Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

I’ve thought about it a thousand times since—there’s no way a shadow under the bed should have grabbed my attention. But it did, and I looked again.

It was a journal, bound in soft, mottled black leather. The surface was covered with the kind of pockmarks and scuffs that come with real age and not a factory stamp.

the pages were filled, cover to cover, with tight scribbles. There were a few different pens, and as I leafed from the first page to the last, I saw that the dates of the entries were spread over nearly eight years.

It didn’t occur to me in that moment that it was hers. I’d found it, and in that moment, it was mine.

Sometimes it feels like I’m in a staring contest with failure, and if I blink, I’ll die. If I stop for even a second to consider that I might not be as good as they think I am, the oxygen will get sucked out of the room and I’ll suffocate.

I was only about a quarter of the way into the journal, but I could already see them spiraling.

I turned to leave the bedroom, with the bare mattress and the journal and the letters on the wall and the wine in the carpet. It was harder than it should have been, turning my back on those letters. I shut the door behind me, and as the latch clicked, I stepped back into the person I’d been the day before. The version of Ivy who laughed and flirted and belonged here. The version of Ivy who could solve this case.

I moved the beam slowly, as slowly as I could, from left to right. Letters fleetingly fluoresced as the flashlight beam passed over them, fading again after a second or so. They were written on the wall behind the locker, near the place where my phone had caught on the paper that hid the flood of love notes.

“All that’s gold does not glitter.” It seemed like the kind of thing that a kid would think was super-deep, would want to get tattooed on themselves. It was important enough to someone that they set up some kind of a spell to keep it near their love letters—but they went to all that trouble, and kept it hidden under a bank of lockers with the spiders and the gum.

My first interview of the day was with Stephen Toff, the infamous English teacher. I wished I’d left him for last the moment he walked into the library.

“Well, you know. Sylvia was great and all. Really warm, totally sweet. Great when girls needed to talk to someone about, you know. Their changing bodies, and birth control and stuff.” I swallowed bile as he winked at me again. “But … she taught health class. She was the school nurse. She wasn’t exactly the brightest star in the Osthorne constellation.” His eyes twinkled, and I was pretty sure I knew who he thought the brightest star was. I congratulated myself on not having misread him in the slightest.

It is a testament to my unparalleled self-control that I nodded politely at this, rather than telling him to sew himself into a burlap sack so I could throw him into the ocean.

He spread his hands, all charm and humility. “Sylvia could be a little uptight about things, I guess. Not to speak ill of the dead, of course.”

“She used to be one of Sylvia’s students? Not one of yours?”

“I mean, she was probably in my class at some point, who can remember? Anyway, she was already eighteen by then, and that’s what matters. And who I date is—er, was. Who I date was none of Sylvia’s business.”

It wasn’t a show. That was the first thing that struck me. These two girls weren’t putting anything on for me, weren’t trying to make me think anything in particular. They were scared, is all. They were scared, and they were helping each other to be brave.

I sounded like the kind of person who could write a journal filled with arcane equations and reflections on my academic insecurity.

“You can do it, babe,” Miranda murmured. She ran her thumb over Brea’s knuckles.

“Alexandria is my friend and I don’t want her to get in trouble or anything. But…” She took a deep breath. “IsawherfightingwithMissCapleythedaybeforeshedied.

The way she told it, she had gone to Miss Capley’s office to get weighed. When she explained that she had to go and get weighed every week, a flash of something crossed Miranda’s face—frustration? worry?—and I wondered but didn’t ask. When Brea had gotten to Capley’s office, she’d heard voices inside. She said she recognized Alexandria’s voice right away. “She talks kind of different, when she’s angry,”

“Her voice gets … bigger? Scarier. Not like shouting, but it just. It makes you feel like you’d do anything to make her stop being mad. Like you’d do whatever she wants, just to keep her happy.”

“Um. They were saying—Miss Capley was saying, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I could get fired,’ and Alexandria was saying, um.”

“Alexandria said that—she said, ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll tell everyone what I saw, and then you’ll get fired anyway.’

“I heard Miss Capley say ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ and Alexandria said, ‘You’d better, or you’ll be sorry,’ and then I left.”

It was easy. It was fun. And, somehow, I hadn’t once had to stop being the version of Ivy who could flirt with a physical magic teacher without flinching. I hadn’t once been irritated by the little magic things he did. I wasn’t trying to pretend that he was normal. I was just … being with him, like he was anyone, like I was anyone, like there was no barrier between us.

“What do I call what?” “Whatever spell it is you use to make your smile so…” I ran out of words, and he raised his eyebrows, still grinning.

It took a good twenty minutes to calm Tabitha down.

“Tabby,” I said in as gentle a voice as I could muster, “what are you doing here?” Her eyes welled up again, and she answered in a very small voice that didn’t sound like her at all. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

To her credit, she didn’t ask any of those things. Instead, she asked the question that I hadn’t even been willing to ask myself. “Do you think I killed her?”

I bit my cheek, took a deep breath, and decided to be honest with her—because if I couldn’t be honest with her in that moment, when could I? “I don’t know.”

“Are you seriously asking me that fucking question after what you let happen to Mom?”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, but I had finally taken the lid off seventeen years of anger and there was nothing she could do—nothing she could say—to stop me.

“I told her you’d be there soon,” I whispered, more to myself than to Tabitha. “She kept asking, right up until the end. And I kept lying to her. You made me a liar.”

When Mom was sick, I was just a kid. I was doing a great job in school, but asking me to heal her would be like asking a first-year med student to perform a heart transplant.” She swallowed hard, closed her eyes. “I’m telling you that now because it’s what I told Dad, when he asked. Back when we first found out Mom was sick.”

I told myself to be brave, and I grabbed her hand. Her fingers felt impossibly small. “Can you tell me now?”

We talked for hours. The anger had seeped away out of the room, and with it, the fear that had been between us. We talked about all of the things we’d spent half a lifetime not talking about. Mom,

An ache gripped my chest, sudden and overwhelming. That’s my sister.

I suddenly felt very cold and very small, as I realized I didn’t know the answer to the question posed. Are you safe?

I pointed out phrases with my free hand, feeling … impressive. I was showing my sister my job. I was showing off my research. And she looked fascinated. She was listening to me.

I felt giddy—I was sharing something with her, my sister, my twin sister Tabitha, the way I hadn’t let myself imagine doing for years.

Don’t worry, the note said. I’ll get into the library + find the spell if you can’t get the potion from Capley.

“These two were pretty desperate. They had a big secret, and then they had an even bigger secret, and they thought Capley was the answer. I think they thought she could set them up with a solution.”

Tabitha’s voice was smooth, calm. Empty. She walked past me, brushing my shoulder with a hand.

You didn’t do anything wrong, people just have to go to work, this is normal, it’s fine. But something was wrong. She’d turned distant. She’d turned nice.

The sound of the front door closing felt like an indictment of something I’d done, or something I hadn’t done, or something I’d missed.

Things had changed the night before, there could be no doubt about that. Something between us had been … not repaired, not exactly, but splinted. I didn’t know how to put weight on it yet, but maybe with time—

An oppressive shock wave of unwarranted terror shot through me, like the shiver before you realize someone is coming up behind you in a dark alley. Grass rustled as Alexandria stalked away. I stood there, trying not to breathe, as waves of a-tiger-is-chasing-you panic rippled across my skin, and listened to Courtney crying. I was trying to decide whether or not I should round the corner and ask her what was going on, but my palms were sweating. What the fuck? I took some deep breaths, pressed the back of my head against the bricks and squeezed my eyes shut as the fear ebbed. What is going on? Why do I feel this way?

“I can tell you whatever I please, Ms. Gamble. He’s getting a tincture for his girlfriend’s cramps.”

“It seems like you’d know everything that goes on around here,” I ventured. “You really don’t know who he’s dating?” “You have a limited number of breaths in this life, Ms. Gamble,” she murmured. “Do you really want to waste any on trying to flatter me into telling you student gossip?”

“Official policy says I can give them prenatal vitamins and a reference to a registered obstetrician in the mage community,” she said, then pressed her lips into a thin line. Everything on her face said this sentence is unfinished, but her eyes were on my notebook and pen. I