Marcelina and Paulie follow suit. They couldn’t look more different: Paulie is ice where Marcelina is obsidian. Paulie’s fitted powder-blue suit is a summer sky next to Marcelina’s black velvet gown. Marcelina is tan where Paulie is pale, round and soft where Paulie is tall and willowy. Her thick black hair piles a lot higher than Paulie’s thin, straight blond hair can. They don’t just look different—Paulie is a cheerleader, and Marcelina is the closest thing our little school has to a real goth, even though she hates it when people call her that. But as opposite as they are, they became friends quicker than anyone I’ve ever seen. Somehow they wind up doing a lot of things in tandem.
Of course Roya is the last to notice me.
I don’t want to look at her anyway. She’s in a bloodred gown. That’s not an exaggeration: she literally texted us all when she found it, saying that she was going to look like a vampire queen at prom. Her long tangle of black hair is piled on top of her head in a way that looks messy and polished at the same time. She’s long-limbed and elegant and glowing and she never pays any attention to what I’m trying to tell her, and as always, Paulie has to slap her arm to make her stop talking and look at me.
Finally, everyone’s quiet. There’s a moment of peace. The silent coyote prevails again. It’s a trick my first-grade teacher used to shut the class up, and it works every single time.
“Okay, so, I guess I have to be in charge right now,” I say, my voice shaking. Roya rolls her eyes, and Marcelina throws her a sharp glare. “We can’t call the cops,” I say. “Roya’s mom would kill her, and also, there’s absolutely no way to explain why his dick exploded without telling them that we’re magic.”
I forgot to mention that part. Sorry. I got swept up in the fact that Josh died from a bad case of exploded-wang.
We’re all magic.
“So we tell them,” Maryam says. She tugs on her sleeve and I can tell she’s on the way from frustrated to pissed. “We can’t just let Josh be dead without telling anyone. I’m tired of keeping the magic thing a secret, anyway.”
Iris suddenly looks very pale under her million freckles. “Maryam,” she whispers. “You know we can’t do that. My parents—”
“I know,” Maryam interrupts, deflating. She covers her face with her hands, and her voice is muffled behind her matte copper fingernails. “Mine too.” She doesn’t talk much about how her family and her faith community would feel about her magic, but the look she shares with Iris from between her fingers tells me that it probably wouldn’t be an easy conversation. Her family doesn’t go to a mosque on a regular basis, but they still have a lot of rules, spoken and unspoken. I’d be willing to bet “no magic” is one of them.
Maryam doesn’t follow all of their rules. She didn’t follow the one that said she shouldn’t go to this after-party. But there’s a big difference between the kind of trouble she’d face for going to a party and the kind of trouble she’d face for being in proximity to a dead white boy.
“Maryam,” I say quietly, and she makes a hmph noise from behind her hands. “You don’t have to be part of this.”
She lowers her hands and looks at me. Her eye makeup is smeared, which I know will infuriate her. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. It’s too dangerous. Even aside from my parents, if the cops found out about this, a girl like me—I can’t be involved. I can’t.”
“It’s okay,” Marcelina says, smiling at her. “We understand.”
“Do we?” Roya asks, eyeing Maryam coolly. “I’m brown too, and I’m staying.”
“You’re not Muslim,” Maryam snaps. “And your mom’s a white cop. You’ll be fine.”
Roya opens her mouth, probably to start up the same argument she and Maryam have every other month—about the ways they’re treated differently, about intersections of privilege and marginalization, about modesty and culture. If they have this argument, Roya will accuse Maryam of being protected by her lighter skin color, and Maryam will accuse Roya of being protected by her mother, and the rest of us will try to stay out of the way as best we can because there are layers to that fight we don’t understand from the inside. And because we know better than to get between those two when they’re pissed at each other.
But Marcelina throws out her arms like an umpire, and Roya’s mouth snaps shut again, and before anything else can happen, Maryam shakes her head. “I don’t think I can be here,” she says, still looking at me. I nod. She gives me a tight hug before she walks out of the room. When she pulls away, she rests her fingertip on my chin and stares into my eyes. It’s something I’ve seen her mother do to her little sister. “I’m still here for you,” she says. “I’m not bailing on you. I just can’t do this.”
“I know,” I whisper, and I feel tears finally spill over. She kisses my forehead and then walks out of the room without looking back at me or at Josh or at anyone. The door closes behind her and my heart sinks. I understand why she can’t be part of this, but I wish she would stay.
“Wait,” Iris says, “we’re letting her leave?”
“I trust her,” I answer. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
“Right, but what if she freaks out?” Iris’s
