Page 73 of When We Were Magic
It hurts to hear, but I shouldn’t expect anything less from Roya. She’s honest, but not particularly gentle. She’s not trying to make me feel bad. She’s just telling me the truth. And it’s true—I’m a little scary now. I’ve never been scary before, but I am. Just a little. I open my mouth to say something, I don’t even know what. Something that will make it okay that I’m scary. But she stops me from saying anything. She stops me in the best way possible.
For a minute—just a minute—my whole world is a curtain of Roya’s hair, and the smell of her vanilla-mint lip balm on my mouth, and the feeling of her fingers on the back of my neck. She kisses me the way she kissed me in the meadow: with everything she is, and everything I am, and something extra that’s outside both of us. She kisses me so hard that the breath leaves my lungs and my toes curl inside my hiking boots.
She kisses me like there’s no plan.
When she pulls away, there are sunflowers brushing against our hips. They’ve pushed up out of the soil in a circle around us, ringing us in bright yellow.
“I mean it,” she says. “No matter what happens, remember that I mean it. Okay? I want this.”
“I know.” I don’t know if I know, but I want to know, and maybe for now that can be enough.
21.
I SEE MOVEMENT OUT OFthe corner of my eye a scant few seconds before I hear Paulie crowing. “All riiiiiight!” When I look over, she’s got both fists in the air, and her face is split into a wide grin. “Finally!”
“Break it up already,” Iris calls from behind her. Next to them, Maryam and Marcelina cackle. Roya laughs into my mouth and gives me a tiny last kiss before she pulls away.
Not a last kiss, I remind myself. Just … the last fornow.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when they get closer. “I thought you were with another group.”
“We swapped with Angela and Gina and the Matts,” Maryam says. “We figured it would be better if we were all together.”
I bite my lip. “Actually, yeah. It’s really nice to all be together for this.” Roya squeezes my hand. “And since we’re all together … there’s something I should tell you guys.”
We start walking, our paces slow and even. We’re arm’s-length apart, except for me and Roya. The two of us keep our fingers linked. Her palm is soft against mine. It’s the onlything I want to pay attention to, the only thing I want to talk about:me and Roya, Roya and me, look, we’re a We, are you all seeing this?But there’s something else that needs to be said, and I need to say it while we’re all alone together.
I squeeze Roya’s hand the way she just squeezed mine, because that’s something we get to do now.
And then I tell them all that Josh’s heart has disappeared.
Paulie’s eyes are on the uneven ground in front of her. “Could someone have taken it? Nico, maybe?”
“Why would they?” I ask. “The bag was in the same place I left it. No, I think … I think it just disappeared. When, uh. When Roya and I got rid of her last piece.”
“What do we do now?” Marcelina whispers, and no one answers. We follow a trail of stirred soil deep into the woods, far from the ongoing searches. We pass through a thick section of twisting black oaks that look like something out of a scary story. I duck under a low-hanging branch and get trailing moss in my hair. I’ve never seen trailing moss before, except in documentaries about bayous and horror movies about haunted houses in the Deep South. Paulie ducks between two of the trees and disappears into shadow. I’m pulling moss out of my hair and looking at Paulie’s retreating form, about to follow her, when a shadow detaches itself from the trunk of an oak just a few feet away from her.
“Paulie,” I hiss.
“What?” she whispers back. I point to the shadow, and Paulie freezes.
It’s the coyote.
Her ears are low, almost flat. She’s staring at me, her yellow eyes wide with alarm. I try to send her calm and comfort and certainty that we won’t do harm, that we’ve just stumbled across her path by accident. I try not to distract myself with prayers that she’s not going to panic and hurt Paulie or me.
Because she might hurt us. She’s an animal, a creature. She’s not a dog and she’s not a person and she has teeth that are made to tear into soft flesh like mine. And if she’s scared of us, she’ll do what she thinks she has to do in order to survive.
But then, impossibly, she takes a step toward me. It’s slow, hesitant—her paw hovers a few inches above the ground before she lets it fall. Her eyes are locked on mine. Paulie is looking at me too, and I shake my head, hoping that she’ll understand what I mean: don’t doanything.
The coyote doesn’t bite me. She approaches, impossibly slow, and pushes the top of her head into my palm.
Strange smell meat found yours come follow come now meat strange new come
Before I can answer—before I can really even begin to understand—the coyote turns and starts to walk slowly between the trees. She slinks with her tail low, glancing behind her.
It’s not that I don’t have a choice, but—what else am I going to do? Of course I follow her. As I pass Paulie, I have just enough time to whisper, “Follow me. Not too close.”
Paulie’s face is frozen with something between fear anddisbelief, but there’s no time to explain. By the time I turn back to the coyote, the dappled shade of the trees has almost swallowed her up.
