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

so she doesn’t do it all that often. She’s the only one of us who can see her own magic, and I think it embarrasses her to use it in front of people. It doesn’t really bother the rest of us to use ours, because we can’t see how flashy it is, so it feels small and subtle and private more often than not. But Iris gets flustered. She sees something huge inside herself, and instead of embracing it, she looks away.

But when she does embrace it—man, it’s awesome. Literally awesome. Not awesome like “cool” or “big” or “loud,” but awesome as in, it puts me into a state of awe. Wonder. She circles her hands over her head and as she does it, blazing threads of white gather around her spread fingers like cotton candy. They cling to her arms too, sliding up around her shoulders like a bright mantle. Her eyes are bright white, and she watches her hands with her lower lip between her teeth as a fat spool of crackling white builds between them. When she’s got exactly enough for whatever she has in mind, she lowers her arms in front of her like she’s about to throw the spool of white power at the ground. But she doesn’t throw it; she holds it there, like a ball of lightning between her fists. The magic is still, static. The air feels heavy. She twists her fingers just so, and the threads shift into some subtly different configuration. She nods, satisfied.

I wonder what it would be like if I could see my magic. Would I be able to do the amazing things Iris can? She has so much control, so much strategy, whereas I just kind of feel things out as I go. She can fine-tune so many little details, all because she can watch what the threads are doing before she uses them. But she’s also obsessed, because she can see everything she makes.

Still, I can’t help admiring both her obsession and her control. If I could see my own power, what could I achieve? What would I become?

Iris interrupts my train of thought by swinging both of her arms in a shallow arc, stretching her magic wide. Then she aims her power at the hands that are spread out on the ground in front of her, and she lets go.

Her magic falls onto the hands in a deluge of electric white. A wintry smell fills the air, like snow and ice and lightning. As I watch, the pink flesh of Josh Harper’s fingers turns pale, then gray, then black. Goose bumps rise on my arms as cracks spiderweb across Josh’s palms. Frost spreads across the ground between us. Iris doesn’t stop until the hands are unrecognizable.

“Whoa,” she says, staring down at the fruits of her labor. A sheen of sweat has broken out across her forehead.

“Are you okay?” I ask, and she nods. “Do you feel … different?”

“Not yet,” she says. “But I’m not really done yet, am I?” She wipes her forehead and gestures to her backpack, which is closer to me than it is to her. I grab it and reach inside.

Textbooks. Notebooks. Her journal. Graphing calculator. A loose pen.

A hammer.

I haul it out. There’s tape across the handle. Iris’s last name is written on it in blue marker. “Is this yours?” I ask.

“It’s my dad’s,” she answers. She holds out her hand, and I give her the hammer. She stares at it for a moment. “Well,” she says to the hammer. “Here goes.”

She crouches in front of the hands, lifts the hammer, and lets it drop. The super-frozen flesh of one hand shatters into a million pieces. She smashes the other hand, one finger at a time, and then she falls backward onto her butt with an oof.

“How do you feel?” I ask, and she takes stock before answering.

“Normal?” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Better than I did a few minutes ago, to be honest.”

I gingerly step over the pile of Josh-shards and sit next to her. We stare at the shattered flesh on the ground for a few minutes before I break the silence. “I’m sorry to have gotten you mixed up in all this,” I say.

She shrugs again. “You’re my best friend. I mean, you all are. I know every one of you would do the same thing for me.” She looks up at me. “Hey, what about you? Have you noticed anything different? Missing?”

I nudge a half fingernail with the edge of my shoe. “Kind of,” I say hesitantly. “I wasn’t sure if it was anything. I mean, I’m still not. It might just be a coincidence. But …” I hesitate, and she nudges me, and I just say it. “I haven’t had any dreams.”

“Since when?”

“Since I buried his head in the woods. So … three days ago?”

“And you’re sure that you’re not just forgetting them?” She grimaces as she says it, knowing the answer already.

“I’m positive,” I confirm. “It almost doesn’t even feel like I’m sleeping. I just close my eyes and then when I open them again, hours have gone by.”

“Roya can’t cry,” she whispers. I look up in surprise. “And you can’t dream, and Marcelina can’t forget.”

I’m about to ask her about Roya—what does that mean? She can’t cry? But my breath catches in my throat. I’m looking at Iris, but she looks … different.

“Iris.” My voice breaks on her name. “Your freckles.”

“What?” She frowns at me. “What about them?”

I swallow hard. I don’t want to tell her. But she’s going to see for herself soon enough. “They’re gone.”

Her face goes pale, and it’s so much more drastic than usual because there’s nothing, nothing at all, covering her cheeks. She grabs at her backpack and roots around inside it until she finds a compact. She opens it up and looks at her face in the palm-sized mirror.

She drops the mirror and uses her fist to muffle her own scream. “No,” she says, “no, no, no, they