When We Were Magic Sarah Gailey (each kindness read aloud .TXT) 📖

get out of here and never look back and all that. But … I don’t know.” She runs a hand through her tangled hair, pausing to tug thoughtfully at the end of one twisted-up tendril. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. And I do know. I’ve been talking all year about how I can’t wait to leave. About how great it’ll be to go somewhere else, where everyone in town hasn’t known me since I was knee-high to a tree frog. And I mean it. I really do. But I also can’t help but feel a little spark of fear, like … what if I leave, and it turns out that this town is the best place there is? What if I go out there and I’m too small for the rest of the world? What if I can never come back, and everything out there is too much, and there’s no place for me after all? “I’ll miss it too,” I add, because that’s the only way I know how to say it.

“But at least we’ll be together,” Roya says, and she bumps her shoulder against mine. “Me and you and Maryam.”

“Yeah, us and Maryam,” I say, because I don’t want to say yeah, but me and you.

“Anyway,” she says, and she gets up and brushes her hands on her shorts. Then she unbuttons them.

“What are you—” I start, but then I realize that she’s wearing a swimsuit under her shorts. “Were you wearing that all day?”

“No, weirdo,” she says, sliding the shorts down her legs and stepping out of them, one foot at a time. One of her feet lands right next to my hand, and almost against my will, my fingers rise to wrap around the gentle curve of her ankle. She leans down and rests a hand on my shoulder for balance as she picks up her shorts. “I put it on after school. It’s why I took forever getting out to the parking lot.” She pulls her shirt off over her head, exposing a long stretch of heavily muscled abdomen. Her lats are swollen—her coach has been drilling her on her hundred-meter fly. I’m almost grateful for the reprieve when she throws the shirt at my head. “Hang on to that for me,” she says, and by the time I get her shirt off my face, she’s started walking away.

I look around just in time to see her slinging an old backpack over her shoulders. It’s one I haven’t seen in years—a tiny old string backpack covered in flowers. She used it all through middle school, until one day Kevin Ng spilled Dr Pepper all over it. It’s still stained brown in a lot of places. I don’t know how I missed her bringing it with us.

“I didn’t know you still had that,” I say, and she looks over her shoulder with a shrug.

“My mom found it in the garage the other day,” she says. It hangs oddly, and I realize what must be inside it a moment before she turns and walks back toward me. She crouches in front of me.

“I’m gonna put it in the reservoir,” she murmurs.

“But—”

“It’ll sink,” she adds. “I put a cinderblock inside. By the time the fabric rots away, the arm will have rotted too.”

I look around, but no one is close enough to hear us. “Is the leg in there too?”

“Nah,” she says, “it wouldn’t fit. Besides, Marcelina said something about doing the pieces separately and I think she’s right.”

“She told me that too,” I whisper, nodding. “I get it. But what about—people will notice you dropping a bag into the water, won’t they?”

She gives me a smile and a wink. “I’m not gonna drop it in,” she says. “I’m gonna leave it in.”

And then she stands up and runs off the edge of the rock. I hear her high whoop, followed by a huge splash. I peer over the edge of the rock, into the water. When Roya surfaces, her hair is draped over her face.

“You look like a sea monster!” I yell down to her, and she parts the hair over her mouth so I can see her beaming.

“Jump in!” she yells back.

I shake my head even though I know she won’t see me. I could yell down a million excuses—I’m not wearing a suit, I have to watch our stuff, the water is cold, I don’t have a towel. But none of them would matter. Roya would yell at me to jump in, and I would listen, and our stuff would get stolen and I’d catch a cold and I wouldn’t regret a second of it.

Instead, I watch her. She swims over to the kid who she told to jump in, and she gives him a high five. I look around at everyone else in the water, watching for anyone who might have seen the backpack, anyone who might have noticed her dropping it. There are a lot of eyes on Roya—but not a soul is looking for the backpack she ditched. They’re watching her, watching the way she cuts through the water like a shark, watching the way her hair fans out behind her. Watching her legs, her arms, her back, her smile.

I look down at my own legs and frown. They’re fine, as far as legs go. I’m not insecure about them or anything. But every now and then I wonder if I’m supposed to be insecure about them. My thighs spread out when I sit down, and I don’t really know if that’s normal or not. There are some girls at my school who brag about the gaps between their thighs. I don’t have a gap, but then, I don’t really want one either. A long stripe of dark hair runs up the side of one of my calves, where I missed a whole section of my leg when I was shaving. I don’t have the huge defined quads that Roya and Iris do. Just like in everything else,