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

“Anyone I know?”

“Yeah, probably,” she says. “If you don’t know her yet, you guys will get along great, though.”

“Cool,” I say, and we wait in the quiet. I listen to the birds that stopped singing when we crashed into the trees—they’re slowly coming to accept that we’re here, and their conversations are starting up again.

“Can I ask you a question?” she says, and I can feel her jaw moving against my shoulder.

“Of course.”

“What were you doing with him?” Her eyelashes brush over my collarbone and I suppress a shiver.

“I think that’s a conversation you should have with a grown-up, Paulie,” I joke, and she jabs me in the ribs with a knuckle.

“You know what I mean. Why would you try to climb on top of Josh Harper? Of all the people in the whole world? Of all the people in the whole school? Hell, of all the people at that party?” She lifts her head from my shoulder and looks at me, her face uncharacteristically still. Why does she have her I’m-fine face on? “Why him?”

“I don’t know,” I say, picking bark off the edge of the stump. “It was stupid.”

She doesn’t let me get away with that, though. “You’re not a stupid person,” she presses. “You don’t do stupid shit like trying to lose your virginity to Josh Harper.”

I flinch. “I don’t really need you judging me right now,” I snap. “I get that I shouldn’t have done it, but I did, so just let it go, okay?”

Paulie stares at me. She pulls her hair up into a ponytail, then nods at me. “Okay,” she says. “If you want to talk about it, we can. I don’t mean to push it. I just want to know that you’re okay.” She’s looking into my face and I feel like there’s something I’m missing, something I don’t understand, but then I say that I’m okay and she nods and rests her head back on my shoulder, and whatever it is that I was missing will just have to stay missed.

“Sorry I was a bitch just now,” I murmur into her hair.

Paulie pats my thigh. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.”

I’m struck by the sentiment. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things,” I repeat, and Paulie taps her fingers on my knee in a pattern I don’t follow.

“Yeah,” she says. “I learned it from the therapist Mom and Dad took me to after Drew died. I kept apologizing for being mad or sad or whatever. She told me that it’s okay to have feelings, and that it’s okay to be upset at things like my brother dying. It helped a lot.”

We sit and listen to the trees and the birds and I think about it. I wonder why nobody’s ever told me that before: It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.

I think about what it would have felt like to be a little kid and have Nico disappear.

I’ve talked about it with Roya before a couple of times—both of us have younger brothers, although Nico is closer to the age Drew would have been if he’d lived. I try to imagine letting myself be upset about something that enormous, and I can’t. I grab Paulie’s hand and send a thread of magic into it, the same way she did to me in the car. I can’t see the glitter, but she smiles, and I know it’s there, dark bright purple or whatever the hell Roya meant. She squeezes my hand and then clears her throat.

“So, while we’re out here—there’s something I’ve been kind of wanting to talk to you about,” she says. She’s turning my hand over in hers and looking at the lines of my palm.

“Are you going to tell my fortune?” I ask, and she smiles down at my fingers before biting her lip.

“Not exactly,” she says.

“Wait,” I say, staring into the trees. I could have sworn I saw a shadow—“There,” I whisper, pointing. Paulie looks up and follows the line of my finger with her eyes. The line of her neck is rigid.

“Say hi,” she whispers back to me without moving her lips.

“What?”

“Say. Hi,” she repeats through clenched teeth. “I called her, but I don’t know how to say hi to her.”

I look into the trees and see the shadow again. It’s completely silent, moving toward us in fits and starts. I say hi.

The shadow doesn’t move.

I tell it that it’s come to the right place; that we have something to share. I tell it that we’re not a threat, but that we’re not to be trifled with either. I tell it without words, using the language I’ve known my whole life without knowing how.

“Paulie,” I breathe as the shadow steps out from around a tree. “Is that a coyote?”

“Holy shit, yes,” Paulie whispers. “It worked. Oh my god, it worked.”

She’s smaller than I expected her to be. I guess in my head, I always thought coyotes were just brownish wolves, but she’s small and skinny. Her tail and head are low, and her hackles are raised. I repeat that we aren’t a threat, but she still walks toward us slowly, pausing every few steps to stare at us with suspicious golden eyes.

Paulie’s got a tight grip on my fingers. “Is she, uh, nice?”

“She’s a fucking coyote, Paulie,” I mutter.

“Right, but is she a nice coyote? Ask her if she’s a nice coyote.”

I grit my teeth, but … it’s not like I have any better ideas. I ask her if she’s a nice coyote, and she freezes. She lifts her head, cocks it to one side, and sits. Just like a dog. It’s so bizarre, because she’s not a dog, but everything in my brain is screaming DOG and I don’t know what to do.

I stare at the coyote. She stares at me.

“What’s wrong with her belly?” she asks, and I drag my eyes away from the coyote’s. Her belly is droopy, slack. Tented.

“She’s nursing,” I answer. “She’s got pups