Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

I’ve never been good at recognizing what moments are important. What things I should hang on to while I’ve got them.

I remembered what it was like, walking through my high school and feeling like everyone else’s lives had already started. There was the girl who was an amazing singer and played guitar outside at lunch, the academic kid who won an award at the national level for some kind of algae farm, the young artists who sat and moodily sketched their friends. I remembered looking at them, and then looking at myself, and wondering when the hell my thing would turn up. My friends and I, we had all been looking for it. What would make us crystallize? Anything could be the Thing that started it all, that started our stories.

she was my sister. I was born reaching for her.

“Wait, don’t you think she needs, like … counseling or something? She seems really freaked out.” “She just saw her secret boyfriend explode,”