At the end of the class, I turn in a blank worksheet. I don’t even put my name on it. Roya’s not here. Paulie’s not here. Something’s going on with Marcelina. It feels like things are falling apart.
I just don’t know why.
* * *
I slip out of fourth period five minutes early by telling the teacher I need to use the restroom. She waves me off without a hall pass. I wait outside of Marcelina’s class and catch her as she’s walking out the door.
“Hey, are you okay?” I wince even as I’m saying it, but then again, Marcelina’s never been one for subtlety.
“No. Definitely not,” she replies. See what I mean?
“What’s up?” We walk toward the senior lockers and I grab her textbooks so she can use both hands to open her sticky combination lock. She bangs on it twice with her fist before it pops open.
“I’m all fucked up, Alexis.” Her voice is calm, but one of her eyes is twitching. She’s hardly wearing any eyeliner at all, and she’s only got four earrings in each ear. She looks like half of a Marcelina. “Like, really fucked up.”
“What is it?” I hand her books over and she shoves them ungently into her locker. She braces herself against the shelves.
“I wasn’t sure until this morning, but now I’ve definitely got it figured out.” She looks up at me and I notice the heavy layer of concealer under her eyes. The thick makeup has settled into creases, making her look older than she is. “I can’t forget anything.”
“What?” I feel like I’ve misheard or misunderstood, like I missed a stair. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” she says slowly, “I can’t forget anything. I remember everything that’s happened to me in the last …” She counts on her fingers. “Five days.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. I move out of the way of her locker-neighbor. Marcelina slams her own locker door shut and spins the lock, and we start toward the cafeteria. She’s walking fast, not looking at anyone we pass. Her eyes stay on the linoleum like she’s watching for landmines.
“Normally you forget like … half the things that happen in a day, right?” she says, her voice low and urgent. I shrug. I guess I know what she means, although I never really thought of it that way before. “Well, I can remember it all. In like … really intense detail. Everything. Even my dreams, Lex. Not just the highlights, like when you describe a dream to someone and you jump between the good parts. I can remember every moment of every dream I’ve had in the past week. Every feeling. Every person who appeared in the fucked-up situations my brain invents while I’m asleep.” She shakes her head hard. “All of it. I can remember all of it.”
“Your—wow,” I say. I think back over my own past five nights with a growing sense of unease. I haven’t had a single dream. Not even the kind that I don’t really remember but that leaves a lingering cloud of emotion for me to wake up to—not even that. “That sounds intense.”
“Iris thinks it’s the spell,” she mutters. “She said that ‘every action we take has a reaction, like ripples in a pond,’ and that she can ‘feel the ripples running back along the threads of the spell every time we sever one.’ ” She says it all in a perfect imitation of Iris’s voice. The pitch and cadence are unmistakable: it’s Iris’s voice coming out of Marcelina’s mouth.
It’s eerie.
“Whoa,” I whisper. “That was … interesting.”
“I know,” she says in her normal voice. “I guess when you can remember every single inflection of how someone talks, it gets easier to do impressions.”
I loop an arm around her shoulder. “I’ll talk to Iris, okay?” I tell her. I try to imagine what Maryam or Roya would say to make her feel better. Not to make her feel like things are solved, but to make her feel better about the fact that everything is messed up. “We’ll figure it out.”
“She’s already trying,” Marcelina answers, but her voice is a little softer. Her face is a little calmer. She bumps her hip into mine and almost smiles. “You don’t have to fix it, you know. We’re already working together. All of us.”
Oh, I think. They’ve been talking about it. Without me. I try to push aside the pang of hurt. Of course they talk without me sometimes, that’s what people do. They talk to each other without me sometimes. That’s normal. It doesn’t mean that they’re excluding me. Be normal about this, I scold myself.
“I know,” I lie, then redirect. “Are you okay?”
“No. I’m freaked out and I didn’t sleep last night because I didn’t want to remember my dreams all day. But … we’ll figure it out,” she says, echoing me in an exact imitation of my voice.
“Okay, but you can’t do that voice thing. I can only handle so much weirdness in a day,” I say, and she lets out a small laugh.
“That’s the least-weird part of this whole thing,” she says. “You’re just gonna have to deal with it.”
14.
“I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M sorry I’m sorry—” I hear Iris long before I see her. It’s after school and I’m sitting in the grass at the edge of the soccer field, watching the endless practices. Boys’ JV, Boys’ Varsity, Girls’ JV, Girls’ Varsity, and Junior Leaguers all practice on various parts of our high school’s gigantic field. I can never tell which team is which—unless my brother’s one of the people kicking the ball. He’s not at practice today, because of something to do with a chemistry project he’s trying to finish at the last minute. As a result, I’m watching the various soccer practices with a kind of removed disinterest. It feels a little like watching waves crashing at the beach: there’s movement and noise and things I don’t quite understand, but I can spot patterns and pretend I get it.
Iris skids onto the grass next to me, still apologizing, and there it is again—that uncertainty. I know what the right way to respond is, and I also know how I could respond. I could give her the cold shoulder, make her explain. I could yell at her that sorry isn’t good enough. I could do it, and then I wouldn’t have to face my mistake. I could blame her.
But then I look up and see her stricken face, and my conscience kicks me hard in the gut. She doesn’t deserve that shit from me.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I say, and I wrap my arms around her. “I’m not mad.”
“Really?” She pulls back and wipes at her eyes, smearing mascara stripes across her freckled cheeks, and my conscience kicks me again for even considering lashing out at her.
“Yeah, really,” I say, smiling. She smiles back, her relief palpable. “I get it. You were worried. It’s okay. I didn’t even get in that much trouble.”
“I just … I didn’t know where you were,” she says, “and with the police around and everything. I was scared that maybe they were talking to you, or maybe …” She looks around and closes her mouth abruptly.
“I get it,” I say. She’s doing that thing where she’s been going over what she should say all day, and my saying that I don’t need to hear an explanation doesn’t change the fact that she needs to explain. She doesn’t need to do it for me, but for herself.