Page 7 of When We Were Magic
“Piece of Josh,” Roya says, and we all laugh desperately. Iris cracks a smile.
“Too soon,” she whispers. She’s still breathing a little fast,but it seems like we’ve successfully derailed her anxiety spiral before she went into a full-on panic attack. “We could try again, though,” she says.
Sometimes Iris says things that she doesn’t mean just so one of us will reply with the thing she knows to be true. Like, she’ll say, “What if nobody likes me?” so that someone outside of her brain can respond, “Lots of people like you.” It’s a coping mechanism we’ve all developed together. It’s not manipulative, and it’s not fake. It’s just that sometimes she needs to hear someone else confirm reality.
“We can’t try again,” Roya says softly, and Iris closes her eyes and listens. “That spell not working was really bad for you. I don’t know what it did exactly, but …” She pulls her hands away, extinguishing the pink light, and Iris gasps with pain. “Yeah,” Roya says, returning her hands. Iris sighs as the pink light returns. “I don’t think you should do magic for a few days. Actually, I don’t think you should doanythingfor a few days.”
“Okay,” Iris says. She looks up at Marcelina, then makes a dismayed sound. “Oh, Marcelina, oh no. I ripped your dress.”
“I could probably try to fix it,” Roya says halfheartedly. “Later, when I’ve got a little more to give.” The muscle under her eye is twitching the longer she keeps her hands on Iris, though, and I can’t imagine that she’ll have anything left by the end of the night.
Marcelina waves the apology away. “It’s fine,” she says, but her chin wobbles a little in that trying-not-to-cry way. We allknow it’s not fine—she worked evening shifts at the Crispy Chicken for four months to save up for that dress. She cried when she finally bought it—she said it was the nicest thing she’d ever owned. It’s black, like all of Marcelina’s clothes, but it has little silver stars stitched into it. There’s a huge rip in the bodice now. It’s definitely ruined. “We’ve got more important things to worry about,” she says.
It’s true. It’s not right, but it’s true.
We help Iris stand up. Her legs are trembling. Her freckles are stark—something she’d love if she was doing it on purpose. Her freckles are her favorite part of herself, her best-beloved feature. She’s told me that they’re the thing that make her feel most beautiful. But right now, she just looks sick. She keeps muttering, “I don’t know what happened.” Roya keeps a hand on Iris’s shoulder, pouring that pink glow into her. We stand there, our arms around each other, staring at the body parts on the bed.
“I have an idea,” Paulie says. She unthreads her arm from around my waist and goes to Josh’s closet.
“Wait,” I say, “what are you doing?”
“Trust me,” she calls back, rummaging. Downstairs at the party someone’s turned the music up, and the bass vibrates through the floor. Paulie emerges from the closet clutching a pile of bags.
“Duffels,” she says, dropping them on the floor next to the bed.
“Duffels?” Marcelina repeats blankly.
“Knew he’d have a buttload of ’em,” Paulie says. “Lacrosse dudes love duffel bags.”
I nod as if that’s a truth universally acknowledged. “Sure,” I say. “But what are we … ?” Paulie folds her arms and waits for the penny to drop. And then it does. “No. No way.”
“Yeah,” Paulie says, looking uneasily at the bed. “We gotta get him out of here.”
Roya is the first one to make a move. She gives Iris a squeeze, then steps toward the bed. Iris makes a small noise in the back of her throat and looks a little gray, but she stays standing under her own strength. Roya grabs a duffel and moves to the bed. In one brisk motion, she grabs an arm and a leg and stuffs them into the bag. She zips it up and takes two fast steps backward. Her lips are pressed together and her nostrils are white. She nods, staring straight ahead without seeming to see anything.
“Right,” Marcelina says. “Sure.” She picks up a duffel and scoops the hands and feet into it. She looks at the floor and bobs the bag up and down, like she’s testing its weight.
Paulie takes the arm and leg that Roya didn’t grab. She doesn’t say anything, and after she’s zipped up her duffel, she sits down on the floor, cradling it in her lap.
“Okay,” Iris whispers over and over again. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” She grabs a drawstring backpack and yanks the top open, then rests it on the bed and starts to load the vertebrae into it one at a time. It takes a while. Her hands are shaking. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three,” she mutters. Sheshakes the bag a little to settle the bones in the bottom of it, then peers inside at the amount of room that’s left. After a moment of deliberation, she picks up the liver and jams it into the bag. She cinches the backpack shut and swings it onto her back, wincing at the rattle of the bones inside.
Marcelina looks up, something dawning across her face. “Oh shit, actually. Iris?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I trade you?” She holds out her duffel, with the hands and feet inside. Iris stares at her and she shrugs. “I need the spine for something.”
Iris shakes her head. “I don’t want to know.” She holds out her bag of bones and Marcelina takes it.
“Thanks.” Marcelina passes over her bag of extremities and beams at Iris, who can’t help smiling back. Nobody can help smiling back when Marcelina turns up the wattage like that. Her cheeks go all round and dimply and everything feels brighter. It’s not magic, but it’s close.
Once the exchange is done, they both turn and look at me. I look around the room. They’re all watching me. Waiting.
“My turn, right?” I say. My voice seems too loud. Downstairs, the party is chanting something, and the chants dissolve into a general all-purpose party-yell.
“Your turn,” Roya says. I look up at her, and she gives me an encouraging little smile. I feel some of the tension slip off my shoulders.Maybe she’s not mad at me after all.
“My turn,” I repeat. I grab the last bag—a beat-up backpack with Josh’s name scrawled on it in Sharpie. It was probably his schoolbag last year. I look inside: a highlighter with no cap on it rolls around in the bottom, next to a crumpled Skittles wrapper and a few curly edges from torn-out notebook pages. I turn the bag over and let the trash fall to the floor. It doesn’t feel right to leave it in there.
