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

She’s like Roya running off the rocks at the reservoir, except half the time, Paulie doesn’t know where she’ll land. But she jumps anyway. She’s always figuring out new things that she can or can’t do, new ways that her magic can move and change and create and destroy. A month before prom, she showed up at my house and showed me that she’d figured out how to make soap bubbles turn into glass. She does stuff like that all the time: hey, check it out, I tried this thing and it worked.

She’s pretty amazing. Iris is more driven, and has more book smarts, but she doesn’t know how to take risks the same way Paulie does. I would have thought that the two of them together could unravel any problem. So it’s kind of scary to think that even with both of them working at it, there’s still not a solution.

I stall by taking a bite of my burrito. If I were Roya, I’d snap at them to figure it out. If I were Maryam, I’d pat Iris’s arm and tell her that I believe in her. If I were Marcelina, I’d ask what ideas they already had, and then I’d help them put something together. If I were Iris or Paulie, I’d … well. I guess I would come up with something brilliant and dangerous and say go.

But I’m not any of them, and I have to figure out for myself what to say.

It’s so much easier to think about my friends than it is to think about myself. It’s so much easier to predict them than it is to predict me. What does Alexis say? What’s the right answer? What does Iris need to hear right now? She and Paulie are both staring at me. Iris has a waiting-face on. Paulie is looking at my mouth and I wipe it with my thumb, thinking I must have rice sticking to my chin or something. I realize that the table has gone quiet: everyone is looking at me, waiting. I swallow my mouthful of burrito and clear my throat.

“We’ll all help you however we can.” I say it without thinking, and once I’ve said it, I know it’s the right answer. I reach out and grab Iris’s hand, giving it a firm squeeze. Relief floods her features. “You’re not alone,” I add, and I’m surprised at the tears that fill her eyes. “You know that, right? You know you’re not all by yourself in this?”

“Yeah,” she whispers, but I wonder. I think back to what she said yesterday, about being the one who’s supposed to have all the big ideas. Iris has always put a ton of pressure on herself, but I wonder if maybe we’ve been putting some pressure on her too—making her feel like she has to be the smartest, the most put-together out of all of us. I squeeze her hand again. She looks away.

“I mean it,” I murmur, low enough that it’s just between the two of us. “You don’t have to have all the answers.”

“I don’t really have any of the answers,” she says. She taps twice on my knuckle with her thumb, and then she lets go of my hand and pretends to rummage in her backpack. “I mean, I still haven’t figured out why we can all do what we do, and I’ve been doing research for years now. Besides, I’m not the one who figured out about the heart,” she says, not looking up.

“You—did you tell everyone about … ?” Everyone’s eyes are still on me.

“I think it’s worth a shot,” Roya says.

“What’s worth a shot?” I ask. My burrito suddenly feels strange in my hands. I pass it to Roya.

“Getting rid of the pieces to bring back the heart,” Maryam says softly. “Your idea.”

I shake my head and look to Iris as if she’ll give me answers, but she’s still pretending to rummage through her backpack. This doesn’t sound like what I said—but it makes sense, sort of. As much as anything does. “So, you guys think that if we get rid of all the pieces of Josh—”

“Maybe his heart will come all the way back, and then we can bring him back to life from there,” Paulie finishes. “Yeah.”

“We should try, right?” Maryam says. “I mean … it’s still worth trying to make it right, obviously. This method is better than nothing.” She’s got her hands folded neatly on top of the table, and everything about her looks carefully constructed to seem calm.

I wait for Iris to look up. When she does, I catch her eye, and she frowns.

“It makes the most sense,” she whispers. “And every time you guys get rid of a piece, except for when Roya did the arm—I feel better every time. Like the thing that’s wrong in that spell is slowly easing off.”

“It feels like we’re setting things back where they’re supposed to go,” Roya says through half a mouthful of my burrito. “So, yeah. Let’s go with it, huh?”

“What about the arm?” I ask, and Iris shakes her head.

“She didn’t actually get rid of it. She just hid it,” Iris says. “She’s gotta go back and get it out of there, get rid of it the right way.” The way she says it, I can tell that they already talked about this part. Without me. They figured it all out already.

Roya rolls her eyes. “Fine, yeah,” she says. “I’ll do it again. Alexis Rules: we have to get rid of the piece all the way, for keeps, before the heart comes back to life. Right?”

Alexis Rules? I’m not used to being the one credited with the big plans, and I’m so afraid that someone will be angry with me if this goes wrong too. “What if it doesn’t work?” I ask.

Maryam unfolds her hands to drape an arm across my shoulder. “Then we’ll figure it out. Together. But we have to try.”

“Maryam’s right,”