Page 68 of When We Were Magic
“It’s a date,” she says softly. Then she steps past me, and my heart is pounding, and she’s gone.
All day I’m waiting for someone to bring up the arm. Waiting to hear a whisper in the halls, or to see a cop in the cafeteria. But other than an announcement in fourth period aboutthe search party, no one is talking about it. Lunch is awkward and stilted, and we spend half of it in silence, staring at each other’s untouched food. I pass by Josh’s decorated locker and see that someone has ripped off the duct-taped teddy bear, leaving behind a swath of adhesive gunk. A sticky note that says “we miss u john” has been stuck to the middle of the gray stripe where the duct tape used to be. I rip it down and crumple it in my fist and drop it into my locker. When I clear my locker out for the summer, I’m sure I’ll find it there, but right now I don’t care. I just don’t want to look at it.
When I get out of sixth period, I have a message from Roya waiting for me.Parking lot fourth row in. Gotta boogie.
I get into her car without letting the heat out properly. I start sweating immediately. Drastically, aggressively sweating. Torrential sweating. Roya’s got the windows down and she starts the AC blasting the second the car is turned on, but it’s still dire. She looks at me with an expression that saysI’m melting, and I would laugh if I could breathe through the heat.
“Drive,” I finally manage to croak. She nods and peels out of the parking lot at Paulie-speed. Her hair whips back from her face in the breeze, and the shimmer of sweat along the curve of her throat makes me lose the ability to breathe for about a minute. I stare out the window until I can get all of my thoughts into a line. “Where are we going?” I ask as she turns onto the highway.
“I want to show you something,” she says. “Trust me?”
“Of course,” I answer. She turns up the radio. At first I thinkthat she’s trying to show me something about the music, but then I realize that she just doesn’t want me asking any more questions. So we sing along with the songs we know, and I stick an arm out the window and let the air rushing past the car lift my hand, and Roya drives.
She drives for an hour before I try to ask again. “Roya? Where are we—”
“Please,” she says, her eyes still on the road. “We’re almost there.”
She parks by a stretch of road that looks exactly like the twenty miles that came before it and, I suspect, exactly like the twenty miles that come after it. Birch trees line either side of the asphalt, a long stretch of white that keeps going as far as I can see.
“Marcelina would love this,” I say, resting my hand against the patchy white bark of the nearest tree. I don’t feel anything but the scratch of wood under my palm, but I know that Marcelina would be immersed in the stories of the forest.
“Yeah,” Roya says, but she sounds distracted and I’m not sure if she actually heard me. She’s got a duffel slung over her shoulder, and she’s staring into the trees in a far-off way I’m not used to. “Let’s go?”
“Sure,” I say, and I follow her into the trees. They’re spaced far enough apart that it almost feels like a set piece in a movie, a fake forest, but then I turn to look behind me and realize that I can’t see the road anymore. Without Roya, I know I’d never find my way back. That’s the mark of a real forest: youcan get lost before you realize that you should be trying to stay found.
I follow her through the trees, only occasionally having to step around the sparse undergrowth. Her hair is up in a high bun. The back of her shirt is dark with sweat. I watch the way her calves move with each step, the way the backs of her knees turn pink in the heat. We don’t speak. She’s not looking back at me. Whatever our destination is, she’s entirely focused on it. Whatever our destination is, I’ll follow her there.
The clearing comes upon us suddenly. Or maybe it seems that way to me. I’m not sure how long we’ve been walking, and I have no idea where the road is, but without warning, the trees fall away. I nearly run into Roya’s back. She’s standing with her arms by her sides, her eyes closed, her chin tipped back. She’s breathing slowly, and every time she exhales: magic.
It’s nothing I’ve ever seen her do before. Roya is frenetic energy, hunger, anger. But in this place, she’s still and calm. Every time she exhales, a bare hush of a breeze stirs the leaves that are littered across the grass of the meadow. A loose tendril of hair plays across her forehead in the breeze, and a whisper of light suffuses her skin.
It’s not that she’s more beautiful than usual. She’s always beautiful. But she’s still, and I get to look at her without reservation, without worrying that she’ll think it’s weird of me to stare. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was, but now I’m offered the opportunity to drink her in. And I take it.
When she opens her eyes, I don’t look away. She looksright at me, and I’m certain that she sees the longing on my face. I don’t try to hide it. For the first time ever, Idon’t try to hide it. My hands are shaking. My heart is shaking.
She smiles.
She bites her lip.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just … I like to take a minute when I first get here. To be present.”
“No worries,” I say, my voice rough. “Take all the time you need.”
“I’m good,” she says. And then she holds out her hand.
I look at it. She’s wearing the gold bangle with the dark green stones. The lines of her palm are dark. The skin of her wrist trembles with the force of the pulse beneath the surface. She twitches her fingers, and I realize she’s waiting for me. I reach out my hand and put it in hers.
Her fingers curl around mine, and she leads me toward the center of the clearing.
“I like to come here sometimes,” she says. Her thumb is tracing the curve of my knuckle. I can’t breathe. “When things get tough. It’s where I first did magic, did you know that?”
“I thought the first time you did magic was at a family thing? The barbecue with the dropped cake … ?” I hear myself say the words as though from a distance.
“I always say that, but this is really the first place.” I realize that she isn’t looking at me. She stops in the middle of the clearing, and she doesn’t look at me, and she traces the line of my thumb. “I got separated from my parents on a campingtrip, and I wound up here. I could hear them looking for me, but I stayed quiet. I remember being scared that if they found me, they’d get mad and send me away.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say. Roya sinks to the grass and sits, still holding my hand. I sit across from her. Our knees are less than one inch apart, but there’s no way for me to scoot forward without it being obvious that I just want her to touch me. I just want her to touch me.
“Yeah,” she says. She’s still not looking at me. “Anyway. I fell and skinned my knee on the way here, and it was bleeding like crazy, but by the time they found me, it was totally healed. No blood, no scar. Nothing. I remember trying to tell my mom about it, and she was sure that I had just gotten scared and imagined it, but I know it happened. That was the first time I did magic.”
