It’s not a nice smell.
When Iris sees what’s on the bed, she covers her mouth with her hand. Her voice shakes. “I’m really sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” Roya says. She’s kneeling behind Iris, helping her sit up.
“No,” Iris says. “It’s not okay, it’s not—we have to try again. Let’s try again.”
Roya looks up at the rest of us with alarm on her face. “We can’t, guys.” Her hands are resting on Iris’s shoulders, and I notice that her palms are still glowing pink. I give her an is-she-okay look, and she responds with a minute shake of her head.
“We have to try again,” Iris repeats, and her voice is getting high and shaky the way it does before she has a panic attack. Her breathing is fast and shallow. I sit down on the floor in front of her and grab her hand in both of mine, then let it go, because I don’t know what will happen if I hold someone’s hand. Because I don’t know how much I might hurt someone. I can’t believe I did magic with them without thinking of it—of what might be inside me, waiting to come out. Of how I might have hurt all of them.
I can’t believe I did that.
What’s wrong with me?
I push back a wave of shame and fear because now isn’t the time. Iris needs me. She needs someone to help anchor her, to keep her from spinning out. I sit on my hands, trying to stay solid for her.
“It’s okay,” I say. Her eyes are shot with the dark red of burst blood vessels. “It’s okay. We can deal with this.” Paulie and Marcelina settle on either side of me, and they make soothing noises too.
“We can totally deal with this,” Marcelina says.
“Piece of cake,” Paulie adds.
“Piece of Josh,” Roya says, and we all laugh desperately. Iris cracks a smile.
“Too soon,” she whispers. She’s still breathing a little fast, but it seems like we’ve successfully derailed her anxiety spiral before she went into a full-on panic attack. “We could try again, though,” she says.
Sometimes Iris says things that she doesn’t mean just so one of us will reply with the thing she knows to be true. Like, she’ll say, “What if nobody likes me?” so that someone outside of her brain can respond, “Lots of people like you.” It’s a coping mechanism we’ve all developed together. It’s not manipulative, and it’s not fake. It’s just that sometimes she needs to hear someone else confirm reality.
“We can’t try again,” Roya says softly, and Iris closes her eyes and listens. “That spell not working was really bad for you. I don’t know what it did exactly, but …” She pulls her hands away, extinguishing the pink light, and Iris gasps with pain. “Yeah,” Roya says, returning her hands. Iris sighs as the pink light returns. “I don’t think you should do magic for a few days. Actually, I don’t think you should do anything for a few days.”
“Okay,” Iris says. She looks up at Marcelina, then makes a dismayed sound. “Oh, Marcelina, oh no. I ripped your dress.”
“I could probably try to fix it,” Roya says halfheartedly. “Later, when I’ve got a little more to give.” The muscle under her eye is twitching the longer she keeps her hands on Iris, though, and I can’t imagine that she’ll have anything left by the end of the night.
Marcelina waves the apology away. “It’s fine,” she says, but her chin wobbles a little in that trying-not-to-cry way. We all know it’s not fine—she worked evening shifts at the Crispy Chicken for four months to save up for that dress. She cried when she finally bought it—she said it was the nicest thing she’d ever owned. It’s black, like all of Marcelina’s clothes, but it has little silver stars stitched into it. There’s a huge rip in the bodice now. It’s definitely ruined. “We’ve got more important things to worry about,” she says.
It’s true. It’s not right, but it’s true.
We help Iris stand up. Her legs are trembling. Her freckles are stark—something she’d love if she was doing it on purpose. Her freckles are her favorite part of herself, her best-beloved feature. She’s told me that they’re the thing that make her feel most beautiful. But right now, she just looks sick. She keeps muttering, “I don’t know what happened.” Roya keeps a hand on Iris’s shoulder, pouring that pink glow into her. We stand there, our arms around each other, staring at the body parts on the bed.
“I have an idea,” Paulie says. She unthreads her arm from around my waist and goes to Josh’s closet.
“Wait,” I say, “what are you doing?”
“Trust me,” she calls back, rummaging. Downstairs at the party someone’s turned the music up, and the bass vibrates through the floor. Paulie emerges from the closet clutching a pile of bags.
“Duffels,” she says, dropping them on the floor next to the bed.
“Duffels?” Marcelina repeats blankly.
“Knew he’d have a buttload of ’em,” Paulie says. “Lacrosse dudes love duffel bags.”
I nod as if that’s a truth universally acknowledged. “Sure,” I say. “But what are we … ?” Paulie folds her arms and waits for the penny to drop. And then it does. “No. No way.”
“Yeah,” Paulie says, looking uneasily at the bed. “We gotta get him out of here.”
Roya is the first one to make a move. She gives Iris a squeeze, then steps toward the bed. Iris makes a small noise in the back of her throat and looks a little gray, but she stays standing under her own strength. Roya grabs a duffel and moves to the bed. In one brisk motion, she grabs an arm and a leg and stuffs them into the bag. She zips it up and takes two fast steps backward. Her lips are pressed together and her nostrils are white. She nods, staring straight ahead without seeming to see anything.
“Right,” Marcelina says. “Sure.” She picks up a duffel
