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

It didn’t work. Iris tried her best, but it didn’t work.

Josh is still dead.

I’m the only one who stayed. Everyone else is gone, doing the things that come between dawn and the first class of the day. We were all freaked out about how things went down—about the heart and about the hawks, and about how badly our attempt to set things right hurt Iris. Roya started asking if the heart was coming back to life, if that meant we could bring every piece back to life but couldn’t put them back together, and Maryam had to calm her down before she hyperventilated. And Iris … Iris was in bad shape, pale and unsteady on her feet.

Even after everyone had calmed down, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had just happened. About our failure, and about what would come next. I told them to go ahead without me.

So instead, I’m burying the head.

I dig as the sun comes up. The shovel crunches through the top layer of dirt and into soft soil, well churned by industrious worms. All I hear as the sky lightens overhead is my own steady breathing and the rhythm of the shovel shifting mound after mound of earth. School starts in a couple of hours—the first day of the last month of classes—and I need enough time to bury the head, go to school, shower, change, and buy a crappy day-old bagel from the cafeteria. The ground is much softer than I anticipated. The digging is easy, and before I know it, I’ve got a pretty deep hole.

I jump down into it and keep going. I dig until the top of the hole is over my head, until I’m surrounded on all four sides by close walls of loose, crumbling earth. Josh is still dead. The hole is only just wide enough for me to stick my elbows out and turn around in a circle. I can’t see anything but hole anymore, and my breath catches in my throat. Josh is still dead. I make an unintentional ragged sound as my lungs clench with the certainty that I’ve dug too deep, that I’m trapped, that someone will find me here in a hole with a head in a backpack next to it.

Josh is still dead. And the only thing we can do is try to hide the evidence.

I take deep breaths. I imagine that I’m coaching Iris through a panic attack. I imagine that I’m floating in a tropical sea, staring up at the moon. None of it works, though, because every time I open my eyes, I’m still in a grave. I have to get out of here.

I toss up the shovel and try to jump. When I bend my knees, I find that there’s barely room for even that—my butt bumps against one side of the hole and my knees bump against the other. I push off and get maybe a foot of height, and when I grab at the edge of the hole, I succeed only in pulling dirt down into my face. I spit mud and try again, keeping my arms over my head this time. I get a little higher and grab at fistfuls of grass near the sides of the hole. Painfully, bracing my feet on opposite sides of the too-small grave, I pull myself up. Soft soil rains down into my shirt and shoes and hair. I have my eyes scrunched shut to keep the dirt out of them, and I don’t open them again until I’m sprawled, panting, on the ground beside the hole I’ve made.

The tree I’ve chosen to bury Josh’s head under is, I think, the lightning-struck tree that Marcelina was worrying about. It’s a huge, gnarled black oak with a squat trunk. Branches shoot up out of it like grasping fingers, and there’s a black scar that travels the entire length of the tree, from the tallest branch to the roots. It’s still alive, but it’s struggling—there are an awful lot of brown leaves, and I can’t see any tender new growth on the tips of the branches.

I pull the head out of my backpack, trying not to touch his eyes or his lips. I drop it into the hole and start shoveling soil back over it. It takes longer than I thought it would—I figured I’d be able to just kind of push a whole pile of dirt into the hole, but it doesn’t quite work that way. I try to shove the pile, and it topples. I have to shovel the dirt in the same way I got it out—one scoop at a time. I’m thankful for the work, for the way my palms burn and my back starts to ache, because Josh is dead and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I’d let myself hope, and that was a mistake, because there’s nothing I can do but try not to get caught.

I wanted to do the right thing. I tried to do the right thing.

By the time I finish, I’m sweating hard, and the sun is already bright in the sky. I wipe my face off on the inside of my shirt, although both are so dirty that I’m sure I’m just smearing mud between the two.

I can’t make this right, but at least I can make it useful. Before I drop in the last few fistfuls of soil, I crouch next to the little mound. I push my fingers into the loose dirt—the grave dirt—and close my eyes.

I don’t have Marcelina’s focus when it comes to plants. Her ability to draw the other tree’s roots to the new nutrient-source is something I’d never even hope to achieve. But I can do something, in my own way, to help. I push magic out into the earth. All of my muscles relax as I let it flow through me and into the tiny tunnels and warrens and scent-trails of