“It’s okay,” Marcelina says, smiling at her. “We understand.”
“Do we?” Roya asks, eyeing Maryam coolly. “I’m brown too, and I’m staying.”
“You’re not Muslim,” Maryam snaps. “And your mom’s a white cop. You’ll be fine.”
Roya opens her mouth, probably to start up the same argument she and Maryam have every other month—about the ways they’re treated differently, about intersections of privilege and marginalization, about modesty and culture. If they have this argument, Roya will accuse Maryam of being protected by her lighter skin color, and Maryam will accuse Roya of being protected by her mother, and the rest of us will try to stay out of the way as best we can because there are layers to that fight we don’t understand from the inside. And because we know better than to get between those two when they’re pissed at each other.
But Marcelina throws out her arms like an umpire, and Roya’s mouth snaps shut again, and before anything else can happen, Maryam shakes her head. “I don’t think I can be here,” she says, still looking at me. I nod. She gives me a tight hug before she walks out of the room. When she pulls away, she rests her fingertip on my chin and stares into my eyes. It’s something I’ve seen her mother do to her little sister. “I’m still here for you,” she says. “I’m not bailing on you. I just can’t do this.”
“I know,” I whisper, and I feel tears finally spill over. She kisses my forehead and then walks out of the room without looking back at me or at Josh or at anyone. The door closes behind her and my heart sinks. I understand why she can’t be part of this, but I wish she would stay.
“Wait,” Iris says, “we’re letting her leave?”
“I trust her,” I answer. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
“Right, but what if she freaks out?” Iris’s voice is getting higher and faster with every word.
Paulie snaps her fingers in front of Iris’s face to get her attention. “No,” she says in a voice that brooks no argument. “We trust each other. That’s rule one. Right?”
Iris hesitates, then nods. “Right.”
Paulie looks to each of us in turn. Her big gray eyes are set in a don’t-you-dare glare. “We trust each other. No matter what.”
* * *
Josh Harper is blond and tall and that’s mostly what I know about him. I’ve gone to school with him for like six years, and I can’t remember anything about him other than “blond” and “tall.”
A quick survey of his room reveals more about him. Things I didn’t notice when I was fumbling his pants off and trying to get him to stop asking if I was sure I was okay.
He liked cars. There are posters of them. Three posters, on the wall above his bed. They’re spattered with blood now.
He played lacrosse. When I think about it, I have a hazy memory of him wearing a jersey to school one day, but I don’t really follow school sports except for swimming, and our lacrosse team is nothing to pay attention to, so I didn’t really put it together. But he definitely played lacrosse—his stick is leaning against the side of his headboard, and a ball rests in the weird net thing on the end of it. They’re drenched in blood too.
He liked to read. A low bookshelf is next to his bed, on the other side of the lacrosse stick. It has a water glass on top—I guess he used the shelf as a nightstand. The books are spattered with red. The glass has three inches of blood-pink water in it.
Somewhere downstairs, someone screams. We all jump. Laughter rises from the party like ripples in the wake of the scream, which repeats with a definite note of delight.
“Okay,” Marcelina says. The thick layer of black and silver around her eyes makes her look even more intense than usual. “So. What are we going to do?”
“We need a spell,” Roya says. Some of the drunken fuzz is gone from her voice. She comes over to stand next to me, and her arm brushes against mine, and my skin jumps like I’m a cat she’s petted the wrong direction.
“Yeah,” I say, because it’s true. There’s only one way to fix this, to bring Josh back and make everything the way it was before. “We need a spell that will make this right.”
We all look to Iris. She’s shaking her head at us, but I can see the gears turning. She closes her eyes and we wait. The glow of her magic shines through her eyelids, illuminating a delicate leaflike tracery of pink veins. We all look away.
* * *
Iris’s eyes glow when she comes up with spells. It’s a whole thing she does. She’s the only one of us who can do it—everyone else just kind of Does Magic and whatever happens happens, but Iris can gather our magic together and give it structure if she works on it really hard. But the working-on-it-really-hard makes her eyes glow. She gets so embarrassed about it. We don’t tell her that the glow is still totally visible even when her eyes are closed. It’s not a big deal to anyone other than her, but we know she would be self-conscious. It’s just better if we don’t tell her.
* * *
We look at each other to keep ourselves from looking at Josh or at Iris. I keep accidentally catching Roya’s eyes and then looking away from her. Paulie bumps her shoulder against mine and whispers “You okay?” and I shake my head. I am absolutely not okay. I’m overwhelmed and terrified and oddly ashamed. And I’m mad that Roya had a prom date to ditch at all, even though that’s not what I should be thinking about right now. It’s too hot in the room, too crowded with the five of us plus Josh plus all the blood. Paulie grabs my hand and squeezes it. Her palm is dry and cool and I resist the urge to press it to my forehead.
After a few minutes, the magic glow from Iris’s eyes dies away. She looks at me and nods, the motion knocking one red curl into her face. “Okay,” she says. “I think I’ve got it. Let’s go.”
2.
WE STAND IN A SEMICIRCLE that arcs out from Josh’s bed. We’re staring at our shoes because it’s getting harder and harder not to look at Josh. We’re all holding hands. Marcelina is next to me. Her hand is soft and warm and it feels like more than I deserve right now. Usually, Iris would be at the end of the line, opposite me—but I think that Paulie, Iris, and Marcelina arranged themselves to stay between Roya and me. It’s probably for the best, but it still makes me a little sad.
Here’s what you need to know about Roya: She’s my best friend. She’s on the swim team and she eats more pasta than anyone I’ve ever met in my life. She talks a lot about macros and carb-loading. She’s Afghani. Her mom is the chief of police and her dad is some kind of fancy accountant, but I can never remember what makes him fancier than a regular accountant. Roya’s parents adopted her when she was six and then gave birth to her little brother six years later. Being adopted was the first thing we bonded over—there was a thing where everyone was supposed to bring in baby pictures and tell the stories of our families, and we were the only two who didn’t know our birth dads’ names.
When Roya is really happy and not paying attention, she makes flowers grow. She has this long thick black hair that’s always loose in beachy waves, unless she’s at a swim meet, in which case it’s tucked up under her swim cap and you can see the back of her neck, which is long and slim and covered in these fine hairs that look like they’d be really soft under your fingertips.