Page 33 of When We Were Magic
My stomach growls. I unzip my backpack to grab my wallet. “Yeah,” I say, digging through the things that didn’t get blindly shoved into my locker, “let me give you some cash—” I freeze as my hand comes into contact with something that isn’t a book, a binder, or a thousand loose pens. It crinkles under my fingers. “Actually, I’m good,” I say. Iris nods and walks over to the tiny window in the side of the cafeteria kitchen where you can buy chips and bagels and uncooked instant noodles. As she walks away, I pull the brown paper bag out of my backpack. I’d meant to stow it in my locker, but between Gina’s detective work and Iris turning into some kind of magic supervillain, I guess I got distracted.
I run my thumb across Dad’s blue handwriting.Alexis!it says, exclamation point and all. I remember hugging him in the hall. Warmth fills my chest, and I eat a ham sandwich for breakfast as the rest of the girls arrive at school. For all that I didn’t want it in the first place, it’s actually a pretty good sandwich.
Guilt gnaws at me, because in spite of how I know I should feel, I’m actually … happy. I should feel like everything is falling apart, and I should be terrified for Gina, and a little scared of Iris, and worried about everyone else. But as I eat thatsandwich with my sleepy-eyed friends, as we all talk about whether or not our magic is bringing a dead boy’s heart back to life, I can’t help feeling overwhelmed by how lucky I am.
I love my friends, and I love my life, and even though I know how easy it would be for all of it to go away—for my life to end for no reason at all, other than a little slip of someone’s magical fingers—in that moment, I feel unbreakable.
10.
I AVOID GINA FOR THErest of the day on Tuesday, or maybe she avoids me. I skip study hall so I won’t have to see her. I stop thinking about how she looked in the half-dark hallway right after Iris finished casting that spell on her, though. Hunched, and weak, and afraid. So afraid.
Afraid ofme.
There’s a little part of me that wants to feel powerful because of that fear. It’s a part I don’t like, a part I don’t trust. A part I can’t listen to. But it’s there, saying,So what if she’s afraid? If she’s afraid of you, she can’t hurt you. If you can make people afraid of you, then maybe you don’thaveto be special. You wouldn’t have to earn their love if you had their fear.
I can’t listen to that part, though. That’s not the person I am. What happened to Josh was an accident. The little ways that people around me seem to keep getting hurt—those aren’t about me. They aren’t myfault. I don’t want those things to happen.
I’m not the kind of person who wants people to be scared of her.
That’s a fact that’s driven home when I get to school on Wednesday morning. Gina is standing by my locker. She’s wearing jeans and a worn T-shirt, and she looks like she didn’t sleep last night. She’s staring at the ground with her brow all scrunched up, like she’s trying to decide something hard. I hesitate, because I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I know I have to talk to her. I have to apologize, to tell her that we’re going to find a way to fix it. I move toward her—but when she sees me, she spooks like a cat and walks away fast.
That’s when I know for sure that I’m not the kind of person who wants Gina scared of me. Because in that moment, all I want is to tell her how sorry I am. All I want is to make things right. I don’t want to see her scurrying around with her head down, trying not to get hurt by something that I can’t even control.
I’m not the person she’s afraid I am. But I have no idea how to show her that.
When I walk into the cafeteria at lunch, everyone’s at the usual table. I keep glancing over at them as I buy food. Roya is stealing something from Maryam’s lunch, and Marcelina is doodling on her arm with a felt-tip pen. Paulie and Iris have their heads bent together. Iris is gesturing wildly, her long pale fingers describing patterns I can’t follow. Paulie looks totally absorbed in whatever they’re talking about—but then, as I bring my burrito over to our table, I catch her eye. Shesays something to cut Iris off. They both look up at me: Paulie expectant, Iris guilty.
“I can’t figure out how to take the spell off Gina,” Iris says without preamble when I arrive at the table. From the way nobody else reacts to this statement, I guess she’s filled them all in, and I guess they’ve been listening to her try to figure it out for a while. “Not without getting her to hold still for at least thirty seconds, and she bolts whenever I get near her.”
Now it makes sense, why Iris and Paulie would be so sucked into their conversation. They don’t usually ignore everyone else at the table, but this is a Paulie-and-Iris situation. Paulie is the only one of us who couldreallyhelp Iris with this problem: while the rest of us more or less stick to the magic we’re good at and only occasionally branch out, Paulie is a great experimentalist. She tries new things constantly. She approaches magic with a kind of courage I’ll never have. She’s not afraid of failure, not afraid of embarrassment.
“I still think that we wouldn’t be in this situation if we’d all put a little more effort into figuring out how this all works,” Iris says. Her tone tells me that the argument has been going on for a while, and she’s hoping I’ll take her side, now that I’ve arrived.
Paulie rolls her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We should just try something out and see how it goes.”
She’s like Roya running off the rocks at the reservoir, except half the time, Paulie doesn’t know where she’ll land. But she jumps anyway. She’s always figuring out new things that she can or can’t do, new ways that her magic can moveand change and create and destroy. A month before prom, she showed up at my house and showed me that she’d figured out how to make soap bubbles turn into glass. She does stuff like that all the time:hey, check it out, I tried this thing and it worked.
She’s pretty amazing. Iris is more driven, and has more book smarts, but she doesn’t know how to take risks the same way Paulie does. I would have thought that the two of them together could unravel any problem. So it’s kind of scary to think that even with both of them working at it, there’s still not a solution.
I stall by taking a bite of my burrito. If I were Roya, I’d snap at them to figure it out. If I were Maryam, I’d pat Iris’s arm and tell her that I believe in her. If I were Marcelina, I’d ask what ideas they already had, and then I’d help them put something together. If I were Iris or Paulie, I’d … well. I guess I would come up with something brilliant and dangerous and saygo.
But I’m not any of them, and I have to figure out for myself what to say.
It’s so much easier to think about my friends than it is to think about myself. It’s so much easier to predict them than it is to predict me. What does Alexis say? What’s the right answer? What does Iris need to hear right now? She and Paulie are both staring at me. Iris has a waiting-face on. Paulie is looking at my mouth and I wipe it with my thumb, thinking I must have rice sticking to my chin or something. I realize that the table has gone quiet: everyone is looking at me, waiting. I swallow my mouthful of burrito and clear my throat.
“We’ll all help you however we can.” I say it without thinking, and once I’ve said it, I know it’s the right answer. I reach out and grab Iris’s hand, giving it a firm squeeze. Relief floods her features. “You’re not alone,” I add, and I’m surprised at the tears that fill her eyes. “You know that, right? You know you’re not all by yourself in this?”
“Yeah,” she whispers, but I wonder. I think back to what she said yesterday, about being the one who’s supposed to have all the big ideas. Iris has always put a ton of pressure on herself, but I wonder if maybe we’ve been putting some pressure on her too—making her feel like she has to be the smartest, the most put-together out of all of us. I squeeze her hand again. She looks away.
“I mean it,” I murmur, low enough that it’s just between the two of us. “You don’t have to have all the answers.”
“I don’t really have any of the answers,” she says. She taps twice on my knuckle with her thumb, and then she lets go of my hand and pretends to rummage in her backpack. “I mean, I still haven’t figured out why we can all do what we do, and I’ve been doing research for years now. Besides, I’m not the one who figured out about the heart,” she says, not looking up.
“You—did you tell everyone about … ?” Everyone’s eyes are still on me.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” Roya says.
“What’s worth a shot?” I ask. My burrito suddenly feels strange in my hands. I pass it to Roya.
