“Oh.” I don’t know what else there is to say. Sometimes I don’t know what to say, and it never feels like it’s okay to not know. Roya would know what to say. It would probably go a little too far, but still. She wouldn’t be quiet in this moment.
We get into the house and whisper-greet the two giant shaggy farm dogs that are sleeping in the mudroom. For anyone else, they’d do big deep fearsome woofs, but I hold out my hands and they stand there, wagging, until I pat their heads and tell them they’re good dogs.
They shove wet noses against my palms and huff hot air against my wrists. They lean against my legs, trying to tell me about the grass and the cat and the one amazing smell they found and rolled in. I smile in the dark and tell them to go back to sleep, that I’ll hear all about it in the morning.
I tell them without words. I tell them the same way that Marcelina tells the tree she’s going to help it however she can. It’s my thing, the thing that only I can really do as far as I know. Fritz and Handsome love me, because they can tell me all the dog-things that no other human seems to understand, and because I listen to them. I listen as much as I can, at least.
We put on the house slippers that are lined up by size in a long row next to the inside-door. Then we sneak down the hall past Marcelina’s parents’ room, past the guest bedroom where Uncle Trev sleeps.
We pass the kitchen. The whole house smells like Clorox wipes, except for the kitchen, which always smells like whatever Marcelina’s mom has been cooking. Her mom is an amazing cook. She’s left a huge disposable pan of something on the countertop, covered with foil. As we pass, I can smell something that smells like salt and vinegar and the color red, and my mouth waters until I remember how it felt when Josh’s blood was burned off my tongue. Marcelina lets out an exasperated sigh in front of me, and I know she’s rolling her eyes at her mom leaving out a whole pan of food for just her and whoever she happened to bring home. I don’t grab her and pull her into the kitchen to eat like I usually would, because I’m sure that I’ll throw up if I try to eat right now, but still. It smells fantastic in that kitchen. Almost good enough to make me hungry.
Marcelina’s bedroom is exactly what you’d expect it to be—lots of black, lots of posters featuring bands where the guys wear more makeup than the girls and everyone’s hair is super long. But it’s also got a million plants in it, and a sunlamp, and a terrarium with a fat lizard inside.
Marcelina walks around the room touching the plants, greeting each one by name. “Hey, Bert,” I say to the lizard, and he blinks a sleepy eye at me.
She opens a drawer and tosses me a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that says “Haunt me Siouxsie Sioux” on the front in a cute font. “Go take a shower,” she says.
“Do I smell?” I ask, trying to discreetly sniff-check my armpits.
“No, but you’re fucking covered in glitter from that stupid dress,” she answers. “And I need a few minutes alone.”
I nod. Marcelina’s not exactly an introvert, but sometimes she hits a wall and needs to just be alone with her plants. She’s had a hard night—it makes sense that she’d want to be alone right now.
I don’t want to be alone. I don’t ever want to be alone again. But I figure I don’t exactly have the right to make anything else about me tonight.
I sneak back down the hall to the bathroom and climb into the tub to take my dress off, hoping to contain the inevitable glitter explosion that will come when I step out of it. It’s not a bad strategy, although I’m not totally sure what to do with the dress once I’ve got it off. I lean out of the tub and reach for the trash can, then pull out the plastic bag that’s lining it and stuff my dress inside. Thankfully, the bag is empty—no ear swabs or wadded-up pads or used tissues to stick to my dress. But once I’ve got the dress in the bag, I know that it wouldn’t matter anyway. It may not have any blood on it anymore, but I’m still going to throw it away as soon as I can.
I’m never wearing that dress again.
When I turn the water on, it’s freezing. I stand under it, shivering and covering my chest with my arms, and wait for it to warm up. The cold is punishing, but I don’t move.
I don’t move because Josh is dead.
Once the water gets warm, I drop my arms and shove my face into the spray. It’s hot enough that it doesn’t remind me of the way his blood felt when it hit my skin, but the comparison still comes to mind and I gag. I brace myself against the wall and let the water get hotter, hotter, scalding. The horror I’ve been pushing away all night rises around me like threads of magic, if they were made of barbed wire. I shiver once, and then again, and then I can’t stop shaking.
Josh is dead. Josh is dead because of me. Because I killed him. Somehow, I killed him.
I don’t know how it happened. I know I said that already, but I mean I really don’t know how it happened. I didn’t just not-do-it-on-purpose—I didn’t know it was possible. To explode someone. To kill someone, just like that, just because of a slip of magic. It’s like if I tripped and fell and accidentally levitated. Except that I have accidentally levitated before, and that’s how magic has always felt—floaty and personal and friendly. Harmless. I’ve never seen Iris get hurt this way before. I’ve never hurt anyone this way before.
I’ve also never tried to use anyone the way I tried to use Josh. I push the thought aside before I can really get my teeth into it, though. It’s not what I want to be thinking about right now.
What happened tonight was something dark and different. That’s what matters. It’s new, and it terrifies me. And my friends are going to help me get out of this; they won’t let me do it all on my own, and that terrifies me even more.
The water is really hot now. Steam is rising up around me, and my skin is turning pink. There’s a mirror suction-cupped to the tile inside the shower—Marcelina’s dad uses it to shave, I think—and I wish it would fog over, because I don’t want to see myself right now. I lather soap between my hands and spread it across the surface of the mirror.
I grab Marcelina’s mom’s fancy apricot scrub and start scouring my body. Iris’s spell took all of Josh’s blood off me, but I can still feel the burn of every drop. I can feel it all, lingering there like flecks of glitter. I scrub until it hurts. I wish I had just had sex with him. I wish I had never tried to have sex with him. I wish I had done whatever I needed to do to keep from killing him.
Josh is dead because of a horrible kind of magic that is apparently inside me. I scrub as if I can get to that magic and wash it out. My skin is a bright, livid red, and I make myself stop before I draw blood.
Before I draw more blood. There’s been so much blood tonight. Oh god, it was in my mouth.
I stand under the water until the heat makes me dizzy. After I turn it off, I lean my head against the tile and finally, finally, I let myself cry.
* * *
When I get back to Marcelina’s room, she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. She’s wearing black sweats and a black tank top. Her hair is in a messy topknot, and she’s taken all her makeup off.
She looks a little naked without makeup. People always talk about how wearing makeup isn’t natural, how “real” women look better, but that’s bullshit. Marcelina is perfectly lovely with or without makeup, but the “real” Marcelina likes wearing a ton of eyeliner and dark lipstick and sometimes does really incredible things with eyeshadow that I don’t fully understand. She and Maryam spend hours experimenting on each other’s faces, turning each other into mermaids and vampires and starlets. She’s good at makeup and she loves it and if that’s not “real,” I don’t want real.