Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

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

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

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

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 it.”

I tried to feel like I was talking to a friend, like this was a real conversation that wouldn’t just turn into a weird story he told at the end of his shift. I 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. That’s how life goes. People don’t stick.

There it was again. That feeling like maybe, in another life, I could have fit in here. I could have auditioned for The Tempest. I could have tried out for lacrosse. It was a feeling like nostalgia, but for something I’d never done. Something I’d never had.

But she didn’t understand yet that I couldn’t give her the thing she really wanted. 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.

“Oh, I see. Too hard to explain.” I said it mildly, trying not to be too obvious about pushing the big flashing red insecurity button. It was like stealing candy from a big bowl of free candy surrounded by helpful multilingual signposts.

Fire’ meaning theoretical magic.” “Right.” She pursed her lips. “You’ve never taken a TM class, so you may not understand—but it’s a very dangerous field even at the entry levels. It’s a lot like sticking your hand into a black box that may or may not have cobras in it.” I blinked. “That’s the most coherent explanation of magic I’ve ever heard.”

The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them—I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go.

People don’t like a PI nosing around: they think we’ll create drama by turning over stones and revealing what’s living in the soft damp dark underneath. They don’t realize that the things live in the soft damp dark whether or not we expose them to the sunlight.

Being brave means holding your fear in one hand and your responsibility in the other, and this kid was doing what he thought was right, even while he was pants-shittingly scared of whatever he’d found out.

As he said it, he winked at me yet again. I wondered if perhaps he had an undiagnosed condition that rendered him incapable of keeping both eyes open for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

“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?”

It seemed like such a short time that the kids had, to get from class to class. Such a short time in which to see each other, pass notes, trip each other, steal from each other, make enemies, find friends, make out. I wondered how they managed it all. I wondered how I’d ever managed it all.

“If I had to guess?” she’d said. “The books whisper because they saw something so terrible and powerful happen. It’s part of why I don’t believe Sylvia had an ‘unfortunate accident’—it would take something big to make those books talk.”

“I guess magic isn’t an exact science, huh?” Her eyes had grown wide and she’d leaned back in her chair. “It’s exactly like science, Ivy. We’re making a lot of guesses, some of which are right, and we’re trying our best to name phenomena we may never truly understand. So I’d say that it is absolutely science.”

The hope was that everything would be new, and easy, and fixed. Or that everything would still be broken, but at least it would all go together and make sense.

“My phone’s been dead. And I lost the charger.” I said. This wasn’t exactly false—my phone was, in fact, dead. I hadn’t lost the charger, though—I’d just decided I didn’t want it charged. And the screen was badly cracked. It had fallen. At high velocity. Toward a wall.