Page 12 of When We Were Magic
4.
WHEN I WAKE UP ONthe floor of Marcelina’s bedroom, I don’t remember right away. I lie in the early-morning grayness under a pile of lap blankets stolen from the living room. My mouth is dry and my shoulders ache a little, but I don’t have that sense of oh-shit-where-am-I that happens sometimes when I wake up someplace that isn’t my own bed. I’m not hungover, because honestly, I was too nervous to drink at the party. I just feel sleepy. That’s all. Just sleepy.
I reach up a hand to rub my face, and a flicker of something crosses my brain.You should be feeling bad about something.
Then I remember.
Josh. Blood everywhere—on my cheeks and burning and coppery in my mouth and sprayed across posters of cars. Maryam leaving. Roya’s incredulous glare. My fault. My fault. My fault.
Before I can think about it, my hand shoots out. My fingertips find canvas, a zipper, a solid lump. My stomach turns.
It was all real.
There is no part of me that thinks,Maybe this is all a terrible dream.It hurts to realize thatJosh exploding is just a nightmarewas a safe psychological harbor I passed by without docking.
“Marcelina?” I whisper. She doesn’t answer. I poke my head up and can see the small hill that is her and her million tangled blankets. She’s motionless in the bed, sleeping so soundly that I’d be worried she was dead if I hadn’t seen her sleep a hundred times before. Still, I wait to see the slow rise of her breathing before I trust that she’s really just asleep. I get up as quietly as I can, gathering my own nest of blankets in one arm and slinging the backpack across my shoulder with the other. I close her bedroom door behind me, holding the latch back with my thumb until the last possible second.
I dump the blankets into the basket next to her parents’ couch. I sneak into her kitchen and grab a roll of duct tape from the junk drawer. I rip off a five-inch strip and slap it over the place on Josh’s backpack where his name is scrawled in Sharpie. For good measure, I put another piece on top of that one. It’s bad enough that I’m coming home from prom with no dress and a strange bag; I can’t have a boy’s name on the bag. A dead boy’s name.No, I remind myself,amissingboy’s name. As far as everyone else knows, Josh is missing. Nothing more.
I ease the bag open just a little and reach in, my fingertips finding the smooth, glassy surface of the heart. It feels a little warmer than it did last night—still hard, still wrong, but just a tiny bit warm. I press gently with my fingers, trying to figureout if it’s softened, if it’s really warmer or if I’m just imagining things.Why would it be different?
“How was prom?” The voice comes from right behind me. I jump a mile and whip around to glare at him—Uncle Trev is there, and he holds two hands up, lifting his shoulders in a whoa-don’t-kill-me stance. “Sorry,” he says, aiming an awkward grin at me. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Well, you did,” I say, breathless, my heart pounding. I adjust the backpack onto both of my shoulders.Oh god, I’m talking to Trev and there’s a head in my bag.“Prom was fine. What are you doing awake?”
“I’ve got a workout this morning,” he says. “Just ‘fine’?” he asks, leaning a shoulder against the wall and crossing his arms. His biceps swell a little with the motion. Trev took up weightlifting after he lost his job, and I’m never sure if he’s showing off his muscles on purpose or if that’s just what happens when you train for three hours a day. He looks like what I imagine Josh would look like if he grew up, stayed sober, got divorced, and did a lot of CrossFit. Tall, blond, trying a little too hard but not in an irritating way. “Did something happen?” he asks.
I’ve always liked Uncle Trev, but right now I really hate how interested and engaged he is all the time. “Um, nothing big,” I say. “Just some drama.” That’s normally a foolproof way to get adults to mind their own business—explanations of drama are usually drawn-out, expansive diagrams of high school social politics. The only people who hate high schoolsocial politics more than actual high schoolers are adults who are pretending to be interested.
“Did you and Roya have a fight?” he asks, tipping his head to one side.
“What? No. What? We didn’t—why would you think that?” I’m talking too fast and my ears feel hot. Trev laughs.
“Okay, well, if you ever want to talk about it, you know where to find me,” he says.
“Thanks, Trev,” I say awkwardly. He shrugs and walks out of the kitchen.
The first time I told my dads about Uncle Trev, they exchanged a long look and then had a talk with me about Red Flags and What to Watch Out For and Adult Men and Grooming Behavior. And I’ve watched out for all the red flags—but honestly, Trev is just a nice guy. I talk to Marcelina about it all the time: how much it sucks to have to be suspicious of a grown man just because he’s kind and thoughtful and listens. But then again, Marcelina and I also talk a lot about grown men we were right to be suspicious of. The kinds of grown men who pretend to be interested in our lives and then start texting us late at night. The kinds of grown men who ask for hugs. The kinds of grown men who say they want to be our friends, who try to tell us secrets because they think we don’t know what it means when a grown man tries to tell a teenage girl a secret. Uncle Trev isn’t like them, and I know that, but it’s awful to be constantly watching just in case he turns out to be that kind of guy.
It’s exhausting.
Anyway.
I go through the mudroom to get out, because Handsome and Fritz would never forgive me if I left without saying goodbye. I sit down and let them bombard me with dog-dreams and news and sheer unbridled affection. They both try to shove their noses into my backpack. Even though they listen when I tell them to leave it alone, I get up and go pretty fast. It doesn’t feel right, sitting there with Josh’s head and his all-wrong heart and letting the dogs tell me how great I am.
Nothing feels right.
I walk home. It’s only about a mile, and the fresh air is nice. It’s early enough that not many people are awake. I pass the places where Marcelina and I used to ride our bikes around when we were kids, before we knew that magic was more than just a game we played. Houses that we’d decided were haunted, or where we said a murderer probably lived. Sidewalks that we dusted with chalk rainbows before rainstorms, so that when the weather started to turn, we could watch the colors run.
I wonder when the days stopped feeling endless. It was definitely long before I had a backpack full of body parts to dispose of.
My house is just like all the other houses on the block. It’s squat and square and has a big window in the front and a little yard next to the driveway. It’s light blue, and the one on the left of it is white and the one on the right of it is brown,and that color pattern repeats over and over for about eight blocks in every direction.
The only thing that makes my house stand out is my dads’ garden. It’s one of the many Couples Hobbies they’ve taken up together over the years in an attempt to stay “connected.” It’s not that their relationship is bad or anything—it’s just that they’re both trial lawyers, which means that they’re both always busy. I guess when you’re that busy, it doesn’t matter if you’re madly in love with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with—it’s still easy to drift apart. So my dads have golfed and tennis’d and biked and run marathons, and now they’re gardening. The front lawn is a patchwork of garden beds that are exploding with flowers—mostly orange and pink ones right now, although they put some blue hydrangeas in for me.
I feel weirdly guilty whenever I see the hydrangeas, even though I know that they planted them to make me happy and it’s not a big deal. I don’t like feeling like I disrupted their color scheme. But then, if I ever told them I felt bad about it, they’d make a big deal about how it’snota big deal. So I don’t say anything, and I tell myself that it’s not something I should feel guilty about.
I walk inside as quietly as I can, thinking I’ll be able to sneak into my bedroom without getting noticed or talked to, but as soon as I step inside, I’m thwarted by my little brother. Nico’s wearing his soccer uniform and he’s got his cleats on, even though he’s not supposed to wear them in the house and Pop will definitely kill him if he sees.
