When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (best books to read non fiction TXT) 📕

the top of my butt when he’d tried to grind on me at prom, so I figured it wouldn’t be too tricky to get him to have sex with me. And I was right. Sort of.

“Oh my god,” Marcelina says, covering her black-lipsticked mouth with her hands. “Oh my god, Alexis, oh my god, what happened to his dick?”

Here is what happened to Josh’s dick.

It exploded.

I was trying to get the condom on him, and I guess I was doing it upside down or something. I don’t know, it looked a lot easier in the YouTube video I watched with the banana. But the room was dark and I couldn’t really see what I was doing, and it was my first time touching a guy below the waist, and it felt weird, and the condom wouldn’t go on. And then Josh asked if it was my first time.

I didn’t answer right away. He started to push me away, and he said something about how he didn’t want to do anything I wasn’t ready for. He was sweet about it. He was kind. But I wanted to have sex with someone, anyone, I needed to just get it over with, and I figured it didn’t matter if I was ready or not because Roya was probably going to fuck Tall Matt anyway, so—I lied. I lied and said that it wasn’t my first time and that it was fine. I tried to ignore the ache in my chest. I told him I wanted it, even though I didn’t.

The lights were off, but I guess Josh heard my voice do that stuffy thing it does when I’m trying not to cry. And he said I didn’t sound so sure, and he tried to grab the condom out of my hand, and I got flustered. And we were both struggling with the condom.

And then his dick exploded. And not in the way people joke about, not in the it-happens-to-a-lot-of-guys kind of way.

Every summer Marcelina cuts a hole into a watermelon and jams a handful of cherry bombs into it and then lights them and we run away and watch the carnage.

That’s the way Josh’s dick exploded.

“Did he try to—” Maryam is getting that face like she’s going to kill someone. If Josh wasn’t already dead, I’d be worried for him.

“No,” I tell her. I tell all of them. “No, he didn’t—we were—oh my god.” I bury my face in my hands. “I don’t know what happened. It was an accident.”

Paulie wraps her arm around my shoulder and squeezes. She smells like wine coolers. “Okay, so, okay. So.” Her eyes are locked on the bed. She’s not blinking. “So, he’s dead.”

“Oh, for sure,” Roya says. “He’s one hundred percent dead.”

I lean against Paulie. She’s shaking hard, still not blinking. Her voice is pitched higher than usual when she asks, “What do we do?”

It takes me a minute to realize that she’s talking to me.

“I have no idea,” I say. They all stare at me. “I don’t know. We … we have to fix it, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to fix it.” I’m babbling. I’m a disaster. Oh god, this is a disaster.

“C’mon, Alexis, you’re the brains of the outfit,” Roya says, giggling.

“Shut up, Roya,” I snap. I shouldn’t be so short with her, but Josh is dead and she’s laughing.

Besides, I’m not the “brains of the outfit.” That’s Iris. And I’m not as cool as Paulie, or as ambitious as Maryam, or as badass as Marcelina, or as funny as Roya. I’m just me, and she’s rubbing it in my face.

I should be more upset about Josh being dead than I am about Roya teasing me. But only one of those things feels small enough to fit inside my brain, and it’s not the dead boy on the bed in front of me. “You’re drunk,” I mumble at Roya.

She waves me off. “You would be drunk too, if you hadn’t run off to get laid.”

As always, Marcelina steps in to save us from ourselves. “Okay, let’s just—let’s figure out what to do.”

“What do you think we should do, Marcy?” Roya asks. Marcelina shoots her a look that would down a helicopter, but Roya’s too tipsy to apologize for using the forbidden nickname.

“We have to call the cops,” Iris says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Everyone explodes. Or, no, I shouldn’t use that word so lightly anymore. Everyone starts yelling. There, that’s less … evocative.

“No,” I say, and I feel dizzy even saying it. “No, no, no—”

“Are you fucking crazy?” Roya shouts. “My mom can’t know I’m here!”

“Not all of us are white,” Maryam snaps at Iris, crossing her arms.

“How are we going to explain what happened?” Paulie demands. “What, we’re just going to tell them about—”

“Guys, quiet,” I say, but none of them listen to me. I’m not going to do that thing where I yell super loud to get them all to shut up, that never works. I hold my hand up in the air with my thumb and middle two fingers together, my pinky and index fingers upright—the silent coyote.

The first one to notice is Iris. That’s not surprising, since she’s always the first one to notice anything. She raises a freckle-covered arm over her head and imitates my gesture. I can tell that she’s pissed because her lips press into a pale line—she’s a pale ginger, so she changes colors a lot when she’s feeling emotions or getting drunk. Right now, she’s so many shades of pink and white that I half expect to see steam rising out of her pile of red curls.

The second person to fall silent is Maryam. She always pays close attention to what we’re all doing, but she didn’t see my silent coyote because she was arguing with Paulie about something. They’re really close, which means they fight harder than any of us, except for maybe Roya and me. When Maryam notices my hand