Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

If you need to hurry, her oft-repeated saying went, you’re already too late.

their whispering didn’t stop—if anything, it increased, the books murmuring to each other like a scandalized congregation of origami Presbyterians.

A small voice inside him whispered, Now, now, it’s happening now.

In the middle of the section, Mrs. Webb stood with the sun at her back.

He has choices. He chooses to tell the first lie, and then he chooses to tell every other lie that comes after that.

If I try to pretend I didn’t have a choice, I’m not any different from the liars whose lives I ruin, and that’s not who I am. I’m nothing like them. My job is to pursue the truth.

Nobody decides to become the kind of person who will stab a stranger in order to get at what’s inside her pockets. That’s a choice life makes for you.

I didn’t have time for an existential crisis. It didn’t have to be a big deal. People get mugged all the time. I wasn’t special just because it was my morning to lose some cash. I didn’t have time to be freaked out about it. I had shit to do.

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

I was going to take just a moment of self-pity before going into my patient I’ve provided you a service and you were well aware of my fee schedule routine—but then I heard the unmistakable sound of the front door to my office opening.

Although, I thought, if this woman was who I thought she was, I didn’t want to impress her anyway.

“You don’t look exactly like her,” Torres said. “I thought you would. The face is the same, but—” “We’re not that kind of twins,” I replied.

We spend most of our students’ freshman year teaching them that words have power, and we don’t waste that power if we can help

She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.

“That,” Torres said after allowing me to stare for an embarrassingly long time, “is Sylvia Capley. She taught health and wellness at Osthorne. Five months ago, she was murdered in the library. I need you to find out who killed her.”

It was just like these people to drop a line like that and then poof. If they would only stay vanished, my life would be a hell of a lot simpler.

I pressed one corner of the business card into the meat of my palm, deciding whether or not to take the case. I stared at the way the paper dented my skin, and I pretended that I had a choice.

Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.

I’d wanted to hide. But then the bartender gave me that you’re-clever smile, and I realized I had to tell someone. Just to have it all out in the world, somewhere other than my own head.

So I told him. I told him everything that I knew about the case, and about Osthorne. Halfway through the story, he looked up at me, opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again and went back to the limes, but a stillness had entered his movements—he was listening now, trying to decide if I was crazy.

“But magic isn’t real,” he said after a moment.

tried not to feel temporary. Just for a few seconds. But trying not to feel something isn’t the same as not feeling it, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I was alone again.

I needed him to believe me. Not that it mattered. I would never see him again. Let him think I was crazy. It didn’t matter.

it was nice, realizing that he might be disappointed if I left.

“I guess you just … you do magic, and then you know. Lots of kids keep their magic a secret, because they know they’re not supposed to be able to do things. Like, Tabitha found out when she was little, because she kept changing another girl’s markers into butter.”

I won’t try to pinpoint the first lie I told myself over the course of this case. That’s not a useful thread to pull on. The point is, I really thought I was going to do things right this time. I wasn’t going to fuck it up and lose everything. That’s what I told myself as I stared at the old picture of me and Tabitha. This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.

glanced back into the office through the safety-glass window. Mrs. Webb didn’t see me—her eyes were on the blank pages of a ruled notebook. She stared at the paper intently. As I watched, she lifted two fingers and pinched herself hard on the arm, hard enough to bruise. Hard enough that I winced to watch her. The older woman’s face remained still as sea glass as she squeezed at her skin. I shivered, and a whisper twined its way through my thoughts. Wake up.

The trash cans weren’t the only thing about Osthorne that were familiar: it all felt like a place I’d seen a thousand times before. There were the scuffed gray linoleum floors lined with lockers, and the walls were frosted with paint that went on fresh every other summer. “Assthorne Asscademy” was scratched into several surfaces with what I’d bet was ballpoint pen. Bulletin boards hung thick with notices—auditions for The Tempest, lacrosse tryouts rescheduled due to weather, take-a-number to call Brea Teymourni for tutoring in math/economics/magic theory, lost my phone $50 reward call Arthur PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

It was a feeling like nostalgia, but for something I’d never done. Something I’d never had.

“They’re always younger than you remember. It’s easy to forget that fourteen is so close to twelve, isn’t it?”

Torres paused next to me, regarding the graffiti. “It’s more ordinary here than you expected.”

The investigators who said that this was a suicide—they let Sylvia down. Do you understand? One of my staff members died on my watch, and those investigators barely lifted a finger to get her justice.” “I’ll do my best,” I said, and I tried to make her hear the thing I couldn’t say because it’s the kind of thing you just can’t say: I can’t bring her back. I failed, though. I could see it in her face: she thought I was nervous, thought I was uncertain.

I can never give any of them what they really want: I can’t fix a marriage, and I can’t undo a lie, and I can’t raise the dead. And I can never tell them, because they think they just want answers.

ran my fingers over the orange paint again. I had never seen magic done by anyone but my sister. Something in me ached at the knowledge that a child had used their incredible, impossible magic for this: to make sure that after the world had ended, when alien archaeologists were digging up the thing that Earth used to be, they’d know that Samantha had been a slut. It hurt even more than the idea that someone had used their magic to murder Sylvia Capley. The idea of some teenager getting stoned and then etching the word “SLUT” into history—it burned in my throat like a swallowed sword.

wanted to feel a sense of affection for the cart, or at least a sense of satisfaction at the understated practicality of the magic on display. But it wasn’t enough to cut through the bitter ordinariness of the room.

Someone once told me at a conference that’s all it really takes to be a private detective: a good memory for names and faces, an eyeball for details, and a halfway decent invoicing system.

“Meddlers. Students who think they can find the killer. This section has always been closed off—used to just be a simple no-access ward, to keep kids from getting into magic they weren’t ready for. They couldn’t walk between the shelves without a staff member present, and nobody could remove a book from the aisle, not even staff. If anyone wanted to look in a book, there would be a staff member standing right next to them to make sure they didn’t try anything stupid. But after the murder, I asked Ms. Gamble—er, Tabitha, that is—to ramp things up a bit.”

“We’ve had more than a few bruised behinds in the front office since we set this up—students who thought they would find hot clues, thought they would solve the murder themselves.” “Kids here do that?” “One kid in particular,” Torres replied, looping a second pass around her own neck. “Dylan DeCambray. You met him earlier this morning.”

“He was in my office trying yet again to convince me that Dark Forces are at work at Osthorne. Something about a Great Evil that’s Bending the Will of Students.”

“He’s what I would politely call ‘troubled.’ Don’t worry—I’m sure you’ll have a chance to talk to him.”

“Wait. You mean … the body—er, Sylvia’s body—it was in both places?”

I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I wondered what Sylvia Capley had gotten herself into.

I thought of my drive up to the campus—of the shape of the road, and of what I had expected to find when the trees parted—and I tried to reconcile the size of this colony of homes with the surrounding geography. It didn’t work. None of it worked. There shouldn’t have been a huge school with ample staff housing and sprawling lawns, not here. There wasn’t room for all this sprawl, not in the cramped, rippling Sunol hills. But, in a display of complete disregard for how space is supposed to function … there was the sprawl. There was the school, and there were the homes. It wasn’t possible, but it was laid out before me as sure as anything. Fucking magic.

Nobody saw me choose a path. Nobody saw me choose. But I chose.

Frances Snead didn’t want to be in this apartment, or he didn’t want to be near me.

So why didn’t he want to be there for longer than he had to? I felt foolish the moment I realized. It was the most obvious thing in the world. Why would there be an empty apartment in staff housing? “No one’s going in there anytime soon, that’s for sure,” he’d said. Because it was Sylvia’s apartment.

I was going to be living in a dead woman’s home.

The photos in the folder had merited a late-night trip to a neon-windowed liquor store in the nearest town.

The headache was probably worth the lack of the complete nervous breakdown that should have come with looking through that folder. Looking at those photos.

She looked like an optical illusion, like a crappy trick at a third-rate magician’s afternoon show at an off-Strip casino in Vegas. She’d been bisected, split down the middle; a clean line from the top of her head, through her nose, down the cupid’s bow of her top lip, between her collarbones, all the way to her bellybutton and beyond. She’d fallen open like a split log; the two halves of her faced away from each other, staring at opposite bookshelves.