my jacket, leaving the rest of my set decoration behind, and went to see if there was free coffee in the teachers’ lounge.

  I found it without too much trouble—it was in the same hallway as the library, thank God. Tall tables lined with stools, a few couches in front of a decent-sized wall-mounted television. Two big refrigerators. A wall of mailbox cubbies. A true teachers’ lounge, not the lounge-slash-copy-room-slash-mail-room of my public high school. A tall guy sat on the couch. I could only see the back of his head, thick dark hair and headphones. I heard the shuffle of papers, the quick scratch of a pen. Grading papers, then.

  The coffeemaker stood in the corner, one of those fancy space-age deals with the pods. It looked straightforward from a distance, but after a few minutes pressing buttons and tugging on levers, I still hadn’t figured out how to get the top to open so I could put the pod in. Ivy Gamble, Ace Detective.

  Just when I was about to give up and go back to the library in a dire state of caffeine deprivation, a throat cleared behind me.

  “Can I give you a hand with that?”

  It was the guy from the couch. I lo
oked up at him. And up, and up. He just seemed to keep going. “Oh, god, please yes.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “I really need the caffeine.”

  He nodded at my visitor’s badge as he popped the machine open by pulling a lever I could swear I’d pulled on nine or ten times already. “You’re the detective, right? Ivy? The staff got a note that you’d be around. You’re here about what happened to Sylvia.”

  “That’s me,” I answered. “How did you get that open? I was trying for ages, and—”

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s easy—you just have to cast an unsealing charm while you pull on this lever. We have to keep it locked, or the kids will sneak in here to steal coffee before first period.” He popped my pod into the machine and pressed a button that made the whole thing purr like a saber-tooth tiger. Double vision: an Ivy who knew what he was talking about, and an Ivy who didn’t.

  Another threshold, right then, and I decided which Ivy to be. I made a choice, one I made in case I needed more credibility, in case I needed him to trust me in ways that he might not otherwise.

  It was a professional decision. This was a job, and I had a deliverable to pursue. By any means necessary.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “An unsealing charm. Of course.” I laughed, and my laugh wasn’t awkward, and it wasn’t hesitant. It was self-deprecating and charming and easy, so easy. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a school. It didn’t even occur to me that I might need to use one of those on the coffeemaker.” He grinned at me—what a strange world us teachers inhabit, of course—and I smiled back, leaning against the counter as the coffeemaker hummed. “Are you a teacher here?”

  “I teach physical magic,” he answered.

  “Oh! You’re…” I reached into the depths of my memory, bumping against that lingering headache on the way. I could remember his alibi—he’d been in urgent care for dehydration resulting from some kind of food poisoning. He’d been one of the five teachers absent from school grounds on the day of the murder, and he’d even provided his insurance paperwork as evidence. His interview answers in the transcript had been direct, if a touch impatient. His name finally floated to the surface of my memory after an embarrassingly long time. “Rahul, right? Sha … crap, I swear I knew your last name.”

  “Chaudhary,” he laughed. “But please call me Rahul? I always feel weird when an adult calls me the same thing that my fourteen-year-old students do.”

  Is this guy flirting with me? I wasn’t used to being around friendly men—most of the guys I met were jealous of their wives, or were angry that I‘d exposed their fraud, or were trying to dodge a bill. I didn’t like this, the way I felt slow and clumsy. I reminded myself what I was there to do. But if he was flirting with me, he would probably slip up and tell me things, right? It couldn’t hurt to go with it.

  I added half a packet of fake sugar to my coffee and decided to press the advantage. “Mind if I join you here for a few minutes? I need to get out of that library. It’s like a peach pit in there.”

  He gestured grandly to the couch. “Of course. And I know what you mean about the library.”

  I blinked at him. I hadn’t even known what I meant. I shifted his stack of graded papers to the little coffee table in front of the couch. The top one was marked by a blue “B+” with a smiley face next to it. “Really?” I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous.

  “Yeah,” he said as he folded his mile-long legs to sit next to me. “Totally. Ever since Sylvia’s body was found, it’s kind of hard to get kids to go in there. Well, except Dylan.” He rolled his eyes. “But nobody wants to go in there for educational purposes. They think it’s haunted, what with the books and all. You’ve heard the books, right?”

  I suppressed a shudder. “Yeah, I’ve heard the books. But, about the students—I saw a group of girls in there just the other day.”

  Rahul shook his head. “Was it Alexandria DeCambray and her group?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “They were in there on a bet. They took a video of themselves walking through the stacks and posted it online this morning.”

  I crinkled my nose. “A bet? That doesn’t really seem like Alexandria’s style.”

  “No? This morning, the entire prom committee stepped down and was replaced by those four girls,” he said. “When Alexandria plays, she plays to win.”

  “Wow. You’ve got the inside scoop, huh?”

  “I only know about it because I’m the staff facilitator for prom this year. Prom was kind of Sylvia’s thing. After she died, no one else wanted to take it on. But I thought the kids kind of needed it, you know? They need that normal thing.”

  “Yeah, yikes.” We shared the awkward silence that comes from small talk gone sad. It was a silence I experienced whenever a new person found out that my mother was dead. “So,” I said in too-bright voice, trying to rescue us both, “physical magic, huh?”

  “That’s my jam,” he said.

  “What made you decide on that?” I pretended that I wasn’t pretending. I pretended that I knew what physical magic was, that I knew how it worked, that I had a reason to ask my question. And whoever I was pretending to be … Rahul liked her. His face lit up, his warm brown eyes crinkling.

  “Well, it’s just so … awesome, right? I mean, for most kids, the first time they do magic, it’s physical magic. Like, maybe they accidentally turned their hair blue, or they grew their poodle three sizes. So they’re already pumped about it, and then I get to teach them that there’s so much more.”

  I nodded like I knew exactly what he was talking about. I remembered another one of Tabitha’s first times doing accidental magic, which was nothing like what he was describing. She’d turned all the water in our community swimming pool into sparks. So much more, indeed.

  “It’s such a trustworthy kind of magic, too, you know?” He leaned toward me, bright with enthusiasm. “It’s not like metaphysical, where you’re turning something into something else. It’s just … making things a little different. Like—can I show you my favorite thing?”

  I nodded without having a clue what he was going to do. He reached forward and touched a scar on my arm, a half-inch-long one that I’d had since an unfortunate tangle with my first training-wheel-free bike. Under his fingertip, it shivered silver like a thread of mercury. My breath caught. I’d never let Tabitha try to do anything like that to me—I’d screamed at her like a banshee the one time she came for my hair with a detangling spell.

  “Wow,” I breathed, then realized how wide-eyed that sounded. “Wow, I forgot I even had that scar.” It was a bad cover, but when I looked up, it didn’t seem like he’d noticed.

  I couldn’t tell if I liked what he’d done or not—my heart was pounding with some combination of excitement and disgust and shame and heat. He sat back with a smile, and my scar went back to its normal pale pink.

  “See what I mean? It’s not metaphysical. It’s exactly what it is. But it’s also more. I guess I just like things to be more of what they are,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and giving me a bashful half smile. “More or less.”

  * * *

  I got back to the library five minutes before the final bell. It was just enough time to gather my props, which were in abject disarray: someone had been investigating me. I started sweeping my scattered business cards into a pile, ignoring my phone buzzing in my pocket. It would be Tabitha, sending me the address of the bar I was supposed to meet her at. Part of me had wanted to invite her back to my bare little apartment in staff housing—me and her and a bottle of wine. I imagined us with our feet tucked up on the couch, leaning toward each other, smiling, laughing about things we’d forgotten. But it was a best-friend tableau I’d never actually experienced. Not with a real best friend, and certainly not with Tabitha. I hadn’t been alone with my sister since high school. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to be friends with her. I tried to imagine it: Drinks after work, dinners on the weekends. Visiting our mother’s grave toge
ther.

  But we didn’t have that. We had silent Christmases and smiles that were just for photographs. We had the crushing weight of things that had gone unsaid for so long that they’d calcified between us. Walls too high to ever turn into bridges. An actual friendship with her would be—

  The tracks evaporated from under my train of thought. I froze in the middle of stacking glossy photos. There was a something tucked under the top page of my legal pad. I lifted the corner of the page—a piece of paper was hidden there, folded into an elaborate star.

  I looked around without picking it up. I couldn’t see anyone else in the library, although I thought I heard a sharp increase in the whispering from the roped-off Theoretical Magic section. I suppressed a shiver and swept everything from the study table into my bag. I needed to get the hell out of that place.

  Once I’d made it to my car, I dug through the debris, letting the bogus photos crumple against each other. It was stuffy, hot, but I didn’t want to turn on the air conditioning, not yet. It felt like the whispers from the library had woven through the pit of my stomach, and they wouldn’t quiet until I’d unfolded that star, read the note I’d been left.

  Tracing my fingers along the seams at the bottom of my bag, I finally found it.

  It was made from lined paper, torn out of a notebook, the perforated edge carefully trimmed. Two sentences were written in a bubbly print in unsmudged pen, right in the heart of the star.

  She’s not who you think she is. Watch out.

  As I read them the words ran like watercolors, the dark blue ink growing thin and spreading to the edges of the page. The pigment sank into the paper and then faded, taking the light notebook-paper lines with it. I stared at the wide stretch of white nothing on the page. I realized that I had no scale for how weird this actually was, in a world where scars can turn to silver and sparks can fly between the palms of a fourteen-year-old kid. I was in so far over my head that I didn’t know which way was up anymore.

  “Shit,” I said, turning the car on without looking at the address Tabitha had sent. I didn’t care if I drove twenty miles in the wrong direction—I needed to get off that campus, far from the library and the bloodstains and the graffiti that wouldn’t scrape away. “Shit.” I pulled out of the Osthorne parking lot with my eyes on my rearview mirror, unable to shake the feeling that someone was standing behind one of those leaded-glass windows, watching me go.