The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  “Sad enough that I’m sitting here,” I said.

  That was almost a joke, but still she didn’t laugh, and not laughing made me feel like I was doing the right thing, and that she was listening and hearing me in a way I hadn’t been listened to or heard in a long time.

  “My mother could make you something that would wipe all that away.”

  “Great,” I said. “Great.”

  “Or I could make it for you.” She glanced up at me. Her eyes were ringed with dark makeup that made the whites seem extra white. “And we could keep it between us.”

  I swallowed. She was too young to be a hekamist, which meant she was illegal. If anyone found out, she and her mom and anyone else in their coven would go to jail.

  But what did that matter? I needed a spell.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  My indifference didn’t seem to make her feel better. Her frown deepened, as if I wasn’t getting something. “My mom charges five thousand dollars for permanent spells.” I didn’t have anywhere near that much money, but I didn’t think about that. “If you wanted to feel okay for a day or week or two, that would be a couple hundred since you’d have to come back every once in a while and re-up, but I won’t do that to you.”

  “Great. Thanks,” I said.

  “You have five thousand dollars?” she asked, and I sort of half nodded.

  “I don’t have it on me, but I can get it.”

  “I want to practice some before I give it to you, make sure it’s all right.”

  “Fine.”

  “Win, I’m going to be in your brain. You’re going to have to be okay with that.”

  “Okay. I’m okay with it.”

  She frowned and pulled her long sleeves over her hands, clenching them into fists. “You don’t even know me.”

  I looked at her and the cards laid out on the table in front of her. I looked at the couch sticking into the room, then back at Echo. Even with my dampened emotions I felt for Echo. Something in the way she held herself, or the depth in her eyes. She shouldn’t even exist. How did she go anywhere? Meet anyone? For a stark moment I forgot my own drowning and felt how it would be to live in this house, to live Echo’s life.

  It would be lonely.

  “I trust you,” I said.

  Finally she let her face relax into an expression of pure sunshine, a strange contrast with the black leather and fierce makeup. “Great. I’m going to fix you, Win Tillman. You’re going to be as good as new.”

  She had me describe how it felt, then, and I tried to tell her. How the world seemed dimmer than it used to be. How when Ari kissed me I didn’t feel anything, or I felt only a crushing panic. She made notes and flipped through cupboards and listened, and I found myself—not happy, but relieved.

  I told her about faking normal with Markos and my wariness of drugs and my fear that I wasn’t strong enough to live through it all.

  “You are,” she said, and I believed her.

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  ..................................................................

  I woke up with sand in my mouth, head resting on my balled-up jacket, Cal Waters’s legs tangled with mine. The light was gray and misty, and the waves hitting the shore sounded like someone retching. No, that was someone retching—fifty feet down the beach, on her hands and knees in the wet sand. The bonfire had dimmed to a couple of red embers in black.

  I extracted myself from Cal and shook out my jacket. He woke up and rubbed his eyes, which only ground more sand into them. Nothing about this seemed romantic or fun anymore.

  “Hey, so, goodbye,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay.” He stood up and reached for my hand. To shake it? I clasped mine behind my back, and he dropped his, grinning cheerfully. “Nice to meet you, Kay.”

  “Same.”

  He leaned forward faster than I could step away in the sand and kissed me, but both of our mouths were flavored with rotting alcohol, and I could see—because I was too startled to close my eyes—that his eyes weren’t closed, either. He was staring at me while our dry tongues and dirty mouths pressed together like pieces of raw bacon.

  Definitely not romantic.

  But at least he remembered my name. At least I hadn’t been so bad at kissing that he couldn’t bear to look at me. I waved goodbye to him, already back on the ground and half asleep again, and then made my way up the beach to the parking lot.

  A year ago, when I used to hear people talking about the aftermath of some awesome party, I always pictured it brightly lit and hilarious. I never would’ve pictured this group of sad, tired leftovers. I needed to find Ari and Diana and tell them what happened; maybe that would make it real and exciting. Maybe they’d missed me and had stories of their own to tell.

  In the parking lot I saw Diana’s car where we left it. Ari was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead.

  “Have fun?” she asked when I opened the passenger side door. Diana lay curled up in the back seat, asleep.

  “Yes,” I said, and waited for her to ask more so I could tell her about Cal.

  She turned to me, and I could see there were tears on her cheeks, and her normally tough face was quivering. “Something happened,” she said.

  My Cal story flew out of my head. She hadn’t even cried at the funeral. “What’s wrong?”

  “Diana . . .”

  As if Diana sensed she was entering the story, she stirred in her sleep, turning her head toward the front of the car. I gasped. The left side of her face was a solid bruise, purple and black and mottled.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She fell,” Ari said.

  “Oh my god.”

  “We were running up the dune. I had this idea. . . . We were going to go to Boston or New York . . . just drive.”

  “You were going to go without me?”

  Ari had the grace to look guilty, although there was a little anger mixed in, too. “It was spur-of-the-moment.”

  “How would I have gotten home?”

  “Didn’t seem like you wanted to go home.”

  So she’d seen me with Cal. It didn’t seem like such a fun story to share anymore.

  “Still, I would’ve gone with you guys,” I said. “If you’re going to go somewhere you should tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, Kay. It was just a dumb idea. We would’ve called from the road.”

  “Calling from the road isn’t good enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re friends.”

  Ari pushed her hair out of her face and wiped at her tears roughly. “I don’t know why you’re giving me a hard time. We didn’t go anywhere, did we? We were heading up the dune, Diana fell, and we stayed here.”

  I blinked slowly, trying to keep all the muscles of my face from jumping. They’d planned to leave. They were going to go without telling me. A hundred miles to Boston. Three hundred miles to New York.

  But in the end they couldn’t leave. Diana had gotten hurt and they stayed.

  Unlike Diana’s horse camp and Ari moving to New York, the idea to drive to New York or Boston had come on suddenly. In order to keep them here, the spell had to act fast and make sure they didn’t even reach the car.

  It could’ve been an accident, but it fit too neatly, and anyway the spell worked through accidents and coincidence. They wanted to leave, but they couldn’t. My spell had done that. My spell had hurt Diana.

  “Why didn’t you go home?” I asked.

  “Didn’t want to scare Diana’s parents.”

  “And we waited for you,” Diana said.

  I glanced back at her. She was touching her bruised cheek with a finger and working her jaw silently.

  I couldn’t believe the spell was that strong.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  Diana nodded, and Ari started the car.

  They had tried, but they couldn’t go without me. It was exactly what
I’d wanted.

  Yes. Exactly what I wanted.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said to them both. “It was an accident.”

  Of course I didn’t want Diana to get hurt, but a part of me was glad that the hekamist was so good at her job, and that the spell was working so well, and that they didn’t leave me alone on the beach. It gave me this opportunity to show them who I am. Why they should care. Why we were meant to be friends after all.

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  ..................................................................

  “I’m going to be fine, you know,” Diana said. We were sitting in Diana’s car watching Kay walk up the steps to her house and then wave enthusiastically from behind the inset glass. “To be honest, it was kind of the best bonfire ever.”

  I shuddered at the thought of Echo demanding her money, and the sound of Diana’s scream. “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Yeah. I got to talk to Markos, and you seemed . . . better.”

  I rubbed my temple. It felt like a long time ago, the idea that I would run off to New York and tell Diana the truth about Win and everything would be perfectly fine. It wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. What did I imagine she could do—conjure five thousand dollars from nothing?

  I made nine dollars an hour selling ice cream at the Sweet Shoppe, twenty hours a week. To earn Echo’s money I’d have to work for a year, nonstop, and probably much more when you factored in taxes and school and the fact that the Sweet Shoppe was closed October through April. Or I’d have to use our New York money, which was the last of my parents’ life insurance. But I couldn’t use that; I needed it to live on while I danced with the junior corps.

  So I had to keep Echo from telling anyone until we left for New York. Which was so obviously impossible the idea squeezed me, like trying to plié in new leather pants.

  “Where was Kay all night?” Diana asked.

  “Saw her with Cal Waters.”

  “Like . . . talking?” she asked.

  “It looked more like flirting.”

  “Wow. Seriously?” I nodded, and Diana’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to warn her away from him like you always warn me away from Markos?”

  “Cal’s the nice one.”

  Diana gave me a withering look, which must have hurt the bruise on her face, because she winced.

  “All right, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll make sure she’s properly cautioned about getting involved with the Waters boys.”

  Diana shifted in her seat and raised a hand to her face, but didn’t touch the bruise; she held her hand over it like it radiated heat. I backed the car out of Kay’s driveway and started for home. “Did you have an okay time, Ari?”

  I’d been blackmailed and my best friend had bashed her face in.

  In my mind, we ran up the dune again and again. I stumbled over and over; I couldn’t find my footing. It was funny at the time. The sand slid and reshaped itself.

  Was I holding on to Diana’s arm when she fell? Could I have tipped her over? Did I make her as unstable as I was?

  Was she better off without me?

  I managed to smile at Diana, though it didn’t feel right. My smiles had become as clumsy as the rest of me. I pushed harder, and the effort hurt my cheeks, my teeth, and the very back of my neck. “Sure. Very memorable.”

  Diana dropped me off and promised to call later. I went to my room and did my exercises like usual, which is to say, I did them terribly.

  The only way I was going to get better was to push through it. This was my plan: keep practicing until I could re-teach myself grace.

  After that first attempt at ballet the Friday after I’d taken the spell, I had tried to get the side effects reversed. It seemed obvious. Whip up another spell and make it go back to the way it was. Whoever this dead boy was, there was no way he was worth screwing up my career.

  So I had gone straight from that disastrous dance class to the hekamist’s house. The familiar middle-aged woman with curly gray hair and a foggy look in her eye answered the door.

  “I know you,” she said.

  I blinked. “I was here yesterday,” I said.

  “Was it yesterday?” She smiled and made a gesture with her hand like she was waving away moths.

  “So,” I said. “About that spell . . .”

  The hekamist leaned against the doorframe. Behind her I could see the crowded living room and a dingy kitchen. I knew I’d been there the day before, but it looked familiar in a distant way, as if I’d only seen photos of it in a book.

  “I hope it worked,” she said. “No refunds.”

  “The spell worked. But I can’t dance anymore.”

  “You’re a dancer? Oh. How lovely.”

  “It seems like I’m dancing, like my brain is telling me to move, to be graceful, but my body won’t listen.” I shifted on my feet. “I fell down in class.”

  She shrugged. “Some side effects are to be expected. I’m sure I mentioned it.”

  “This isn’t ‘some side effects.’ I can’t do anything I used to be able to do.”

  “But you’ve forgotten your dead boyfriend. You feel better.”

  “I guess. I don’t remember how I felt before.”

  “True, true. So strange, memory spells. When they work, everyone always wonders why they got them.” She looked up and down the road behind me, blinking. It occurred to me that she was going crazy. Hekamists go crazy when the rest of their coven dies. I’d heard about it, but I didn’t know what it looked like until then. She pressed her cheek into the door frame, covering one eye and letting the other one focus in and out slowly. “You’re unhappy about your side effects. Hmm. Have you had other spells?”

  I wanted to scream with frustration, but instead I gripped my swollen left wrist and pinched the pain down. “Yes. I had one when I was eight years old. Permanent trauma removal.”

  “Oh. I see. You didn’t say that yesterday.” She kept her face smashed into the door frame, still staring at me closely. “Trauma spell. That means memory, too. Boyfriend dead. Memory gone. Two permanent memory spells. Sad, sad, sad, aren’t you?”

  My wrist throbbed. “My parents—died. In a fire. I saw the house burn down. Apparently I had nightmares.”

  “A fire. An accident?”

  I gritted my teeth and squeezed my toes in my shoes. “Someone broke in. Lit fireworks in the fireplace.”

  Her mouth dropped open and she moved away from the door frame. “Oh.”

  “Listen, you have to undo this spell. Please. I’m going to New York in August to study ballet and I can’t even—”

  “No,” she said. “Those memories are gone and there’s no way to get them back.”

  “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care about the memories. I want my body to work right. Can you fix that?”

  Her mood had shifted. Instead of looking out at the street, she glanced back into her house and shrank away from me. Afraid. “A hekamist could fix you. Add another spell to counteract the side effect. You’d be as graceful as a gazelle. But then that spell comes with its own set of side effects, and then you’re up to three permanent spells—very bad. Very risky. Side effects cascading.”

  I bit my lip. The other girls had talked about spells at the Summer Institute last year. Rumor had it that one of the prima ballerinas at the Manhattan Ballet had gotten a spell to make her a star, and that was why she was so dull to talk to. Or there was the girl who couldn’t nail a double pirouette—kept losing her balance right at the end—and then one day she came in and did fourteen in a row flawlessly. She cried every morning when she woke up because she couldn’t remember where she was, but she could dance. Last I heard she was an apprentice at the San Francisco Ballet.

  I’d always thought those were selfish spells—shortcuts to greatness. The prima ballerina and the pirouette girl could’ve practiced and maybe they would’ve gotten where they need to go anyway. I couldn’t even practice. I l
ooked like a fool. The side effects bent and twisted me. I needed a spell to get me back to normal, to be me again.

  But would I really be myself if I couldn’t remember my own name?

  “Not me,” the hekamist said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Not this hekamist. Silly me, silly me. No no no. I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She started to close the door, and I put a hand out to stop her.

  She took a deep breath and seemed to gather herself together. “You are a sweet girl. I can tell. And you seemed sad the other day about your dead boyfriend. I think you made the right decision.”

  No one who knew me would have ever described me as sweet. And I knew I didn’t make the right decision.

  “No, there’s no way. . . . Please. I love dance more than anything.”

  “Now you do.” She pushed the door hard against my hand. “Yesterday you loved your boyfriend more. Try to think that you’ve done yourself a favor.”

  With a final shove, the door closed. I knocked on it a couple more times, but she didn’t come out again.

  Even if I decided to risk the compound side effects, she wouldn’t do the spell, and she was the only hekamist in town. Plus there was the question of payment—no way another five thousand dollars would show up in the back of my closet. Especially since Echo told me Win had put it there.

  So I had to keep practicing.

  The morning after the bonfire, July fourth, I bent at the waist and reached for the floor. I used to be able to flatten my whole torso against my legs and wrap my arms around them so that my hands touched the sides of my face. Now, the tips of my fingers barely grazed the carpet. I squeezed my eyes closed and willed myself not to start crying. I had another hour to get through.

  I was stuck in this uncooperative body. And Echo was going to tell the truth about Win to everyone I knew unless I figured out a way to stop her.

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  The day after the bonfire I woke up with a hangover beating at my head and an urge in the pit of my stomach to burn down the world. At a certain point during the bonfire, after Diana had hurt herself and then gone off with Ari to recuperate, I’d gotten drunk enough that I’d forgotten Win was gone. I remembered that feeling of security, knowing—but not dwelling on—the fact that my best friend was out there somewhere and any moment he would emerge from the crowd, dump my drink in the sand, and drive me home. But of course he didn’t, so I kept drinking. More than the alcohol hangover there was the hangover from forgetting. I was paying for my lobotomized night.