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

and scoops the hands and feet into it. She looks at the floor and bobs the bag up and down, like she’s testing its weight.

Paulie takes the arm and leg that Roya didn’t grab. She doesn’t say anything, and after she’s zipped up her duffel, she sits down on the floor, cradling it in her lap.

“Okay,” Iris whispers over and over again. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” She grabs a drawstring backpack and yanks the top open, then rests it on the bed and starts to load the vertebrae into it one at a time. It takes a while. Her hands are shaking. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three,” she mutters. She shakes the bag a little to settle the bones in the bottom of it, then peers inside at the amount of room that’s left. After a moment of deliberation, she picks up the liver and jams it into the bag. She cinches the backpack shut and swings it onto her back, wincing at the rattle of the bones inside.

Marcelina looks up, something dawning across her face. “Oh shit, actually. Iris?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I trade you?” She holds out her duffel, with the hands and feet inside. Iris stares at her and she shrugs. “I need the spine for something.”

Iris shakes her head. “I don’t want to know.” She holds out her bag of bones and Marcelina takes it.

“Thanks.” Marcelina passes over her bag of extremities and beams at Iris, who can’t help smiling back. Nobody can help smiling back when Marcelina turns up the wattage like that. Her cheeks go all round and dimply and everything feels brighter. It’s not magic, but it’s close.

Once the exchange is done, they both turn and look at me. I look around the room. They’re all watching me. Waiting.

“My turn, right?” I say. My voice seems too loud. Downstairs, the party is chanting something, and the chants dissolve into a general all-purpose party-yell.

“Your turn,” Roya says. I look up at her, and she gives me an encouraging little smile. I feel some of the tension slip off my shoulders. Maybe she’s not mad at me after all.

“My turn,” I repeat. I grab the last bag—a beat-up backpack with Josh’s name scrawled on it in Sharpie. It was probably his schoolbag last year. I look inside: a highlighter with no cap on it rolls around in the bottom, next to a crumpled Skittles wrapper and a few curly edges from torn-out notebook pages. I turn the bag over and let the trash fall to the floor. It doesn’t feel right to leave it in there.

I step up to the bed feeling like a spotlight is on me. Gingerly, I pick up his head. The eyes are closed, and he would look like he was sleeping if it wasn’t for the blue tint of his lips and the deathly pallor of his skin. His head is lighter than I would have anticipated. I wonder if his brain is still inside.

I hold the head in both of my hands. His hair is soft under my palm. There had been some sort of gel in it before, when we were making out, but now it’s just clean. I bite my lip and put his head into the backpack as gently as I can manage. Then, before I have time to hesitate, I grab his heart.

I gasp without meaning to. “It’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Iris asks.

I shake my head. “Feel.” I hold the heart out to her, and she pokes it with a tentative fingertip.

“Oh, fuck,” she whispers. “It’s … it’s so cold?”

No one else wants to touch the heart, and I can’t blame them. It feels awful. It’s like glass, hard and smooth and cold and much too heavy. Warmth seeps out of my hand and into the heart by the second. I stare at it. It’s almost translucent, but not quite, and I feel sure that if I just moved into better light, I could see all the way to the center of it. I can feel something in me moving toward it—something stirring deep inside me, being pulled toward the thing at the core of the heart, the thing I can’t quite see—

Roya grabs the heart out of my hands and drops it into my backpack. She zips it up without looking at where the heart has landed.

“Maybe don’t hold that thing in your hands for too long, huh?” she says, dipping her head low to look into my eyes.

“Yeah,” I say, shaking myself. “Thanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Wait,” Roya says. “How are we doing this?”

“We each get rid of our pieces,” Iris replies in her bossy-voice.

“I want to be with you guys,” I add quickly. “When you do it.”

“What?” Paulie asks. “Why?”

“I just … I did this,” I say. “And you guys don’t have to help me. But I know”—I hold up my hand to stem the tide of of-course-we’re-helping objections—“I know you’re going to help me. So I want to at least be there with you when you get rid of your … your parts. Okay?”

Marcelina nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

“Thanks,” I say. There’s an awkward moment where none of us knows what to say to each other. Roya breaks through it by opening the door to the bedroom. She walks out without another word. Iris smiles at me over her shoulder, then follows Roya out. Paulie goes after her.

I look at Marcelina. “Um, this is awkward, but …”

“What?” she asks.

“I told my parents I was sleeping over at your house tonight,” I say.

She narrows her eyes at me. Her smile is always luminous, but when she’s mad, she looks like a lioness. “Because you were going to stay here?”

I shrug, trying not to look away. “I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay. Anyway, um. I can’t stay here tonight. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” she says. She hefts her duffel and purses her lips for a moment before shrugging, and I know I’ve been forgiven for using her in my lie. “Of course you can