Acknowledgments
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the friends and family that hold us together. It’s about uncertainty. It’s about learning to accept love and support. It’s about how scary that can be, and how hard a skill it is to learn. It’s a book about doing hard things unalone.
To DongWon Song, my agent and friend, who has seen me through the good times and the grieving times;
To Liesa Abrams, my brilliant editor and champion of this project;
To Ryan and Christina, who let me be strange;
To Mom and Dad and Katie and Scott and Rachel and Mathew and Becca and Amy;
To Mark Oshiro, who helped me to find the person I needed to be in order to write this book;
To all my early readers, including Sarah, Sharon, Ashley, Melanie, Charis, Hilary, and Mark;
To Kaye, for helping me get it right and for telling me where I got it wrong, with kindness and patience;
To Mallory O’Meara and Elisabeth Fillmore, both of whom have given me real talk and shown me real kindness;
To all my communities—PQ, MF, the coven, the squad, the group text, the group chat—I know I will never have to hide a body alone as long as I have all of you;
To Team DongWon (all of you are magic);
To Tinkerbell, who is not allowed on the bed and who is an outlaw;
To everyone who saw me through the writing of this book and all the other ones, who congratulated and consoled me, who held my hand during bad news and hugged me after good news, who made me eat and sleep and hydrate and go outside, who showed me around new cities and kept me from getting lost;
To everyone who believed in me and to everyone who didn’t;
To you, for reading this book:
Thank you.
About the Author
Hugo Award winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor for Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Their fiction credits include Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and the Atlantic. Their novels have been published by Simon & Schuster and Tor Books, and their novellas have been published by Tor.com. You can find more about their work at sarahgailey.com. You can also find them on social media @gaileyfrey.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition March 2020
Text copyright © 2020 by Sarah Gailey
Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Amalia Alvarez
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Jacket designed by Sarah Creech
Interior designed by Mike Rosamilia
Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Amalia Alvarez
Author photograph copyright © 2020 by Allan Amato
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gailey, Sarah, author.
Title: When we were magic / by Sarah Gailey.
Description: First Simon Pulse hardcover edition. | New York : Simon Pulse, 2020. | Summary: When Alexis accidentally kills a classmate on prom night using magic, her best friends
Roya, Iris, Paulie, Marcelina, and Maryam join in using their powers to try to set things right. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019001195 (print) | LCCN 2019002854 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534432871 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534432895 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Witchcraft—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G3453 (eBook) | LCC PZ7.1.G3453 Whe 2020 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001195
