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

And is it worth it to risk that recoil if it means saving my friends?

I decide to think about that later. I can’t put that on Iris. It’s a decision I’ll have to make on my own. But there is one thing I should tell her about, no matter what I decide. “There’s something else that’s been going on,” I say, and she waits while I figure out how to explain it. “I think I’ve been … hurting people?”

“What do you mean?”

I tell her about the girl with the nosebleed in the cafeteria, and my bruise at the reservoir, and the blood that oozed from Gina’s eye. I tell her about a half dozen other moments I’ve noticed—moments when I’m not sure if someone is just having an accident near me, or if I’m causing them injury somehow. “I’m not doing any of it on purpose. It’s just kind of happening,” I explain.

“Okay,” she says. She tugs on one ginger curl. “Well, that makes sense, with all the tension.”

“You think it’s stress-induced?” I ask doubtfully.

“No, no, not like that. The magical tension. Maybe because you did the original, uh … thing?” I’m grateful that she doesn’t say “murder.” Iris doesn’t usually mince words, but she’s being gentle with me. She’s being careful. “All of the magic that’s being used to hold the body in pieces is pulling on me, right? Well, it’s got to be pulling on you, too. And that recoil is probably hitting you really hard.”

She pulls on the rubber band around her wrist again, harder this time than before. I flinch as it snaps against her skin. The place it strikes her turns red, but then she pulls the whole thing off and shows me the red mark it left on the opposite side of her wrist, where it dug into the skin as she pulled on it. She continues with her explanation, running a finger across the red welt the rubber band has left. “The tension and the recoil are both going to be hard on you, and something in that has to be making you do stuff by accident. I mean. That’s all just a theory, but you’ve definitely got a lot of”—she gestures vaguely—“a lot of residual magic pulling on you. It looks like you’re getting yanked in a bunch of directions all at once. Have you been hurting anyone on purpose, or is it like, when you’re stressed and not paying attention?”

I remember how I tripped before hurting Gina. I remember giving myself the bruise while I was thinking about Roya, and watching the cop when that poor freshman got the nosebleed. “Stressed and not paying attention,” I answer. “Definitely that one.”

“Well, there you go,” she says authoritatively. “The parts of the spell that are tangled up around you are tense as hell. It’s snapping when you get stressed out, and it’s hurting people around you by accident.” I would be skeptical—after all, we don’t really know how any of this works—but then, it’s Iris. She’s bossy and overbearing sometimes, but she’s brilliant and she understands magic better than I do. And I trust her, and she sounds certain.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to have all the answers,” I say, hesitant. “But we should try to figure out how to fix this.”

Thankfully, she nods. “I don’t think we can prevent everyone from losing things as they get rid of pieces. But we can keep your problem from escalating. For that, it just stands to reason that we have to get rid of all the pieces as fast as we can. There’ll be consequences for the rest of us, but there were always going to be consequences for us. At least this way you won’t, you know. Slip up.” She nods, and I nod back, and with that, we agree to stick with the crappy answer for now.

“So what do we do?” I ask softly.

With a grim smile, Iris unzips her backpack and pulls out two gallon-sized ziplock bags. Each one contains one of Josh Harper’s hands.

“What do we do?” she repeats. She drops the ziplock bags to the ground and then looks back up at me. “We make sure.”

When Pop and Dad met, Pop was trying to make it as a musician. He was the lead singer for a prog-rock band called WYLDFYR2. I guess they were supposed to be called WYLDFYR3, but the guy who printed their T-shirts messed up and they stuck with it. I’ve never known him to be anything but bald, but before I was born, he had long wavy hair down to his butt and these big hair-sprayed bangs. He wore eyeliner and stuck his tongue out a lot in photos. Dad met Pop after a show and told him that when you say “WYLDFYR2” out loud, it sounds like “wildfart” and Pop couldn’t stop laughing and I guess the rest was history. Even though there are tons of pictures, I still have a pretty hard time imagining Dad at a show or Pop onstage.

Even harder to imagine? Pop drove a van. Technically, he lived in the van, although he also talks a lot about crashing on people’s couches and doesn’t like it when I say, “Pop lived in a van.” The van had this amazing airbrushed mural on the side—it was a wizard standing on top of a mountain, doing battle with a dragon, and a half-naked Viking-god was riding the dragon. It was awesome. In the pictures I’ve seen of the mural, the wizard has his arms over his head and lightning is shooting out of his staff and one of his hands is holding a big fireball.

That’s kind of how Iris looks now. She looks like the wizard, except instead of fire and lightning, she’s got a thousand threads of magic. Honestly, I think she’d beat the wizard. I love it when she does this. Her magic is always really showy,