The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  I could hear my brothers gathering in my kitchen before I got out of bed. My back clenched, but I went down the stairs like usual, ready to be the usual Markos.

  “You look rough,” Dev declared as soon as he saw me.

  “Yikes!” Cal echoed.

  “Oh, Markos,” my mom said, and hurried to pour me an orange juice.

  Brian leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his uniformed chest. “You make it hard for me not to arrest you sometimes, dude.”

  “Whatever.” I opened the cabinet door and stared at the boxes of cereal.

  “Don’t ‘whatever’ me. If someone else at the party had called the cops on you, I would’ve been in big trouble.”

  “No one did, did they?”

  Dev spoke through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “If you’re going to binge, at least be a funny drunk.”

  Cal cackled. “You told me I was a phony, selfish dickpocket. What’s a dickpocket?”

  “Like a pocket for your dick, duh,” Dev said.

  “What, like a pouch? Or a sock with a pocket sewn on it?”

  “Boys . . .” Mom murmured from her seat by the window. She didn’t care what we said, but occasionally felt the need to remind us that she could hear that we were saying it.

  “Regardless,” Brian said. “Maybe try to have a little self-control next time.”

  I slammed the cabinet door shut. No one even flinched. They all blinked at me—Brian, Dev, Cal, and Mom—as if I hadn’t done anything at all.

  It didn’t matter what I did. I would always be the youngest, the baby, the fuckup. They didn’t see me when they looked at me; they saw a Markos-shaped animatronic. I could slam doors and scream and tear the place apart and they’d barely look up from their corn flakes.

  “I’m going out,” I said, and left before anyone could stop me.

  I called Diana North. We hadn’t hooked up, so I didn’t have to wait a few days. I hadn’t been an ass to her, which meant she’d actually answered the phone. She met me at the bagel place with a patio out back, and we bought bagels and sat at a table in the sun. The light was too bright and hot—it was past noon already and my head ached—but I did not suggest moving to the shade. The hurt was what I deserved for forgetting Win the night before.

  She looked prim in a dress with a collar, though her long, thick hair was still a color red not found in nature and the bruise on the side of her face looked both tender and angry. She ate her bagel in tiny bites, wincing when she had to move the right cheek, and stared at me with her bloodshot eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  “How’s your face?”

  She shrugged, which made her wince again. “Nothing broken.”

  “You could tell people you got into a fight.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. Very believable. Did you have a good time the rest of the night?”

  “Fine,” I said. I didn’t mention my brothers, and I didn’t say the thing about forgetting Win was dead, but I must’ve been thinking about Win because of what came out of my mouth next. “Usually Win would come by with coffee and donuts. On July fourth, I mean.”

  Diana scraped cream cheese off her bagel carefully. “Usually Ari would sleep over. I guess we sort of did because we slept in my car. My mom’s car.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t feel like going home.”

  “Why not?”

  Diana spoke to the bagel. “My mom kind of freaked out over my face. Knew she would.”

  “It’s not like it was your fault.”

  “She’s super protective. I didn’t want to have to hear the whole routine: should’ve been more careful, should’ve watched where I was going, shouldn’t have been running—or at a party—to begin with.”

  “That’s crazy. Tell her to shut her face.”

  Diana looked up from the bagel, her good eye wide. “I could never do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You tell your mother to shut her face?”

  I thought of my mother, who’s been distracted most of my life. By the store, by one of my brothers, by a series of disasters—illnesses, injuries, money troubles. But when it was your turn to have a crisis, she would claw anyone’s eyes out for you. If I came home with a bashed-in face, she’d toss me a bag of peas and demand to know who it was she should be suing for damages. “My mother doesn’t think anything’s our fault.”

  “You guys are saints, then?”

  “Yup.”

  “My mom’s okay. She’s always looked after me—too much, probably. Trying to keep me safe and happy always. Between her and Ari—sometimes it felt like they were living my life for me.” She stopped talking and flushed.

  I thought of my brothers with their endless reams of advice, and the expectation that I would be exactly like them. “But you don’t feel that way anymore?”

  “No,” Diana said, seemingly surprising herself. “No, I don’t. Actually—it’s because of Win. Ari started spending so much time with him . . . I was on my own.”

  I swallowed half a bagel in three bites. “What’s up with Ari anyway?”

  Diana looked at me out of the corner of her eye, like I was setting a trap. “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me much anymore.”

  “Well she hasn’t talked to me much either.”

  “Really? But you were such good friends.”

  I shifted on my metal seat. It burned the backs of my knees. “She was Win’s girlfriend.”

  “Come on. You were friends, too.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the point now? We’re going to sit around and share our feelings?”

  Diana picked at her bagel. “It might be good for both of you to talk about all this stuff.”

  “Doesn’t seem fucking likely. Ari having a heart-to-heart? Come on. That’s one good thing about her—she’s not a sappy romantic. Thank god. If she’d been needy with Win he’d have been needy right back and it would have been unbearable. He was so—” I threw the rest of my bagel down onto my place. “He was so damn nice all the time.”

  Diana didn’t look startled, but I felt strange—like on the beach: heart racing, breathing coming in weird gasps. I made myself inhale and hold it for five seconds before opening my mouth again.

  “Do you think about what happens when you die?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Not like heaven or angels or whatever—that’s stupid—but the end of everything. How nothing matters after that.” How nothing matters now, I wanted to say, but I could tell that would bring on the weird breathing, and she wouldn’t understand anyway.

  “I think about how upset my parents would be,” Diana started to say, “and my little cousins, and Ari. She’s been through enough, with the fire, and then Win. But you know—” She stopped suddenly, looked at me like she was remembering who I was, then continued more slowly. “It doesn’t make me sad to think about it. It’s, like, I almost want to see it, because then I’d know what people really thought of me. If they really cared.”

  That should’ve made me angry, because of Win. Because Win didn’t ask to die, and we all really did go through that torture, and it wasn’t part of some selfish, self-centered fantasy. But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t panicking anymore, either.

  “That’s messed up,” I said and smiled, and Diana drank that smile up like it was sunlight and she was a fucking flower. Even the bruise on her cheek seemed to shrink in her glow.

  That was a nice feeling. I thought about the night before and how I didn’t want to kiss her and it seemed stupid now. Why shouldn’t I? Seeing her in the bright morning light of the bagel shop backyard, seeing how her happiness shone, I figured if that made me feel okay, there was no harm in making her more happy. We were both getting something out of it—so what if it wasn’t the same thing?

  We left the bagel place and started walking down the street toward the beach. There were tourists everywhere; it was the height of the season, the biggest holiday of the year on the Cape. We passed my family’s hardware store
and I turned away from the windows. There wasn’t much chance of anyone seeing anything through the mounds of junk on display, but I didn’t want to risk making eye contact with my brothers or mother.

  “Ari’s afraid to go in there,” Diana said, nodding at the store.

  “It’s a hardware store.”

  “Yeah, but she hates it. Says the walls crowd in on her.”

  “Maybe it’s me.”

  She elbowed me jokingly. I hadn’t ever thought that mousy Diana North, the one who laughed at Ari’s jokes and wore polos buttoned all the way up to her neck, would be capable of joking with me.

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “If anyone could talk to her, you could.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and smiled again.

  The look on her face was so perfect—surprised and pleased—that I laughed, and she started turning red all around the black and blue of the bruise. “I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m laughing because . . .”

  But I didn’t know why I was laughing. Because I was alive? Was that the big joke?

  Or was it funny—surprising—to remember that I scared people or made them glow or whatever? In my house I felt sometimes like a broken TV: people looked at me then turned away because I was always the same. The same mistakes, the same disappointments. Nothing I did made a dent to them.

  Not like with Diana. Everything I did with her was new, everything mattered. She didn’t expect me to be one way or another, and what I did affected what she did in return.

  With her I could put a dent in the world.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Echo said she needed to practice the spell a couple times to be sure but she’d let me know when it was ready. I said I’d work on the money, and I fully intended to work on it immediately, but it’s a funny thing about being depressed: it’s pretty fucking hard to make and follow through with a plan.

  I had no money. My mom had no money. My sister Kara was eleven—and she had no money. Ari had enough savings from her parents’ life insurance to get her life started in New York, which was one of those almost invisible but huge differences between us, and though she might’ve given me the money, I couldn’t ask. It was her parents’ life insurance, for one thing. And she and her aunt needed that money. I couldn’t take New York away from her. Nice Win, upstanding boyfriend, Good Guy, definitely couldn’t do that. Asking for it would mean admitting I wasn’t Nice Win Good Guy anymore. Plus, if she knew what I was doing she would blame herself, and seeing that on her face would make me feel worse.

  I loved her. But it was like loving someone through six feet of bulletproof glass. She was muffled, distant.

  That left Markos. Markos himself had no money, and his mom had constant problems paying suppliers for the hardware store and covering their mortgage, but at least she had the store—people came in every day and handed them cash. I didn’t know how to ask him for it, though.

  Knowing that the spell was on its way, I got my appetite back some, and I even managed to play a few baseball games without faking knee pain and sitting in the dugout.

  It probably sounds strange that I was counting on the spell but made no attempt to figure out how to pay for it. I wasn’t planning on ripping Echo off or anything. I wanted to pay my debt. It’s just—I wanted to get better more. I wanted out of the hole.

  It was a lot like a hole. Or more like a well, maybe: dark and claustrophobic, with the fingernail marks along the walls that the other prisoners made as they attempted their escapes. I’d look up and see a pinprick of light, but then I’d blink and the darkness would come in again; I’d start thinking about how my mom couldn’t catch a break and Kara would eventually get bitter and Ari probably didn’t really love me and Markos thought of me as an obligation, and I didn’t even blame them for any of it, because I knew I deserved to be treated like shit. Because I’d never done anything to make the world a better place, I wasn’t an upstanding moral citizen by any stretch of the imagination, and the fact that I couldn’t enjoy my life like a normal person probably meant I was an evolutionary mistake that needed to be stomped out.

  The world belonged to the happy people, the carefree souls. I didn’t begrudge them that. I only wanted out of their way.

  One of the things that had originally drawn me to Ari was that she wasn’t one of the carefree souls. This was before I fell down the well for real, when I could still pretty much fake my way through a day, even the dark ones. We had been in school together forever, but I feel like I really noticed her for the first time in trig, which we both had first period sophomore year.

  She sat so straight, like the line of her hair down her back. That type of posture could read snobby to some people, but I’d been going to school with her for so long, I knew her history. The tragedy of her parents, killed in a fire; the fact that she lived with her aunt, who had tattoos and worked in a coffee shop; and that she was a dancer, and good at it.

  She’d lived through something bad. I didn’t pity her for it; it made me respect her.

  I started talking to her before and after class, and we became friends. I couldn’t tell you how. The mechanics of how a person becomes friends, especially with a girl: it all takes place in gestures and moments and looks and jokes, and then before you know it you’re always at a person’s locker in the morning or at their house after school and plans on Friday are assumed, as are Christmas gifts and bad days and hurt feelings and last-minute rides to school. Impossible to track or re-create. We were friends for a year, and then we were together. It happened.

  We were doing homework in her kitchen near the end of sophomore year, right before we started dating, when I was trying so hard to think of anything but how much I wanted to kiss her, so I asked her if she thought her spell was worth it.

  “Yes,” she said without hesitating. “You know how people say ‘I can’t imagine how awful that must have been?’ Well, now I can say that, too. I can’t imagine it.”

  For some reason I didn’t want to let go of the topic, even though I could tell Ari had said pretty much all she wanted to say about it. She rubbed her wrist with her thumb, frowning, and stared at her trig book intently. “Who do you think did it?”

  “A tourist.”

  “Why?”

  “They found the remnants of fireworks in the grate. That always made me think of someone on vacation—someone here to have a good time. So what I think is that a tourist kid broke in, probably high, set off some fireworks, and it got out of control.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if reading a news report.

  “So not on purpose.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I can’t imagine that someone would do this on purpose. I just . . . can’t believe that.”

  “If you believe it was a tourist, how can you even look at them now?”

  “Kind of hard to avoid them.”

  “They think they own everything.” They did own everything, at least compared to me. They could take vacations.

  My mom drove me and Kara to Block Island for the day once when I was eleven. It seemed a lot like home: tourists everywhere, beaches, seafood. She bought us ice cream. I felt, even more than usual, like I was supposed to be having a good time, and I was mad at myself for not feeling it. But that day I wasn’t the only one; none of our smiles stayed fixed.

  Ari hadn’t said anything, and I wondered if I’d gone too far. Finally she shook her head. “I can’t get angry at every tourist. I wouldn’t be able to function. But I can’t help hating them all a little, too.”

  “And if they caught the guy? Would you feel better?”

  “No.” She exhaled so hard it ruffled the pages of her notebook. “Besides, it’s been almost eight years. He’s long gone by now. I doubt he even knows the house burned down. It wasn’t like he did it maliciously.”

  I felt my heart clunk down to my gut as I realized what she was saying.
She’d given up hope.

  Something inside of me warmed to that bleakness. Drew closer. Sitting next to her at the table, I actually felt the room get smaller, and the two of us slide together like water pouring down a drain.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m asking about all this stuff.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She even smiled a little bit. “I’d rather you ask than never ever mention it like it was some sort of horrible disease. I’m fine now.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course you are.”

  “I have Jess and Diana and dancing—and I have you, too.” She said the last bit quickly, like she wasn’t sure if she was going too far, claiming me as hers.

  She wasn’t going too far. I felt good—great, even—being in the list of things she lived for, because I felt the same way without realizing it: she fit into a hole in my life I hadn’t known I’d had until then. That was the moment I decided I wasn’t just going to think about kissing her, but I was actually going to do it. I didn’t end up doing it for a little while longer, but the decision could be traced back to that conversation.

  “I’m fine,” she said again, and elbowed me with her sharp, precise elbow.

  But I didn’t believe her. She wasn’t fine, and neither was I.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  We were not okay. After the bonfire, if I didn’t hear from Ari or Diana for a day, I’d start to get panicky—picturing Diana’s bruise or worse. That big black shadowy bird hovered over my head daily, threatening to swoop down and carry my friends away. I had to be on constant alert so that no one would get hurt again.