Page 8 of When We Were Magic
I step up to the bed feeling like a spotlight is on me. Gingerly, I pick up his head. The eyes are closed, and he would look like he was sleeping if it wasn’t for the blue tint of his lips and the deathly pallor of his skin. His head is lighter than I would have anticipated. I wonder if his brain is still inside.
I hold the head in both of my hands. His hair is soft under my palm. There had been some sort of gel in it before, when we were making out, but now it’s just clean. I bite my lip and put his head into the backpack as gently as I can manage. Then, before I have time to hesitate, I grab his heart.
I gasp without meaning to. “It’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Iris asks.
I shake my head. “Feel.” I hold the heart out to her, and she pokes it with a tentative fingertip.
“Oh, fuck,” she whispers. “It’s … it’s socold?”
No one else wants to touch the heart, and I can’t blame them. It feels awful. It’s like glass, hard and smooth and cold and much too heavy. Warmth seeps out of my hand and into the heart by the second. I stare at it. It’s almost translucent, but not quite, and I feel sure that if I just moved into better light, I could see all the way to the center of it. I can feelsomething in me moving toward it—something stirring deep inside me, being pulled toward the thing at the core of the heart, the thing I can’t quite see—
Roya grabs the heart out of my hands and drops it into my backpack. She zips it up without looking at where the heart has landed.
“Maybe don’t hold that thing in your hands for too long, huh?” she says, dipping her head low to look into my eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, shaking myself. “Thanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Wait,” Roya says. “How are we doing this?”
“We each get rid of our pieces,” Iris replies in her bossy-voice.
“I want to be with you guys,” I add quickly. “When you do it.”
“What?” Paulie asks. “Why?”
“I just … I did this,” I say. “And you guys don’t have to help me. But Iknow”—I hold up my hand to stem the tide of of-course-we’re-helping objections—“I know you’re going to help me. So I want to at least be there with you when you get rid of your … your parts. Okay?”
Marcelina nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
“Thanks,” I say. There’s an awkward moment where none of us knows what to say to each other. Roya breaks through it by opening the door to the bedroom. She walks out without another word. Iris smiles at me over her shoulder, then follows Roya out. Paulie goes after her.
I look at Marcelina. “Um, this is awkward, but …”
“What?” she asks.
“I told my parents I was sleeping over at your house tonight,” I say.
She narrows her eyes at me. Her smile is always luminous, but when she’s mad, she looks like a lioness. “Because you were going to stay here?”
I shrug, trying not to look away. “I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay. Anyway, um. I can’t stay here tonight. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” she says. She hefts her duffel and purses her lips for a moment before shrugging, and I know I’ve been forgiven for using her in my lie. “Of course you can stay at my place tonight, Alex. Now let’s get the fuck out of here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I pick up my bag full of Josh Harper and turn off the desk lamp before we go. I shut the door behind me. I don’t look back.
3.
MARCELINA IS COMPLICATED.
She’s this tiny, plump Filipina girl with the most perfectly round face you’ve ever seen. She’s small and soft and likes to tell people that she’s only four feet tall, just to see if they’ll call her bluff. She does the whole cute-goth thing really well: lots of black lipstick and eyeliner but also occasionally some silver glitter. Her hair is long and black and she piles it up tall most of the time. She wears high heels that she buys cheap, and then she paints them or glues studs and feathers to them until they look like something you’d have to get on a waitlist to buy.
She doesn’t really seem like the type of girl who would live on a farm, but if you decide you’re going to tell Marcelina what kind of person she’s supposed to be? Well … good luck with that, is all I can say.
Marcelina likes to say that her family is land-rich. They’re in a rambling one-story house with a lot of DIY additions tacked onto the sides. It sits on twenty acres of undevelopedland that butts up against the woods, and they kind of think of the woods as their property too. Marcelina especially, since her best magic is tree magic.
We all have something like that. We can all do a lot of the same little things, like knocking over trash cans from across the room or drying each other’s hair or warming up our hands when it gets cold out. Some of us can do stuff that the others can’t, like how Marcelina can talk to trees and Paulie can make water into shapes. And each of us has something we’re best at—something we practice all the time, something that feels morerightthan any other magic we do. For Marcelina, it’s plants. Trees especially, but really, all plants. She understands them on a level that I can’t even comprehend, and a lot of the time it seems like they understand her back. I know how it sounds, but it’s true.
