Paulie wraps her arm around my shoulder and squeezes. She smells like wine coolers. “Okay, so, okay. So.” Her eyes are locked on the bed. She’s not blinking. “So, he’s dead.”
“Oh, for sure,” Roya says. “He’s one hundred percent dead.”
I lean against Paulie. She’s shaking hard, still not blinking. Her voice is pitched higher than usual when she asks, “What do we do?”
It takes me a minute to realize that she’s talking to me.
“I have no idea,” I say. They all stare at me. “I don’t know. We … we have to fix it, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to fix it.” I’m babbling. I’m a disaster. Oh god, this is a disaster.
“C’mon, Alexis, you’re the brains of the outfit,” Roya says, giggling.
“Shut up, Roya,” I snap. I shouldn’t be so short with her, but Josh is dead and she’s laughing.
Besides, I’m not the “brains of the outfit.” That’s Iris. And I’m not as cool as Paulie, or as ambitious as Maryam, or as badass as Marcelina, or as funny as Roya. I’m just me, and she’s rubbing it in my face.
I should be more upset about Josh being dead than I am about Roya teasing me. But only one of those things feels small enough to fit inside my brain, and it’s not the dead boy on the bed in front of me. “You’re drunk,” I mumble at Roya.
She waves me off. “You would be drunk too, if you hadn’t run off to get laid.”
As always, Marcelina steps in to save us from ourselves. “Okay, let’s just—let’s figure out what to do.”
“What do you think we should do, Marcy?” Roya asks. Marcelina shoots her a look that would down a helicopter, but Roya’s too tipsy to apologize for using the forbidden nickname.
“We have to call the cops,” Iris says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Everyone explodes. Or, no, I shouldn’t use that word so lightly anymore. Everyone starts yelling. There, that’s less … evocative.
“No,” I say, and I feel dizzy even saying it. “No, no, no—”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Roya shouts. “My mom can’t know I’m here!”
“Not all of us are white,” Maryam snaps at Iris, crossing her arms.
“How are we going to explain what happened?” Paulie demands. “What, we’re just going to tell them about—”
“Guys, quiet,” I say, but none of them listen to me. I’m not going to do that thing where I yell super loud to get them all to shut up, that never works. I hold my hand up in the air with my thumb and middle two fingers together, my pinky and index fingers upright—the silent coyote.
The first one to notice is Iris. That’s not surprising, since she’s always the first one to notice anything. She raises a freckle-covered arm over her head and imitates my gesture. I can tell that she’s pissed because her lips press into a pale line—she’s a pale ginger, so she changes colors a lot when she’s feeling emotions or getting drunk. Right now, she’s so many shades of pink and white that I half expect to see steam rising out of her pile of red curls.
The second person to fall silent is Maryam. She always pays close attention to what we’re all doing, but she didn’t see my silent coyote because she was arguing with Paulie about something. They’re really close, which means they fight harder than any of us, except for maybe Roya and me. When Maryam notices my hand in the air, she looks pointedly away from Paulie and raises her chin imperiously at the same time as her own hand goes up. Her hands are covered with gold flash tattoos that match her emerald-green dress, and both are matched by her elaborate eye makeup. Between her aesthetic and the way she’s holding herself and her quiet fury at Paulie, she looks like she belongs on a throne.
Marcelina and Paulie follow suit. They couldn’t look more different: Paulie is ice where Marcelina is obsidian. Paulie’s fitted powder-blue suit is a summer sky next to Marcelina’s black velvet gown. Marcelina is tan where Paulie is pale, round and soft where Paulie is tall and willowy. Her thick black hair piles a lot higher than Paulie’s thin, straight blond hair can. They don’t just look different—Paulie is a cheerleader, and Marcelina is the closest thing our little school has to a real goth, even though she hates it when people call her that. But as opposite as they are, they became friends quicker than anyone I’ve ever seen. Somehow they wind up doing a lot of things in tandem.
Of course Roya is the last to notice me.
I don’t want to look at her anyway. She’s in a bloodred gown. That’s not an exaggeration: she literally texted us all when she found it, saying that she was going to look like a vampire queen at prom. Her long tangle of black hair is piled on top of her head in a way that looks messy and polished at the same time. She’s long-limbed and elegant and glowing and she never pays any attention to what I’m trying to tell her, and as always, Paulie has to slap her arm to make her stop talking and look at me.
Finally, everyone’s quiet. There’s a moment of peace. The silent coyote prevails again. It’s a trick my first-grade teacher used to shut the class up, and it works every single time.
“Okay, so, I guess I have to be in charge right now,” I say, my voice shaking. Roya rolls her eyes, and Marcelina throws her a sharp glare. “We can’t call the cops,” I say. “Roya’s mom would kill her, and also, there’s absolutely no way to explain why his dick exploded without telling them that we’re magic.”
* * *
I forgot to mention that part. Sorry. I got swept up in the fact that Josh died from a bad case of exploded-wang.
We’re all magic.
* * *
“So we tell them,” Maryam says. She tugs on her sleeve and I can tell she’s on the way from frustrated to pissed. “We can’t just let Josh be dead without telling anyone. I’m tired of keeping the magic thing a secret, anyway.”
Iris suddenly looks very pale under her million freckles. “Maryam,” she whispers. “You know we can’t do that. My parents—”
“I know,” Maryam interrupts, deflating. She covers her face with her hands, and her voice is muffled behind her matte copper fingernails. “Mine too.” She doesn’t talk much about how her family and her faith community would feel about her magic, but the look she shares with Iris from between her fingers tells me that it probably wouldn’t be an easy conversation. Her family doesn’t go to a mosque on a regular basis, but they still have a lot of rules, spoken and unspoken. I’d be willing to bet “no magic” is one of them.
Maryam doesn’t follow all of their rules. She didn’t follow the one that said she shouldn’t go to this after-party. But there’s a big difference between the kind of trouble she’d face for going to a party and the kind of trouble she’d face for being in proximity to a dead white boy.
“Maryam,” I say quietly, and she makes a hmph noise from behind her hands. “You don’t have to be part of this.”
She lowers her hands and looks at me. Her eye makeup is smeared, which I know will infuriate her. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. It’s too dangerous. Even aside from my parents, if the cops found out about this, a girl like me—I can’t be involved. I can’t.”