Roya ignores Paulie. She puts her hands on Iris’s temples. A soft pink glow shines out from under her palms. Her jaw clenches—she should be drained of magic right now. She must be drawing on some deep reserve. Iris’s eyes flutter open, and she looks at Roya with a dreamy kind of smile.
I look away.
That’s when I notice Josh.
“Um, guys?” I say it too quietly at first and nobody notices me. “Guys,” I say again. “We’ve got a problem.”
They all look up at me, and I point at the bed.
“No way,” Paulie says.
Marcelina looks up at the bed. “Way,” she responds quietly.
“What is it?” Iris says from the floor. Her words are a little slurred. She tries to sit up, and Roya puts a hand on her chest, gently pushing her back to the floor.
“Josh is back,” I say.
“Well. Sort of,” Paulie adds.
Sort of.
* * *
I took biology in my freshman year of high school. It’s where I met Paulie. At first, I thought she was just another pretty, preppy blond cheerleader-type. I was kind of a shallow, judgy freshman, and I thought high school was going to be all about cliques and groups. So, when I sat down on my first day of class and the girl next to me was a shiny-haired Taylor Swift lookalike in a cheer uniform, I rolled my eyes. I braced myself for a whole year of stupid questions and conversations about diets and boy drama and … well. I was kind of a dick to Paulie for the first month of school.
But then we got paired together for a dissection. It was a cow eye—we were supposed to cut it open and find the lens, and draw diagrams of the sclera and the retina and the optic nerve. The teacher came around to our lab tables with a big bucket and dropped an eyeball onto each of our dissection trays.
“Whoa,” Paulie said when the eyeball splatted onto our tray. “Cool.”
I remember being surprised at her reaction. “Cool?” I repeated. “It’s pretty gross.”
“Yeah,” she said, and she looked up at me with this kind of wild, excited smile. “It’s totally gross. And it’s also cool.”
We dissected our cow eye and then we talked about other cool, gross things. I realized how wrong I’d been about Paulie. We became friends in that immediate way that happens when you find someone amazing and don’t want to let go of them for anything, and it only took a month for us to realize that we were both keeping the same secret. I’d always thought I was weird for being magic. I’d known I wasn’t the only one, because of Roya and Maryam, but I thought we were freaks. I tried to love our magic then, but I couldn’t help feeling like something was wrong with us. Paulie thought she was weird too, but she thought it was cool. “Like a cow eye?” I’d asked the first time she told me so.
“Exactly like a cow eye,” she’d said.
* * *
“Okay, so, it didn’t work,” Marcelina says. She’s staring at the bed and fidgeting with a curl that’s come loose from her prom updo.
“It kind of worked,” Paulie says.
“What happened?” Iris asks.
* * *
Here is what happened:
Josh came back. But not all of him. And not all in one piece.
His head is there. His spine is there, although it takes me a minute to realize that’s what the little pile of round bones is. A big purple cushion-looking thing is there, which I will later figure out is his liver. His hands are piled one on top of the other, and his feet are at either end of the bed. They are not attached to his arms and legs, which are stacked like firewood at the foot of the bed.
His heart is there. It’s sinking into the bed, like it’s heavy, heavier than any of the other parts of him that are there. It’s translucent and shiny and it looks … cold.
All of the parts are clean and really pale. There’s no oozing blood. The sheets look cleaner than they did when I came into the room the first time, and they’d looked clean enough then that I’d been willing to lose my virginity on them.
It’s helpful. It makes everything look kind of fake, like drawings in a textbook. Although there is a smell. A sweet, cooked-meat kind of smell.
It’s not a nice smell.
* * *
When Iris sees what’s on the bed, she covers her mouth with her hand. Her voice shakes. “I’m really sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” Roya says. She’s kneeling behind Iris, helping her sit up.
“No,” Iris says. “It’s not okay, it’s not—we have to try again. Let’s try again.”
Roya looks up at the rest of us with alarm on her face. “We can’t, guys.” Her hands are resting on Iris’s shoulders, and I notice that her palms are still glowing pink. I give her an is-she-okay look, and she responds with a minute shake of her head.
“We have to try again,” Iris repeats, and her voice is getting high and shaky the way it does before she has a panic attack. Her breathing is fast and shallow. I sit down on the floor in front of her and grab her hand in both of mine, then let it go, because I don’t know what will happen if I hold someone’s hand. Because I don’t know how much I might hurt someone. I can’t believe I did magic with them without thinking of it—of what might be inside me, waiting to come out. Of how I might have hurt all of them.
I can’t believe I did that.
What’s wrong with me?
I push back a wave of shame and fear because now isn’t the time. Iris needs me. She needs someone to help anchor her, to keep her from spinning out. I sit on my hands, trying to stay solid for her.
“It’s okay,” I say. Her eyes are shot with the dark red of burst blood vessels. “It’s okay. We can deal with this.” Paulie and Marcelina settle on either side of me, and they make soothing noises too.
“We can totally deal with this,” Marcelina says.
“Piece of cake,” Paulie adds.
“Piece of Josh,” Roya says, and we all laugh desperately. Iris cracks a smile.
“Too soon,” she whispers. She’s still breathing a little fast, but it seems like we’ve successfully derailed her anxiety spiral before she went into a full-on panic attack. “We could try again, though,” she says.
Sometimes Iris says things that she doesn’t mean just so one of us will reply with the thing she knows to be true. Like, she’ll say, “What if nobody likes me?” so that someone outside of her brain can respond, “Lots of people like you.” It’s a coping mechanism we’ve all developed together. It’s not manipulative, and it’s not fake. It’s just that sometimes she needs to hear someone else confirm reality.
“We can’t try again,” Roya says softly, and Iris closes her eyes and listens. “That spell not working was really bad for you. I don’t know what it did exactly, but …” She pulls her hands away, extinguishing the pink light, and Iris gasps with pain. “Yeah,” Roya says, returning her hands. Iris sighs as the pink light returns. “I don’t think you should do magic for a few days. Actually, I don’t think you should do anything for a few days.”