“I want to be with you guys,” I add quickly. “When you do it.”
“What?” Paulie asks. “Why?”
“I just … I did this,” I say. “And you guys don’t have to help me. But I know”—I hold up my hand to stem the tide of of-course-we’re-helping objections—“I know you’re going to help me. So I want to at least be there with you when you get rid of your … your parts. Okay?”
Marcelina nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
“Thanks,” I say. There’s an awkward moment where none of us knows what to say to each other. Roya breaks through it by opening the door to the bedroom. She walks out without another word. Iris smiles at me over her shoulder, then follows Roya out. Paulie goes after her.
I look at Marcelina. “Um, this is awkward, but …”
“What?” she asks.
“I told my parents I was sleeping over at your house tonight,” I say.
She narrows her eyes at me. Her smile is always luminous, but when she’s mad, she looks like a lioness. “Because you were going to stay here?”
I shrug, trying not to look away. “I wasn’t sure where I was going to stay. Anyway, um. I can’t stay here tonight. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” she says. She hefts her duffel and purses her lips for a moment before shrugging, and I know I’ve been forgiven for using her in my lie. “Of course you can stay at my place tonight, Alex. Now let’s get the fuck out of here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I pick up my bag full of Josh Harper and turn off the desk lamp before we go. I shut the door behind me. I don’t look back.
3.
MARCELINA IS COMPLICATED.
She’s this tiny, plump Filipina girl with the most perfectly round face you’ve ever seen. She’s small and soft and likes to tell people that she’s only four feet tall, just to see if they’ll call her bluff. She does the whole cute-goth thing really well: lots of black lipstick and eyeliner but also occasionally some silver glitter. Her hair is long and black and she piles it up tall most of the time. She wears high heels that she buys cheap, and then she paints them or glues studs and feathers to them until they look like something you’d have to get on a waitlist to buy.
She doesn’t really seem like the type of girl who would live on a farm, but if you decide you’re going to tell Marcelina what kind of person she’s supposed to be? Well … good luck with that, is all I can say.
Marcelina likes to say that her family is land-rich. They’re in a rambling one-story house with a lot of DIY additions tacked onto the sides. It sits on twenty acres of undeveloped land that butts up against the woods, and they kind of think of the woods as their property too. Marcelina especially, since her best magic is tree magic.
We all have something like that. We can all do a lot of the same little things, like knocking over trash cans from across the room or drying each other’s hair or warming up our hands when it gets cold out. Some of us can do stuff that the others can’t, like how Marcelina can talk to trees and Paulie can make water into shapes. And each of us has something we’re best at—something we practice all the time, something that feels more right than any other magic we do. For Marcelina, it’s plants. Trees especially, but really, all plants. She understands them on a level that I can’t even comprehend, and a lot of the time it seems like they understand her back. I know how it sounds, but it’s true.
We walk along the edge of the woods with our shoes in our hands, the grass soft and cold and already a little dewy between our toes. My dress is still shedding glitter, so my feet are shining everywhere that they’re not muddy. I wonder if, come morning, there will be a sparkling trail to mark where I walked. The idea gives me a brief spasm of desperate hope, like I could follow the trail back to the beginning of the night, before I decided to sleep with Josh.
Before something broken and awful rose up inside me and killed him.
Marcelina pauses and rests her free hand against the trunk of a twisting black oak. She looks like a storybook witch in her torn starry dress, with moonlight on her face and a gnarled old tree casting curlicue shadows across her cheeks. I tell her as much and she gives me one of her amazing Marcelina-smiles. It’s a high compliment to her aesthetic.
“So what’s up?” I ask, nodding to the tree.
Marcelina hands me her shoes so she can lay both palms on the bark. She leans her cheek against it too, and the leaves of the tree rustle as if there’s wind. Which there isn’t. “I’m just checking in on her,” she says. “It’s been a hard year. Remember that lightning storm we had in March?”
I don’t remember, but I nod anyway, because I want to hear how the tree is doing.
“Well, she didn’t get hit, but one of the trees she’s friends with did. It’s really hard on both of them. She’s been giving up a lot of minerals to help her friend recover.”
I blink at her. “What?”
She waves a hand at me. “It’s a whole thing with the root systems and fungal exchanges. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” She presses her forehead against the tree’s trunk and whispers something. Then we’re walking along the tree line again, toward the dark house. Josh’s backpack bumps against my back, and I suppress a shudder at the thought of his face mashed against the canvas.
“I’m really sorry, Marcelina.” My voice is shaking and I try to take a deep breath, try to imagine that my lungs are big billowing sails and I’m filling them with wind. It’s something Iris taught me—a trick she uses to manage her anxiety. It works well enough that I’m able to look at Marcelina, who’s swinging the string backpack like a handbag. “I’m sorry that I got you into this.”
Her face is still angled up at the trees, and the white light of the moon catches on a smear of glitter that I think is probably secondhand, shed from my dress onto hers. The rip in her gown gapes open, and the moonlight illuminates a stripe of bare skin. I wonder if Roya will ever be able to fix the dress. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make up its loss.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says quietly, but her hand rises to that tear in the bodice of the dress she worked so hard for. And even if the dress was intact … Josh is dead and his head is in a backpack.
“Um, I think it’s a pretty big deal,” I say. She just shakes her head.
“It’s nothing you wouldn’t do for any of us,” she says, and we’re quiet until we get to the house. She lifts up the manual garage door with one hand, shuts it after us as we slip inside. It’s completely dark in the garage, and musty. It smells like cigarettes.
“Did your dad start smoking again?” I whisper as we feel our way across the garage.
“Him, or maybe Uncle Trev,” she says. Uncle Trev is her mom’s friend from college—he’s been staying with them for the past two months while his wife decides whether she’s going to divorce him or not. To hear him tell it, the only thing that went wrong in their marriage is that he lost his job. He never says anything bad about his wife, though, which makes me trust him a little more. Pop told me a long time ago to never trust guys who have a lot to say about how awful their exes are.