Page 36 of When We Were Magic
“Last night.”
I can’t help it. I laugh, delighted at the way she justdiscoversthings. “Teach me how?”
She aims a grin at me. “You know it.”
Once we’re far enough from the road that we can’t hear cars, she finds a tree stump and sits down. She pats it and I squeeze in next to her.
She leans her head on my shoulder, her blond hair spilling across the front of my shirt. She holds her hands out in front of her like she’s pushing something away, and a net of blue erupts from her palms. The net flies out into the trees, taking a long time to fade from view.
This magic, I know. I know it because I taught it to her. I’ve tried to teach the other girls, but they never really got the hang of it the way Paulie did.
“Who ya callin’?” I ask, tilting my head to rest it on top of hers.
“A friend,” she answers.
“Anyone I know?”
“Yeah, probably,” she says. “If you don’t know her yet, you guys will get along great, though.”
“Cool,” I say, and we wait in the quiet. I listen to the birds that stopped singing when we crashed into the trees—they’re slowly coming to accept that we’re here, and their conversations are starting up again.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says, and I can feel her jaw moving against my shoulder.
“Of course.”
“What were you doing with him?” Her eyelashes brush over my collarbone and I suppress a shiver.
“I think that’s a conversation you should have with a grown-up, Paulie,” I joke, and she jabs me in the ribs with a knuckle.
“You know what I mean. Why would you try to climb on top of Josh Harper? Of all the people in the whole world? Of all the people in the whole school? Hell, of all the people at that party?” She lifts her head from my shoulder and looks at me, her face uncharacteristically still. Why does she have her I’m-fine face on? “Why him?”
“I don’t know,” I say, picking bark off the edge of the stump. “It was stupid.”
She doesn’t let me get away with that, though. “You’re not a stupid person,” she presses. “You don’t do stupid shit like trying to lose your virginity to Josh Harper.”
I flinch. “I don’t really need you judging me right now,” I snap. “I get that I shouldn’t have done it, but I did, so just let it go, okay?”
Paulie stares at me. She pulls her hair up into a ponytail, then nods at me. “Okay,” she says. “If you want to talk about it, we can. I don’t mean to push it. I just want to know that you’re okay.” She’s looking into my face and I feel like there’s something I’m missing, something I don’t understand, but then I say that I’m okay and she nods and rests her head back on my shoulder, and whatever it is that I was missing will just have to stay missed.
“Sorry I was a bitch just now,” I murmur into her hair.
Paulie pats my thigh. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.”
I’m struck by the sentiment. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things,” I repeat, and Paulie taps her fingers on my knee in a pattern I don’t follow.
“Yeah,” she says. “I learned it from the therapist Mom and Dad took me to after Drew died. I kept apologizing for being mad or sad or whatever. She told me that it’s okay to have feelings, and that it’s okay to be upset at things like my brother dying. It helped a lot.”
We sit and listen to the trees and the birds and I think about it. I wonder why nobody’s ever told me that before:It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.
I think about what it would have felt like to be a little kid and have Nico disappear.
I’ve talked about it with Roya before a couple of times—both of us have younger brothers, although Nico is closer to the age Drew would have been if he’d lived. I try to imagine letting myself be upset about something that enormous, and I can’t. I grab Paulie’s hand and send a thread of magic into it, the same way she did to me in the car. I can’t see the glitter, but she smiles, and I know it’s there, dark bright purple or whatever the hell Roya meant. She squeezes my hand and then clears her throat.
“So, while we’re out here—there’s something I’ve been kind of wanting to talk to you about,” she says. She’s turning my hand over in hers and looking at the lines of my palm.
“Are you going to tell my fortune?” I ask, and she smiles down at my fingers before biting her lip.
“Not exactly,” she says.
