When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey

Author:Sarah Gailey [Gailey, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2020-03-02T18:30:00+00:00

13.

ON THURSDAY MORNING I WAKE up to a dozen texts from Iris. I’m so sorry, can we talk, call me, call me, call me. A thousand sad and embarrassed emojis.

I don’t know how to feel about Iris talking to my dads. On the one hand, I know I shouldn’t be mad. She wasn’t trying to get me in trouble—she was just worried. I probably would have done the same thing, and hearing about how I made Dad and Pop worry by going AWOL makes me understand even better why she would be so stressed by my disappearance. Besides, I’m not even grounded. The only thing that happened was that my dads got upset and I had to apologize, and then I had to apologize again to Pop this morning and have a whole big talk with him. And I spent last night feeling guilty. But that’s about my thoughtlessness, which isn’t Iris’s fault. It’s nothing to be upset about, really. That’s obvious and reasonable.

But on the other hand … I know I’m supposed to be mad. I know that’s what a girl in my situation is expected to do. If I watched a movie where this exact situation played out, the girl playing my role would be outraged that her friend got her in trouble; she would make it a huge thing, force Iris to apologize, hold it over her friend’s head as relational leverage. You owe me, she’d say later, and she would use that for as long as she could.

I know that I’m supposed to be angry with Iris. I’m supposed to not speak with her, and I’m supposed to start a lot of turmoil about it. I have a free pass right now to be pissy and dramatic, and I know it’s what everyone expects from me. Not because of who I am and how I act, but because that’s how these situations go. She got me in trouble. I’m supposed to pitch a fit.

But I’m just not mad at her. I know that she did the right thing, even though it got me in trouble. I keep looking for any part of me that might be angry with her, but it’s not there. I completely understand where she was coming from, texting my dads, and even though I wish she hadn’t, I get it. And I bet I would have done the same thing, if Roya or Paulie or Maryam or Marcelina or Iris had vanished without notice.

It would be easy to just feel what I feel and not be mad at her, except for the guilt. I feel so awful for making Dad and Pop worry, for making them think that I didn’t care about their feelings. I was an asshole to them—there’s no way around that. I didn’t consider them, the fact that they love me and notice me. I got so wrapped up in my own world that I basically forgot about them altogether—these men who devoted their lives to raising me and loving me.

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