Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Did he pressure you? To get rid of the baby?”

  Her eyes shifted from the shelves to the carpet to my knees, like she couldn’t figure out where to look. “No, not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He told me that he would support me no matter what, and that it was my decision. And he totally meant it, okay? Like, if I said I wanted to keep it and get married, he would have. But … I couldn’t do that to him. He’s got a lot of responsibility, with the Prophecy and everything. He’s the Chosen One, you know? You can’t be the Chosen One if you have a baby before you even graduate high school.”

  I shook my head. “Of course you can.”

  She just rolled her eyes, okay whatever, very inspirational. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep it even if he’d asked me to. My parents would…” Courtney trailed off, her eyes on the bloodstain in the carpet. She took a deep breath, forced her eyes back to me. “And I couldn’t go to a clinic. I couldn’t afford it, even if my dad didn’t know every other doctor in the state. So I went to Miss Capley. She usually has—had—everything that anyone needed, in terms of like, birth control and stuff. So we figured she could probably help out with this, too. Dylan wanted to come with me to get the pills, but then Miss Capley said nobody could come in with me.”

  “Pills?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You said you went to get pills from Miss Capley. I thought it was a potion?”

  “I didn’t say pills,” she said. “I said potions. Dylan wanted to come with me to get the potions.”

  I took a mental snapshot of the moment, then let it go. I leaned against a shelf and felt the rustle of a book against my sleeve. “Okay, so you got the potions from Capley. Then what?”

  “I took the first one, like she said, and then I took the second one and I started … you know. Bleeding. I stayed home from school for a few days. It was like a really heavy period but then I felt dizzy and nauseous and I had strong cramps.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “‘Strong cramps’?”

  Courtney nodded. “But I took some Tylenol and that helped. And then it was over and I came back to school, and the next day Miss Capley was—um.” Her eyes fell on the bloodstain that bridged the aisle. “The next day, she died,” she whispered.

  “So she gave you the potions on the first day of school, and then you missed a few days and came back for the welcome feast, and then she was dead?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her eyes still on the bloodstain.

  “And she gave it to you without an argument or anything? Just handed it over.”

  “I mean, she wasn’t excited about it, but it’s not like it was a huge deal,” Courtney said. “She probably did that kind of thing all the time.”

  “Okay,” I said. “One last question.” She huffed out a breath and shifted her weight, one hip jutting out. “Do your friends know about all this?”

  Her face went still. “Only Alexandria,” she murmured. “She figured out that I was—um, that I was pregnant. She didn’t know it was Dylan’s. Doesn’t know.” She didn’t say Don’t tell her, please don’t tell her, oh god anything but that. But then, she didn’t have to.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind if I have to ask her more questions.”

  We stared at each other as Courtney tried to decide if I was threatening her or comforting her. She looked like a trapped cat that hasn’t decided if it should try to dart between your feet or launch itself at your face. A bell rang—it was muffled behind the hiss of the books, but we both heard it. She picked up her book bag and threw it over one shoulder, giving me a hard look. “I have to get to class. You already made me miss algebra.”

  “Wait, Courtney. Just one more thing?” She stopped, one hand on her hip, and gave me an I’m-waiting look. “Do you ever feel afraid of Dylan?”

  She blinked at me, thought it over. I wondered if there was a possible situation, in any universe, when someone having to stop and think about that sort of question would indicate a good answer.

  “He’s going to be the most powerful mage in the world,” she said. “Of course I’m afraid sometimes. But he would never hurt me. At least, not on purpose.”

  She hiked her bag up on her shoulder and stalked out of the aisle without another word. I stared at the place where she’d been standing, six inches from the end of the dark brown bloodstain that marked the place where Sylvia Capley had died.

  “Shit,” I muttered, pulling out my phone. I didn’t want to be right. That’s the worst kind of hunch, the kind that comes with a knot of dread. A quick web search unspooled that knot of dread, and I closed my eyes for a moment, hoping that when I opened them, the text on the screen would be different.

  But, of course, it wasn’t different. It was right there on the Planned Parenthood website: what to expect after a medical abortion. It sounded exactly like the lines Courtney had fed me, down to the way she’d slipped up and said “pills” instead of “potions.”

  She was lying. And she wasn’t just lying in the moment—she had that explanation handy. She had looked it up ahead of time, if not for me then for someone else. She’d found a plausible story, she’d memorized the symptoms that would fit, and she’d tried to get me to buy it.

  “What are you hiding, Courtney?” I whispered it to myself, and the books seemed like they were trying to answer—but their answer was incomprehensible. I chewed the inside of my cheek and ran a finger along the cover of What Plants Know: A Theory of Horticultural Alchemy. I could feel the leather buzzing. “What did you do?”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  I STAYED IN THE STACKS for a long time after Courtney left. I sat in the shadow of the shelves and stared at the carpet, letting everything sift through my brain. The books settled down so long as I stayed quiet—they whispered occasionally, the soft flutter of sleeping birds resettling their wings. It was nearly peaceful, if I didn’t let my eyes wander too near that huge, dark bloodstain. I traced fingers along their spines, feeling them shiver as they talked to each other in that indecipherable static.

  “What did you see?” I whispered. “What happened to you?”

  For a few seconds, all of the books went dead silent. I caught my breath. I wondered if maybe, possibly, they were going to answer me. If maybe there was something about me that the books knew, something I didn’t know, something that would make it so that I could be a recipient of their secrets. Could it be that easy?

  But then they erupted into more noise, so loud that I flinched away from the shelf that I’d been unconsciously leaning my ear toward. I darted out from between the rows as quickly as I could go without running, the books hissing louder and louder behind me.

  GambleGambleGambleWeKnowYouGambleDidYouGambleAreYou

  I paused by the end of the stacks and listened to the books seethe with my name. I pressed my hand to my navel and made myself take slow, deep breaths, feeling the way my belly pushed against my palm with each inhalation. I made myself breathe through the panic as I listened to the rise and fall of the whispers coming from the Theoretical Magic section. It was a trick I hadn’t used in years—a trick my high school guidance counselor had taught me when I told her that I got so angry that I wanted to throw up. She’d taught me how to find my way through what I thought was anger. It took me years to realize that she was actually teaching me how to find my way through fear.

  I headed for the hallway when I could breathe again. I hated that fear. I hadn’t felt it in so long. I hadn’t felt it when I’d moved out of my parents’ house to live on my own for the first time with no job and no degree. I hadn’t felt it when my first client had pulled a gun on me. I hadn’t even felt it a few days before, when that mugger ran at me with his knife pointed at my throat—but here, in the presence of magic?

  I was back to being seventeen again, hyperventilating because everything was just Too Much.

  I had my hand on the doorknob and was trying to decide how I could get out of t
hat place without talking to anyone when I heard footsteps behind me. I whipped around, my heart pounding again already.

  “Wait!” Rahul staggered out from behind the returns desk, peeking over the top of a tall stack of wilting magazines. “Can you hold the door?”

  I propped the door open with my foot and shoved everything that had happened that day into the brick-lined oubliette where I’d been tossing the rest of my feelings about this case. It took a little work to press everything down into there, but I managed it. So I was able to stop myself from asking how long he’d been there, whether he’d seen my panic. I pulled it together, slipped into the skin I’d worn for him before, the Ivy that never was.

  I became her, and she smiled at him.

  “Doing some light reading?” I said, relieving him of the top half of the stack.

  “Oh, god, thank you for taking those.” Rahul sighed. I booted the door open and walked beside him as he headed for his classroom. “And, you sort of made a pun but you didn’t know it. And I don’t really know how to reverse-engineer a pun. But, yeah, ‘light reading.’ My seniors are working on color theory.”

  I wrinkled my nose. I couldn’t remember another time in my life when I’d wrinkled my nose to show that I was confused, but there I was, making a cute face at Rahul. “Color theory? Isn’t that kind of basic?”

  He looked at me askance. “Uh, no. It’s really advanced. You have to change the property of the interaction of light with the molecules in the—” I rolled my eyes at him, and he laughed. “Okay, fair enough. You don’t need to hear the whole lecture. But no, it’s not usually in the 101 courses here. Were you in advanced classes in high school or something?”

  “Wait, so what do the magazines have to do with the properties of light?” My dodge was graceless, but the redirect still worked beautifully.

  “It’s the properties of the interaction of light, you can’t actually change the properties of light itself. Or, well. I don’t think you can. Tabitha might tell you something different.” He gave a little half shrug as he used one elbow to shove on the handle of his classroom door, then held it open by standing in the doorway so I could squeeze by. I stopped as I passed in front of him, and for those two heartbeats, I forgot all about the secrets I’d found in the library and the horror of those books hissing my name. We were so close that I could see the end-of-the-day stubble coming in on Rahul’s jaw. I wondered how it would feel against the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. Then I wondered how it would feel against the soft skin on the inside of my thigh.

  And then a third heartbeat, and I was past him. I dropped the magazines on his desk and shook out my arms.

  “Okay, so the properties of the interaction with light, then,” I said, flipping open a battered old copy of a car-enthusiast magazine so I didn’t have to make eye contact.

  Rahul dropped his stack of magazines beside mine and started sorting them into piles. “The assignment is to pick out an ad or a photo spread and make it into a color negative of itself.” I caught on to how he was sorting the magazines—by the dominant colors on the cover—and started sorting my own stack into his piles. He paused, watching me, then nodded. He didn’t say anything to confirm that I was doing it right; he just accepted that we were on the same page. He trusted that I knew enough to be there.

  “What do you mean by ‘a color negative’?” I asked. “Doesn’t a negative have to be black and white?”

  “That’s the fun part,” he said. “The kids have to figure out what the opposite colors are in the picture, and then they have to figure out how to reverse them. That means they have to understand color theory, and the physics of light, and abstract pigmentalia, and focused applications of all of that stuff. It’s a whole project. It’ll last them about a month, and we’ll wrap right before Spring Break so they don’t have time to get antsy.” He opened a copy of a nature magazine to a photo spread featuring a huge owl. It was a classic, big spectacle eyes and tufty horn-looking things. In the photo, it was in flight, clutching a doomed rodent in one set of talons.

  Rahul glanced at me, which I probably wasn’t supposed to notice. Then he placed his finger in the center of the owl’s forehead. Slowly, like ink bleeding into water, the colors on the page began to shift. After thirty seconds, it was completely different—the browns had turned blue, and the yellows were purple, and I should have felt like my eyes were bleeding but the effect was actually kind of pretty. I leaned in closer and saw that every feather was shaded a slightly different color; he’d even maintained the little drop of blood that welled up under the owl’s talons.

  “A color negative,” I murmured, tracing a fingertip over the owl’s wing. “Okay. Cool.”

  “Yeah,” Rahul said. I looked up and realized I’d leaned so close to him that we were nearly cheek to cheek. I felt myself flush as he grinned at me, his eyes flicking across my face. I saw him notice me biting my lip. “It’s really cool.”

  I opened my mouth to say something that was going to be clever and charming and was certainly not just going to be me saying “cool” again like a trained cockatiel. But before I could say anything, the door to his classroom burst open. We startled away from each other as though we’d been doing what I can safely say we’d both been thinking of doing—as though it had been more than just magazines spread across that huge desk of his.

  Alexandria DeCambray was framed in the doorway, one arm bracing the door open. There was no sunlight in the hallway or in the classroom, but her sun-blond hair glimmered regardless. She glanced around the room, her eyes barely landing on either of us.

  “Can I help you with something, Alex?” Rahul said.

  “It’s Alexandria,” she snapped, and I flinched as a wave of shame and fear battered me. “And no, I was just looking for Dylan. Have either of you seen him?”

  “Mmmmmno,” Rahul said. “But if I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

  “Don’t bother,” Alexandria said, every line of her face taut with irritation. “I’ll find them eventually.” She finally looked at Rahul, and on the way to him, her eyes snagged on me.

  “Who else are you looking for?” I asked. She gave me a tight little fuck-off curl of the lip and left without answering me.

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “What was that?”

  “Yeah, she’s intense. You have no idea,” Rahul said. “Both of them are.”

  “What’s the story there?” I asked, raising my eyebrows, but he just shook his head.

  “No story. There never is a story with her. I mean—it always seems like there could be a story, but she does damage control better than anyone I’ve ever seen. The hurricane always just misses her.” His brow furrowed. “Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she always seems to be right in the eye of the hurricane. Which I guess would make Dylan the hurricane.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I went back to sorting magazines and hoped our hands might brush together again. They did, enough times that I wondered if maybe he was going out of his way to grab magazines that were closest to me.

  “You heard about the graffiti thing, right?”

  “Yeah, poor Samantha,” I said.

  “I mean, yeah, poor Samantha, but that’s not the part of it that’s stuck with me.” He shook his head again. “They wanted me to try to fix the lockers, so I got a close-up view of the magic involved there. It’s some of the most advanced spellcraft I’ve seen in a long time. And there’s no way to prove that Alexandria’s the one who did it, but we all know that it was her. They had a falling-out. With extreme prejudice.”

  “Is that how she can do that, uh. That thing?” I realized I still wasn’t sure how to describe the rush of emotion that came with being around her, that made me want to just … bend in whatever direction she told me to. That made me feel like if I didn’t bend, I’d break.

  I’d call it a personal rule to never ascribe powers of manipulation and mind-control to teen girls—it’s a line of thinking that rings a little too Humbert Humbert for my liki
ng. So I didn’t say anything about the floods of fear and shame and regret that I felt whenever I made Alexandria DeCambray angry. I didn’t say anything about what I’d overheard earlier. I left it vague, and Rahul shrugged as he flipped through Hounds Quarterly. He traced his finger across every instance of the word “bitch,” and the words vanished at his touch. He saw me looking.

  “It’s so they can’t cut the word out and paste it on each other. I’ve done this project every year since I was hired here—you learn to think ahead on these things.” He flipped past a spread of bloodhounds running through a British-looking field. “Anyway, yeah. Alexandria. I have no idea if she did that graffiti herself or if she had help. But I can guarantee you that it was her idea.”

  I tossed a copy of Mariner’s Magazine onto the blue pile. “How do you figure?”

  “Well, like I said, the falling-out was epic. And the other girls in her group aren’t really that vindictive. But Alexandria—well. She’s, uh. She doesn’t pull punches.” He suddenly seemed very absorbed in an article about coat glossiness in Afghan hounds.

  “What’s with the ‘Alex’ thing?” I asked, rescuing him from whatever discomfort he was failing to hide.

  “Hmm?” Rahul looked up from the magazine, but his eyes were still distant. A crease had formed between his brows. I resisted the urge to smooth it with a fingertip.

  “The ‘Alex’ thing,” I repeated. “She gets really pissed if anyone calls her that.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That. Well, when she got to this school, she went by Alex. I had her in my Intro to Phys class that year. She was really different then.” He opened a copy of Teen Style to a picture of a girl. Her teeth made me think she was probably a Disney star. Rahul traced his fingers across the page, and the starlet’s features shifted until she looked a bit like Alexandria. “When she got here, she looked like that.”

  I realized that I was looking at his exact recollection of Alexandria from four years ago. Her hair was brown, with mistake-bangs, and she had crooked eyeteeth. She was smiling a wide, excited, can-I-sit-with-you smile. Her uniform shirt was misbuttoned. Her face was younger, that on-the-cusp face that girls get when they’re one summer away from coltish. She was pretty, sweet-looking. Her eyes weren’t shuttered yet.