Page 26 of When We Were Magic
Roya cups her hands around her mouth. “You gotta run at it!” she shouts. The kid looks over at her—he can’t be older than thirteen. “Close your eyes and run!” Roya says, then waves her hands at him, egging him on. His eyes flick down to her legs, dangling over the edge of the rock. She’s wearing shorts, and the dusky brown of her skin glows against the dark rock. “Do it!” Roya shouts, and a few people lift their heads from their towels to stare.
The kid nods, jogs backward, and screws up his face. Then he runs, his arms pumping, and like a cartoon character, he runs straight off the edge of the rock. He seems to hover in the air for a second, and then he’s yelling, and then there’s a splash and all his friends cheer. Roya cheers too, clapping her hands and peering down into the water below us.
“Way to go, kiddo!” she cries, and she’s grinning at him, and the poor kid is looking up at her like she hung the moon.
“You know he’s in love with you now, right?” I say, and she laughs one of her big laughs, the kind that makes other people smile even though they didn’t hear what was funny in the first place. Below us, the kid is getting splashed by his friends.
“He won’t be scared to jump next time, though,” Roya says,kicking her feet. “That’s the key to doing stuff you’re scared of. You gotta run at it.”
I glance over at her, and she’s staring down into the water with a little secret smile on her lips. Her hair hangs down over her shoulder in a waterfall of tousled waves. I lean back onto my elbows and close my eyes, listening to the splashing and yelling that echoes up from the water. I can’t pick out any individual voices—they all blend together in a wash of summer-noise. I swing my legs through the air and wonder if, a hundred years from now, some other girl will be swinging her legs in this same spot, feeling all the same things that I’m feeling. I think probably not, but maybe something close. Maybe she’ll feel everything I do, minus the murder-anxiety.
“Hey.” Roya’s voice is about an inch from my ear, and I jump, and she lets out another big laugh. “You startle so easy, Alexis. If I was meaner, I’d think it was funny.” Her hair is brushing my shoulder and her face is right next to mine, so close that almost all I can see is her eyes, but then I look down and I realize that I was wrong because I can see her mouth, too. She boops my nose with hers and then leans back onto her elbows, mirroring my pose. “I’m gonna miss this,” she says.
“Hnngmh?” I’m going for nonchalant-interrogative, but it comes out slightly strangled, because of the way her hair slid over my shoulder.
“Hanging out like this,” she says. “In the fall. It’ll be hard, being apart from everyone.”
“We’ll still hang out, though, right?” I say. Do I sound clingy? I hope I don’t sound clingy. I hope I don’t sound desperately afraid that she and Maryam will abandon me the moment we all set foot on campus at State. “I mean, like … at school and stuff?” I add in a pathetic attempt to remain nonchalant.
“Of course we will, dummy,” she says, shoving my arm with one hand. “Like all the time, are you kidding? Me and you and Maryam are gonna be all sewn together into one giant three-headed sweater. You two aren’t allowed to stray more than a hundred feet from me at any given moment.”
“Okay, okay, I get it—”
“It’s just that I’ll missthis,” she says. She gestures at the reservoir. “I mean … I want to leave and everything. I want to get out of here and never look back and all that. But … I don’t know.” She runs a hand through her tangled hair, pausing to tug thoughtfully at the end of one twisted-up tendril. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. And I do know. I’ve been talking all year about how I can’t wait to leave. About how great it’ll be to go somewhereelse, where everyone in town hasn’t known me since I was knee-high to a tree frog. And I mean it. I really do. But I also can’t help but feel a little spark of fear, like … what if I leave, and it turns out that this town is the best place there is? What if I go out there and I’m too small for the rest of the world? What if I can never come back, and everything out there is too much, and there’s no place for me after all?“I’ll miss it too,” I add, because that’s the only way I know how to say it.
“But at least we’ll be together,” Roya says, and she bumps her shoulder against mine. “Me and you and Maryam.”
“Yeah, us and Maryam,” I say, because I don’t want to sayyeah, but me and you.
“Anyway,” she says, and she gets up and brushes her hands on her shorts. Then she unbuttons them.
“What are you—” I start, but then I realize that she’s wearing a swimsuit under her shorts. “Were you wearing that all day?”
“No, weirdo,” she says, sliding the shorts down her legs and stepping out of them, one foot at a time. One of her feet lands right next to my hand, and almost against my will, my fingers rise to wrap around the gentle curve of her ankle. She leans down and rests a hand on my shoulder for balance as she picks up her shorts. “I put it on after school. It’s why I took forever getting out to the parking lot.” She pulls her shirt off over her head, exposing a long stretch of heavily muscled abdomen. Her lats are swollen—her coach has been drilling her on her hundred-meter fly. I’m almost grateful for the reprieve when she throws the shirt at my head. “Hang on to that for me,” she says, and by the time I get her shirt off my face, she’s started walking away.
I look around just in time to see her slinging an old backpack over her shoulders. It’s one I haven’t seen in years—a tiny old string backpack covered in flowers. She used it all through middle school, until one day Kevin Ng spilledDr Pepper all over it. It’s still stained brown in a lot of places. I don’t know how I missed her bringing it with us.
“I didn’t know you still had that,” I say, and she looks over her shoulder with a shrug.
“My mom found it in the garage the other day,” she says. It hangs oddly, and I realize what must be inside it a moment before she turns and walks back toward me. She crouches in front of me.
“I’m gonna put it in the reservoir,” she murmurs.
“But—”
“It’ll sink,” she adds. “I put a cinderblock inside. By the time the fabric rots away, the arm will have rotted too.”
I look around, but no one is close enough to hear us. “Is the leg in there too?”
“Nah,” she says, “it wouldn’t fit. Besides, Marcelina said something about doing the pieces separately and I think she’s right.”
“She told me that too,” I whisper, nodding. “I get it. But what about—people will notice you dropping a bag into the water, won’t they?”
She gives me a smile and a wink. “I’m not gonna drop it in,” she says. “I’m gonna leave it in.”
And then she stands up and runs off the edge of the rock. I hear her high whoop, followed by a huge splash. I peer over the edge of the rock, into the water. When Roya surfaces, her hair is draped over her face.
