Page 45 of When We Were Magic
“Okay,” she says, and then she takes a deep breath and says it again. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, so, something’s going on.”
I lean against the fence, bouncing against the chain link. “I know,” I say. Iris gives me a confused look. “I mean, I know about one thing that’s going on. Maybe it’s not the same thing you mean? But I know about Paulie and Marcelina.”
“And Roya,” Iris adds, and now it’s my turn to be confused. She looks uncertain. “Did she not tell you?”
“Um, no?” There’s my asshole-voice again. I don’t know where this is coming from, this anger. I could let it trip me up, but instead, I cross my arms and just try not to feel embarrassed at my ignorance. I try not to wonder why Roya didn’t talk to me about whatever’s going on. I try not to wonder why she talked to Iris instead.
“Well, anyway, I figured it out this morning,” Iris continues, blatantly ignoring the uncomfortable moment. She’s not going to tell me what’s happening with Roya, then. I usually really admire how Iris and Maryam both refuse to gossip, but right now, it’s the most annoying thing about either of them. I just want to know what’s goingon.
“I went over some of my notes and I realized that there’s a correlation between some of the—well, okay, let me back up. See, after I cast the spell on the, um.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “The body? I felt like I was being pulled in a bunch of different directions. It’s gotten a little better every day, and at first I thought that I was just getting used to it. You know, like. Getting stronger or something.” She looks uncomfortable. “I guess I wanted to believe that I was growing, somehow. Getting more powerful. But then I started talking to everyone and I realized that every time I was feeling better, someone else was feeling worse.” She clenches her fist as she talks, but her voice stays low. “And then last night, I got a text from Paulie right after you guys got rid of the leg, and I realized that I wasn’t just getting used to feeling bad. I really was feeling better. Because you got rid of one of the parts.”
I shake my head at her. Poor Iris—she’s so ambitious. The idea that she thought she was getting better when she really wasn’t is kind of heartbreaking. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I whisper.
“It does, though,” she says. “See, my magic is what’s holding all the pieces of Josh separate. And it’s a lot, you know? That spell was a lot. I’d never done anything like that before. It’s … it’s all of us, all bound together, stretching one spell to its breaking point to try to make someonedisappear.” She rolls her wrist across her hip, pushing a rubber band from her wrist onto her fingers. She stretches it out tight. “Like this but a million times more complicated.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” I lie.
“Shut up, no it doesn’t, but just. Listen.” She holds the rubber band up and stretches it as far as she can. “Here’s what I think is happening. When you get rid of one of the body parts, my part of the spell is over, and the magic kind of … breaks. I can feel it. It pulls really tight, and then itsnaps. And then the recoil hits us.” She flicks her thumb, and the rubberband snaps against her palm. Her pale skin reddens immediately. “This is a really powerful spell, and it’s connected to all of us, and it’s super volatile. When one of us gets rid of a body part, I think we sever our connection to it. The magic breaks, and snaps back on us. I think we’re all losing things because the spell is doing something to each of us every time we break part of it.”
I shake my head. “That’s never happened before,” I say.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” she answers. “We’ve never … we’ve never killed anyone before.” She can’t look into my eyes, and I know what she isn’t saying.
It’s not thatwekilled someone. It’s thatIkilled someone.
I used someone. I lied to him. I pretended that I was ready for something I wasn’t, and I pretended to be someone I’m not. I took the part of me that knew I was only going to hurt myself by making myself do something I didn’t want to, and I pushed it so far down that it turned into this. It turned into Josh being dead.
I used him, and I lied to him, and I killed him, and now all of my friends are dealing with the consequences. An awful thought occurs to me: What if my friends weren’t helping deal with the consequences? What if all the losses weren’t distributed across our group? If I had tried to use magic to get rid of the body all by myself … would that magic snap right back and kill me, too?
And is it worth it to risk that recoil if it means saving my friends?
I decide to think about that later. I can’t put that on Iris. It’s a decision I’ll have to make on my own. But there is one thing I should tell her about, no matter what I decide. “There’s something else that’s been going on,” I say, and she waits while I figure out how to explain it. “I think I’ve been … hurting people?”
“What do you mean?”
I tell her about the girl with the nosebleed in the cafeteria, and my bruise at the reservoir, and the blood that oozed from Gina’s eye. I tell her about a half dozen other moments I’ve noticed—moments when I’m not sure if someone is just having an accident near me, or if I’m causing them injury somehow. “I’m not doing any of it on purpose. It’s just kind ofhappening,” I explain.
“Okay,” she says. She tugs on one ginger curl. “Well, that makes sense, with all the tension.”
“You think it’s stress-induced?” I ask doubtfully.
“No, no, not like that. The magical tension. Maybe because you did the original, uh … thing?” I’m grateful that she doesn’t say “murder.” Iris doesn’t usually mince words, but she’s being gentle with me. She’s being careful. “All of the magic that’s being used to hold the body in pieces is pulling on me, right? Well, it’s got to be pulling on you, too. And that recoil is probably hitting you really hard.”
She pulls on the rubber band around her wrist again, harder this time than before. I flinch as it snaps against her skin. The place it strikes her turns red, but then she pulls thewhole thing off and shows me the red mark it left on the opposite side of her wrist, where it dug into the skin as she pulled on it. She continues with her explanation, running a finger across the red welt the rubber band has left. “The tension and the recoil are both going to be hard on you, and something in that has to be making you do stuff by accident. I mean. That’s all just a theory, but you’ve definitely got a lot of”—she gestures vaguely—“a lot of residual magic pulling on you. It looks like you’re getting yanked in a bunch of directions all at once. Have you been hurting anyone on purpose, or is it like, when you’re stressed and not paying attention?”
I remember how I tripped before hurting Gina. I remember giving myself the bruise while I was thinking about Roya, and watching the cop when that poor freshman got the nosebleed. “Stressed and not paying attention,” I answer. “Definitely that one.”
“Well, there you go,” she says authoritatively. “The parts of the spell that are tangled up around you are tense as hell. It’s snapping when you get stressed out, and it’s hurting people around you by accident.” I would be skeptical—after all, we don’t really know howanyof this works—but then, it’s Iris. She’s bossy and overbearing sometimes, but she’s brilliant and she understands magic better than I do. And I trust her, and she sounds certain.
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to have all the answers,” I say, hesitant. “But we should try to figure out how to fix this.”
Thankfully, she nods. “I don’t think we can prevent everyone from losing things as they get rid of pieces. But wecankeep your problem from escalating. For that, it just stands to reason that we have to get rid of all the pieces as fast as we can. There’ll be consequences for the rest of us, but there were always going to be consequences for us. At least this way you won’t, you know. Slip up.” She nods, and I nod back, and with that, we agree to stick with the crappy answer for now.
“So what do we do?” I ask softly.
