Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Okay,” I said. “She looked like that, and she went by Alex. And then?”

  “Then something changed. Like, overnight, she was practically a different person.” He sounded bewildered, but I knew exactly what he meant. Every girl I’d ever known had gone through a change-everything phase. Rearrange the bedroom, do an at-home dye kit, maybe a haircut. Learn to do makeup, start wearing hoop earrings. The hope—that fervent, please-God-let-it-work hope—was always that it would be like it was in the movies, where a girl has a big montage that involves eyebrow waxing and bursting out of a changing room wearing different outfits while a close friend nods or frowns. The hope was that everything would be new, and easy, and fixed. Or that everything would still be broken, but at least it would all go together and make sense.

  I had gone through it myself, right after Mom died. It didn’t help anything make sense. But it helped, somehow. It made it feel okay that I wasn’t going to college, that I wasn’t likely to join the FBI like I’d planned. That I would never become any of the things Mom had wanted me to be. That she wouldn’t be there to even see.

  “Alex DeCambray came back from Spring Break that year and she was blond, and her bangs had suddenly grown out, and she had all this … I don’t know. Charisma. And she wanted to be called ‘Alexandria,’” Rahul continued. “We’ve all tried to remember not to call her ‘Alex,’ but honestly, it’s such a natural abbreviation that it just slips out sometimes.”

  “I get it, though,” I said. “I get wanting to be someone new.”

  “Oh, yeah? Were you ever not-Ivy?” he asked, the beginnings of a joke in his voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. I tried to say it light, easy, but it was too heavy. The weight of it pulled the conversation down. “I was not-Ivy for a long time.”

  I held my breath while the silence pulled itself out between us like taffy. Finally, Rahul bit his lip and closed the magazine. He didn’t look at me.

  “I was going to give her a B-minus last year. She didn’t do well on this project.” He tapped the piles of magazines. “I normally grade for effort as well as execution, because I’m a total softie. And I know she can do colors without even thinking about it. I mean … well. You’ve seen her hair, right?” I nodded. “Alexandria maintains that all day, every day, even when she’s taking tests. So, she can handle color. I knew that she did poorly on the project because she hadn’t wanted to put the effort in, and I told her so. I said I’d pass her effort with a D-plus. But this is a pretty big project, so the D-plus would have brought her cumulative grade down from an A-minus to a B-minus. And I don’t grade on a curve, so—”

  “Um, Rahul—?”

  “Right, I know, that’s not the important part. I just.” He closed his eyes. “I just don’t want to talk about the next part.”

  I put my hand on his and gave it a squeeze.

  This isn’t a story about things I’m proud of, and I said I would tell the truth. I didn’t put my hand on his because I wanted to comfort him. It was because I could tell that he was about to give me something, and I wanted it. I wanted to know about Alexandria and the thing she’d done. I wanted to feel like I’d gotten the scoop, like I was doing real detective work. So I squeezed his big, callused hand, and I caught his eye, and I tried to look gentle and nonjudgmental and receptive.

  And it worked.

  Rahul took a big breath. He looked at me. Heat rose in my cheeks when his eyes caught mine, and I clenched my stomach like a fist around the first tremblings of guilt. I told myself that I wasn’t actually manipulating him. I’m just listening. I’m a good listener.

  “Okay,” he said, more to himself than to me. “So, she showed up in my classroom at the end of the day. I think she actually watched for everyone to start leaving. She said she’d forgotten something and needed to look for it. Once everyone else had cleared out, she came up to me and said that if I didn’t raise her grade, she’d go to Torres. She said that she’d tell Torres I was writing theory essays and selling them to my students.”

  He looked queasy. I squeezed his hand again, and this time, it was true.

  “What did you do?” I whispered. He rubbed his thumb across my knuckle.

  “I reported her. Immediately. I went to Torres and told her the whole thing. She believed me, thank God. Alexandria was called into the office and denied it, of course, but it was enough to scare her off. She didn’t try to blackmail me again. She took the D-plus. I thought it was over, you know? I figured we were even. But then, a few months later? I went out to my car after work and … and it had been smashed.”

  “The windows?”

  Rahul cleared his throat. “The whole car. It had been turned into glass, and then shattered. Probably with a vibration-key spell.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “She can do that?”

  He shrugged. “Someone can. And it didn’t quite feel like a coincidence, you know? Vibration-key spells are … well, you know how rare they are. Whoever did that to my car was flexing, I think. Making sure I knew what they were capable of. And the craziest part is, she waited a few months so the administration couldn’t directly tie it to the incident.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I settled for another hand squeeze. He sighed, then looked at me in that way people do when they want to be done sharing hard feelings.

  “Anyway, that was the end of the school year last year, and when we came back this year? She had a different teacher for Advanced Phys, and she didn’t so much as blink at me funny when she asked if I had a nice summer.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. We were quiet for a few minutes, because “damn” and “yeah” pretty much encompassed the breadth of what we could say on the matter. The only sound was the rustle of magazine pages as we continued sorting. When all of the piles were settled, Rahul snapped his fingers; the stacks nudged themselves into neat, well-aligned rectangles of glossy color.

  He cleared his throat and looked at me. “Just for the record,” he said, “I didn’t sell theory papers to any students.”

  “I figured.”

  “But like … I really didn’t. Tabitha has charms that detect cheating. And. I wouldn’t do that.”

  I laughed. “I know, dummy.” He breathed a laugh, relief caught in the crinkles around his eyes.

  He let go of my hand and ran his fingers nervously along the edges of the stack of green magazines. “So, hey, I was thinking. If you’re not doing anything tonight, would you maybe want to have dinner again? Um, together?” Rahul flushed around the edges of his hairline, but soldiered bravely on. “I just got a huge batch of fresh scallops. I guess I must have … I must have accidentally asked for like, twice as many as I needed. And I have to use them within the next couple of days. I thought maybe I could cook them for the two of us. If you want.”

  I rode a brief but extreme emotional roller coaster as I imagined dinner at his place, and then breakfast at his place, and everything in between the two—and then as I remembered that Tabitha had already asked me to get drinks with her. I kicked myself hard for saying yes to my sister. “Oh, man,” I said, “I would love to, but I have plans tonight.”

  “Tomorrow, maybe?”

  I hesitated. A second date would make this into more than a fun, easy flirtation. I should have hesitated more. But it was right there: a second date with someone who thought I was enough. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

  “Okay, great!” He was trying so hard not to look relieved that I couldn’t hold in a bubble of laughter. “I’ll, uh, well. I was going to say that I’d text you my address, but you don’t really need it, since we’re neighbors and all.”

  I smiled. “I’ll bring a bottle of wine. I can’t wait.”

  Neither of us could figure out what to say, so we just stared at each other—okay, we’re doing this. After a minute of this, we both decided to break the tension.

  I broke it by laughing that other-Ivy laugh, bubbling and bright and strange.

  He broke it by leaning across hi
s desk to kiss me.

  Magazines scattered as he braced himself against the surface, his careful piles sliding off the edge of the desk and onto the floor. A large stack fell onto my feet, slapping against my shins. Rahul put his hand on my waist and the corner of a magazine dug painfully into my hip as he pulled me across the desk. Our teeth bumped.

  It was perfect. For a minute—just one, just long enough for me to close my teeth around his lower lip—I forgot about the whispers in the library and the lie of who he thought Ivy Gamble was and the bloodstain on the carpet and the students who may have committed murder. For that minute, the only thing making my heart pound was Rahul’s breath, whispering its way over the top of my tongue.

  For just that one minute, everything was okay.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  TABITHA PICKED THROUGH THE NEARLY empty popcorn basket on the table between us, sorting the half-popped kernels from unpopped ones. The bar was busier this time than it had been the Friday before, but Tabitha had imposed a pocket of quiet—an invisible bubble of calm that made it so we could hear the awkward silences that occasionally bloomed between us. The waiter was a hulking blond guy who looked like he commuted to the bar from his home in Valhalla. His forearms rippled with unnecessary muscles as he took our empty glasses and deposited full ones. Tabitha eyed her new drink skeptically. “Did we order these?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “but it’s possible.” We were both just drunk enough that it was completely within the realm of possibility that we’d ordered the drinks and forgotten about them in the time it took the waiter to fetch them for us. Tabitha stuck a finger into her cocktail, turning the drink an offensively bright shade of pink.

  “What’d you just do?” I asked around a mouthful of half-popped popcorn kernels.

  “I turned it pink,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “So it’ll be pink.”

  I sipped my drink—which was not pink—and realized I couldn’t taste the alcohol in it anymore. I tried to gauge internally how drunk I was, and compared it to how drunk I needed to be in order to get through the night without bursting into either tears or inappropriate laughter, or both. I calculated that I still had a long way to go.

  “Hey, do you have a hangover cure?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a big drippy cheeseburger and like … a liter of red Gatorade,” Tabitha mumbled, licking the tip of her finger and using it to pick up popcorn crumbs. I rolled my eyes.

  “No, come on, you know what I mean. I want a magic one.”

  She stuck her crumb-finger into her mouth, shaking her head. “S’different for everyone,” she said. “I mean, are we talking about a whiskey hangover or a tequila hangover? Do you get headaches or nausea or…?” She giggled in a very un-Tabitha way, then did a spooky-ghost voice. “Or the poooops?”

  “Oh, god,” I said. “I’m not answering that question.”

  “Then I can’t help you,” she said, smothering a laugh with a fistful of half-popped kernels.

  We’d spent the last two hours like this—getting steadily, intently drunk as we felt our way through conversation about things we’d spent our lives not discussing. So far we’d covered politics (we felt the same), religion (we felt very differently), and sports (neither of us felt anything). I kept wanting to find some exact revelation that would make us sisters again, that would prove that everything was fixed. I wanted something to wrap up our lost years in a nice tidy packet and deposit them in a basket. It kept being not-quite right, though. It kept feeling like small talk.

  “I don’t get it,” I said testily. “You have a way to make dick-clouds and go invisible and spot plagiarism on essays and, and … and cure the common cold probably, but you don’t have a way to fix a hangover?”

  Tabitha shrugged again, then knit her brow. “Wait, how do you know about the cheating thing?” She looked at me and burst into laughter, loud enough that Thor looked over at us from behind the bar. “Ivy, you’re magenta.”

  “I am not!” I was.

  Tabitha dipped her fingers into her water glass and flicked them at me. “How do you know about the cheating thing? Tell me, or I’ll douse you.” Her fingers hovered threateningly over her glass.

  “Fine!” I said. She was teasing me. “Rahul told me.”

  “What? I can’t hear you when you have your hands over your face like that.”

  I took a long sip of my drink, choked on it, coughed. Took a smaller sip. “Rahul told me,” I said again, then bit my lip to keep from smiling. It was a real smile—not the smile that belonged to the Ivy I’d been pretending to be. A smile that belonged to the Ivy whose sister cared enough to press for more information.

  She smirked. “Oh, did he now?” I sucked my lips in and her smile grew wider. “When did Rahul tell you?”

  I let myself have the smile, let myself sink into the moment—just deep enough to enjoy it. Not deep enough to tell her more about Rahul. Not deep enough to let her find out that the person he liked was a lie. “Come on, I answered you, now you’ve gotta answer me. How does the cheating thing work?” Tabitha rolled her eyes at me, but it worked. It was just enough of a push to tip her away from small talk, into telling me about her work. About her life. About who she was.

  If I’d understood any of what she was saying, I’m sure it would have been fascinating—she used the word “interweaving” a lot. I took the opportunity to watch her. I’d never seen her talk about her magic before, not like this. I’d always stormed out of the room or tuned out when she talked about it before. I’d always tried to send a very clear message: I don’t want to know about this.

  I realized now that when she talked about magic, her entire face lit up. She became animated. She grabbed saltshakers off neighboring tables to illustrate the ways that different bits of a spell interacted. She wandered down little side-paths of theorems and applications, then found her way back to what she’d been trying to say. “You see, Bressom thought that paper didn’t have a memory, but then DeWitt decided to try a little experiment with tree memory…” and off she went, telling me about trees and how the bark remembers everything that’s ever touched it.

  “Do you think that has anything to do with the books in the library?” I interrupted, and she gave me a long look that I couldn’t quite decipher.

  Finally, she shook her head. “Nah.” Then she went back to talking about Bressom and DeWitt, and their lifelong feud, and their dueling publication schedules.

  “Okay, uncle!” I said, slapping my hand on the table. “I give up. Can you just give me the dummy version? The preschooler version?”

  She chewed on her straw, a habit I remembered setting my teeth on edge when we were kids. “Um, sure. So, uh, the test looks into the contraliminal properties of the essay and compares them to the untegruous quality of the core subject matter, and—”

  I dipped my fingers into my water and flicked them at her. “You know what? Never mind.”

  The water steamed off her skin in little puffs of vapor, and she bared her teeth at me in a hard grin. “So, how’s the case going?”

  “Good, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I mean … I’ve only been on the job for a week or so, but I think I’ve got some pretty good leads.”

  Tabitha raised her eyebrows at me. “Has it really only been a week?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So it’s going well, then.”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know, Tab. This is my first murder case. I don’t know if I’m supposed to have it wrapped up by now, or if I should just be scratching the surface.” I fiddled with my straw. “I don’t know if I’m actually any good at this.”

  She reached across the table and grabbed my hand. I almost drew away in surprise, but caught myself in time. Her fingers were cool and dry. I was reminded powerfully of the way my mother used to hold my hand, before I was old enough to cringe away and tell her I was too old for hand-holding. “Hey, of course you’re good at this,” she said.
“You’ve been doing this for … um, how long have you been doing this for?”

  “Fourteen years,” I said. “Wow, holy shit, fourteen years. That’s a long time.”

  “Damn.” She grinned at me. “You’ve been doing this longer than I’ve been teaching, and I’ve got tenure. So you can’t be all that bad at it, right?”

  I gave her fingers a squeeze. “Well, okay, yes. I’m very good at following adulterous husbands and tracking down insurance scammers. But this is a whole different ball game.”

  “I have complete faith in you,” she said. Her eyes were locked on mine. I realized I didn’t mind the way she changed them with her magic. It wasn’t so bad, if I just let go of the resentment I’d been clinging to for so long. If I did that, it felt less like looking into a flawed mirror, and more like looking at my sister. She bit her lip, then nodded, like she’d decided something. “I was wrong.”

  “What—?”

  “I was wrong,” she said again. “I should have introduced you to Sylvia. Back when we were together. She would have loved you.” She picked at her fingernails without looking at them. “She was a lot like you, back before she was dying.”

  “She was dying?” I thought back to Sylvia’s file and remembered that she’d taken a couple of days off right before she died. Tabitha’s eyes went round for a moment, briefer than imagining.

  “Before she died, I mean,” Tabitha said it fast. I wondered if it was hard for her to get the words out, the way it was for me right after Mom died. “She was a lot like you, before she died. I think you two would have gotten along like gangbusters. And I know she would have agreed with me that you’re a better detective than you give yourself credit for.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I meant a lot more than that but didn’t know how to say it, so I decided to do what I’m best at. I decided to dodge. “Anyway, I might be good, but I haven’t learned any magical tests to spot fraudulent insurance claims. Yet.”