Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  When I stepped out into the parking lot, most of the clouds that had been bruising the sky all day had clotted near the horizon, and there was just enough sun shining to make me squint. I found a reusable grocery bag in the trunk of my car—one that I’d bought in a fit of good intentions but had never actually used. I emptied my jacket into it, filling it to the brim with paper stars. I carefully folded the jacket so that the high school hallway grime was facing in, and put it gingerly on top of the stars in the bag. I started toward home.

  Not home. I didn’t live there. This wasn’t home. This was just a case. It wasn’t my apartment. It wasn’t my place.

  But it was home for the time being. It was okay to think of it that way. Just for a little while.

  I flickered between self-reproach and luxuriant basking as I walked. I should have told Rahul that I wasn’t magic—but then, it was better for the case if nobody knew. They would talk to me differently if they realized I was an outsider. It wasn’t because I wanted him to like me—it was just for the case. For the job.

  Still. I’d asked if he was flirting, and he’d said maybe I am as if it were a delightful surprise he’d uncovered. I tried not to let it charm me, but I caught myself smiling. It was nice, being flirted with. I bit my lip hard and tried to shake off the giddiness. It didn’t belong to me. It belonged to whoever he thought he was flirting with, whoever I was letting him think I was.

  I tried to shake it off. But I didn’t try very hard.

  As I approached my front door, my phone buzzed again. I pulled it out of my pocket, brushing off some of the sub-locker gunk, and unlocked it on the first try. There were four messages from a subcontractor updating me on a case, and one from a number I didn’t recognize. I ignored the subcontractor to open the mystery text.

  It was a photo. A candid shot, blurry with rain, taken from across a decently lit street. Me and Tabitha. In the picture, we were sitting outside the hipster bar, and she was looking right at the camera. She looked angry. Not startled or curious—just pissed, like the photographer had caught her at a bad time. I was drinking my water, not looking at my sister.

  I studied the picture. I should have been looking for clues as to who took it, why, what they wanted when they sent it to me. Instead, I studied the two of us. The way we leaned slightly away from each other at the shoulders. The way we both sat with one foot tucked under the other—her, right over left. Me, left over right. Mirror images. I zoomed in a bit, and the photo got grainy, but it was clear enough for me to see that her eyes looked different in the picture than they had in person.

  They looked just like mine.

  I went over that night in my head, but I couldn’t remember a single second when she’d dropped whatever the spell was that made her look like more than me. I couldn’t recall seeing it flicker. So when had she let it go? And why? Who was she doing it for?

  Once I was inside with the door firmly locked behind me, I sent a response to the unknown number. Who is this?

  I left my phone on the kitchen counter and headed for the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, ran wet hands through my hair. Considered filling the sink with water and dunking my head in. I braced myself on the sink, avoiding the mirror as I tried to get my head straight.

  Truth matters. Truth has always been the thing I’m after, the most important thing. But sometimes, to get to the truth, detours through fiction are necessary. That’s the job. Osthorne was a big case—a career-changing one with real consequences. I would do whatever it took to solve it.

  I left the bathroom, my face still dripping. I stared into the empty bedroom. The stripped mattress was still off-center. I looked at the bare walls, which were painted a washed-out kind of tan.

  I couldn’t sleep in there. It was too hollow. It was too familiar. There was pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and then there was sleeping alone in a bed that didn’t belong to me, and the gap between the two was too wide for me to jump.

  But just because I wasn’t sleeping in there didn’t mean the space couldn’t be useful.

  I left the doorway to get the bag of paper stars. When I returned and stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the room had been waiting for me. The whole apartment had been waiting for me. All day, while I’d been gone, it had been waiting to welcome me back.

  I shut the bedroom door behind me, and I left my double vision behind. There was clarity in here. Something in the emptiness brought me back to myself. I upended the bag over the bed, scattering paper stars across the mattress. As I got to work, I felt myself fully exhale for the first time that day.

  I was home.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT, I’d made my way through half a bottle of wine and opened all of the star-shaped notes. I took a photo of each one as soon as I opened it, but, fortunately, none of them dissolved the way that first one had. Apparently these were made to last.

  They were love notes, for the most part. I tacked them up on the bedroom wall in no particular order. They were written in the same bubbling hand as the warning and the note from the library—when I noticed, I pulled a marker out of my bag and started circling handwriting flourishes in case I needed to spot them later. The way the letter a was written like typeface, the way the author didn’t close their capital Bs at the bottom, the weird and regular misspelling of “were” as “where.” There was never a name mentioned anywhere—never a “Dear [Murderer’s Name]” or a “Love, [I Know Who the Murderer Is]”—but there was a lot there. A lot of words. I resolved to read them in depth later, when I could focus. When there wasn’t wine in between me and the letters.

  The notes papered a full wall of the bedroom. I sat in the middle of the bare, off-center mattress, staring at the words. I let my eyes unfocus just enough that the written lines formed uneven, abstract shapes. Or were they abstract? The longer I looked at them, the more it seemed like there was something beneath the words, something shifting, something that was just beyond my grasp. If I could only look at it the right way, I could—

  But I couldn’t. It would always be just beyond me. The longer I stayed in that room, the farther the other possible Ivy seemed to drift. The more ridiculous it seemed that I was letting myself sink into that life. I wasn’t magic, and I never would be. The best I could hope for was a passing glimpse of a world that would be polite to me but that would never want me.

  I didn’t want that world to want me. I just wanted to solve the case. I just wanted to be a good detective who could solve a murder, and the answers were there, they were all right there in front of me, if I could just be good enough to see them.

  I slid from the mattress to the floor, leaned my back against the bed frame, slumped low enough that my spine ached. I let my eyes unfocus again, and I stared at the words on the wall. Lightning. River deltas. Continents. Marshland as viewed from the window of a plane. Rows and rows of books, so many books, and whispers just beyond the edge of my hearing, saying my name over and over again, Gamble gamble gamble gamble—

  I startled awake as my wineglass started to tip out of my hand. “Fuck,” I muttered—I’d drifted off, and I’d been dreaming, and there had been an answer on the periphery of the dream, but it was gone. And so was half my glass of wine, sacrificed to the thick nap of the carpet. “Fuck,” I said again, louder this time as the situation came into focus.

  I scrambled up and grabbed a towel out of the bathroom. By the time I was on my hands and knees pressing the towel into the spreading wine stain, I’d completely lost the thread of my dream. All I could remember was that it had been … important.

  I lifted the towel to check on the carpet. Most of the stain was gone, but there was still a faint pink hue to the fibers. I refolded the towel and pressed down like I was performing CPR, trying to soak up the stain, hoping I wouldn’t have to go out and buy some kind of carpet cleaner—and something caught my eye.

  I don’t know how I saw it. I shouldn’t have been able to see it, not
from my angle. I’ve thought about it a thousand times since—there’s no way a shadow under the bed should have grabbed my attention. But it did, and I looked again. I bent, leaning my weight on my elbows on that poor wine-soaked towel, my heart fluttering in that looking-under-the-bed way that calls back to childhood certainty about where monsters and murderers will hide.

  I shouldn’t have been able to see it. I had to reach far enough that my fingertips only just caught the far end of the little book.

  When I got it into the light, I forgot the spilled wine. It was a journal, bound in soft, mottled black leather. The surface was covered with the kind of pockmarks and scuffs that come with real age and not a factory stamp. I ruffled the uneven pages, which were swollen and creased with use. There were no initials on the inside cover, no “This book belongs to” inset. But the pages were filled, cover to cover, with tight scribbles. There were a few different pens, and as I leafed from the first page to the last, I saw that the dates of the entries were spread over nearly eight years.

  I should say that my first thought was that this was a major clue. It had to be Sylvia’s diary, or at the very least her datebook. I should say that my first thought was how the journal would give me insights about the dead woman whose apartment I was squatting in. But the truth is that the moment I saw the symbols written in that journal—some of which I recognized from high school chemistry classes, and some I couldn’t begin to comprehend—I just … wanted it. I wanted it more than anything.

  It didn’t occur to me in that moment that it was hers. I’d found it, and in that moment, it was mine.

  And then, when I noticed Sylvia’s name on one of the back pages, my immediate possessiveness was justified. It was evidence. It was a clue. I couldn’t give up a clue.

  I tossed the towel through the open bedroom door and across the hall. It landed on the bathroom floor with a wet-fabric noise. I didn’t bother looking at the carpet where it had been sitting. Instead, I leaned back against the mattress, and I opened the journal, and I began to read.

  * * *

  When I woke late the next morning, my skin was prickling. I was still slumped against the mattress, and my ass was half-numb from sitting on the floor for so long. The journal was still open to the page I’d been reading when I dozed off, an entry from a few years before. The top half of the page was nearly black with dense lines of symbols, arrows pointing between what looked like equations, cross-written numbers that could have meant anything. It all looked like the scribblings of a lunatic. But the bottom half of the page was devoted to a totally lucid journal entry. I read it as I made coffee, holding the journal in one hand and spilling water on the counter with the other.

  The journal was strange. About halfway through reading it, I began to wonder who it was really about. Some entries were clearly that of a teacher at the school, referencing meetings and parent-teacher conferences and stress about grading. Mostly, though, the journal was full of an obsession over a single spell. The one that they were trying to work out at the top of that page, maybe. The entry had started out as a reflection on the process of putting the magic together—I’ve tried looking at it as glass lightning, and that didn’t work. I took a blood-as-sand approach, but the light levels wouldn’t support it. I’m starting to think it would be better served by a sponge-made-of-slowly-growing-roots perspective—but by the end of the page, their reflection had devolved into a case study of academic insecurity. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a staring contest with failure, and if I blink, I’ll die. If I stop for even a second to consider that I might not be as good as they think I am, the oxygen will get sucked out of the room and I’ll suffocate.

  The pressure the author described sounded maddening. I was only about a quarter of the way into the journal, but I could already see them spiraling. Trying to be the good-enough, smart-enough, clever-enough kind of person who deserved to be at Osthorne. The kind of person who might experiment with theoretical magic they weren’t ready for—the kind of person who might screw up and find themself split in half in the middle of the library. I wondered if the NMIS was really that far off-base about how Sylvia had lost her life.

  My phone buzzed with a reminder—time to get to work, Ivy. I downed the last of my coffee and, after a moment of indecision, put the journal in the bedroom.

  I tilted my head, trying to see the pattern in the letters again, the one I’d half dreamed when I’d been staining the carpet with wine the night before. It was on the tip of my tongue, in the corner of my eye, like an overheard conversation where the sounds are clear but the words aren’t, and if I could just—

  My phone buzzed in my hand. A number I didn’t recognize lit up the screen, and I almost didn’t answer. Strange phone numbers had been too big a factor in the previous few days. But I caught myself before that brief flush of cowardice could make me let the call go to voicemail.

  “Ivy Gamble?” The voice on the other end was loaded with the patient exhaustion of someone who worked in customer service. “I’m calling regarding your request for documentation in the matter of the death of Capley comma Sylvia.”

  The ’miz. “Yes, hi, thank you,” I said brightly, hoping that if I sounded polite and optimistic enough, they might actually help me.

  “At this time,” they continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “the locational data of the medical file requested has been erroneously allocated. We are taking steps to process a location analysis report and should have an update available to you within the next six to twelve weeks.”

  I digested the bureaucratic doublespeak for a minute, then swore. “You lost it?”

  A long, stern pause. “We should have an update available to you within the next six to twelve weeks regarding the status of the location analysis report request. Have a nice—”

  And before they could tell me what nice thing I was supposed to have, they’d hung up.

  “They lost it,” I breathed, staring at the call ended time stamp screen on my phone. “Great job, ’miz. This case is falling together like a fucking dream.” I squinted at the letters pinned to the wall, glaring as if they were responsible for the missing file. I was angrier than I should have been. I was missing something.

  I turned to leave the bedroom, with the bare mattress and the journal and the letters on the wall and the wine in the carpet. It was harder than it should have been, turning my back on those letters. I shut the door behind me, and as the latch clicked, I stepped back into the person I’d been the day before. The version of Ivy who laughed and flirted and belonged here.

  The version of Ivy who could solve this case.

  * * *

  I walked through the empty halls as the Osthorne student body settled into their first-period classes. I peeked into classrooms, catching glimpses of the ordinary. I let myself slip deeper into a sense of nonexistent nostalgia: Ah, yes, I remember what it was like. A sense of fondness stole over me, and it was like drifting to the bottom of a cool, deep ocean.

  As I walked through the hall to the library, I paused to look at the bank of lockers. I remembered them flashing brown as Rahul tripped over his own two feet, and a trail of warmth started to spread up my neck. But there had been something more important here—the notes.

  I glanced around before getting down on my hands and knees again to look underneath the lockers. This time, I pulled out my key chain and turned on the tiny flashlight I kept there, sweeping the beam back and forth. A few many-legged shapes scuttled out of the path of the light. They ran over coins, dust bunnies, a few pieces of gum. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—more notes? A signed confession? As I swept the flashlight back and forth, I started to notice movement following the light. At first I thought it was an enterprising spider. Then—

  I moved the beam slowly, as slowly as I could, from left to right. Letters fleetingly fluoresced as the flashlight beam passed over them, fading again after a second or so. They were written on the wall behind the locker, near the place where my phone had caught on the p
aper that hid the flood of love notes. I read the letters several times to make sure I had it right. Then, I went into the library to set up my tableau and prepare to interview Osthorne staff. As I spread myself out, I tried the words out in my head.

  “All that’s gold does not glitter.”

  It seemed like the kind of thing that a kid would think was super-deep, would want to get tattooed on themselves. It was important enough to someone that they set up some kind of a spell to keep it near their love letters—but they went to all that trouble, and kept it hidden under a bank of lockers with the spiders and the gum.

  I pushed aside the bitterness that, yet again, these kids used their magic for such trivial shit. I pushed it aside, because really, I was being shortsighted. It wasn’t trivial to them. It was worth all the trouble.

  My note-sender was someone who loved a good secret.

  As I straightened, my phone buzzed. It was a multimedia message from an unknown number. I had an urgent flush of adrenaline, wondering if it would be another melodramatic warning from my note-sender.

  When I opened it, laughter bubbled up out of my belly uninvited. It was a selfie of Rahul, holding an empty pizza box and making an elaborate pouty-face. The text read I was going to have leftovers for dinner, but my roommate ate them all.

  I laughed at the thought of him taking that picture at home and then saving it all morning so he could send it to me. I workshopped my response for an embarrassingly long time before I texted him back: I guess you’ll just have to cook?

  The response came immediately. Actually, I was thinking of going out … but the place I wanted to try only accepts reservations for two. A giggle bubbled out of me, taking me completely by surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d giggled. But it was easy, somehow, when I was pretending to be the kind of person who could feel that ocean-bottom fondness for a place like this.