Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  Mrs. Webb went very still. “Go on,” she said quietly.

  “I think I blew him up,” Alexandria said in a quavering voice, and tears started to stream down her cheeks again. “I think I blew him up, and then Ivy came and she told me how to put him back together, and then Courtney came in and she tripped and broke her nose and that’s why there’s so much blood.” Her chest shook as she held back sobs.

  “You can’t have blown him up,” Mrs. Webb said, peering at Alexandria like she was some exotic new species of jellyfish, dredged up from the uncharted depths of the ocean for study. “You can’t have. It takes years of … but then, your hands…” The old woman walked to Dylan, still on the lab table. The heat of his skin fogged the sealed black surface of the table. She flicked her wrist, and a long Osthorne-blue sheet billowed over Dylan, covering him from the chest down. She pressed a hand to his forehead, and I wondered if she was performing some magical evaluation I would never be able to understand, but it looked for all the world like she was a grandmother checking a child for a fever. She shook her head. “This isn’t possible. This isn’t something that happens by accident.”

  “Please,” Alexandria whispered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I did it, I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s alright,” Torres said, laying a hand on Alexandria’s shoulder. “It’s okay. We’ll talk about it in my office, alright? You’re not in trouble.”

  Alexandria nodded. “Okay.” Then she turned to me. “I’m sorry. Thank you. I didn’t— I didn’t do what you think I did.”

  I nodded at her. “I believe you.”

  I didn’t know for sure if I was telling the truth, but her face forced the words out of me—and not with a body slam of emotion. It was the change in her. She looked completely haunted. She looked afraid. She looked terribly, terribly young.

  I thought about the story she’d been building for herself—a girl, a young woman in charge of her world. Unstoppable. Fearless. But that girl had never encountered anything this frightening before. She’d encountered drama with her friends and her parents and boys and grades. Maybe she’d seen bullying, intimidation, violence. But in all this time, she’d never encountered anything so frightening as her own power.

  “Let’s go to my office, Alexandria.” Torres put an arm around Alexandria’s shoulder, and started guiding her toward the door. “Mr. Chaudhary, please come with us. I’ll need your assistance. Mrs. Webb? Would you mind waking the other two, and they can join us?”

  Mrs. Webb nodded, and Torres, Alexandria, and Rahul walked out. I didn’t see if Rahul turned to catch my eye as he left the room. I couldn’t stand to look, in case he didn’t. It was just me and Mrs. Webb. I realized I had no idea what her first name was.

  She rested her hand on Dylan’s forehead again, and something about the position of her fingers was different, but it was nothing I could have described in a report. He took a deep breath, a gasping, choking breath, and sat up.

  “What—what happened?” He looked at Mrs. Webb like a drowning man might look at the shadow of a whale shark. “Oh my god, I was—what happened?”

  Mrs. Webb peered into his eyes, but didn’t see what she was either worried about or hoping for. “You aren’t the Chosen One, my boy,” she said. She didn’t say it gently, but she wasn’t cruel, either—she was ripping off a Band-Aid, and must have known that wasting time would only make it hurt more.

  Dylan heaved an immense sigh. “Okay,” he said. He nodded to himself, then to Mrs. Webb. “Okay. I’m not the Chosen One.” He laughed softly, still nodding. Something seemed wrong—the boy who had been ready to tear Alexandria apart was gone.

  “It’s your half sister,” Mrs. Webb said. “I’m sorry. I know you two don’t get along—no, now, don’t try to deny it. But it’s her. She’s more powerful than anyone you’ve ever heard of. And she’s going to need a friend in the next few years, when the Prophecy is fulfilled.”

  Dylan pushed himself off the edge of the counter. “It’s funny,” he said to Mrs. Webb—neither of them seemed to remember that I was still in the room—“it’s funny, but I’m not so worried about it anymore.” He looked like he was going to say more, but he interrupted himself with a retch. He doubled over, clutching the sheet to himself, and gave three long, hacking coughs. He held his hand to his mouth and spat something into it, something that clicked against his teeth.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Webb asked sharply. “What did you find?”

  Dylan pulled out a tiny blue marble—smaller than a regular marble, but bigger than a ball bearing—and handed it to her. “I don’t know. This isn’t mine? I, um. I don’t feel so well.”

  She rolled it between her fingers. “Hm. Go along to Ms. Torres’s office, Dylan. I’ll be there shortly.”

  He walked out of the classroom with the sheet wrapped around him, sparing me the barest of glances as he passed, lingering for a moment next to Courtney’s still-unconscious form. I started to raise my hand in a wave, but he was already gone.

  Mrs. Webb walked to the front of the room. I drew up beside her.

  “What is that?” I asked, gesturing to the little ball in her hand. She touched it to her tongue before dropping it into my palm.

  “If I had to guess? I’d say it’s his obsession.”

  I stared at the little ball. No mysteries swirled within its depths. It didn’t feel warm, it didn’t vibrate, it didn’t glitter. It looked like a funny little marble, like something a grandpa would have in a cigar box tucked away on a shelf somewhere.

  “Is that something you can do? Mages, I mean—you can just take something out of someone like this?”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Webb murmured. “I was a healer for longer than you’ve been alive. This is impossible. But then, that’s a Prophecy for you.” She shook her head. “Young Miss DeCambray is probably only just starting to show us what can be done when magic is applied the right way. Or rather, when magic is applied her way.”

  “What do we do with it?” I asked.

  “You dispose of it,” she answered. “It’s medical waste.”

  “Really? That seems … I don’t know. Wrong, somehow.”

  “Does it?” she asked. “If you had your gallbladder removed, would you want to save it just because it pained you for a decade?”

  I considered the little marble, then set it on one of the lab tables. “I guess not.”

  “Hmph.” Mrs. Webb picked it up and hucked it. It smacked into the trash can near the door with a loud, satisfying ping. She approached Courtney and pressed a hand to the girl’s forehead, then jumped backward as Courtney sprang off the table.

  “Oh my god oh my god oh my god Dylan I can’t believe she did it to Dylan you have to stop her—”

  Mrs. Webb looked at me, apologetic, and then slapped Courtney smartly across the face. Courtney’s mouth shut with a little pop.

  “I’m sorry, young lady,” Mrs. Webb said, and she sounded like she meant it. “You’re panicking, and you have to stop. You’re safe. Nothing bad is happening to you.”

  “But Dylan—”

  “Dylan is safe too,” Mrs. Webb said. “Everything is fine. Now, we’re all going to go to the front office, and you’re going to talk about whatever you need to discuss.”

  Courtney looked between Mrs. Webb and me. She shook her head. “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t need to talk to anyone.”

  “Are you sure about that?” I asked. “You seem pretty, uh. Traumatized.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, looking away from both of us.

  “Alright,” Mrs. Webb said. She turned, walking toward the door. I looked between the two of them, trying to figure out what to do, then dashed out the door after Mrs. Webb, leaving Courtney in the classroom alone.

  “Wait,” I called, and Mrs. Webb paused in her brisk walk down the hall. “Wait, don’t you think she needs, like … counseling or something? She seems really freaked out.”

  “She just saw her secret boyfriend explode,” Mrs. Webb sa
id, dry as kindling. “Courtney will be fine. She might be a little panicky for a few days, but then they’ll make out and she’ll have a big personal revelation about true love, and then she’ll be back in school next Monday with new bangs.” Mrs. Webb patted at her immaculate hair. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. Always a crisis, with these girls.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It seemed wrong—it didn’t seem like enough. But I didn’t know how to say that to someone who clearly thought it was so much more than enough, so I watched her head down the hall away from me, slow and stately. Something didn’t fit. I stood in the hall by myself, uncertain—where could I go from here? But before I could decide, Courtney eased the door to Tabitha’s classroom open behind me.

  “Oh, Courtney,” I said, reaching for her automatically. She looked up and down the hall, then slowly sank to the floor, sobbing. “Oh, god, uh, oh man. What—what are you—” I stood there, not knowing what to do with my hands. She was sobbing harder than I’d ever seen anyone cry. Worse than Tabitha on my couch a few days ago. Worse even than my dad, sitting on the edge of the empty hospital bed in our living room so many years ago. It was a kind of sobbing that seemed to come from below her lungs, from the deep aching roots of her. Finally, desperate, I grabbed her under the arms and half pulled, half carried her across the hall and into the empty library. I steered her to a chair and she sank into it, folding her arms on the table and sinking her face into her elbows.

  “Hey, shhh, hey,” I said, over and over, rubbing her back in small circles. I’ve never been good at comforting people—never really known what they might need. But the low drone of my voice seemed to help, and after a while her sobs diminished, and became hiccups.

  She lifted her head, and her eyes locked on mine. “Oh, god,” she moaned. “Oh, god, I can’t believe—I can’t believe it happened to him, too.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ICE WATER RUSHED THROUGH MY belly. “What did you say?”

  She gulped. “It happened to him, too. What happened to me. It’s so awful—he’s going to have nightmares for weeks.”

  I sat in a chair across from her and digested this. Alexandria had played me. She had played us all. “I don’t know how I did it,” she’d said—but she’d done the same thing to Courtney? When? How many times? How many people had she put at risk? This girl is a monster, I thought, and then I thought of all of the people alone in an office with her right now. Dylan. Torres. Mrs. Webb. Rahul.

  I cursed myself for not grabbing my recorder out of my bag before I left Tabitha’s classroom, but I had to know. I had to ask her. I had to be my own witness. “What did she do to you?”

  She sniffed hard. “She did that. What she did to Dylan. Oh my god, Dylan—”

  “Can you tell me about it? From the beginning?”

  Courtney wiped at her eyes, and a long streak of mascara smeared from her eyelid to her temple. “Okay,” she said, “okay I—I think I can tell you. Because, I mean. Alexandria’s going to tell everyone anyway, probably.” A bead of sweat traced its way down my spine. Would Alexandria tell everyone? Or would she show everyone? “It was when I needed the abortion. Ms. Capley, she didn’t want to—she wouldn’t give me the potion. She, um, she said I was too pregnant for it. I thought I was just eight weeks, but she said it was probably closer to like ten or twelve? And so she said, um, she said the potion wouldn’t work.” She sniffed every few words. “So then Alexandria told her to give me the other kind of abortion.”

  “The surgical kind?” I whispered, but Courtney flinched as if I’d spit at her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The surgical kind. But then Ms. Capley was like, ‘No, you have to go to the doctor for that, it’s not safe to do it here,’ and I was like, ‘Okay but I can’t,’ and she was all, ‘I’ll make it happen’—”

  “Wait, who?”

  She shook her head. “Alexandria. She said she’d make Ms. Capley give me the surgery. And Alexandria tried to make her do it, but she just wouldn’t. And so then I went to Mrs. Webb, but she was like, ‘No, it’s too dangerous to do this outside of a clinic’ and she tried to give me a referral but like she just totally didn’t get it—” She took a deep, ragged breath. “Anyway, so, then Alexandria was like, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and she got Ms. Gamble to do it.”

  I shook my head. “Slow down, Courtney. You’re talking too fast, you’re getting mixed up. So, Alexandria was like, ‘Don’t worry about it’ and then she did it? She, uh…” I made a blowing-up motion with my hands. “Alexandria did the surgery?”

  Courtney shook her head, her brow furrowed. “No,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “No, she threatened Ms. Gamble. Alexandria had some kind of … I don’t know, some kind of leverage over her or whatever. So she made Ms. Gamble do it.”

  The sweat that had dripped down my spine froze into an icicle of horror. “Ms. Gamble, as in, your theoretical magic teacher? She performed your abortion?”

  “Yeah,” she said, drawing out the word as if she thought I might be a little slow.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Walk me through it. What exactly happened?”

  Courtney looked like she was going to throw up, but I had to be sure. I had to.

  “Well,” she said, “she, um. We went into her classroom, and she had me lie down on the lab table. And then she, um.” Her voice had gotten so soft I had to lean in to hear her. “She kind of rubbed her hands together, and she kept saying ‘okay, okay, okay,’ like she was hyping herself up? And then she said, ‘Here we go, deep breath,’ and then I was kind of … I was … everywhere.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I could see all of myself? Like I was floating above my body, I think? I was—I mean, my body was in a big cloud, and I couldn’t feel myself, and I could see this little, um. This little blob, kind of toward the middle of me? And then Ms. Gamble, she reached out with her finger and just sort of…” She made a plucking motion in midair with her thumb and forefinger. “And I could see myself but I couldn’t see myself, and I was just in this big cloud? And then she said, ‘Oh, wait,’ and then she was focusing really hard, and then, um, I came back.” The tears were flowing freely now, but Courtney was staring unblinking at her hands, seemingly unaware of the fact that she was steadily crying. I thought of Dylan’s heart, grasping at empty air. “I came back, and it didn’t hurt at all or anything, but … I don’t know, I don’t know, I saw all of my insides like spooling back in and—”

  She started to hyperventilate, and I jumped up to rub her back again. “Okay,” I said, “let’s just take slow breaths. Slow, slow breaths. Here, put your hand on your belly like this, okay? Now take a deep breath. Hold it, hold your breath, there you go—” It didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, but something in all of that worked well enough to keep her from passing out or vomiting.

  “I don’t feel well,” she said in a soft, high voice, like a little girl.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Let’s get you to the office, okay?” I thought back to what Mrs. Webb had told me about surgical magical abortions. It’s perfectly safe if it’s done by a medical professional in a sterile environment. The girl gets a sedative so it’s not too traumatic. If what Courtney was telling me was true, then Tabitha had performed an abortion on one of those lab tables—classroom desks with gum barnacling their underbellies. She’d performed an abortion with no sedative, no painkillers, nothing. She’d done the magical equivalent of a bathtub appendectomy performed with a rusty screwdriver and a watch strap to bite down on.

  No wonder Courtney was freaking out, after seeing Dylan go through the exact same thing.

  I towed Courtney down to the front office. I kept up a steady wash of soothing phrases—it’ll all be okay, you’ll be fine, you’re safe now. I had no idea if any of it was true. If I’d been betting on it, I’d have said none of it was going to be okay. But it kept her calm enough to put one foot in front of the other.

  “Wait,” she whispered when we got to the front office. My hand was an in
ch from the doorknob, but I stopped and looked at her. She was staring at her feet.

  “What is it, Courtney?” I kept my voice soft.

  “I just, um. Before I go in there. Because they’re probably gonna call my dad and then I won’t probably talk to you again.” She sniffed, pulled at her blazer. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry if my texts freaked you out or whatever.”

  I shook my head. “What texts?”

  She pulled out her phone and scrolled through a string of messages. They were all addressed to me. The picture of me and Tabitha outside the bar; the shot of Tabitha breaking into my house. Are you safe?

  I looked between her and the phone. “Why?”

  “I didn’t want anything bad to happen,” she said, hunching her shoulders. “I saw you talking to Ms. Gamble and then Dylan told me about the note he left you, and I just thought … I thought maybe I could help.”

  “But you were too scared to say anything directly,” I murmured, trying to keep the words from stinging her the way they would have stung me.

  She nodded. “I’m ready now,” she said. “I just wanted to say … to say sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling awkward. “Thanks, then. I think I understand what you were trying to do.”

  When I opened the door to the front office, Mrs. Webb was making a harried phone call. “Yes, well, young man, I’m a mandated reporter,” she said in a voice that made me want to snap to attention. “And I’m telling you that I’ve got a Prophetic Fulfillment over here, and I need official attention paid to it. So, who will you be sending over?”

  She saw us waiting and held up one long, knobbly finger. I guided Courtney onto one of the benches where truants and cheaters sat. I waited near Mrs. Webb’s desk, watching Courtney shiver out of the corner of my eye. She looked small and exhausted there.

  “Excellent. I’m very glad to hear it,” Mrs. Webb said with grim satisfaction. “I’ll expect your agent here within the hour. If it takes longer than that, I will be calling again. Is that understood?”

  I imagined the person on the other end of the phone sitting up a little straighter in their desk chair. As Mrs. Webb hung up, I glanced between her and Courtney, unsure of how I should begin.