The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  I caused that.

  “You’re the phony,” she said. “Trying so hard to seem like you don’t care.”

  I made a face. “So insightful.”

  “You’re only being a dick to me because you’re mad at Ari.”

  “I am mad at Ari, but maybe also I don’t like you.”

  “You wouldn’t be such an asshole to me if you knew what I could do,” she said.

  I laughed. “Oh great and terrible one, please spare me.”

  “Shut up already!” she said. Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

  I should’ve gotten pissed. Pushed her away. Told her that she wasn’t going to prove anything by making out with me. She’d still be a phony and I’d still hate her. I should’ve come back with something even crueler to crush her properly into oblivion.

  But there wasn’t anything left in me to get angry.

  While I was angry, Ari felt nothing.

  While I was in pain, Ari felt nothing.

  While I looked for ways to make the pain worse, Ari felt nothing.

  While I waited for it to all make sense, Ari felt nothing.

  Nothing would ever affect her the way Win’s death was killing me.

  Now I felt nothing. Or maybe this feeling was everything, like how white is all the colors combined.

  “Why’d you do that?” I said. Kay shrugged. I grabbed her arm and pulled her closer and kissed her, hard. She kissed back.

  “You’re going to regret this,” she said when we took a breath.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” I said.

  I didn’t care about her—I didn’t even like her—which meant that what was happening didn’t matter. I wasn’t Win, stuck with one girl forever. I was me, the Markos Waters of legend, one of the carefree Waters boys, life of the party, and I sank back into the role with relief. Easier than drowning.

  When Kay left a while later, I turned on my phone to text Ari to tell her if I saw her I’d kill her, then I blocked Diana’s number and deleted all her messages. I sat in front of the TV with a bottle of Jack Daniels and proceeded to get shitfaced, which is the temporary, normal, nonhekamist way to obliterate your festering, gut-wrenching memory.

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

  PART III

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  I walked away from the Waterses’ house different. The world was different. It was almost dark instead of bright midday, but also the air smelled like fall and the sky pressed down on my shoulders.

  And me. Inside. I’d gone over to check in on Cal, do my duty to the spell. Instead I’d kissed his brother.

  Markos had been so mad. And so mean. I wanted to kiss him to prove that he didn’t actually think I was a fake ugly liar. Or at least prove he was as bad as me, and we both knew it.

  It didn’t even end up proving anything to Markos. It only proved to myself what type of person I was.

  A bad one. A person whose best friends hated her and kept secrets from her—for good reason, even if they didn’t know it.

  That was the problem with my “relationship” with Cal, too. I agreed with Markos; I agreed with Diana and Ari: I didn’t belong with someone cheerful and inclusive and popular like Cal. I knew exactly what I looked like inside, and it wasn’t girlfriend material. No. I deserved to be called names by Markos, and disrespected, and tossed aside when it was over. That was who I really was.

  A person who had to get a spell to keep her friends.

  I walked from Markos’s to Ari’s. She answered the door wearing her ballet outfit—tights, leotard, gray shrug—but she didn’t appear winded or sweaty. She let me in and we sat on the couch in her basement for five minutes without speaking. She was distracted, eyes hollow. We could hear her aunt singing off-key as she walked around the kitchen upstairs.

  “I’m kind of having a bad day, Kay,” Ari said after a while. “So maybe we do this some other time?”

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  “It’s just . . . bad.”

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Why?” I asked. I pushed my back into the far corner of the couch and my heels into the space between two cushions. “You sad about Win? Because it isn’t good to bottle it all up, Ari. You should talk about him more. Let us in. Share some of those precious memories.”

  Her expression emptied, a beach house left vacant for the winter. “So . . . you heard.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “How?”

  “Markos told me.”

  “When did everyone start hanging out with Markos without me?”

  I could feel my face heating up. “What do you mean, everyone?”

  Ari pressed the heels of her hands into the black shadows under her eyes. “Diana thinks they’re dating. That they’re in love.”

  “Who’s in love?”

  “Markos and Diana.”

  “Shut up,” I said. Ari shrugged. “She never said anything about it to me!”

  “Sorry you didn’t get the bulletin.”

  A flash of anger made me forget for a moment how both Ari and Diana had lied to me. “You know, while you were off with Win doing whatever, Diana relied on me. Because you were nowhere to be found.”

  “I’ve gathered that.”

  “She used to get upset about it. That you were abandoning her for some boy. But I was there for her.” Ari didn’t say anything. She wrapped her shrug tighter around her shoulders. “Then, you know what? After a few months she stopped being upset. She moved on. She didn’t need you anymore.”

  Ari flinched, and my bad insides made me smile. “What’s your point, Kay?”

  “I don’t have one. I’m telling you how it was.”

  “Well, you can stop.”

  I hugged a throw pillow into my chest. “I don’t know if you know this, but you and Diana act like you don’t even like me sometimes.”

  Ari looked up at the ceiling. Part of me hoped she’d deny it, but she wasn’t in a denying mood. “It’s just that . . . you try too hard.”

  “I make an effort. I took care of Diana. I take care of you both.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we don’t want to be taken care of.”

  “Well maybe I don’t want to be the pity case you both laugh at.”

  The words came out before I could decide if they were a good idea. Yet Ari didn’t seem offended. She seemed—embarrassed? But I’d told her off. I wasn’t nice at all.

  Jess belted a high note from the kitchen and we winced. I’d been spending the entire summer—the entire spring, too—making an effort with Ari and Diana. Trying to get them to treat me like a real friend.

  But I didn’t have to do any of it. No taking care of Diana after her accident. No compliments, no thoughtfulness. I could be as mean as I wanted—I could hook up with Diana’s crush and tell Ari what I really felt—and they would still have to be around me. That’s what my hook gave me. I had them on the line.

  The only reason to make an effort was to prove that my insides weren’t totally rotten. And my insides rotted anyway, so the effort was wasted.

  “I made an effort,” I said again. “At least I don’t give up like you do.”

  She shook her head, her eyes closed. “Sometimes giving up is the smart move.”

  “Right. Forgetting Win’s really going so well, huh?”

  The corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile.

  I relaxed back into the couch. Everything was messed up, yeah, and I’d kissed Markos and not checked in with Cal and if any of them stepped out of line the spell would be there to push them back, violently if necessary, but Ari and I had had our first genuine interaction in months, and it was all because I’d stopped worrying about being a good pers
on (because I wasn’t) and stopped worried about how great Ari was (because she wasn’t) and simply said what I thought.

  Ari was right. I didn’t have to try so hard. I had to let the spell do its work.

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  Kay was right about one thing: I couldn’t give up yet. After she left, I put on civilian clothes and went to Echo and her mother’s house. I couldn’t dance, Diana barely tolerated me, Markos hated me, even Kay snapped at me, and soon the whole town would look at me like I’d personally turned the wheel of Win’s truck. Standing at their door, I braced myself, waiting for one of them to appear so I could unleash my self-righteous fury.

  When Echo opened the door, I heard the wailing. It was steady and piercing, a single-note scream.

  Echo’s face lit up when she saw me, and she waved me in before running back to the kitchen. I didn’t know what else to do, so I stepped inside the door. Echo’s mother crouched in front of the sofa, face stuck between two cushions. Her curly white hair was all I could see of her head. The noise leaving her was steady and piercing. I didn’t know how she was breathing. Other than the noise, she kept suspiciously still, tensed like a single touch would set off an internal spring and the noise and the couch and everything near it would combust.

  I kept my back to the front door. Echo opened cabinets and poked into the refrigerator. She produced an apple and an instrument that look like a large hockey puck.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s dying.”

  I froze. “Should we call the hospital?”

  “It’s not that type of dying. Give me a minute.”

  Echo put the puck on the kitchen table and the apple on top of it. The apple floated above the puck as if magnetized. She sat in front of the apparatus and stared at the apple, which was slowly turning from side to side.

  The air pressure increased like we were in a plane about to land; my ears popped. The air turned hot, too, so that my shirt stuck to my skin. All the while Echo’s mother kept screaming wordlessly into the couch. “What are you do—”

  “Quiet.”

  I found my eye drawn to the apple, which I only realized later was because all the light in the room dimmed except for a spotlight over the puck.

  Echo leaned into the light. I hadn’t noticed until then that she wasn’t wearing her usual jacket, only a long-sleeved black T-shirt. She pulled up the sleeve, revealing a row of cuts from her wrist to her shoulder—some of them fresh and not scabbed over.

  She picked up a jagged stone and selected a spot. I told myself to run over there and knock her hand away, but I couldn’t move. When she cut, she didn’t scream or wince. She didn’t close her eyes. She watched—and I watched—as blood from the cut dripped down onto the hockey puck. After a few moments of dripping, all the light in the room turned red. I thought I saw a face above the apple, blinking, malignant, and then Echo screamed and I screamed and shut my eyes and covered my head with my arms.

  When I opened my eyes, there was silence in the room. Even Echo’s mom had stopped crying. She stood at the kitchen table with the apple in her hand, chewing. Echo slumped over, her head next to the puck-like device. Now that the room seemed less like it was going explode, I could walk over to Echo, checking to make sure she was breathing. She was.

  Echo’s mother patted her daughter’s unmarked arm. “Thank you,” she said, then she lay on the couch. The crack of the apple’s flesh as her teeth ripped off another piece of fruit reverberated through the room. Echo’s arm continued to bleed, red puddling beneath her hair.

  Echo was a hekamist.

  She shouldn’t exist.

  All the anger and recrimination that had sounded so good in my head on the way over seemed pointless. My secret was out. There was nothing Echo could do about it now.

  I opened and closed a few cabinets until I found a huge pack of gauze and some antiseptic wipes. When I touched the wound with the wipe Echo started awake and blinked twice at me.

  “You’ve got the money?” she said in low voice, glancing at her mother surreptitiously.

  I let my jaw drop for a moment before answering. “Seriously? I came over here to give you shit—Markos knows, which means soon everyone will. I thought you got tired of waiting and told him.”

  Her shoulders slumped and sank further into her seat. “Why would I tell Markos? Keeping the secret was my only leverage.”

  “Well, someone told Markos.”

  “Maybe he figured out you were lying.”

  “I’ve barely hung out with him since Win’s funeral. He’s had no opportunity to test me on Win trivia.”

  She sucked in a breath as if I’d pinched her, hard. “It’s not a joke, you know. Just because you don’t remember doesn’t mean a person didn’t die.”

  I held my wrist where it hurt the most. “I know that.”

  “You can’t know. That’s the point.”

  She wiped blood away from the cut on her arm. It was a clean line, despite the rough edges of the stone, still clutched in her hand.

  “I told Markos,” Echo’s mom said from the couch.

  Echo and I turned to her. “Mom—why?”

  “If you get money you’ll leave me,” Echo’s mom’s voice got soft; her eyes closed. The core of the apple rested on her chest. “Couldn’t let that happen. Too dangerous for my Echo to be out in the world . . . too many dangers . . .”

  “Did you talk to my mom?” Echo asked me.

  “Um,” I said. “Yes. But . . . you aren’t both blackmailing me? Together?”

  Echo shook her head slowly. “She doesn’t want me to go. She worries about me. Shit.”

  I tried to change the subject. “What kind—I mean—well—what’s wrong with her, exactly?”

  Echo inclined her head at her mother, now seemingly asleep on the couch, as she started wrapping a bandage around her arm. “This is what happens when we lose our coven. First the mind becomes unbalanced, unreliable. Then there’s a period of pain, sudden and devastating. And eventually we stop being able to eat or speak, and . . .” She shrugs. “The more spells you’ve done, the faster it happens. That’s why I’m still okay and she’s in the pain part. I’ve been giving her some spells to take the edge off.”

  “Why not take one spell and be cured?”

  Echo shook her head. “One spell, for that amount of pain, would kill her. The best I can do is dull it temporarily. Buy myself some more time.”

  “More time for what?”

  “To get out of town and convince more hekamists to add us to their coven. To save her life.”

  “You can’t just email them?”

  “I’m illegal. Not supposed to exist. If I get caught, everyone in my coven goes to jail. I need to persuade them personally. Maybe even pay them off. What did you think I wanted your money for?”

  “Oh.” I glanced over at Echo’s mom, asleep on the couch. “Oh. She doesn’t want to find another coven?”

  “She’s afraid. That I’ll get caught, get taken away. Afraid I’ll leave her.”

  “You are going to leave her, though.”

  “When we’re both still alive in six months, she’ll be in better shape to understand why I had to go.” She gestured at the small room filled with cheap furniture. “People pay a lot for what we do, but she’s always hidden the money, says she doesn’t want to call attention to ourselves by spending it, and I’ve never been able to find it. I’m not sure she knows where it is anymore, now that her mind’s going. So I have to earn money myself.”

  We sat in silence for another few moments. It struck me that Echo had been here the whole time I’d been going to school, living her life in a tiny house, invisible to the rest of us—except when we needed her or her mother.

  “So you’re a hekamist,” I said.

  Echo nodded.

  “And it’s always like that? Spells, I me
an?”

  “More or less. Food, blood, will.” She recited the words like a mantra, then bit off a piece of medical tape with her teeth and attached it to the gauze.

  “And it . . . hurts?” I asked.

  “Like hell.”

  “So why do you do it?”

  She peered up at me through dark hair matted with blood. “It’s not just pain. It’s also joy—the power of it. I’m a part of something bigger than me. Something beautiful. I set things right, keep the balance. That always feels good.” She sat up, pulling down the sleeve of her shirt over the fresh bandage. “Plus it’s my choice. I get to choose to help my mom stop suffering.”

  “You never regret it?”

  She looked for a second like she might snap at me, but seemed to reconsider. “There are moments. When it would be easier . . . not to be a hekamist.”

  I’d heard hekamists on TV protesting the laws against joining covens, but they never talked about this. They talked about history and natural balance and the free market, and the grand peaceful history of hekame. No “food, blood, will.” No pain.

  Echo leaned back in her chair. Her hair dripped red onto her cheek, so I handed her some extra gauze and she wrung out handfuls.

  “Well, now that the secret’s out, I guess we’re done, then,” she said.

  “Yeah. Good luck.” I started to creep toward the door, stepping carefully around the awkwardly placed couch and the passed-out older hekamist sleeping on it.

  “Hey,” Echo said. She chewed on her bottom lip, hesitating. “The night Win died—the night he was going to pay me. Do you really not remember it at all?”

  I stared at her, examining every twisted piece of hair and cinched buckle on her boots. Her eyes were light brown, softer than the sharp angles of the rest of her face. I had that not-quite-a-memory feeling again—of buoyancy. Light and air.

  “You do seem a little familiar. I don’t know what this means, but I have a vague memory of—lightness.”

  She smiled big then, so big it seemed to crack her face in two and she started crying.

  I could’ve left then, turned around and walked out the door. But there was nothing out there for me except videos of past performances and friends who didn’t trust me. Strangely, Echo reminded me of Diana, or at least the old Diana, who needed me to be the strong one, the leader. Even though she was a hekamist. Even though I was the one who knew a secret about her, now. The secret made her real.