Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

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

oh, hush,” she snapped at the books in the restricted Theoretical Magic section. But their whispering didn’t stop—if anything, it increased, the books murmuring to each other like a scandalized congregation of origami Presbyterians.

But then he licked his dry lips with a dry tongue, and I knew that his fear and my fear were not the same kind of fear.

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’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 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.

THE DRIVE THROUGH THE SUNOL hills was as beautiful as the novocaine that comes before the drill.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

My memories of the frenzied hours of note-taking were slipping away from me like sand eroding out from under my feet at the beach, every hour a lapping wave that eased the details away grain by grain. By noon, all that was left was a masturbatory sense of shame and urgency. The clarity was gone.