The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

“Echo?” The hekamist’s face flashed a moment of genuine surprise, as if waking up from a dream. “Have you two met?”

  “Come on. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “It’s not funny. Echo’s blackmailing me. She wants five thousand dollars or she says she’ll tell everyone that I forgot Win.”

  The hekamist’s eyes widened. She was afraid: good.

  I went on, pressing my advantage. “I already paid you five thousand dollars. I should go to the cops.”

  “The cops?” The hekamist’s face sharpened, like clay hardening into cracks and planes. “What would you tell them about Echo?”

  I frowned. “That she’s blackmailing me, of course. That you both are. What else would I tell them?”

  “Oh.” Echo’s mother sighed the word, and her face relaxed. “Oh . . . Echo, my Echo . . . Secrets are so powerful.”

  “I know.”

  “Because if you hadn’t kept the spell a secret, Echo would not be able to pressure you for money.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” I started to feel like I’d let the conversation drift off track. “But I don’t have any money, so you’re both going to leave me alone or I will call the cops.”

  “Yes, of course.” She looked through me with an empty smile.

  There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I clutched my wrist and shifted on tingling feet. “Okay then.”

  “Ari Madrigal,” the hekamist said as I started to walk away. “You won’t give Echo any money?” It almost sounded like she was begging. But that didn’t make any sense.

  “Right,” I said, and kept walking.

  My brain told me I should be triumphant, having confronted my enemy and figured out her game. But Echo’s mother didn’t seem like an enemy, and if she wasn’t, then maybe Echo wasn’t my enemy, either. So I had the strange, inexplicable sense that I’d been the one who’d been played.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  “Kay! You awake?”

  “Cal? What time is it?”

  “Two thirty-eight. What are you doing?”

  “I was asleep.”

  “Oh yeah.” He laughed. “Sorry. I was thinking of you.”

  “You were?”

  “Sure.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. I held my breath. “I’m not sure, exactly. I just thought: Kay Charpal. And then I called.”

  “So . . . was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  “I guess not. People don’t call just to call anymore, do they?”

  “Not at two thirty in the morning, at least.”

  Cal laughed again. He seemed extremely cheerful for two thirty in the morning. “I’ll let you go to sleep. Good night, Kay.”

  I pressed End on my phone and lay back in the dark. I slept with a comforter because my parents kept the house ice-cold even in summer. Mina rebelled and stuffed towels over the vents and opened her windows, but I liked the feeling of the downy warmth all around me. I burrowed in more deeply, but a place under my heart and right above my gut still felt cold.

  That call was the spell pushing Cal to me. We talked regularly now; we would soon hang out, too. Ari and Diana would see that I wasn’t a throwaway girl to Cal. He thought of me in the middle of the night. He wanted to talk to me. Exactly as I’d wanted.

  Right?

  Unhooked.

  That was the word the hekamist used to describe my side effects. She said a part of me would dislocate. Unhook. I didn’t know what it meant to unhook. Maybe she didn’t know, either, or she might have explained it better.

  Unhooking could explain this coldness in my chest, more than the air conditioning. Everything I loved most—Ari, Diana, even Mina, having friends who were close, who understood, and all the other things they meant to me—I could pull off like a cloak and hang on a peg. Underneath the cloak there was nothing. The people and things I loved most felt far away and foreign, the cloak beautiful but strange. I could pry the cloak up and try it on, but it still felt like an object, not a part of me.

  Unhooked. Had to be. Because if it wasn’t my side effects, why wasn’t I happy?

  Cal kept calling in the middle of the night. He never slept, at least not as far as I could tell.

  “Can we talk tomorrow, Cal?”

  “But then I’ll be awake for the next five hours by myself.”

  “You could go to sleep.”

  “Nah. I don’t sleep much.”

  “What’s ‘not much’?”

  “I haven’t slept a whole night through since I was twelve years old.”

  I pulled the comforter all the way over my head and burrowed in. “Why?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I close my eyes like everyone else does. I’m tired, or at least I think I am. And nothing happens. I see the inside of my eyelids. Does that happen to you?”

  “No. I fall asleep right away.”

  “Lucky.”

  “Except when you call, of course.”

  “Sorry. I don’t want to bother you.”

  “You’re not,” I said. At least I didn’t think I was bothered. It was hard to tell, sometimes, the difference between excitement and dread. Another thing that had come unhooked? “Do you want to hang out during the day?”

  There was a pause. “Why not?” he said. “Come by the store tomorrow. We’ll pretend to be tourists and go to the carnival.”

  Great. Me and Cal and—“Can my friends Ari and Diana come, too?”

  “Ari Madrigal? Oh man, it sucks so much about Win. Of course she can come.”

  So we made a plan. A date.

  Ari and Diana met us at Waters Hardware. They stood just inside the front door, next to a display of cleaning products, wearing almost identical expressions of discomfort.

  I wanted them to come in and join me by the registers, but I could tell they weren’t going to, so I went over to them. Cal leaped over the counter to join me and nearly made it without falling, but he was off balance from his jump, and he landed on his knees right in front of Diana and Ari. We all reached forward out of instinct, trying to either stop him from falling—too late—or help him up.

  “Ow,” he said, smiling, and popped back up without anyone’s help.

  Diana smiled back at him, but Ari looked as if his lack of coordination was a personal affront to her, and tucked her outstretched hand firmly back under the opposite elbow.

  “Can we go?” she asked.

  “Jeez, Ari, it’s like you’re afraid to run into me.” Markos Waters appeared from the depths of the store.

  “Hey, Markos,” Ari said. Diana stepped toward him but stopped short when she saw he wasn’t looking at her.

  Cal went to punch Markos in the arm but whiffed. “Dude, come out with us, we’re going to the carnival.”

  Everyone but Cal looked appalled at the idea. I knew I should have appreciated his generosity and inclusivity, but part of having best friends meant enjoying that you were a part of an exclusive club. He messed that up by inviting other people in.

  “You ever find anyone to get you that money?” Markos asked Ari.

  There was a moment of confused silence, and then everyone spoke at the same time.

  “Money?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What money?”

  “Let’s just go.”

  “Did you pay or not?”

  “Maybe we should talk about this some other time.”

  “It’s going to get crowded if we don’t leave soon. . . .”

  “Wait, why do you need money?”

  Ari raised her voice. “Everything’s fine. I don’t need money. Let’s just go.”

  She left the store. Diana waited for a second, looking back and forth between the door and Markos, but then Markos turned back into the depths of the store without saying
anything and her shoulders slumped and she joined Ari out on the sidewalk.

  Cal grabbed my hand and pulled me to the door. “Come on!” he said.

  I pulled back, and he stopped walking. “Don’t you think that was weird?”

  “What—Markos?”

  “Yeah, and Ari asking him for money. Did you know about that?”

  Cal shrugged. “Everyone has their secrets.”

  “But he’s your brother.”

  “I’m not in charge of my siblings. Do you know everything your sister does?”

  I pictured Mina at the bonfire, walking away because I told her to mind her own business. Maybe Cal was right and I should expect a certain level of hidden surprises, even with best friends. It didn’t feel right, though. It felt as empty and disappointing as his hand holding mine, sweaty even in the air-conditioning of the store.

  The four of us went to the carnival, which was set up in a parking lot at the end of the main drag. Cal didn’t seem to mind that Ari was surly and snappish, and that Diana was withdrawn and distracted. He bought me a stuffed hippo after he failed to win the ring toss five times. He stuck with us all morning and didn’t flirt with other girls.

  Tourists crowded the carnival in bright colors, laughing loudly. Games and souvenir shops lined border of the lot, with a few games and rides in the middle. On one end, there was an arcade with a dozen ancient machines—Skee-Ball, the claw, pinball—and on the other end, high enough to look out over the ocean, stood the Whirlpool, an octopus-like contraption that spun in a circle and side-to-side and up and down. We waited in line for it. Mostly potheads and dropouts got summer jobs at the carnival, but Cal knew the guy who ran the ride and he promised to sneak us in without tickets.

  Cal asked Ari about dancing. She described the program she’d be joining in New York in the fall, and the audition process, and where she and Jess were planning to live. I stood next to Diana.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Because back at the store you seemed—”

  “I said I’m fine, Kay.”

  “Markos can be such a jerk, seriously.”

  “Just because you have a Waters boyfriend doesn’t mean you’re some sort of expert on them,” she snapped, then immediately winced. “Sorry. That was awful.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not an expert.”

  “It’s not okay. I shouldn’t say stuff like that. You shouldn’t let me get away with it.”

  I didn’t say, So it’s my fault when you say mean things to me? I didn’t say anything.

  We reached the head of the line and stepped into the tiny cars. Since I was standing with Diana, she and I shared a car, and Cal and Ari shared the one behind us.

  “Sometimes I want high school to be over already, so I can get out,” Diana said. “It’s going to be a strange year.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “I was thinking maybe I’ll go to boarding school. Be on my own for a while.”

  From the car behind us, I could hear Ari talking about the Manhattan Ballet. “. . . leave August first, and we’re already starting to pack up . . .”

  “A girl I know from horse camp goes to a school in Maine. Or I could go someplace else—somewhere I’m a complete stranger.”

  “. . . want to get a handle on the subway, too, so I’m not totally lost the first day . . .”

  The Whirlpool started its spin slowly. At first we only went in one big circle, but after a full revolution our cars started turning. The bar across my lap and Diana’s creaked.

  “You want to leave me here,” I said.

  “Oh, Kay. That’s not it. I want to see what it’s like on my own.”

  The doubly spinning cars lifted up and down, metal groaning. Behind me and all around me as we spun, I heard Ari shriek.

  “Say you won’t leave me,” I said quickly. I could swear the safety bar lifted; I kept a grip on it, pushing it down.

  “What?” Diana shouted. Our car shook; the safety bar rattled. I grabbed Diana’s hand. It would be so easy for a screw to loosen, for the pothead at the controls to drift off, for springs to rust and break, for electric wires to fray. I’d walked Ari and Diana right onto a machine that could do so much more damage than what a cooler on a beach did to Diana’s face.

  “You need to say you won’t leave!” I shouted.

  “We can’t get out of the car, the ride’s already started!”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes focused on her; the ride moved too fast. All I could see was red hair and blue sky and bright lights, and the unnaturally loud creaks of the metal as the machine reached its highest speed. “Just say it! Say you won’t leave me!”

  “Okay, jeez! I won’t leave you.”

  I let go of her hand and closed my eyes. The ride spun and spun.

  For the moment I didn’t feel unhooked from my feelings. I was too scared.

  It might have been irrational, but I had the strong, clear feeling that if Diana and Ari had kept talking about their plans, the spell might’ve hurt them to keep them here with me.

  After we got off the ride, no one seemed to notice anything had changed. I watched Ari and Diana and Cal being themselves, unaware how close they’d come.

  It was one thing for the spell to bring me regular doses of Ari and Diana. I wanted to protect them. I cared about them, and they used to care about me. I would be there for them no matter what. But Cal . . . he had never really wanted to be near me. The spell had given him more than a gentle nudge—it shoved with both hands.

  The thought rattled me. I’d saved Diana and Ari on the Whirlpool, and I’d always save them because we were best friends, but Cal was different. I mean, for one thing, he was clumsy: it would make it almost too easy for the spell. He’d fall one day, really hurt himself, and it would be my fault for not wanting to hang out with him. But more importantly, I didn’t even like him that much, and Ari and Diana seemed totally unimpressed that I’d managed to “date” him, whatever that meant. It had been an impulsive, stupid idea to give him the hook. Now I was stuck with the responsibility.

  The next day when he called at two thirty in the morning, I barely spoke.

  He talked about nothing for a while until eventually noticing I wasn’t responding. “Is something the matter?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I started to say, but I couldn’t tell him the truth. That he was in some sort of nebulous, ever-present danger because of me. That he wasn’t in control of what he was doing. I couldn’t risk the spell snapping and doling out punishment.

  I had to keep answering the phone in the middle of the night. I had to keep hanging out at the hardware store watching him knock over displays of bug spray and step on rakes. I had to keep doing what he thought he wanted to do. What the spell thought I wanted to do. What neither of us needed or wanted at all.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  I’ve never apologized to a girl as much as I had to apologize to Diana. Not because she was mad at me—she wasn’t—but because I didn’t stop feeling bad.

  “I’m sorry again. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I was such a dick.”

  Diana and I were at the diner, drinking cup after cup of watery coffee. Diana looked down into her mug, her hair falling over her cheeks. “Stop, Markos. It was one stupid day.”

  I wanted to reach over and brush Diana’s hair behind her ear, but clenched my hands around my mug instead, burning them. “I should’ve gone to the carnival with you. I should’ve been fucking normal.”

  “It was too weird. Your brother and Kay . . .”

  Later I had asked Cal if he was dating Kay, and he’d laughed and said no. But he’d gone to the carnival with her like it was no big deal. Why the hell couldn’t I do the same thing?

  “Goddamn Ari and her goddamn money,” I said.

  “Don’t blame Ari. She’s
going through stuff, too.”

  “Is that what I’m doing? Going through stuff?”

  Diana didn’t answer, which was its own answer. I had to blame someone for how bad I felt, for how stupid I’d acted, and there was Ari, “going through stuff.” It couldn’t have been me being an asshole for no reason.

  “Do you think Ari got it somewhere else? The money, I mean?”

  “I doubt it.”

  It had been less than a week since Ari had asked me for five thousand dollars and told me she’d spent what I’d given Win, and though it was embarrassing to admit, it still bothered me. Actually it would’ve been embarrassing to admit to anyone but Diana. I could vent to her about it all day and she wouldn’t mind.

  “It pisses me off that she thinks she can come in after however long and ask me for something like that. It’s like she thinks because Win loved her, I owe her something.”

  “There’s got to be something else going on,” Diana said.

  “Like what? Gambling addiction? Bad real estate investment?”

  “She must’ve really needed it, that’s all. Maybe it had something to do with New York.”

  “You give her way too much credit. She’s barely talked to you at all this summer.”

  Diana raised an eyebrow. “You know the reason Ari and I became friends in the first place? She told me this a few years ago. I was the only one in fourth grade who didn’t ask her anything about her parents, ever, but who still stuck around. The last thing she wanted to do was talk, and I was always too scared to bring it up, so we’ve been best friends ever since.”

  “You . . . don’t seem scared anymore.”

  Diana looked up at me sharply, and I held my breath and leaned carefully back in my seat. Casual. Arms resting on the back of the booth.

  “I mean,” I said, and forced my voice not to shake. “You’re not the worst person in the world to talk to.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from making eye contact and then I was falling into the big dark pit, disappearing, but in a good way.

  “Thank you,” she said, but it sounded strange and far away, like sonar underwater, pinging in the darkness: There I was. There she was.

  I couldn’t speak.