A thousand sightless consciousnesses turn to me, touched by the message that I’ve sent to them. Normally, they’d be drawn by the smells of decay, but not this time. This time, they’ll be the first to the meal.
I snip off my magic like threads on a loom, leaving trails that can be followed. There’s a shudder beneath my feet, and I pull my fingers out of the dirt fast. An underground stampede is happening—an army of burrowing beetles and worms and mites are coming to see why I called them. I use the shovel to spread the last of the dirt in an even layer over the mound, and then I leave. I want to be gone before they try to thank me for the gift of Josh’s head.
I walk away without looking back, because there’s nothing else for me to do.
Against my back, through the thin canvas of my backpack, I can feel the way Josh’s glass heart starts to beat just a little harder.
6.
THE WALK TO SCHOOL IS strange. I keep expecting people to pull over and ask me why I’m covered in filth, but there are almost no cars on the road. I suppose it’s still too early for them—the sun is up, but only because it’s practically summer. An empty bus passes, and the driver lifts his hand to me without looking at me. I lift my hand back anyway. The back of it is covered in grime, and half of my sparkly prom-manicure has chipped off. My fingernails look like treasure maps.
If Roya was here, she could will the dirt away from me. It’s something we figured out when we were kids, back when we were first realizing that the things we could do weren’t just in our imaginations—that I really could talk to her cat, that she really could kiss a bruise and make it disappear. We were alone at her house, playing. Roya’s parents were at a doctor’s appointment—they would come home with glowing smiles and a blurry black-and-white photo of Roya’s little brother. But all we knew then was that we had the run of the house, and we took full advantage of it. We poured tall glasses of grape soda and smeared our faces with Roya’s mother’s forbidden lipstick and pulled all of her father’s shirts out of the closet for some grand dress-up scheme.
You can imagine what those shirts looked like by the time we’d finished with them. Each and every one, indelibly stained in ways that we somehow failed to notice while we were playing. I remember staring at one mark on the shirt I’d just taken off, then looking at all the others with increasing horror as the stains and lipstick-smears seemed to multiply. It was like that thing where you notice one ant, and then another, and then you realize that they’re everywhere.
Roya squeezed her eyes shut and pushed her hands at the pile of ruined shirts, and the next thing either of us knew, they were back on their hangers, clean and pressed as if nothing had ever happened. Roya’s pupils were dilated for the rest of the day, and she was way too quiet, but her parents never knew what had happened.
I always think of her magic as fixing-things magic. Roya can heal people, like she did when Iris was hurt on prom night, and she can clean things, like with her dad’s shirts. She has a lot of other magic—we all do—but she’s the only one of us who can do those particular things. She hates it. She says it’s regressive. But then, she can also start a car just by laying her hands on the engine block, and she set my arm with an audible crunch back when I broke it in fifth grade, so … I think she’s just looking for something to be mad about.
Which isn’t all that surprising. It is Roya, after all.
If she was here, she’d will me clean. But she’s not here.
I come onto campus the back way and head for the gym lockers, which are in a low-ceilinged, temporary-looking building between the pool and the auditorium. There’s no proper door on either of the locker rooms, which has always seemed weird to me—just a curving wall at the entrance that hides the inside of the rooms from passersby, like at a rest-stop bathroom. The entire school is like that: built sometime in the late eighties to fulfill a design aesthetic that seems halfway between airplane hangar and National Park outbuilding. There are lots of low timbers and metal crossbeams, and everything needed to be power-washed about ten years ago. There’s new paint every year, covering up old graffiti and trying to make the place look fresh, but the stucco and cinderblock never really stops being outdated.
I walk into the locker room, feeling furtive and victorious, and head for the showers. I drop my backpack on a bench without breaking stride. I strip off my shirt as I go, raining dirt that no one will notice onto the pebbly, never-mopped floor. Clean, I think, reaching back to unhook my bra. So close to being clean—
“I don’t know.”
I freeze with my fingers on the clasp of my bra. The echoes of a voice, distorted by the way the sound bounces around the locker room. No one is supposed to be here this early. Shit. I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, so I race toward the showers, hoping to duck behind a curtain before anyone sees me. Before anyone can ask what I’m doing here and why I look like a swamp creature.
“Just ask her,” another voice answers just as I reach the showers. Too late, I realize that I’ve come closer to the voices, rather than farther from them. I duck behind a shower curtain and whip it closed just as the sound of shower shoes slapping wetly on the floor reaches me.
“She won’t tell me,” the first voice answers, and I realize who it is I’m hearing.
Roya.
The footsteps stop just outside of my shower stall, and a locker swings open. The voice that answers Roya is unmistakable, now that it’s close enough not to echo off the metal lockers. It’s Iris. “Well, maybe if you didn’t—”
Oh, thank god, I think, and I open the shower curtain again. Iris and Roya are right there, and they freeze at the sight of me. “You guys scared the shit out of me,” I say.
They don’t answer. They’re staring at me. Iris is clutching the top of her towel, and Roya has frozen halfway through drying her mass of hair.
“What the hell,” Iris breathes, and I realize what I must look like—hair in a half-fallen-out topknot, dirt caked into my every pore, shirtless, my bra hanging halfway off. I’m not sure if I look better or worse than I did on prom night. At least I’m not covered in blood this time.
“Um,” I say.
“Holy shit, Alexis,” Roya says, and then she starts cackling at me, a desperate kind of “oh thank god I can still find things funny” laugh. “It’s only been like … an hour and a half. What happened to you?” Roya gasps.
“Lots,” I snap. “Lots of stuff happened to me.” I pull the shower curtain closed and strip, throwing my filthy clothes out past the vinyl. Every item I toss elicits a new round of laughter from Roya—I can hear Iris joining in, less enthusiastically, but she’s laughing all the same. “It’s been a long morning,” I say, turning on the water and tipping my head back to shake the dirt out of my hair.
I do not think of the fact that I am in here, naked, and Roya is out there, wearing only a towel. I do not think about it, okay? Not at all. Not even a little.
“Do you need soap?” Roya asks. Before I can answer, her hand thrusts through a gap in the shower curtain, holding a bottle of the mint body wash she loves. Her wrist brushes my stomach as she waves the bottle back and forth. I can’t breathe.