Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

I hadn’t thought about Sylvia nearly as much as I’d thought about Courtney, and Dylan, and Mrs. Webb.

He was a Jell-O mold of a teenage boy, and he had tried to fill himself up with purpose but it just wouldn’t set.

The Ivy I was—the half-feral detective with the perpetual hangover, covered in ink smudges, devoid of magic—that wasn’t the Ivy Rahul deserved. That wasn’t an Ivy anyone could want. And that wasn’t the Ivy I was going to be tonight.

I hated how badly I wanted to tell him which students I was looking at most closely. How much I would have told him, even though I knew it was a bad idea.

“So, here’s what you can help me with: what do you know about emotional manipulation magic?”

“Oh, wait—I got ahead of myself, sorry. I do that sometimes. I’m thinking that the magical emotional manipulation thing might be a factor in the case because I think one of the students at Osthorne is doing it. To everyone.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Isn’t that like outlawing unicorn breeding? What’s the point of making something impossible illegal?”

This was it—this was the other shoe, and it was dropping right on my head. I rubbed Alphabet between the ears as I tried to figure out a solution. It was just because he’d never asked if I was magic. That’s all. It was just so easy.

I didn’t want to be magic. But I’d been tasting the life I could have had if I had been born equal to Tabitha. If I were magic, I could laugh with people. I could talk to them as if I were on their level. If I were magic, I could eat scallops here every night with Rahul.

Maybe he’ll forget what he was about to figure out. Maybe we can just have one more date. Just one more before I have to tell him, please, please, please.

To do something like that, you’d have to be the most powerful mage in the history of magic.

Everything seemed to zoom together: lead filings drawn to the magnet of a suspect. “So if someone could do that—the dynamism thing—they’d be like. Power coming out of their ears.” I shifted under Alphabet’s weight as I considered the possibilities,

“So if a student could do that, the dynamism thing, they’d be more powerful than anyone else in the world,” I continued with a dawning sense of horror. “They could do anything, right? They could do anything.”

“Sorry, sorry, I just—you just helped me realize something huge about the case.”

“God, it all fits. She does have the power, she just doesn’t know it yet. Or maybe she does know it, and—”

My eyes landed on Rahul’s face. He looked stunned. I realized too late what I’d said. “Oh.”

I swallowed hard, and tried to map a memory of his hand on mine, knowing it was the last time I’d feel it. “You wouldn’t have clarified that if you didn’t already know, Rahul,” I whispered. I set my wineglass down on the coffee table, bracing myself for the way things would land after they fell apart.

“I’m not magic,” I said. I hadn’t felt the injury of those words so deeply since Tabitha had left me behind. It knocked the air out of my lungs, and I had to catch my breath. It had been coming, and I’d hoped I could hold it off, but I’d been fooling myself.

“Yep. My sister. Tabitha got it all, I guess. She’s the special one. Sorry I tricked you into thinking I was special too.” I cleared my throat. “I’m not. You picked the wrong sister. Guess it’s better for you to find that out now.”

“I don’t understand why you lied.” He took my hand and looked at me with a compassion that scalded me. “Why would you pretend?” I swallowed a laugh. Really? It felt so obvious. But then I let myself look into his eyes and hear the thing he was trying to say to me: that I didn’t need to pretend. Not for him. It almost sounded like he thought it was true.

Alexandria’s eyes flashed up to meet mine, and I rocked back in my chair. Wrongwrongwrongwrong she didn’t do that you’re wrong look somewhere else look somewhere else. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tabitha flinch. It was the first time I’d seen someone else react to what Alexandria did—the emotional manipulation that her friends described as power and that the staff described as charisma, because they couldn’t imagine that it was anything more than that.

“I didn’t do anything,” she whispered. She looked incredibly small. The room was thick with her manipulation; my head buzzed with no no no no no no no no no look away go away. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.”

“Come on, Alexandria,” I said. “You can play like you didn’t, but don’t try to pretend that you couldn’t.”

“She is not the Chosen One,” he choked. His face was pink, blotchy; there were wet streaks running down his cheeks. His chin buckled as he stalked toward us, still fighting through tears. “She is not, she’s just a popular bitch!” He punched the surface of the lab table with all the force his high-school-boy rage could generate. The tendons in his neck stood out as he pointed a finger at her. “She might be able to keep everyone scared of her. She might be able to terrify Courtney into keeping us a secret, but that doesn’t mean—she’s not worthy of the Prophecy!”

He wheeled around, his praying-mantis elbows swinging. “We were in love, Alexandria. Courtney and I were in love!” A fleck of spittle flew from his mouth—he was literally frothing. His eyes were wild and white. “And you ruined it!”

But it was too late. Dylan had already exploded.

It spun slowly, a long pink streak of mist and foam and jellyfish-like hunks. I swallowed bile as I stood up and walked in a wide arc

“You need to put him back together, Alexandria. Can you do that? Please?” Some distant corner of my mind congratulated itself on the steadiness of my voice. She shook her head, and tears spilled from both her eyes.

I tried to reach out with something that wasn’t my mind, with that something that Tabitha and Alexandria and Rahul and everyone here but me seemed to know how to access. It was a habit that I pretended not to have, and yet I did it then. I tried to reach out, and I failed like always. I couldn’t do it. I would never be able to do it. I snapped my fingers next to Alexandria’s face. “Hey,” I said, my voice sharp. “This one’s on you. Put him back. Come on. We don’t have much time, now.”

“Imagine that your magic is a swimming pool, okay? Now hold your breath.” Alexandria nodded, her eyes locked on mine, and took a deep breath. She didn’t exhale. “Okay,” I said. “Now … now freeze the water, and then dive in.”

chest. It was worse, somehow, seeing him almost put together—it was harder than it had been to see him in pieces.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, looking frantically around for Tabitha—I couldn’t handle this on my own anymore, there was just too much. But my sister was nowhere to be seen, so I went to Courtney and helped her up. Blood poured from her rapidly swelling nose. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered, freezing up with my hands six inches from Courtney’s shoulders

“She did what she did to me, she did it, she did what Miss Gamble did, and I—she did it to him, is he dead? Did he die? What did you do?” With this last word, she lunged toward Alexandria. Rahul caught her by the shoulders and held her in place even as she kicked and screamed nonsense panic-sounds like a cat trapped under a fallen branch.

Because Ivy said I was the Chosen One. And then my hands got hot and then Dylan … exploded.”

She looked completely haunted. She looked afraid. She looked terribly, terribly young.

I thought about the story she’d been building for herself—a girl, a young woman in charge of her world. Unstoppable. Fearless. But that girl had never encountered anything this frightening before. She’d encountered drama with her friends and her parents and boys and grades. Maybe she’d seen bullying, intimidation, violence. But in all this time, she’d never encountered anything so frightening as her own power.

“You aren’t the Chosen One, my boy,” she said. She didn’t say it gently, but she wasn’t cruel, either—she was ripping off a Band-Aid, and must have known that wasting time would only make it hurt more.

“If I had to guess? I’d say it’s his obsession.” I stared at the little ball. No mysteries swirled within its depths.

“Young Miss DeCambray is probably only just starting to show us what can be done when magic is applied the right way. Or rather, when magic is applied her way.”

Mrs. Webb looked at me, apologetic, and then slapped Courtney smartly across the face. Courtney’s mouth shut with a little pop.

“She just saw her secret boyfriend explode,” Mrs. Webb said, dry as kindling. “Courtney will be fine. She might be a little panicky for a few days, but then they’ll make out and she’ll have a big personal revelation about true love, and then she’ll be back in school next Monday with new bangs.” Mrs. Webb patted at her immaculate hair. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. Always a crisis, with these girls.”

It was a kind of sobbing that seemed to come from below her lungs, from the deep aching roots of her.

“It happened to him, too. What happened to me. It’s so awful—he’s going to have nightmares for weeks.”

“Okay,” she said, “okay I—I think I can tell you. Because, I mean. Alexandria’s going to tell everyone anyway, probably.” A bead of sweat traced its way down my spine. Would Alexandria tell everyone? Or would she show everyone? “It was when I needed the abortion. Ms. Capley, she didn’t want to—she wouldn’t give me the potion. She, um, she said I was too pregnant for it. I thought I was just eight weeks, but she said it was probably closer to like ten or twelve? And so she said, um, she said the potion wouldn’t work.” She sniffed every few words. “So then Alexandria told her to give me the other kind of abortion.”

“Alexandria. She said she’d make Ms. Capley give me the surgery. And Alexandria tried to make her do it, but she just wouldn’t. And so then I went to Mrs. Webb, but she was like, ‘No, it’s too dangerous to do this outside of a clinic’ and she tried to give me a referral but like she just totally didn’t get it—” She took a deep, ragged breath. “Anyway, so, then Alexandria was like, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and she got Ms. Gamble to do it.”

“No, she threatened Ms. Gamble. Alexandria had some kind of … I don’t know, some kind of leverage over her or whatever. So she made Ms. Gamble do it.”

She’d done the magical equivalent of a bathtub appendectomy performed with a rusty screwdriver and a watch strap to bite down on.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry if my texts freaked you out or whatever.”

She wasn’t sure if she could say it. She wasn’t sure that it was allowed.

“Okay. I’m going to find you someone to talk to—no, I’m sorry, but you will have to talk to someone, Courtney. What you went through is highly traumatic. It’s illegal, and the person who did that to you didn’t take the proper steps to protect you. Do you understand?” Courtney didn’t quite nod, but she blinked a few times, and that seemed to be enough for Mrs. Webb. “You’re a very strong girl,” she murmured, squeezing Courtney’s hands.