Page 78 of When We Were Magic
I can hear them as I walk across the grass to Marcelina’s front door. I can hear Paulie loudly telling some story or other, and I can hear Maryam interrupting her to add parts. I can’t hear Roya, but I know she’s sitting there hugging a pillow and grinning at both of them and waiting for the moment that she can drop some joke that will make the entire thing brighter for everyone. I can’t hear Iris, but I know that she’s sipping on something—probably Uncle Trev’s super-sour lemonade, maybe with some of Roya’s mom’s stolen vodka mixed in—and enjoying being quiet for a minute or two. She does that more now, after whatever broke inside her at the edge of the woods that day we tried to bring Josh back.
We all do things a little differently now. None of us have gotten back the things we lost. I suppose it’s only fair—Josh didn’t get back what he lost either.
I pause with my hand on the doorknob and breathe in the not-quite-summer air and try to figure out how I can hang on to this moment, the moment before, the music-swelling importance of it.
But then the doorknob turns under my hand and the door falls open and Gina says, “Finally!”
Oh yeah. Gina’s here.
She didn’t tell anyone about us. But she did ask us questions. She wanted to know how, and for how long, and who could do what. And then, once we’d been honest with herabout everything we could do, she showed us whatshecould do. She opened up her hands and held two little flames steady in her palms, and she cried and we cried because we’d found each other. Because she didn’t have to be alone anymore, and because we had a new member of our weird little magic family.
And then Iris cried even more, because Gina pulled out a notebook of her own research and asked if we knew anything about how this all worked.
She’s been helping Iris study us, trying to understand the roots and rules of our magic. They’ve gotten really close, and they balance each other. She’s helped Iris to accept that sometimes, it’s okay to not have all the answers. Sometimes, not having the answers means hurting people, and that part is terrible. But a lot of the time, not having the answers means letting things be what they are.
Because whatever this thing is, it’s beautiful. And whatever it is, it’s ours.
The sleepover is everything we all hoped it would be. It’s perfect. We throw things at each other and make a mess and at midnight Roya says she wants some cookies, so we make cookies out of whatever we can find in the kitchen. Gina and Paulie draw closer and closer to each other over the course of the night, until finally, they disappear into the backyard, arms around each other. When the door shuts behind them,Maryam and I share a smile, and nobody says anything because it’s insane that it’s taken three whole weeks for Gina and Paulie to hook up.
Around four, I’m snuggled up with Handsome and Fritz. Handsome is breathing deep and heavy, and Fritz’s paws are twitching with some kind of dog-dream. I lay a hand on his wide flat head and try to figure out what he’s dreaming about, but all I can get is a sense of wind making his ears flap. Listening in on his dream isn’t as good as having my own, but I sink into it all the same, trying to remember what it’s like.
Maryam has fallen asleep on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in her lap. She’s been planning nonstop, putting together mood boards for the apartment she and Roya and I will share, mapping the neighborhood we’ll be living in. She’s really excited about the mosque a few blocks away from our school—she keeps talking about finally finding an imam, someone she can talk to about faith and magic, so she can decide which rules she wants to keep living by and what she believes in. Iris’s head rests on her shoulder. Paulie and Gina are in Marcelina’s room, and none of us have checked on them, but I’m pretty sure that they’re asleep together. Marcelina is softly stroking the leaves of a deep purple basil plant she grew.
Roya is watching me.
I ease my way out from under Handsome and Fritz and head for the front door. The dogs, exhausted by the amount of attention they’ve gotten, don’t stir. Roya follows me—I canhear her soft footfalls on the thick, ancient carpet of Marcelina’s hallway. I don’t look back. Not because I’m scared that she won’t be there, but because I know that she will be.
“What’s up?” she whispers as we step outside. Her hands finds my hips and she presses her lips to my temple as she finishes thepin “up.”
“I have to do something,” I whisper back.
“Do you want company?” She draws lines on my shoulders with her fingertips, and the way the moonlight reflects off her cheekbones is transcendent, and I want to say yes.Yes, Roya, yes, I always want company, your company, you, yes, you, us, yes.
But.
“I have to do this alone,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m sorry. But I’ll be back soon and then maybe we can watch the sunrise?”
“Perfect.” She gives me a squeeze and pulls away and then changes her mind and kisses me. She kisses me like it’s the first day of summer. She kisses me like a patch of blue sky breaking through a gray morning. She kisses me like she’s saying yes.
I could kiss her forever.
I would kiss her forever.
But I have to do this alone.
“I love you,” I whisper, and she whispers it back, and then she kisses me again and then she’s gone. The door closes with the softest of clicks and I’m alone outside.
Alone doesn’t feel the same now as it used to feel. Before prom—before Josh—alone felt scary. It felt like maybe if I wasn’t careful, alone would be permanent. But as I walk across Marcelina’s lawn and into the trees, alone feels temporary. It feels like a gift that the morning is sharing with me: a moment with myself and the waking-up forest and the taste of heat already on the air.
I walk without direction. I know that when the time comes to find my way back, I’ll be able to. I can ask a bird or a colony of beetles the way home. And more than that, I can feel it. I can feel the pull of the sleeping magic girls in that house. I can feel Roya waiting to kiss me and fall asleep together. I can feel the path I’m cutting through the forest, the broken leaves and bothered mice.
It doesn’t take long for me to reach the lightning-struck tree. I step around the place where I buried Josh’s head—the earth is still a little rounded there, and I give it a wide berth. I walk around the tree in a circle, looking up at the branches. The long black scar is still there. I wonder if it’ll ever fade. And a lot of the leaves are still brown. But at the very tips of some of the branches, in the graying light of the predawn sky, I can just make out a few buds of bright green. New leaves.
I lay a palm on the trunk and press until the bark hurts the tender parts of my skin. I close my eyes and I try. I know that I’m not Marcelina, and I can’t tell this tree anything or hear anything back from it, but I try to tell it that I’m happy it’s doing better. I hope it knows. I hope it understands.
This is what I needed to see. I needed to see the place where I dug a hole for a boy’s head. I needed to see the tree that his bones fed.
I’m startled by a noise—a whistle of wind, a heavy wingbeat. I look up to see a hawk dropping from the branches of the lightning-struck tree. Her wings don’t flutter, she’s not a fluttering kind of bird, but she’s not diving for prey, either. She lands on a gnarled tree root and cocks her head at me.
