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

her. I do. But Iris doesn’t really hug people, and something feels wrong. I ask the only question I can. “Do you promise?”

She steps back from me and holds out her pinky finger. “Promise.”

I wrap my pinky finger around hers and we shake on it. The promise is sealed more tightly now than any spell could bind us—the pinky-swear is unshakable. And Iris might be turning into someone whose power I don’t understand, but she’s still my friend. I have to trust her.

I have to.

We head to the cafeteria together, weaving our way through the people who are slowly filling the halls. My phone goes off again, and I hear Iris’s phone going off at the same time. “Do you know what’s going on with Marcelina?” I ask. “She’s been acting kind of off, and then those texts this morning—”

“Yeah,” Iris interrupts. “I wanted to ask you about that. Have you noticed anything weird these last few days?” I don’t say anything, letting the absurdity of the question hang between us. “Right,” she says, “okay, that’s fair. But like, have you noticed anything missing?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I haven’t really been looking, though. I’ve kind of been thinking about …” Roya, Josh, body parts, the monster I might secretly be.

“Well. Start paying attention,” she says. She shakes her head at me. “I’m not just being mysterious and annoying,” she says. I’d think she was reading my mind, but irritation is probably written all over my face. “I just … I’m not totally sure what it is, but I think I have an idea.”

“What is it?” I say, and I can hear how brusque I sound, but I can’t be bothered to apologize. It’s been a long morning.

“There’s a pull on the spell I cast on prom night,” she says softly, pushing open the cafeteria door. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just like … a little tug on the threads of the magic.”

My annoyance at her information-hoarding evaporates. “You can feel the spells you cast?” I ask, incredulous. She’s cast so many over the years, while we were all experimenting with our magic and learning what we can do. I can’t imagine having to be aware of all those spells, all the time.

“Not forever,” she says. “And not all of them. But this one was really big, and I’m kind of … aware of it.” She shrugs and pulls out a chair at one of the little round cafeteria tables. I sit across from her and rest my head on my arms. I’m so tired already. “My connection to the spell is going away, but it’s not fading evenly like it usually does,” she continues. “It’s like it’s getting split off, one chunk at a time. And I think something weird is happening when you guys do whatever you do to make that split happen.” I stare at her, my chin digging into my arms, and try to do a mental inventory to see if I’ve felt anything “weird.” I can’t figure out what’s weird enough to stand out and what’s insignificant. “Try not to worry about it,” she says, all business. “Stay focused on … on trying to bring Josh back.”

A flash of irritation—does she think I’m not focused enough on bringing Josh back? Does she think that’s the problem, my focus? I clench a fist and then immediately force myself to relax, because I’m afraid to get angry. Because I don’t know what I’m capable of anymore. I can’t let myself hurt anyone else.

I’m enough of a problem already.

She doesn’t notice my anger or my fear, or any of it. She’s in her own world, trying to fit all of our problems into boxes. “Just let me know if you notice anything, okay?”

“Sure,” I say. “If I notice anything abnormal about any part of my life, I’ll definitely tell you. There is one thing, though, and I don’t know if they go together or—”

“What?” She’s staring at me with intense focus, and the part of me that’s worried about her strobes again. I ignore it.

“The heart,” I mutter. “You know how it’s wrong?”

“Yeah, and then that thing where it—” She flexes her fingers in a pulsing cardiac rhythm.

“Right.” I nod. “It’s beating. Just a little bit right now, but it happens more every time someone … splits off a chunk.”

She grimaces. “Yeah, we should find a better way to phrase that. So, you think the heart is, what? Coming back to life?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “We should talk to everyone about it, right?” The truth is, that’s exactly what I think. I think that the heart is coming a little bit back to life every time we get rid of a piece of Josh.

Which would mean … what? Roya was panicking about it when we tried to bring Josh back to life, when all those hawks fell to the ground around us. She was afraid that we would be able to bring him back to life bit by bit, but that we wouldn’t be able to put him back together, and that we would make everything worse with whatever we tried.

I don’t know if his heart beating is making things better or worse. I don’t know if we’re solving the problem or if we’re just hurting ourselves in order to put unearned life into a dead organ.

I don’t want to be the one to say that Josh’s heart is coming back. I want to throw it out there as an idea and let someone else pin it down, lay claim to it as a fact.

“Sure. We can all talk it over.” Iris nudges my foot with hers. “Hey, do you want a bagel? I’m going to go grab one. I’ll see if I can eat half of it before Roya gets to school.”

My stomach growls. I unzip my backpack to grab my wallet. “Yeah,” I say, digging through the things that didn’t get blindly shoved into my locker, “let me give you some