Page 9 of When We Were Magic
We walk along the edge of the woods with our shoes in our hands, the grass soft and cold and already a little dewy between our toes. My dress is still shedding glitter, so my feet are shining everywhere that they’re not muddy. I wonder if, come morning, there will be a sparkling trail to mark where I walked. The idea gives me a brief spasm of desperate hope, like I could follow the trail back to the beginning of the night, before I decided to sleep with Josh.
Before something broken and awful rose up inside me and killed him.
Marcelina pauses and rests her free hand against the trunk of a twisting black oak. She looks like a storybook witch in hertorn starry dress, with moonlight on her face and a gnarled old tree casting curlicue shadows across her cheeks. I tell her as much and she gives me one of her amazing Marcelina-smiles. It’s a high compliment to her aesthetic.
“So what’s up?” I ask, nodding to the tree.
Marcelina hands me her shoes so she can lay both palms on the bark. She leans her cheek against it too, and the leaves of the tree rustle as if there’s wind. Which there isn’t. “I’m just checking in on her,” she says. “It’s been a hard year. Remember that lightning storm we had in March?”
I don’t remember, but I nod anyway, because I want to hear how the tree is doing.
“Well, she didn’t get hit, but one of the trees she’s friends with did. It’s really hard on both of them. She’s been giving up a lot of minerals to help her friend recover.”
I blink at her. “What?”
She waves a hand at me. “It’s a whole thing with the root systems and fungal exchanges. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” She presses her forehead against the tree’s trunk and whispers something. Then we’re walking along the tree line again, toward the dark house. Josh’s backpack bumps against my back, and I suppress a shudder at the thought of his face mashed against the canvas.
“I’m really sorry, Marcelina.” My voice is shaking and I try to take a deep breath, try to imagine that my lungs are big billowing sails and I’m filling them with wind. It’s something Iris taught me—a trick she uses to manage her anxiety. It workswell enough that I’m able to look at Marcelina, who’s swinging the string backpack like a handbag. “I’m sorry that I got you into this.”
Her face is still angled up at the trees, and the white light of the moon catches on a smear of glitter that I think is probably secondhand, shed from my dress onto hers. The rip in her gown gapes open, and the moonlight illuminates a stripe of bare skin. I wonder if Roya will ever be able to fix the dress. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make up its loss.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says quietly, but her hand rises to that tear in the bodice of the dress she worked so hard for. And even if the dress was intact … Josh is dead and his head is in abackpack.
“Um, I think it’s a pretty big deal,” I say. She just shakes her head.
“It’s nothing you wouldn’t do for any of us,” she says, and we’re quiet until we get to the house. She lifts up the manual garage door with one hand, shuts it after us as we slip inside. It’s completely dark in the garage, and musty. It smells like cigarettes.
“Did your dad start smoking again?” I whisper as we feel our way across the garage.
“Him, or maybe Uncle Trev,” she says. Uncle Trev is her mom’s friend from college—he’s been staying with them for the past two months while his wife decides whether she’s going to divorce him or not. To hear him tell it, the only thing that went wrong in their marriage is that he lost his job. He neversays anything bad about his wife, though, which makes me trust him a little more. Pop told me a long time ago to never trust guys who have a lot to say about how awful their exes are.
“Oh.” I don’t know what else there is to say. Sometimes I don’t know what to say, and it never feels like it’s okay to not know. Roya would know what to say. It would probably go a little too far, but still. She wouldn’t be quiet in this moment.
We get into the house and whisper-greet the two giant shaggy farm dogs that are sleeping in the mudroom. For anyone else, they’d do big deep fearsome woofs, but I hold out my hands and they stand there, wagging, until I pat their heads and tell them they’re good dogs.
They shove wet noses against my palms and huff hot air against my wrists. They lean against my legs, trying to tell me about the grass and the cat and the one amazing smell they found and rolled in. I smile in the dark and tell them to go back to sleep, that I’ll hear all about it in the morning.
I tell them without words. I tell them the same way that Marcelina tells the tree she’s going to help it however she can. It’s my thing, the thing that only I can really do as far as I know. Fritz and Handsome love me, because they can tell me all the dog-things that no other human seems to understand, and because I listen to them. I listen as much as I can, at least.
We put on the house slippers that are lined up by size in a long row next to the inside-door. Then we sneak down the hall past Marcelina’s parents’ room, past the guest bedroom where Uncle Trev sleeps.
We pass the kitchen. The whole house smells like Clorox wipes, except for the kitchen, which always smells like whatever Marcelina’s mom has been cooking. Her mom is an amazing cook. She’s left a huge disposable pan of something on the countertop, covered with foil. As we pass, I can smell something that smells like salt and vinegar and the color red, and my mouth waters until I remember how it felt when Josh’s blood was burned off my tongue. Marcelina lets out an exasperated sigh in front of me, and I know she’s rolling her eyes at her mom leaving out a whole pan of food for just her and whoever she happened to bring home. I don’t grab her and pull her into the kitchen to eat like I usually would, because I’m sure that I’ll throw up if I try to eat right now, but still. It smells fantastic in that kitchen. Almost good enough to make me hungry.
Marcelina’s bedroom is exactly what you’d expect it to be—lots of black, lots of posters featuring bands where the guys wear more makeup than the girls and everyone’s hair is super long. But it’s also got a million plants in it, and a sunlamp, and a terrarium with a fat lizard inside.
Marcelina walks around the room touching the plants, greeting each one by name. “Hey, Bert,” I say to the lizard, and he blinks a sleepy eye at me.
She opens a drawer and tosses me a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that says “Haunt me Siouxsie Sioux” on the front in a cute font. “Go take a shower,” she says.
“Do I smell?” I ask, trying to discreetly sniff-check my armpits.
“No, but you’re fuckingcoveredin glitter from that stupid dress,” she answers. “And I need a few minutes alone.”
I nod. Marcelina’s not exactly an introvert, but sometimes she hits a wall and needs to just be alone with her plants. She’s had a hard night—it makes sense that she’d want to be alone right now.
Idon’t want to be alone. I don’t ever want to be alone again. But I figure I don’t exactly have the right to make anything else about me tonight.
I sneak back down the hall to the bathroom and climb into the tub to take my dress off, hoping to contain the inevitable glitter explosion that will come when I step out of it. It’s not a bad strategy, although I’m not totally sure what to do with the dress once I’ve got it off. I lean out of the tub and reach for the trash can, then pull out the plastic bag that’s lining it and stuff my dress inside. Thankfully, the bag is empty—no ear swabs or wadded-up pads or used tissues to stick to my dress. But once I’ve got the dress in the bag, I know that it wouldn’t matter anyway. It may not have any blood on it anymore, but I’m still going to throw it away as soon as I can.
