The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  —Yeah.

  —I mean it sucks A LOT.

  —Never leaving the living room probably makes it suck more.

  —But I like it here. It’s safe.

  —Safe?

  —Yeah, safe. Protected.

  —Huh. Is it?

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to work at the Sweet Shoppe like normal. But the rhythm of the scooping felt off, and the cold didn’t make me numb—it made me shudder.

  When Diana came in, I braced my hands along the glass of the display case and thought of Echo’s promised spell. If it could let me dance, I could leave for New York as planned—in one week. Everything would be back on track. I could survive one more week if I could dance at the end of it.

  “I got your message,” she said.

  “Thanks for coming by. I wanted to apologize—I know Markos found out about the spell. I didn’t have a chance to tell him first.”

  She shrugged. “You were never going to tell him the truth. You only told me you would to shut me up.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s okay, Ari. You were right about Markos. We weren’t in love. Let’s just go back to the way things were.”

  I hated the way her voice sounded, toneless and careful. I hated that Markos had done this to her, and I especially hated that it was exactly what I predicted would happen.

  “Do you want an ice cream?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. She would’ve agreed to anything—ice cream cone, face tattoo, drowning. I filled a waffle cone with Rocky Road and handed it to her.

  Diana eyed the ice cream but didn’t eat any. “I’ve been thinking a lot since you told me about your spell. Things have been so weird between us, and I didn’t know why.”

  “It’s been tough for me . . . figuring out what to say and what not to.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. I think—I know things were weird between us before you did this spell. You didn’t . . . I had to call Kay. I couldn’t rely on you anymore. And I always felt like there was this Ari-Win-Markos club that I wasn’t invited to join.” She sighed. “A tiny jealous part of me thought that you wanted to keep Markos for yourself, and you didn’t want competition.”

  “Diana, I promise you, I don’t think of Markos that way.”

  “Then why didn’t you invite me along? The night before Win died, you went out just the three of you. Like you always did. You never included me—and not just that night. All the time.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember. I could see myself spending time with Markos, having fun—Markos teasing me, Markos getting himself kicked out of restaurants and bowling alleys, Markos singing classic rock at the top of his lungs in the passenger seat of a truck driven by . . . a blank space.

  These memories seemed fun, but I saw them mostly from the outside, with no internal monologue, and they jumped and skipped and were as thin as paper. “I don’t know why I didn’t include you, Diana. I can’t remember.”

  She nodded. “I figured. If you still remembered I would’ve been afraid to ask. I’m not sure I want to know the answer.”

  “Was I that bad?”

  “You’re not bad. You’re you. You make a decision and once it’s decided that’s the way it is forever.”

  I couldn’t tell if that was true—except that the decision to take a spell to erase Win seemed to fit with it.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  She looked at the ice cream and shook her head. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”

  When Jess got home from work I was lying on the living room floor. My back had started spasming during a plié and this was the only thing that stopped it. Even lying down it hurt, but at least it didn’t seize up and shake me like a rag doll. (The only thing that comforted me was the thought that Echo’s spell would save me. I had to wait long enough for Echo’s spell.) I could see Jess’s black clogs but nothing else.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She knelt on the ground and wrapped her arms around me, resting her head on the carpeted floor. I could smell the coffee on her clothes and the hair product keeping her short hair pompadoured.

  “Hey—what are you doing?” I asked, attempting to shimmy away.

  “I’m so, so sorry, Ari,” she said into the carpet.

  “For what?”

  “You must have been hurting so bad.”

  I closed my eyes. “You heard.”

  “I heard.”

  “From who?”

  “Some kids at the coffee shop, gossiping. Apparently they heard from Markos and his brothers.” I could imagine a group of my classmates—several groups—going over the news with relish. Everyone had seen me at the funeral. Everyone had an opinion about how awful I was. “Then I went to see Rowena. She told me you haven’t been to class all summer.”

  “Oh no, Jess—”

  “I should’ve gone weeks ago.” Jess let go of me and rocked back on her heels. “I should’ve paid more attention. Noticed things. I’m such an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot, Jess, come on.”

  Jess shook her head. “I’m supposed to take care of you.”

  “You didn’t ask for this.”

  “Does that mean it’s okay that I’m bad at it?” Jess rubbed her hands over her eyes. I remembered how she looked the day after I took my spell—she had been crying and wanted to talk. And I went to dance. Pushed her away. “Sometimes I think if your mom could see us now she would’ve picked someone else for this job.”

  My wrist pounded and I held my breath to make the pain go away. “Don’t say that,” I said, but I’m not sure she could hear me, even as close as she was sitting.

  “I’ve always been too quick to believe what’s on the surface. If something obvious is off, I can fix it. But if you look fine, I assume that you are fine. That insight—it must be some sort of mothering instinct I didn’t get. Katie had it.” Katie was my mother; I’d barely heard Jess say her name in years. “She always could tell what everyone was really thinking. But I got a different set of genes.”

  “If I look fine, I am fine, Jess.”

  “Yeah—even I know that’s not true.” The lines on Jess’s face around her eyes and mouth held the shadows, as if someone had drawn in the grief with wax pencil. “I made you an appointment with Dr. Pitts and I canceled the moving trucks.”

  I propped myself up by my elbows. “You did what?”

  “You should talk to someone, and I think I’ve proven that I’m not the greatest at heart-to-heart moments, so—”

  “Not that. New York.”

  The look on her face was so full of pity and guilt I could barely stand it. “We can’t go to New York.”

  “No. We can. You didn’t even ask me.”

  “Can you dance right now, Ari? Show me.” I didn’t move from my position on the floor. Jess nodded. “Rowena said she hasn’t seen you since you fell in class. Right after Win died.”

  Jess wasn’t mad at me. She didn’t scream or sound disappointed. Maybe she expected me to be a failure, to suddenly stop doing the one thing I’ve ever been any good at. I sat up completely and curled my arms around my knees as best I could. “I’ll be able to dance soon.”

  Jess didn’t say anything, just looked at me with that horrible, unnatural pity. She reached for my bad wrist and held it; pain thumped along with my heartbeat.

  “I’m so sorry I did this to you,” she said, and brushed the wrist with her thumb. “Your old spell. It’s okay to hurt sometimes. It’s okay to have bad memories.”

  I pulled my wrist out of her grasp and winced as the pain shot to my elbow. “Stop it. You did the right thing.”

  She only shook her head. “Maybe if I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have felt like you had to forget Win.”

  “That�
�s not important. New York is important.” I didn’t agree with Jess that this was all her fault, and that she should’ve known better or any of that crap. The Win spell was a huge, ugly mistake—but it was my mistake. Not hers. Her mistake would be keeping us from moving. “We have to go to New York.”

  “Dr. Pitts is expecting you.”

  “Jess, no. You’re overreacting. We’re going to New York. Tell me we’re going to New York.”

  “I’ll take you to Dr. Pitts first. Then we can talk.”

  I didn’t want to talk to anyone—not her, as strange and sad and wrong as she was being, and certainly not Dr. Pitts. But I followed her out to the car anyway.

  Jess wasn’t mad at me like Markos or disappointed like Diana. So why did her pity and love feel like such a burden?

  After I explained what I had done, Dr. Pitts sat back in her chair, staring at the wall behind my head. We didn’t talk for a long moment. And in the end, I was the one to break it. “So you can see why all your attempts to get me to grieve properly might not have worked. But, hey, maybe that’s a good thing. You don’t have to blame yourself for not fixing me. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She shook her head, wearing her sympathy on her face like stage makeup. I couldn’t take it. I preferred when she was needling me into shouting at her. “Ari, we don’t ‘fix’ people in therapy.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I don’t think you were. That type of attitude—that pain can be fixed—could be what made you go to a hekamist instead of dealing with your feelings.”

  “Pain can be fixed. I’m sure you take Tylenol, Dr. Pitts.”

  “You really believe that a spell to give yourself brain damage is the same as a Tylenol?”

  I ignored the “brain damage” dig. “I’m only saying, I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not I believe in something. It’s true. Take a pill, no more headache. I took a spell, no more grief. I don’t know if it’s right, but I know that it worked.”

  “You call not being able to dance working?”

  “I’ll dance again.” I placed my bad wrist against my heart. Echo’s spell. She promised. Any day now. Must be patient.

  And still Dr. Pitts exuded a noxious cloud of fake sympathy. Sickening. I don’t know how she didn’t throw up from it. “How?” she asked.

  “I just—I will.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t get to choose to escape something like this, Ari. You can’t swallow and push through it. There are always consequences.”

  “Like having to sit here with you.”

  Her sympathetic face twitched. If I had to be in this room, I resolved to make an enemy of her. Enemies don’t try to figure you out. Enemies leave you alone.

  “Look, I don’t know what Jess hoped to accomplish by making me come here. I know that this whole thing is totally messed up. I will apologize to Jess, and to Diana, and to Kay, and even to Markos and everyone else in town if you make me. Okay?”

  Dr. Pitts just looked at me. Maybe I should’ve offered to apologize to her, too.

  “Let’s talk about your parents.”

  “Why?”

  “They died, too.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You don’t remember the fire. But you still might feel that the world is random and dangerous.”

  “What, so, you think because my parents died in an accident I’m more likely to try to control my life in any way I can? Very astute. I’ll be thinking about that while staring up at the three a.m. sky wondering if there’s a heaven.”

  “Have you noticed you often use sarcasm to change the subject?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever works.”

  Dr. Pitts shook her head. “It doesn’t work. One day you’ll be alone with yourself and you’ll have to face the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “That you’ve experienced loss. That it’s changed you.”

  I swallowed another sarcastic response. She clasped her hands together and took a deep breath.

  “Tell me, Ari. Why is it that you can’t seem to talk about your parents?”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Anything.”

  “But I barely remember them.”

  “What do you remember?”

  You could fit all the memories I had of my parents into six bars of music. “My mother had thin straight hair, like me. My dad had a goatee.”

  “Okay.”

  “We listened to a lot of music together.”

  Music in the car, music in the house, music out in the backyard. Classical, indie rock, pop, showtunes. When I pictured my parents, I pictured them singing.

  “Is that what drew you to dance? The music?”

  “Maybe.” I remembered the day my dad gave me my first iPod—one of his old ones. He’d left a bunch of his music on it, but I was so thrilled to add my own. I used to fall asleep with the headphones on.

  I didn’t know if this was true and I had no one to ask, but I suspected that was why I didn’t hear the smoke alarm. That was why the house was burning so strongly by the time my dad got me out and then went back for my mom.

  But since I’d forgotten that day, I didn’t have to know for sure.

  “Interesting. Is there anything else you remember about them?” Dr. Pitts asked.

  “See, I have to disagree with you. I don’t think it is interesting. It’s the only stuff I remember but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. We listened to music. So what?”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  My mouth went dry. I hadn’t said anything about the headphones to her or to anyone else, ever. “No. Guilty about what?”

  “That you survived and they didn’t.”

  “I’m not guilty. Stop trying to make me fit some grief checklist.”

  Dr. Pitts offered me a Kleenex. I wasn’t crying, but my face must have looked like I was on the verge. Her gesture only made me swallow painfully, then take a breath and hold it, more determined than ever never to break.

  “I’m not trying to impose a theory on you, Ari,” she said softly. I didn’t need her softness. Didn’t need her sympathy. “I’m giving you another way to look at your situation.”

  “Other than the one where I’m the weak, pathetic jerk who erased her beloved boyfriend and then lied about it? We’re going to blame the dead parents instead?”

  “There’s more than one way to look at everything. If you know why you feel the way you do, you can better know how to deal with your emotions.”

  “But I don’t want to know,” I said without thinking.

  Dr. Pitts sat silently for a long moment, letting the words hover in the air.

  “You don’t want to know what, Ari?”

  “Nothing. I was being contrary.”

  “What don’t you want to know? Yourself?”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. It just came out.”

  “Please tell me. You don’t want to know . . .”

  “I don’t want to know why I did it! Why I erased Win. I don’t want to know any of it.”

  Dr. Pitts’ composed expression shifted, and I think she was genuinely curious when she asked, “Why?”

  Because I was scared if I looked too closely, I would discover I’d changed in ways I had no control over. Old Ari seemed like a different person from me. Abandoning Diana, choosing a boy over everything, including dance. Even Older Ari—the little Ari, the one with a hand-me-down iPod and singing parents—she wasn’t me, either, since I’d taken away the memory of the fire. But those were changes I’d planned for, changes I’d chosen, even if I no longer understood why I’d made the choice. I didn’t want to know what other changes had taken place without my knowledge or permission.

  I wanted to be a predictable set of reactions to a finite set of situations; I wanted to know that I was a girl who would always make the same choices she’d made before. The thought of changing suddenly and randomly scared me down to my marrow.

  I smiled at Dr. Pitts, ev
en though the smile hurt my face. “Because it’s better in the dark.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  The late summer light cast long shadows onto the deck. Diana lay curled in a ball in the hammock on one end, and Ari had pulled a deck chair next to her. Out on the lawn, the automatic sprinklers ticked as they shot tiny rainbows into the sky. My mother was somewhere near the edge of the property in her dirty gardening outfit, which she practically lived in. She’d be out there until it was too dark to see. My dad, who spent most weeks in Boston being a CEO, joked that the garden was her third child, only the real joke was that the garden was her only child.

  I pocketed my phone, with its messages from Cal. I hadn’t actually talked to him or seen him in much longer than three days, but I got his texts and voicemails, and I assumed that was enough, or the spell would shove him my way. The longer it went since I’d seen him, the less I wanted to, especially since his texts had started to get super weird.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s the middle of summer. Let’s go do something.”

  Diana swung in the hammock silently, and Ari adjusted her neck. “We’re not in the mood,” she said.

  “You guys are depressing,” I said. “So Ari lied about her spell and Diana had a secret boyfriend. Now we know about the spell and Markos is gone. So what?”

  Ari raised her head halfway. “Nice, Kay. What do you want from us?”

  “I want you to snap out of it!” I said. Diana sighed deeper into the hammock and Ari rolled her eyes. “Ari, you once said to me that you were awesome, and you weren’t friends with anyone who wasn’t awesome, too.”

  “I don’t think I put it like that. . . .”

  “All I’m saying is, you’re still Ari Madrigal and Diana North. So act like it.”

  They didn’t answer, but before I could press them to get up and do something, the doorbell rang six times in a row, as if someone was leaning his or her whole weight into it. I left them on the deck and ran through the house to get it.

  Cal stood on the front steps, with gray skin, sunken cheeks, and hair so greasy it looked like ink. “Oh, hey, Kay,” he said when he saw me, then sank down onto the top step.