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They tell him magic doesn’t work on him anymore, but that isn’t quite true. Sabrina can still do whatever she wants with him, send him to a dream realm to fight Josh or give him the ability to drive stick or induce him to talk obsessively about the benefits of salt. It has the same power over him it always did. Only now, he remembers. There is no more vague fuzziness around certain moments, a strange lapse of memory he can’t quite seem to make himself care about much. Everything is in sharp, clear focus, even the most dreamlike moments, moments where fantasy overwhelms the senses; rather, they are all,in a way, too clear, in loud and vivid technicolour. It’s like wearing glasses that are somehow too clarifying. It gives you a headache, at least until you're used to it. For around a month after he found out, he found himself having to sit down all the time, out of breath over nothing, only the formless shapes of memory. And he wouldn’t help himself; he’d make himself dizzy retreading ground, circling over moments again and again inexorably, shining this new light at every corner and seeing what could be revealed.
To be honest, there was not a lot. Mostly, when he returned to the same moments, again and again, only one thing revealed itself that really mattered: Sabrina had been lying to him, always.
They say, the both of them, later, that Harvey broke up with Sabrina because he discovered she was a witch. This, too, isn’t really the truth. He won’t pretend that wasn’t part of it– it was weird. It was something he knew to be true because four years of memory fell upon him, because he experienced it, was changed by it, felt it, heard it; it wasn’t something he would have believed if he was merely told. What do you do when you have the impossible undeniably thrust into your vision? There were a million things he didn’t understand, that he now knew he didn’t understand, and all those things widened the gulf between him and Sabrina into an interminable chasm. His ignorance yawned between them, pulling them into two different worlds beyond that of just witch-mortal.
The gulf was already there, though. Maybe not so wide, maybe not a gulf but a river.... and maybe, for a while, it was a good thing. Sabrina was enigmatic but endearingly so, a book he never wanted to stop reading. She was sweet, and funny, and at times totally strange. Everything she did surprised him, yet was totally Sabrina. It was almost like a dance, an imperfect one, one Harvey was captivated by, where she travelled every part of the stage yet always returned to a comfortable centre. Perhaps it’s naive to call anything love at first sight, but it was certainly something at first sight— something that grabbed him, hard. He remembers that first time he laid his eyes on her. Knowing there was no way he had seen her before. Being unable to look away. Walking right into a door, like an idiot. The memory still makes his ears flush. That river between them was this gorgeous unstoppable rush, a perfect unknown he couldn’t cross, but— maybe, someday he would. More naivety, he supposes.
He was wrong, and with every year Sabrina remained as impenetrable as ever. And then–
And then Sabrina met someone.
He tries not to linger on this part too much, that part that washes the entire past into an ugly shade, that throws doubt on every glance, and every gesture, every turn of the mouth. This part which moves Sabrina from the dashing performer to the critic in the front row, brows furrowed: no, not quite, not good enough…
In his worst moments, he sort of hopes Josh gets hit by a car.
But he doesn’t really mean it, he swears. Scout’s Honour and everything.
Harvey remembered a lot of things, after capital-F capital-O Finding Out. The first was the insane rat race to save Sabrina that he had only just ran, waking with his breathing heavy, still panting hard and fast, muscles still aching. There was dust in his hair and on his pillow. He went down that morning, his parents still asleep in the near-dawn, and ran the pillow case with bedsheets through the washing machine. His dirty clothes were still on him, but he didn’t care much; it was important, for some reason, that he should have a clean bed. There was a vague, devastating fuzziness in his head, and lingering over top of it all was a thudding annoyance. All this, and now he had dirty sheets. It was a Saturday morning, and it wasn’t even 7am, and he had another chore, cleaning up a mess he didn’t make. He sat on the floor of their laundry room for a very long time, his back to the wall, watching the machine buzz and whir.
The second thing he remembers isn't quite a memory, but an experience, in the brief moments between that magical setting and reality, whether it was sleeping or dreaming or something else. Seeing, but not quite. Not reliving. Not remembering, exactly. Two versions of the same moment, both true, moving in sync, and then out, a shifting focus lens. Harvey outside her house, still high from the rush of his win, cheeks still aglow with the thrill of the night. He had so much to tell her. She was going to be so proud.
Sabrina outside her door, with her own smile, her own red cheeks. With someone else. A hug. And then, a kiss.
Oh. Oh.
It resurfaces again (not quite a memory, not quite a vision) as he walks up her driveway, for the final time– and he knew it would be the final time. He knew, with every step, that they were already over. There was nothing Sabrina could say that would fix things, nothing that would return them to how they were before, even if, somehow, she could explain away all the magic and the witchery, even if it was all some kind of bizarre, comical misunderstanding, it just didn’t matter. The magic didn’t fucking matter. He had already lost her. Now, he was only cleaning up the mess.