The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  I got the call from Ari as we checked the last open hole-in-the-wall bar and started to head for Brian’s squad car at the end of the block. I let it ring until it went to voicemail, and then it started right up again.

  I hated Ari. I never wanted to talk to her again. She’d fucked over my best friend.

  But my best friend had loved her.

  —She can go to hell.

  —Don’t be that way.

  —Fine, then. Tell me what to do.

  —See what she’s calling about, at least.

  —But she’s the worst.

  —She’s not. You know that.

  —I’m still angry, though.

  —Fine, be angry. But forgive her.

  —What if I can’t?

  —You can.

  —What if I don’t want to?

  —Shut up and do the right thing, dumbass.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Are you at your store?” she asked. Her voice seemed higher-pitched than usual.

  “No. Why?”

  “Diana’s bike’s here. She’s not answering her phone. The door’s locked, though, so I don’t know how she’d get in. I don’t know why she’d go in, either, if it wasn’t to find you.”

  I stopped walking, letting Brian and Dev get into Brian’s car without me. “Diana’s not at home?”

  “No, she left to find you, according to her mom.”

  I could tell from her tone she thought finding me was the stupidest thing Diana could’ve ever thought to do. And for a second I agreed with her—the deal was, Diana would stay in place, and I would sit and wait for her.

  Only I’d left my spot, and so she’d left, too. She didn’t get it. What, did she think me in her yard was her looking after me?

  And then Brian honked his horn for me to get in the car and I knew why I’d been coming to her house in a way I hadn’t known before. It wasn’t so much that I thought she’d forgive me, or that I was doing penance. It was my version of Diana GPS: As long as I knew where she was, she wasn’t quite lost to me. Actually it was that I knew where I was: I was at her side.

  But now she was lost. And so was I.

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  I didn’t fall sleep. I lay on my bed with my phone resting on my chest, waiting for Diana to call and let me know she was okay—waiting for her to save herself, if she could. I watched the room darken and the light from passing cars flash on the ceiling for hours, and she still hadn’t called. I wondered if the hook could accidentally kill her in its attempt to keep her near me.

  It’s a blunt instrument, I reminded myself. It keeps people close and that’s all it does. Maybe it couldn’t calibrate finely enough to stop pushing them back to me before it was too late.

  After midnight I heard Mina’s car in the driveway, and then a couple minutes later she tiptoed into my room and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Did she call?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No luck on my end, either. Went to every diner and bar within twenty miles.”

  “You were out looking for her?”

  “Checked a few beaches, too, but no one had seen a teenage girl with ultra-red hair.”

  “Why would you—”

  “You were worried. I wanted to help.”

  I turned onto my side and curled into the fetal position. “She’s got to be hurt or trapped somewhere. She can’t contact me. The spell would work, otherwise. It always works.”

  Mina plucked a feather from the comforter. “I don’t know her very well. But she seems . . . like a regular girl.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You really thought a spell was the only way to be friends with her?”

  I put my phone up against my heart, letting it warm me. “If my own sister wanted to get away from me, why would anyone else stick around?”

  “Katelyn.” She tugged at my blanket, waited until I was looking right at her before continuing. “When did I try to get away?”

  “As soon as you got better you were gone. Globetrotting without me. We used to talk about traveling together, but I guess that was dying-girl talk—not a real promise.”

  “You had school.”

  “So did you. But you didn’t go. The whole plan changed. You changed. Look at you.”

  She bit her lip ring and shifted in her safety-pinned shirt. “When we found out the cancer was in remission . . . Yeah, I guess you’re right, in a way. I thought the rules had changed. They changed so I could live.” She frowned, remembering. “I had to jump at the chance. For the first time in years, I wasn’t dying. You don’t know—”

  “No, I get it. I don’t know how hard it is to be sick and all that.” I took a breath and whispered, “I wanted you to get better, Mina. That’s all I wanted. For years. Mom and Dad spent all their time on you, and so did I, because I loved you.” I tried to breathe again but couldn’t because of the snot leaking from my nose. “This is the horrible selfish stuff I shouldn’t even be feeling. But I do feel this way. So it’s like I told you, I’m horrible.”

  “I will still be your best friend, no matter how horrible you are.”

  You know when someone says something super nice and heartfelt, and you know it’s true and she has no reason to lie, but instead of lifting you up it curdles and twists unbearably?

  Mina did that. I should’ve been happy that my sister bothered to take the time with me—it should’ve washed away the past two years, or at least made them slightly less awful.

  But Diana was out there somewhere, in trouble, because of me. Not to mention Ari and Cal—they were all potentially in danger. From something I’d done to them.

  I don’t think even Mina would want to be my friend if I got Diana hurt. Or killed.

  Or maybe she would stand by me, always understanding, loyal forever—but I didn’t want to be someone who she had to forgive every second of every day. I wanted to be better than that. Deserving. Someone that she would be proud to stand next to for the rest of our lives.

  My phone buzzed with a text. I knew it wasn’t Diana, and I knew what I was going to do before I even read it. It was from Ari:

  Come to the hardware store NOW.

  Mina read it over my shoulder. “I need you to drive me somewhere,” I said.

  “Let me guess . . .”

  I shook my head. “I have to stop somewhere first.”

  Mina nodded and held my hand.

  It would be okay. I would fix what the hook had broken.

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  I left my brothers and ran to the hardware store, which wasn’t easy after two weeks of living on Fritos and beer. By the time I got there it was officially the middle of the night, and the street was deserted, stores all dark and shuttered. You could hear the ocean hitting the sand a couple blocks away. Ari unfolded herself from where she was sitting, tucked in the store’s doorway. She stumbled and nearly fell, catching herself with a hand on the “WA” of the “WATERS” label on the glass door.

  I thought I’d be furious to see her again, but it was a relief. For a second it didn’t matter that she’d forgotten Win—she cared about Diana as much as I did. That was something.

  “You look like shit,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Thanks. Why don’t you fall down some more?”

  “If you’re lucky. I fall like a goddamn angel.”

  I got out my keys and gestured for her to get out of the way of the door.

  “You really think she’s here?” I asked.

  “Can’t hurt to check.”

  I propped open the door with a brick. “Dev went through a couple hours ago when we were looking for Cal and said it was empty.”

  Ari blinked a couple times.
“Cal’s missing too?” I couldn’t read her face in the darkness. I was going to answer but she reached out and grabbed my arm, hard. “Do you smell that?” she asked, and as soon as she did I could: a dry, sharp chemical scent coming from inside the store.

  Not good.

  “Diana!” I called as soon as we stepped through the store’s door. The smell got stronger inside, and there was something in the air—something that got in your throat and made you cough like you’d inhaled fifty cigarettes. “Diana, you here?”

  Ari stood close behind me. I knew she didn’t like the store, and for once I couldn’t blame her: it looked menacing in the dark of night, the uneven rows crowding in and strange shapes materializing out of the darkness, the smell of fumes in the air. We walked as quickly as we could up and down aisles, calling Diana’s name.

  “So you can’t find Cal?” Ari asked.

  “No. I don’t know what’s going on with him. I found out my mom pays an old hekamist every month to spell him—has been paying her six thousand dollars a month for years.”

  “Six thousand dollars!” Ari’s eyes practically bugged out of her face. “That’s more than I’ve ever heard anyone pay for a permanent spell. And that’s every month? What for?”

  I hadn’t realized it was so expensive. The only spell I’d ever bought was the one on Win’s last night. “He can’t hurt people. Couldn’t hit me. But maybe if it’s that much money, it’s for something else, too.”

  “Huh. That’s so weird, because Kay’s spell—”

  I winced. “Can we please not talk about Kay?”

  She was silent a second, thinking, and we reached the end of another aisle before she spoke again. “Hey, can I ask you . . .” She breathed out through her nose, frustrated. I’ve never known her to ask permission to ask a question, so I braced myself for whatever it could be. “You really like Diana?”

  I looked straight ahead. “I’m in love with her,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything for another couple steps. Then she tripped over a stray gardening hose and hissed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Some heavy, sad feeling in my chest broke loose and banged around my heart.

  “I mean for everything. I’m really sorry.”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  She was not forgiven. Not yet. But I fell into step next to her easier now. If I closed a part of my mind, I could believe Ari and I were friends again, like before. If I didn’t look to the left, I could imagine Win next to us, silently a part of the group.

  We saw a ring of light around the almost-hidden door to the woodshop. Ari saw it, too, and grabbed my arm.

  “Diana?” I called. “You back here?”

  I opened the door with my free hand—it stung my skin. The woodshop was so bright I had to blink a couple times to see. It wasn’t only the fluorescent lights; some of the scrap bins lining the walls were on fire.

  “Shit—we have to get out of here,” I said, backing away from the door. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of the woodshop caught fire, and then the rest of the store—we’d be stuck here.

  Behind me, Ari sucked in a breath and pushed past me, running straight into the burning woodshop. I started to call her an idiot then saw what she saw: Diana, behind the chain-link fence of the cage where we usually kept the welder.

  My heart pounded against my ribs, no no no no no no no, and the shelves of wood and tools and fire closed in and towered above me.

  When Diana saw us, she scrambled to her feet and started crying and talking at the same time. But I couldn’t hear anything she was saying over the rushing in my ears.

  I ran across the shop, stumbling, and grabbed the chain link and shook it—actually kind of surprised when it didn’t crumble in my hands. The key the key the key the key—I knew where the key was, by the door, on a hook by the wood shop door, had to get the key to unlock the cage so Diana—

  Diana was crying. Ari pressed her hand through the holes in the fence, reaching for her. “I was looking for you,” Diana said to me. “You weren’t under the tree. I went looking for you.”

  I wrenched myself away and ran for the door, where I knew the key would be. The scrap bins burned and I could see where the end of a stack of two-by-fours had started to get black and smoky. I slipped on something on the floor—paint thinner? Alcohol? The floors all shined—someone had covered the place with it.

  At the door I reached for the key on the hook even when I could see perfectly clearly that there was no key hanging there. Someone had taken it.

  I kept saying “someone” in my mind but there was really only ever one person who could’ve done it, gotten in the hardware store after Dev checked it, known where the key was kept, locked her in and set the place on fire—even though I couldn’t imagine why and I didn’t want to believe.

  Tools hung on a pegboard to my left. Fire licked at the bottom of it, but it wasn’t burning yet. (It would burn soon. The whole place would be ablaze. And Diana locked in the cage.) I took a deep breath, coughing on smoke, and grabbed a crowbar from its spot.

  It was red hot; it burned my hand. I screamed and dropped it, then used my shirt wrapped around my left hand to carry it back to Diana.

  She stood behind the fence watching me, tears streaking down her face.

  She didn’t hate me. Okay.

  I was breathing too fast. Wood shavings and paint thinner and something like sulfur filled my nose; there wasn’t enough air. I wedged the crowbar into the padlock—but the bar slipped from my hand and clattered to the ground. I bent down to pick it up again—I could barely stand to tear my eyes from Diana for a second—when Ari shouted and I turned.

  Cal stood in the doorway to the woodshop. He had his silver lighter in one hand and a bottle of paint thinner in the other.

  “Give me the key!” I yelled. It was hard to hear words, and I didn’t think it was just me; the flames had gotten louder, the burning more intense.

  Cal started walking toward us and I looked at Diana. “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ll get you out—”

  “Markos, no—you’ve got to get out of here—”

  “I’m not leaving without you.”

  Cal stopped a few feet away and put the can down. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t look too closely at his face—there was something strange happening with his eyes—and I didn’t let myself think of anything except that he had the key.

  “Hurry up hurry up! The key!”

  “I’m not under a spell anymore,” Cal said.

  Diana sucked in a breath and I turned to look at her. Which meant I missed the moment that Cal picked up my dropped crowbar; missed him winding up and swinging; saw nothing but Diana’s wide-eyed panic before the pain hit and the whole world turned black.

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

  “Cal, no!” I shouted, but he’d already swung. The crowbar hit Markos’s head solidly, straight on, and he collapsed. Cal dropped the crowbar and covered his eyes with both hands, pressing the lighter into his eye socket. Markos’s body lay unmoving on the ground, and Diana knelt behind the cage and whispered to him. Spots of fire licked at wood and walls.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “Because I couldn’t before,” Cal said into his hands. “And it’s his fault that I can remember.” He said the word is if it tasted bad.

  My heart felt strangely light, beating its way out of my chest, and the room pitched sideways as I tried to breathe normally through the smoke. Something was seriously wrong with Cal. But more importantly, I needed to open the cage and get Diana and Markos out before the fire spread.

  “Cal . . . the key . . .” I said, keeping my eye on the crowbar in case he came after me next.

  Cal looked up.

  His eyes . . .

  He looked so much like Markos, only shattered. Like behind his eyes, a cornered animal peered out instead of a pers
on.

  He tried to take a deep breath but it got caught in his throat and he gasped. “I used to be angry,” he said. I couldn’t even tell if he knew who I was, or if he understood what he was saying. “Angry about my dad, about everything—but I haven’t been angry in nine years.” He blinked and whatever wild thing had taken up residence inside him shifted, pushing its way to the front, all rage and blindness. “Do you know what that’s like? No emotions? It’s not being able to breathe, but also not even remembering what breathing even is. But now I can, only it’s—too much. Too big. You understand?”

  I didn’t try to answer. Something caught his eye on the wall—the security monitor, with its dozens of camera angles throughout the store. Most were dark, but the view of the door had enough streetlight to make out two people walking through the propped-open door. One of them had a long swinging coat and short hair.

  Cal made a noise, something between a cry and a scream, and ran out of the burning shop.

  “Ari,” Diana said. “The fire.”

  I snapped into action, grabbing a dropcloth from underneath one of the machines and using it to smother the fires—the two-by-fours and piles of scrap. The flames hadn’t joined together into one big blaze yet. I felt cold, even, but I suspected that was some sort of shock, the sweat on my skin chilling like shards of ice.

  It took me a second to realize that as I was running from fire to fire, Diana kept saying my name. “No—Ari. No,” she said. She knelt behind the cage as close as she could to knocked-out Markos, but she looked up at me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get out. Echo’s here now. She’ll find us. It’s okay.”

  “No, Ari. The fire. Not this fire.”

  “The fire?” The only other fire I could think of was the fire that burned down my house when I was eight. Diana never brought it up. We never talked about it. It was in the past.

  “I came here to try to find Markos,” Diana said. “The door was open so I walked in. I could smell the kerosene or oil or whatever this is—found my way back here—Cal was dousing the place. I tried to stop him and he freaked out. Put me in here.”