I did this. It’s my fault. I deserve worse than what I’m getting.
And then, faster than should be possible, the light of the spell fades, and he’s gone. Josh is gone. One second he was there, and everything was covered in blood, and the next—he’s not there anymore. All the blood is gone. The strange rush that comes with pain suddenly disappearing washes over me.
It totally worked. I smile, even though I don’t really feel happy. It’s over. I can pretend that it was all a bad dream.
He’s gone.
And then Iris yells and her knees buckle and it’s not over after all.
Marcelina grabs Iris before she falls. Her eyes are glowing again, brighter than they usually do—they’re blue-white and painful to look at. She’s biting her lip hard, making a sound like a held-in scream. Her skin is so pale that her freckles stand out like ink spatters across her cheeks. She clutches at Marcelina’s black dress. I hear the fabric rip, and then a louder ripping-fabric sound that can’t be Marcelina’s dress, it’s so loud. It’s too loud.
There’s a flare of light on the bed. At the exact same moment, Iris faints.
Her dress is pooled around her, a puddle of white satin and gold sequins. Marcelina and Roya drop to the floor beside her without hesitating. They both know CPR—Roya from being on the swim team, Marcelina from when she used to be a Girl Scout—and they’re checking her pulse and looking inside her mouth and saying things quietly to each other that I don’t really understand.
“She’s okay, I think,” Roya says.
“She … doesn’t look okay,” Paulie replies.
Roya ignores Paulie. She puts her hands on Iris’s temples. A soft pink glow shines out from under her palms. Her jaw clenches—she should be drained of magic right now. She must be drawing on some deep reserve. Iris’s eyes flutter open, and she looks at Roya with a dreamy kind of smile.
I look away.
That’s when I notice Josh.
“Um, guys?” I say it too quietly at first and nobody notices me. “Guys,” I say again. “We’ve got a problem.”
They all look up at me, and I point at the bed.
“No way,” Paulie says.
Marcelina looks up at the bed. “Way,” she responds quietly.
“What is it?” Iris says from the floor. Her words are a little slurred. She tries to sit up, and Roya puts a hand on her chest, gently pushing her back to the floor.
“Josh is back,” I say.
“Well. Sort of,” Paulie adds.
Sort of.
I took biology in my freshman year of high school. It’s where I met Paulie. At first, I thought she was just another pretty, preppy blond cheerleader-type. I was kind of a shallow, judgy freshman, and I thought high school was going to be all about cliques and groups. So, when I sat down on my first day of class and the girl next to me was a shiny-haired Taylor Swift lookalike in a cheer uniform, I rolled my eyes. I braced myself for a whole year of stupid questions and conversations about diets and boy drama and … well. I was kind of a dick to Paulie for the first month of school.
But then we got paired together for a dissection. It was a cow eye—we were supposed to cut it open and find the lens, and draw diagrams of the sclera and the retina and the optic nerve. The teacher came around to our lab tables with a big bucket and dropped an eyeball onto each of our dissection trays.
“Whoa,” Paulie said when the eyeball splatted onto our tray. “Cool.”
I remember being surprised at her reaction. “Cool?” I repeated. “It’s pretty gross.”
“Yeah,” she said, and she looked up at me with this kind of wild, excited smile. “It’s totally gross. And it’s also cool.”
We dissected our cow eye and then we talked about other cool, gross things. I realized how wrong I’d been about Paulie. We became friends in that immediate way that happens when you find someone amazing and don’t want to let go of them for anything, and it only took a month for us to realize that we were both keeping the same secret. I’d always thought I was weird for being magic. I’d known I wasn’t the only one, because of Roya and Maryam, but I thought we were freaks. I tried to love our magic then, but I couldn’t help feeling like something was wrong with us. Paulie thought she was weird too, but she thought it was cool. “Like a cow eye?” I’d asked the first time she told me so.
“Exactly like a cow eye,” she’d said.
“Okay, so, it didn’t work,” Marcelina says. She’s staring at the bed and fidgeting with a curl that’s come loose from her prom updo.
“It kind of worked,” Paulie says.
“What happened?” Iris asks.
Here is what happened:
Josh came back. But not all of him. And not all in one piece.
His head is there. His spine is there, although it takes me a minute to realize that’s what the little pile of round bones is. A big purple cushion-looking thing is there, which I will later figure out is his liver. His hands are piled one on top of the other, and his feet are at either end of the bed. They are not attached to his arms and legs, which are stacked like firewood at the foot of the bed.
His heart is there. It’s sinking into the bed, like it’s heavy, heavier than any of the other parts of him that are there. It’s translucent and shiny and it looks … cold.
All of the parts are clean and really pale. There’s no oozing blood. The sheets look cleaner than they did when I came into the room the first time, and they’d looked clean enough then that I’d been willing to lose my virginity on them.
It’s helpful. It makes everything look kind of fake, like drawings in a textbook. Although there is a
