I SAT IN THE LIBRARY as the school wound down for the day. I’d removed the sign from the door and locked it from the inside. Hopefully Torres wouldn’t get pissed that I was denying the Osthorne student body access to what the poster behind the checkout desk called “The Magic of Learning.” I turned off the fluorescents so the library was bathed only in the yellow-gray light of the indecisive sky outside. At a study table that was out of view of the windows in the hall, I rested my head on my arms, hoping the clouds would break into a white-noise rain so I wouldn’t have to think anymore.
The tableau needed a break. The detective needed a break.
It had been hard work, getting Alexandria to leave. She had wanted to stick around to watch my reaction. Her eyes had glittered as she waited for me to show my underbelly. I’d tried to change the subject a few times, asking her about Toff in hopes that there would be a note of the salacious there that might grab her interest—but it didn’t play. She kept saying that there was something else about Sylvia that I needed to know, something big. But she played too coy for too long, and I finally decided that whatever she knew couldn’t possibly be worth getting my head fucked with. I told her that I needed some time to think about what she’d already told me. It seemed to satisfy her need for me to be reeling, and I sent her back to class nearly on time.
Tabitha and Sylvia.
Why hadn’t Tabitha told me? We weren’t exactly in the business of telling each other things, but couldn’t she have dropped into conversation that she’d been dating—or at the very least, fucking—the woman whose grisly murder I’d been hired to solve? I thought back to the night we’d gotten drinks, when I’d worked up the courage to ask her something personal. When I’d gone with the safest option I could think of to get her to connect with me.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“It didn’t work out.”
Didn’t work out, indeed.
Every single book I’d ever read, every seminar I’d ever attended, every true-crime show I’d ever watched—they all rang through my head with the same crystal-bright tone as the Osthorne lunch bell. It’s always the spouse. I drew spirals in my notebook as I thought about the timeline, not wanting to write it down.
Alexandria had found out about Tabitha and Sylvia in May. They’d been seeing each other since at least Thanksgiving of the year before, which is when my Dad gave me the annual Sibling Update. Tabitha wouldn’t have mentioned to Dad that she was seeing someone if they hadn’t been together for at least a month or two already.
I thought of Tabitha changing the coaster under my drink into copper, then brass. I thought of her eyes, of the sunbeams that hit her hair just right. I thought of my shoulder, exploding. I very carefully did not think about Sylvia, lying bisected on the floor of the library.
What had the books in the Theoretical Magic section seen? Had they seen my sister?
I drafted and deleted a few text messages to Tabitha, then put my head in my hands as the last bell rang and the halls filled with sound. My phone buzzed in my pocket three, four, five times. I watched the weak sunlight crawl across the study table toward me and wished for an eclipse.
Finally, after I-have-no-idea-how-long, something inside me snapped shut. I ran my fingers through my hair and rubbed them across my face, smashing my eyes under the heels of my hands. I let out my breath. I said “shit” because it felt good to swear. I said it a few times. I stood up, put on my jacket, and stalked out into the hallway. Texting wasn’t going to work, this needed to happen in person. There was nothing else for it: I was going to go find Tabitha and hammer this out with her.
Fuck. If I talked to her and she was anything but beyond reproach, I’d have to drop the case. I’d have to return the retainer—which I no longer had—and I’d have to walk away. Part of me desperately wanted the opportunity to turn my back on Osthorne and never think about it again. But then, if that happened, how would I tell Torres why I couldn’t follow through?
Could I implicate my own sister in a murder?
I opened the library door and went to pull my phone out of my pocket to see what all the buzzes were about. I stared at the little maze of dots on my phone screen, a security measure that a software update had exhorted me to set up a couple of weeks before. I could never remember the sequence of dots I was supposed to press in order to get my phone open. I tried two or three times, and my phone buzzed angrily at me to let me know I’d gotten it wrong. I finally remembered the code—a little spiral, counterclockwise—and just as I got it right, I smacked headfirst into someone. I caught a glimpse of thick black hair and crinkly eyes as I went down.
Rahul Chaudhary.
I fell flat on my ass, a perfect slapstick fall that sent a breathtaking bolt of pain up my tailbone. My phone flew out of my hand, skidded across the floor, and slid neatly under the nearest bank of lockers. Rahul had been carrying a stack of papers; it flew into the air and fluttered down around us like the feathers of some massive exploded bird as he tumbled backward, skidding across the linoleum floor.
Of course I would run into him. Of all the staff and students at Osthorne, it would have to be him. At the exact instant when I least wanted to see anyone in the world, of course I would see the dreamboat physical magic teacher who had maybe been flirting with me. Classic.
“Shit, fuck, damn it, ow,” I said. My words seemed to echo slightly, and I realized that Rahul had said the exact same thing at the exact same time. Our eyes caught and we both burst out laughing. The laugh slipped me sideways a little. Nonmagic Ivy who was trying to decide if her sister was a murderer couldn’t have laughed just then if her life depended on it.
But the version of Ivy that lived on the other side of that double vision … she probably laughed all the time. She probably laughed easily. She probably loved little moments like this one, probably laughed about them again later over wine with friends.
Meet-cute, her voice whispered.
Shut up, I thought. But I didn’t think it very loudly.
“Here, let me—” I started gathering Rahul’s papers, but he held out a hand to stop me.
“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, helping me up. I let myself smile at his hand in mine. His papers were spread snowily across the full length of the hallway—some had even slid under the lockers after my phone. They covered every part of the linoleum that wasn’t occupied by my black boots or his brown loafers.
“This seems like a bit much,” I said, surveying the sheer distribution of the papers.
“It’s just this hallway that does it,” he explained. “It’s a charm someone cast back in October. If you knock someone’s books or whatever out of their hands, they’ll fly to opposite ends of the hall.”
I swallowed down a flash of anger at the way these kids wasted their magic. They could do anything, and this is what they chose. I forced myself to give Rahul a wry smile. “That’s not terribly … well. Charming.”
He looked delighted. “It’s clever as hell, though, isn’t it? Fortunately, the staff knows the countercharm.” He spread his hands wide, made a gesture that combined the wave with a game of one-sided patty-cake. I bit my lips to keep from laughing at him, and I let myself enjoy the feeling of having to hold back laughter.
“I know,” he said with a one-sided smile. “The student who designed the charm constructed it so that undoing it makes the victim look as stupid as possible.”
“Why don’t you just … I don’t know, get rid of it?”
He shook his head. “Can’t. It’s airtight—only the caster can undo it. To be honest, I’m kind of proud of whoever came up with this thing. It’s really just…” He did a funny little wiggle that could have been part of the counterspell, but also could have been an expression of sheer joy. “It’s really neat magic. Besides, it’s kind of fun to watch the freshmen dance after they drop something.” He did a complicated series of maneuvers that seemed to involve his hands passing directly through each other. When he laid his hands out flat in front of him, they were full of papers again.
I’d expected to see the papers come floating showily back, one by one, settling in his hands after a brief whirlwind of sparks. But no—it was suddenly as though they’d always been there, as though he’d never dropped them. The floor of the hallway was clear.
I could have stared in open-mouthed amazement. I could have asked him how that was possible. I could have said any number of things. But I was still a little warm with the feeling of laughing at a shared moment with a good-looking guy, and I didn’t want to let it go. I didn’t want to let the Ivy I could have been get swept away by the Ivy I was.
So I made a choice.
“Wow. I mean, that was really smoothly done. I haven’t seen anything that clean in a while.” My heartbeat only picked up a little. Rahul grinned at me, and I knew that he was grinning at the Ivy I was pretending to be, but I loved the way his smile felt. No part of me wondered if there was condescension there. No part of me flinched away. “I don’t understand, though—if the kids can cast spells that you can’t undo, how do you keep them from using magic to cheat?”
“We don’t,” he said with a shrug. “We usually just catch them after the fact, and then they get a failing grade. Did you have anything?” he asked as he tucked his huge stack of papers into the air in front of his chest. The papers vanished. “The countercharm only works on items the caster dropped. Which is nice, I suppose—keeps students from using it to steal from each other.”
“I had my phone.” I looked around, even though I’d seen it slide under the lockers. I didn’t want him to see me scramble around on the floor, but no other viable options were presenting themselves.
“Do you want me to show you how to do the countercharm?”
“Oh, um, no, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just, uh. I’ll just grab it.”
For the long minute during which I was on my hands and knees, reaching through the grime under the closest bank of lockers and feeling through the cobwebs and mystery-gunk to find my phone, I wanted to black out from embarrassment. I wondered how my ass looked in my new slacks. I wondered if the Ivy I was pretending to be would wonder how her ass looked in those same slacks. I wondered if I even wanted the attention of a guy who’d prioritize my ass over my apparently useless brain—even if he was tall and crinkly-eyed and filled out his own slacks very nicely. My hand brushed past at least one spider as I groped under the lockers—I felt its fat, sleek body wiggle out from under my palm. I was about to give up when my fingers closed over something slim, hard, rectangular. Something that my hand immediately recognized as “phone.”
I pulled it out, and it snagged on something. There was a rustle, a ripping sound. I yanked my hand back fast, thinking of spiders and egg sacs. A small flood of fat white things erupted out after my hand. I screamed, scuttled backward on all fours like a crab, ran into Rahul’s legs. He gripped my arm in one strong hand and hauled me up next to him. He didn’t let go of my arm as we watched folded paper stars pour out from underneath the lockers.
“What the hell?” We said it at the same time again; this time, we weren’t laughing.
“Can I see that?” he said, reaching. I was about to ask why, but Rahul didn’t wait for my answer. I thought he was going to take my phone. Then I thought he was going to take my hand. He didn’t want either: he reached between them with deft fingers and pulled something out—something that had gotten stuck to the backside of my phone. There was a piece of not-old-enough gum between the two. I made an oh-god-why noise as the gum stretched between the sheet of bright green in Rahul’s hand and the phone in my hand.
Rahul wrinkled his nose. He twitched his hand at the long line of gum, as if he were flicking water at it. It hardened and crumbled, falling to the floor between us in a shower of greenish dust. He winked at me, saying, “That’s one that comes in handy around here a lot too.”
He was holding a piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped out of a notebook. Nothing was printed on the side that I could see, but there was something written in dark ink on the side that faced him. He read it for a moment, then showed it to me. “I wouldn’t have expected to find one of these babies under there, would you?”
Another opportunity to choose. This was the moment for me to say “One of what?” or “What’s that?” or anything, anything that might give him a hint. Anything that might come near the truth. “Why not? Doesn’t seem so out of place.”
“Well, I mean, it takes a certain amount of skill to put one together at all—much less to stash one where you can’t see the target for it. That’s probably how it wound up with gum on it, don’t you think? Bad aim.”
I took the sheet of bright green paper from him. It had a few words written on it, but they were … wrong. They looked like English words, but every time I looked away from the paper, they swam in my memory until I wasn’t sure what they’d said at all.
“Hm,” I said, trying to sound thoughtful. “So this was with all of those, then?” I gestured at the fifty or so folded paper stars scattered at our feet.
“Ooh,” Rahul breathed, taking the paper back from me and looking it over with all the enthusiasm of a kid with a new action figure, “I bet they decided on the dimensional pleating because they don’t know how to do the air-pocket-file yet! Man, do you remember how much energy it took to keep those things up? But if they didn’t know the air-pocket-file or at least a basic safekeeping illusion, they’d think it would be the only way to—” He stopped suddenly, shaking his head. “But of course, your sister can tell you more about dimensional pleating than I can. I shouldn’t speculate. Sorry. I get a bit carried away talking about theoretical magic sometimes. I’m kind of an enthusiast.”
I made a mental note—dimensional pleating, and oh god he’s smart—and then caught up with the rest of what he had said. “Oh, right. Tabitha will tell me. Sure.” My voice caught on her name. No matter what version of myself I was pretending to be, I still had a sister to confront.
Rahul didn’t say anything. He just waited, leaving me the space to tell him why I couldn’t say my sister’s name without choking on it. But I really didn’t even know yet what I would say.
Instead, I stooped to collect the stars. Rahul hesitated for a second or two before folding his long legs and helping me.
There were seventy-three in all. They all looked exactly like the warning that had been left for me, like the one that was dropped in the library. Fat, seven-pointed things that seemed to have no proper edges.
“Aaah,” he said, picking one up and turning it over. “I love these things.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying and failing to figure out how to keep the notes from slipping out of my grip. I gave up, laying my brand-new jacket out on the floor with a wince and piling the stars in the middle of it.
“Oh, well, every class figures out a different version of this. They all think they’re coming up with something brand-new, but it happens every year—someone comes up with a spell to fold notes and get them to the person they’re intended for, and then spreads the spell around. In a way, they are brand-new. The shape is different every year. It’s kind of a rite of passage.”
“Huh,” I said. “So, what year are these? Do you know?”
“Seniors,” he answered. “I’ve been finding these stars around for almost four years now. Juniors are doing rabbits, sophomores are sailboats. Freshmen are doing something that I think might be a Pokémon.”
“I don’t get it—why don’t they just text each other?” I asked as we piled the last few stars onto my jacket. I folded the jacket around them, tying the sleeves to make a bundle the size of a beach ball. He shrugged.
“Most of them do, after the novelty of the spell wears off about halfway through freshman year. After that, it usually ends up being a few hopeless romantics sending love notes, or random hate-mail shoved in lockers, or just rude drawings.” He paused. “Hey, can I get one of your business cards? I don’t think I got one from you when we talked the other day.”
I set down my bundle of notes, sat back on my heels, and dug through my bag, finding the least-crumpled business card I could. “Here—that’s my cell number on there, it’s the best way to reach me. Rude drawings?” I asked as I handed him the card, even though I could imagine what he probably meant.
“Yeah. Usually, you know. Dicks.” I laughed as he spread his hands about two feet apart. “Almost always dicks, with these kids. And then, of course, the occasional high-quality sketch of a hunky teacher with no shirt on.” He winked at me.
It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Are you flirting with me?” I almost didn’t recognize my own voice—there was invitation there, clear as anything. Whatever kind of Ivy I was pretending to be, she was bolder than me.
Rahul stood and gave me a lip-biting grin. I found myself easily able to imagine some rude drawings of my own as I got to my feet, clutching the bundle of secret notes to my chest.
“Huh. Yeah, maybe I am,” he said. He turned on his heel and, with his hands in his pockets, walked down the hall, his shoulders tucked up around his ears. As he walked out the door, he stumbled, and in the moment before he caught himself, the lockers in the hallway glowed briefly, changing hue. It took me a moment, but I recognized the color. It was the same brown as my eyes.
Tabitha had already gone home for the day by the time I made it to her classroom. Her locked door felt like a reprieve from the universe: I had at least one more day before I had to confront her about her relationship with Sylvia. One more day before I had to make myself ask her if she knew anything about her girlfriend’s death.
When I stepped out into the parking lot, most of the clouds that had been bruising the sky all day had clotted near the horizon, and there was just enough sun shining to make me squint. I found a reusable grocery bag in the trunk of my car—one that I’d bought in a fit of good intentions but had never actually used. I emptied my jacket into it, filling it to the brim with paper stars. I carefully folded the jacket so that the high school hallway grime was facing in, and put it gingerly on top of the stars in the bag. I started toward home.
Not home. I didn’t live there. This wasn’t home. This was just a case. It wasn’t my apartment. It wasn’t my place.
But it was home for the time being. It was okay to think of it that way. Just for a little while.
I flickered between self-reproach and luxuriant basking as I walked. I should have told Rahul that I wasn’t magic—but then, it was better for the case if nobody knew. They would talk to me differently if they realized I was an outsider. It wasn’t because I wanted him to like me—it was just for the case. For the job.
Still. I’d asked if he was flirting, and he’d said maybe I am as if it were a delightful surprise he’d uncovered. I tried not to let it charm me, but I caught myself smiling. It was nice, being flirted with. I bit my lip hard and tried to shake off the giddiness. It didn’t belong to me. It belonged to whoever he thought he was flirting with, whoever I was letting him think I was.
I tried to shake it off. But I didn’t try very hard.
As I approached my front door, my phone buzzed again. I pulled it out of my pocket, brushing off some of the sub-locker gunk, and unlocked it on the first try. There were four messages from a subcontractor updating me on a case, and one from a number I didn’t recognize. I ignored the subcontractor to open the mystery text.
It was a photo. A candid shot, blurry with rain, taken from across a decently lit street. Me and Tabitha. In the picture, we were sitting outside the hipster bar, and she was looking right at the camera. She looked angry. Not startled or curious—just pissed, like the photographer had caught her at a bad time. I was drinking my water, not looking at my sister.
I studied the picture. I should have been looking for clues as to who took it, why, what they wanted when they sent it to me. Instead, I studied the two of us. The way we leaned slightly away from each other at the shoulders. The way we both sat with one foot tucked under the other—her, right over left. Me, left over right. Mirror images. I zoomed in a bit, and the photo got grainy, but it was clear enough for me to see that her eyes looked different in the picture than they had in person.
They looked just like mine.
I went over that night in my head, but I couldn’t remember a single second when she’d dropped whatever the spell was that made her look like more than me. I couldn’t recall seeing it flicker. So when had she let it go? And why? Who was she doing it for?
Once I was inside with the door firmly locked behind me, I sent a response to the unknown number. Who is this?
I left my phone on the kitchen counter and headed for the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, ran wet hands through my hair. Considered filling the sink with water and dunking my head in. I braced myself on the sink, avoiding the mirror as I tried to get my head straight.
Truth matters. Truth has always been the thing I’m after, the most important thing. But sometimes, to get to the truth, detours through fiction are necessary. That’s the job. Osthorne was a big case—a career-changing one with real consequences. I would do whatever it took to solve it.
I left the bathroom, my face still dripping. I stared into the empty bedroom. The stripped mattress was still off-center. I looked at the bare walls, which were painted a washed-out kind of tan.
I couldn’t sleep in there. It was too hollow. It was too familiar. There was pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and then there was sleeping alone in a bed that didn’t belong to me, and the gap between the two was too wide for me to jump.
But just because I wasn’t sleeping in there didn’t mean the space couldn’t be useful.
I left the doorway to get the bag of paper stars. When I returned and stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the room had been waiting for me. The whole apartment had been waiting for me. All day, while I’d been gone, it had been waiting to welcome me back.
I shut the bedroom door behind me, and I left my double vision behind. There was clarity in here. Something in the emptiness brought me back to myself. I upended the bag over the bed, scattering paper stars across the mattress. As I got to work, I felt myself fully exhale for the first time that day.
I was home.