Page 20 of When We Were Magic
I always think of her magic as fixing-things magic. Roya can heal people, like she did when Iris was hurt on prom night, and she can clean things, like with her dad’s shirts. She has a lot of other magic—we all do—but she’s the only one of us who can do those particular things. She hates it. She says it’s regressive. But then, she can also start a car just by laying her hands on the engine block, and she set my arm with an audible crunch back when I broke it in fifth grade, so … I think she’s just looking for something to be mad about.
Which isn’t all that surprising. It is Roya, after all.
If she was here, she’d will me clean. But she’s not here.
I come onto campus the back way and head for the gym lockers, which are in a low-ceilinged, temporary-looking building between the pool and the auditorium. There’s no proper door on either of the locker rooms, which has always seemed weird to me—just a curving wall at the entrance that hides the inside of the rooms from passersby, like at a rest-stop bathroom. The entire school is like that: built sometime in the late eighties to fulfill a design aesthetic that seems halfway between airplane hangar and National Park outbuilding. There are lots of low timbers and metal crossbeams, and everything needed to be power-washed about ten years ago. There’s new paint every year, covering up old graffiti and trying to make the place look fresh, but the stucco and cinderblock never really stops being outdated.
I walk into the locker room, feeling furtive and victorious, and head for the showers. I drop my backpack on a bench without breaking stride. I strip off my shirt as I go, raining dirt that no one will notice onto the pebbly, never-mopped floor.Clean,I think, reaching back to unhook my bra.So close to being clean—
“I don’t know.”
I freeze with my fingers on the clasp of my bra. The echoes of a voice, distorted by the way the sound bounces around the locker room. No one is supposed to be here this early. Shit. I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, so I race toward theshowers, hoping to duck behind a curtain before anyone sees me. Before anyone can ask what I’m doing here and why I look like a swamp creature.
“Just ask her,” another voice answers just as I reach the showers. Too late, I realize that I’ve come closer to the voices, rather than farther from them. I duck behind a shower curtain and whip it closed just as the sound of shower shoes slapping wetly on the floor reaches me.
“She won’t tell me,” the first voice answers, and I realize who it is I’m hearing.
Roya.
The footsteps stop just outside of my shower stall, and a locker swings open. The voice that answers Roya is unmistakable, now that it’s close enough not to echo off the metal lockers. It’s Iris. “Well, maybe if you didn’t—”
Oh, thank god, I think, and I open the shower curtain again. Iris and Roya are right there, and they freeze at the sight of me. “You guys scared the shit out of me,” I say.
They don’t answer. They’re staring at me. Iris is clutching the top of her towel, and Roya has frozen halfway through drying her mass of hair.
“What the hell,” Iris breathes, and I realize what I must look like—hair in a half-fallen-out topknot, dirt caked into my every pore, shirtless, my bra hanging halfway off. I’m not sure if I look better or worse than I did on prom night. At least I’m not covered in blood this time.
“Um,” I say.
“Holy shit, Alexis,” Roya says, and then she starts cackling at me, a desperate kind of “oh thank god I can still find things funny” laugh. “It’s only been like … an hour and a half. Whathappenedto you?” Roya gasps.
“Lots,” I snap. “Lots of stuff happened to me.” I pull the shower curtain closed and strip, throwing my filthy clothes out past the vinyl. Every item I toss elicits a new round of laughter from Roya—I can hear Iris joining in, less enthusiastically, but she’s laughing all the same. “It’s been a long morning,” I say, turning on the water and tipping my head back to shake the dirt out of my hair.
I do not think of the fact that I am in here, naked, and Roya is out there, wearing only a towel. Ido not think about it, okay? Not at all. Not even a little.
“Do you need soap?” Roya asks. Before I can answer, her hand thrusts through a gap in the shower curtain, holding a bottle of the mint body wash she loves. Her wrist brushes my stomach as she waves the bottle back and forth. I can’t breathe.
“Yes, thanks,” I say, grabbing the bottle in a wet hand. Our fingers tangle for a moment before she lets go of the bottle.
I shove my face into the spray. She’s my best friend. I don’t think about it.
“What are you guys doing here so early?” I call. “I thought you’d go back to bed.”
“Practice,” Iris answers, and that’s all she needs to say. They must have come straight here from Marcelina’s house. There’s abig meet coming up, but “practice” would have been the answer even if there hadn’t been a single meet on the calendar. With his two best swimmers about to leave, the swim coach has been driving the team hard all year. If I breathe deep enough, I can smell the chlorine still clinging to Roya’s hair and skin.
And Iris. It’s also clinging to Iris. Not just Roya. Not just Roya’s skin.
I lather, rinse, and inspect. Still dirty, although the first round got most of the loose dirt off.
“Hey, do you want me to do your hair?” Roya calls. I start soaping up again, trying to get some of the more stubborn dirt off my hands and arms.
“Why?” I ask as I rinse.
“So you don’t have to wash it,” she says. “I should be able to get the dirt out without getting it wet.”
“Too late,” I reply, turning off the water and wringing out my hair, and I hear her mutter anI told you soto Iris. “Um, speaking of which,” I add, but before I can finish, Roya’s arm thrusts back into the shower, this time clutching an only-slightly-damp towel. “Thanks,” I say sheepishly. After I take the towel, her arm hesitates for a moment.
I stare at the soft inside of her wrist. It’s a lighter shade than the deep brown-gold of the rest of her, but still dark enough that my fingertips look ghostly against the backdrop of her skin. A bangle, gold with dark green stones, hangs just above the jut of bone at the base of her hand. It’s the bangle I gave her for her birthday last year.
