The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

Ever since the bonfire I kept seeing her, day after day, and I still didn’t touch her. It got to the point where I wasn’t pretending to myself that I didn’t want to anymore. Sometimes when I was with her I started staring at her—any part, really, like a shoulder—and I went into a total fucking fugue state just thinking about that shoulder, how soft her skin must be and the two freckles and how the shoulder is close to the neck and her mouth and her breasts and how it might taste or how she might shiver if I kissed it right. I mean I was gone. Brain wiped. Desperate.

  But I didn’t do anything. Maybe the not doing anything made it worse. Maybe this was what it was like for guys who were homely or only talked about video games—maybe they went around hungry all the time, so that by the time they talked to a girl for real they were too starved for touch to get a word out.

  I could talk to her—god, I talked and talked like an asshole. But the longer it went on the more it felt simultaneously like I had to kiss her and that I’d never be able to. And yet instead of doing anything about it—either kissing her, which I was reasonably sure she wanted, or cutting her off and hanging out with someone else, which I knew I didn’t want—I kept calling and picking her up and watching TV and getting smoothies.

  It was pathetic.

  And—okay. I’ll be honest, even though this was the most pathetic thing yet. It wasn’t entirely true that I hadn’t touched her. Nothing serious had happened, but when it was night and we were in my basement watching a movie, we sat next to each other on the couch and we—I can’t believe I’m saying this, please avert your eyes—we held hands.

  HAND HOLDING. I HELD DIANA NORTH’S TINY SOFT PERFECT FUCKING DELICATE WARM HAND.

  DAMN IT!

  So we went to the diner, because I knew if I sat in the basement with her hand in mine again I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the movie and I wouldn’t be able to be anything but a weak coward, so it was better to be out at the diner where talking was what’s expected.

  Diana smiled at me, a half-smile that made my stomach drop to my knees because it was unexpectedly the most beautiful expression I’d ever seen. “Other than Ari and the money mystery, how was today?”

  “Today. Today was medium good. Bad warmed over.” What she meant was, how sad was I today. How much did I miss Win. “It sucks, though. Because the days that’re not total shitshows, I feel guilty. Like do I deserve to be fine, helping customers, watching TV, drinking this coffee?”

  “You do,” she said. “What good would it do if you’re never allowed to be happy again?”

  “What good would anything do? Who says good things have to happen?”

  She stirred her water with the straw. “I used to think that there was a fixed amount of good and bad for every person. That they had to balance each other out. That my cat’s kidneys failing meant that I was paying for having fun on the weekend or something. That he’s sick not because he’s old but because—” She looked at me, flushed, and looked down again. “Because I spent time with you.”

  “I never touched the cat.” I had to make a joke or melt into the floor and die, and she rolled her eyes, like she should. “But you know that whole theory’s bullshit, right?”

  “I don’t know. It’s sort of what hekamists do. They mix up what you’ve been given, but there’s always a balance.”

  “That’s different from real life. Sometimes things suck ass and they don’t get better. Some people have no worries in the entire world forever—there’s no balance.”

  “I mostly agree.” She bit her straw and looked at me. “But you should listen to yourself. Just because Win died doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to be happy.”

  I drank my coffee. I didn’t let my hands shake. I breathed normally. Looked around the diner—anywhere but at Diana. It was funny to me that I didn’t used to think she was pretty. I must’ve only seen a fraction of her, like looking through dirty glass. She was too beautiful now. And I didn’t care what she said. I didn’t deserve to be happy.

  The diner was full of people, and I knew most of them. I could’ve gone up to any of their tables and started a conversation about nothing and they would’ve accepted me—no, they would’ve loved to have me there. The surface Markos could do all the work, and it would have been painless. We wouldn’t have to talk about anything serious. We could make up new jokes, instead of missing the ones we used to have. I could ask one of the girls out. Easy, not painful. I wouldn’t care enough to be afraid to do anything beyond hand-holding.

  So why else was I torturing myself with Diana, if I didn’t think I should be living in pain?

  The room started to feel stifling, and I grabbed a couple dollars from my pocket. “I gotta go,” I said.

  “Really? But we’ve only been—”

  I was at the door already, ignoring the shouts hello from the other tables and Diana calling my name. Out in the parking lot in the humid night I gulped down air like I was drowning, and I felt a pressure on my hand.

  It was Diana. She ran after me. She was holding my hand, looking at me, concerned.

  I kept walking to the car, but she didn’t let go, and when I got there I was dizzy. Too dizzy to pull my keys from my pocket. The streetlights pulsed and I closed my eyes.

  Diana stepped in front of me, between me and the car door, facing me, holding my hand. I could smell her hair and her body and could feel it through the layers of clothes between us. With her free hand she reached into the front pocket of my jeans for my keys. I wasn’t breathing. Her breath moved the fibers of my shirt against my chest. She was there. Right there. In between me and the car door. I was a statue—a man trapped in marble, blood pumping, without the strength to break the stone and move.

  Holy shit.

  It hurt so bad. A hurt that told me I was alive.

  Any second she was going to turn and open the car door and the incredible pain would be over, but I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to hurt like this forever.

  Her pulse beat in my hand.

  I guess you could call it self-control keeping me from kissing her, but it was more that I wanted the pain more than I wanted her.

  But then it occurred to me that if I leaned forward, this type of pain—the wanting type—might end, but a new pain would begin. The pain and regret and remorse and stupidity of having ruined something wonderful.

  And that’s what I’m good at—ruining things.

  I took a breath and so did she and I leaned in and I kissed her and she kissed me and the parking lot and the car and the diner and Win all vanished. It was the perfect horrible moment, everything I’d wanted for weeks and everything I was scared of, the beginning and the end all at once.

  She kissed back and I could feel her smiling, and that ache for her didn’t go away; it grew and grew.

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  Diana burst into my room at the end of my daily stretches. It was the middle of July. I was running out of time, and the exercises hadn’t gotten any better in the two months since the spell. I put on a shrug over my leotard and swallowed down panic. Sometimes if I pushed myself too hard I’d throw up from the stress. But I preferred being sick to the days where I gave up halfway through and curled on the floor in a ball, crying.

  Diana dumped her purse by the spare bed and flitted around the room examining every object, as if she hadn’t spent fifty percent of the past ten years here. Her humming energy wasn’t perfectly happy, but it wasn’t sad, either. She seemed on the verge of lots of different emotions all at once, and I wasn’t sure if she’d laugh or cry or scream.

  “Are you okay?” Diana asked. She looked into my eyes, squinting as if to make out something on the horizon. “We didn’t get to talk at the carnival. How’s it been going?”

  My hand went to my burning wrist. “I’m fine. Fine.”

  “You don’t have to be fine.”

  I laughed. “Sometimes I wis
h everyone would be a little less in touch with their feelings and thoughtful and empathetic.”

  “I can be cold and remote.”

  “Yeah right. Give it a try.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and raised her eyebrows, frowning, but she could only hold the pose for a few seconds before laughing and collapsing backward onto the bed.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  She hugged her arms around her chest and stared up at the ceiling. “You’re going to laugh at me.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You would about this.”

  I pinched the sensitive skin inside my elbows. Stupid, stupid Old Ari. Had I laughed at her before? In the year I spent with Win, did I tease her? Make her feel bad about herself? Was I so different with my stupid fancy boyfriend that she stopped depending on me?

  I could kill the old me. How dare she treat my best friend like that. How dare she make Diana think she couldn’t tell me anything in the world.

  “Try me,” I said.

  She covered her face with her hands and moaned. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  She took a deep breath and smiled so that it filled up her entire face. “I think Markos and I are in love,” she said.

  I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t move a muscle from shock.

  “Say something,” Diana said.

  I swallowed. “That’s . . . wow.”

  “You don’t believe me.” The smile deflated.

  “Give me a second, Diana.”

  “I always believed you when you said you were in love with Win.”

  I decided it was worth hazarding a guess. “Come on. I never collapsed on your bed and announced we were in love.”

  Her smile didn’t collapse any further, and I knew my guess was on target. Sometimes Old Ari wasn’t as mysterious as I thought.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  “We’ve been spending a lot of time together since the bonfire, and . . .” She stopped and looked at me, lips flattening, huge smile gone for good. “You know what, no. I’m not spilling my guts to you without some answers. Markos told me about the money he gave Win, the money you spent. What did you do with it? Why do you need more? Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  The room seemed to chill; I felt a neck muscle pinch. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Come on, Ari. I get not telling Markos. But you can tell me.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about me.”

  “Oh, please. Shut up already! I’m supposed to worry about you. That’s what best friends do. God, Ari. Your boyfriend died. You needed money—a lot of it.” She picked at the quilt on my bed. “Tell me. Let me make up my own mind if I should worry.”

  Once in seventh grade Diana and I had stopped for ice cream on the way home from school and then spent an hour on the beach. When we finally reached Diana’s house Mrs. North screamed at us. Every second you’re not here I worry, she’d said, and that had sounded so crazy but also so . . . caring. I imitated her saying that for months and we always laughed, but every time I said it, it was with a twinge, the faint but undeniable knowledge that I made fun of Mrs. North because I feared that no one worried about me like that.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Diana asked.

  “It’s bad,” I said.

  Diana nodded. She leaned forward expectantly, ready to be understanding and supportive. I felt sick, as if I’d been spinning without spotting my turns.

  I hadn’t heard from Echo since I talked to her mother the hekamist—I might’ve scared her away. Or maybe she’d come back and blow everything up. I didn’t want to live with the threat hanging over me, a ransom I couldn’t pay.

  My mind felt muddled. Diana seemed to float farther and farther away.

  Diana and Markos were in love. I’d never been in love. As far as I knew.

  Diana loved Markos. He would break her heart, the bastard, but she’d gotten what she always wanted. She hadn’t listened to my advice—she didn’t need me. She had red hair and her own strong opinions and we hadn’t had movie night in a year and she’d been forced to befriend Kay and now she was asking to worry about me.

  Maybe I should let her.

  “I took a spell that erased my memory of Win,” I said. The words floated out of me easily, lightly. “So I wouldn’t have to be sad, I guess. I don’t remember anything about him.”

  Diana jerked back as if I’d hit her. She blinked rapidly. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t remember Win.”

  She put a hand over her mouth and stared at me. I couldn’t tell what was going through her head. Fear? “So you’ve been lying all summer,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah. It was . . . easier. I guess . . . maybe . . . I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to explain why I’d done it, because I didn’t remember what made me feel so bad. I thought it would be better to pretend.”

  Diana stood up and started pacing the length of the room. “You’ve been lying to us. You’re not suffering. You’ve just been avoiding me.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You could’ve tried telling me the truth.”

  “I am telling you—”

  “I mean before.” She paced again, looking anywhere in the room but at me. “Before you did this. After Win died. You could’ve told me you were thinking about it. I could’ve helped you. Talked about it. I would’ve helped you do whatever you wanted to do. You—you didn’t trust me even then.”

  “I’m so sorry, Diana.”

  She shook her head, hair whipping from side to side. “You never came to me with problems. You’d talk to Jess or to Win. I was always silly old Diana with her pointless crush, your loyal shadow.”

  The sting started in the back of my throat and traveled up through my sinuses to my eyes. But I wouldn’t cry. I pressed my thumb and forefinger around my left wrist, holding the pain in place. “That’s not true. I’m telling you now. Not Jess or Kay or anyone else. I trust you.”

  Diana stopped, facing away from me. “So you spent Markos’s money on a spell.”

  “Yes.” Diana wouldn’t face me. I couldn’t guess her expression. “Win must’ve hidden it in my closet, but I didn’t know where it came from—I only found out later it was his, and that he’d gotten it from Markos. The problem was, Win owed it to someone. That person told me that if I didn’t pay what Win owed, she would tell everyone I don’t remember him.”

  Diana turned to me. Her eyes were bright and fierce.

  “So did you pay her?”

  The air leaked out of my lungs. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Diana so angry. “No. I followed her. . . . She might leave me alone for a while.”

  As if she were deflating, Diana sank to the floor next to the bed, anger melting away into despair. “Oh god. What am I supposed to tell Markos?”

  “You don’t have to tell him anything.”

  She glanced up at me, her eyes big and full of disappointment. “But you’ll tell him yourself soon, right? Before this blackmailer comes back and tells for you?”

  I didn’t answer, but I moved from my desk chair to the floor across from Diana. We’d spent hundreds of hours of our life here in this room. But this felt different, as if we’d been acting before, and now we were real.

  Diana didn’t say anything else for a long time. She leaned her head back on the mattress and stared up at the ceiling. I tried to follow her gaze and see what she was looking at, but there was nothing there.

  “You might not remember Win,” she said, finally, “but you should still remember that you and Markos were friends. You gave him a hard time, but you were friends. Now I think he misses you. And it’s not fair lying to him like this.”

  I reached for Diana’s hand and held it, even though she looked down at my hand as if it repulsed her. “Please tell me you forgive me, Di. Please.”

  She stared at my hand holding hers. But then, after a long mom
ent, she nodded.

  I nodded back. “I’ll tell Markos soon. I promise.”

  But if I told Markos I’d have to tell everyone, and the girl I used to be—the dancer, the girlfriend, the good person—she’d be gone, replaced by this liar, rotten to the core. So rotten my best friend could barely stand to talk to me or look at me. I thought if I told Diana the truth we’d be close again, the way we always were before. But seeing how I looked through her eyes—seeing that look in everyone else’s expression, forever—

  I didn’t know if I could do it.

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

  I didn’t know if I’d be able to break up with someone. So much of my life had been trying to get people to stay. I couldn’t quite imagine telling one to go away; it seemed impossibly hard, even if Cal hadn’t really chosen me to begin with. So I decided to go to the hekamist and get his hook broken, and then I wouldn’t have to talk to him or worry about him ever again.

  When I heard my parents turn on the TV in the living room late one night, I crept to the front hall where my mother leaves her purse. I pulled out the snakeskin wallet and removed the black AmEx card. If she looked at her bill—which she, on principle, does not—she would assume she’d bought extra fertilizer or dirt or something that month.

  I’d tucked the card in my pocket and was returning the wallet when Mina appeared in the doorway behind me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Pizza money,” I said. “She won’t mind.”

  “You just ate dinner.”

  “For tomorrow, duh.”

  Mina watched me, suspicious, but she let me go.

  The old hekamist who’d given me the hook wasn’t home.

  “Is your mom around?” I asked the girl who answered the door, even though there was nowhere for anyone to hide in their small house.

  “She’s not available,” she said.

  “Well, when will she be?”

  The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “That depends.”