It could’ve even been that he wanted to cheer me up.
Ari and Markos riffed back and forth as the sun started to go down. Since it was raining, there was no subtle sunset; it got grayer and grayer until it was black, and Markos flipped on a flashlight.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” he said, pointing the light at his chin.
Ari grabbed it from him. “And a douchebag prowled the beach, slowly drowning his friends to death.”
Ari handed the flashlight to me and I looked into the bulb. It was my turn to continue the scary story, but all I could think to say was the scary truth, so I didn’t say anything. I shone the light at Markos: grinning, confident, reliable Markos, hair blackened by rain and falling into his eyes. Then I shone it at Ari: funny, dedicated, tough Ari, skin even more glowing with rain dripping over it and the flashlight making her squint. I couldn’t see it then, but I see now: they loved me. Wholly, completely. And not like Kara and my mom. Ari and Markos loved me because they chose me. How incredible.
At the time I saw their faces and felt their love like a burden. As if each of them had installed their own iron ring around my heart, and when they wanted to punish me all they had to do was make eye contact and the iron would cinch a little tighter.
So I flipped off the light.
Markos “hey”ed and grabbed it from me in the sudden dark. Dark on the beach, this far out, was different from dark in town. The ocean was pure blackness and suddenly loud, like the light had been keeping it in check and now it could scream. The dunes seemed endless, a desert to cross back to cars and people and life.
“Dude, we need the light,” Markos said, half laughing, as he fiddled with the button. “That’s how she’s going to find us.”
“She?” I said as Markos’s beam hit a girl’s figure not ten feet away. Ari screamed and I grabbed her hand, but not to comfort her—to steady myself. The girl now stepping closer to our small circle was Echo.
“Hey, you’re here,” Markos said. He immediately adopted the tone he took with waiters and cleaning ladies and other service staff: self-important, chummy. “You’ve got it?”
Echo held up a bag filled with three small, round, white pastries. “As you ordered, sir,” she said.
Markos laughed and grabbed the bag out of her hands, but she wasn’t amused. She kept staring at me. I must’ve looked terrified because she shook her head slightly.
“What are they, Markos?” Ari asked. She didn’t sound entirely pleased.
“Why don’t you try one and find out?” Markos said. He opened the bag and ate a pastry in one bite, then handed the package to Ari.
We watched him, all of us—even Echo. He crossed his arms over his chest, waiting. At first it happened so slowly I didn’t notice. But then I heard Ari gasp, and I shook myself out of my fog, because Markos was floating five feet above the ground and rising fast.
At ten feet he let out a yell and zoomed over our heads, swimming through the air.
“You’ve only got a few minutes, so don’t go too high,” Echo said, but Markos was already climbing, flapping his arms like a butterfly and disappearing into the dark and rain.
“Get up here, Win!” he called.
Ari looked at the bag and then at Echo. “Are these safe?”
Echo shrugged. “They’ll let you become impervious to gravity for a while. Nothing about that sounds safe to me.”
“And side effects?”
“Unpleasant. But since it’s a temporary spell, they won’t last long.”
“I have a memory spell from way back. Will the side effects be a problem?”
Echo considered her. I had a brief, terrified worry that she would lie to Ari to hurt her—I thought of nearly kissing Echo in the truck, and what Echo must think of Ari, my girlfriend—but then I shook it off. Echo wouldn’t do that, even if she was jealous. “No. You should be fine.”
Markos whooped and Ari looked at me, eyes sparkling. “Well?” she said.
“How could we not?” I asked.
Ari laughed, trying to sound unworried, and ate her pastry. “Mascarpone. Delicious.”
“Thank you,” Echo said.
Ari handed me the bag from shoulder height. “Holy shit! Win, hurry up!”
She spun away into the sky. Already she was more graceful than Markos. Her ballet training showed as she twirled and tumbled in the rain. I opened the bag, but Echo grabbed it out of my hands before I could fish out the last pastry.
“What the hell?”
“Have you taken your other one yet?” she asked quietly. I shook my head. “Then you can’t do this, Win. The side effects—”
“Come on!” I said. It came as something of a shock that I wanted to fly. I hadn’t wanted anything in so long. “I’ll take the other spell as soon as I get home.”
“Please trust me.”
“You said it wouldn’t mess with Ari’s side effects. Why am I different?”
She looked at me for a long moment, rain making her hair stick to her forehead so that her eyes seemed bigger. “Because you are.”
I reached for the bag but she turned away, quicker than me in the wet sand. Markos yelped and then landed nearby with a thud.
He hoisted himself to his feet, swayed, and then barfed. On his side now, he moaned. “I feel like shit,” he said.
“It’ll wear off,” Echo told him.
“Oh man. Fuck you. Seriously fuck you.”
“The spell makes you weightless physically. Mentally, it brings you down. Way down.” She said it loud enough for Markos to hear, but she was staring straight at me.
“What am I supposed to tell them?” I muttered. Ari buzzed by my head, lightly tapping me with her pointed toe. Markos swore loudly, a string of uninterrupted curses.
“Not my problem. I can’t let you have this.” She shook the bag.
“What, because of some sort of hekamist’s code of ethics?” I meant it sarcastically, but she nodded.
“Something like that.”
“Please for the love of god kill me!” Markos shouted. Echo looked at me pointedly.
“But Markos paid you for three. . . .”
“I’ll take it out of your tab.”
Ari floated to the ground, as graceful as always, until both feet touched sand. Then she shuddered and sank to her knees. Very slowly she lowered her forehead straight down until it rested on the sand, like someone praying.
“I hate you, Markos,” Ari said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m going to hold my breath until I stop breathing.”
“Ari?” I said.
“I hate you, too, Win.”
Something flared in my chest, and it took a second to figure out why my back clenched up and my jaw ached. I was angry. Not at Echo for denying me flight. At my supposed friends, for—what? Co-opting my sadness?
Aching and moaning on the ground, wailing and gnashing their teeth. This wasn’t the same as Ari’s freakout over the Manhattan Ballet, which at least was genuine, even if it didn’t last very long. This felt like a parody of what I was living, day in, day out. I knew they weren’t doing it on purpose, but it didn’t matter. They took what was horrible and secret and mine and lurched around like drunks, proclaiming it to the world.
And what was worse, they got to fly. I never got to fly, so why I did I feel like shit? Where’s the balance in that?
“I have your money,” I said to Echo.
Her face lit up and she grabbed my wrist from excitement. I thought she might try to kiss me, and so I yanked my hand away.
“I’ve got to go get it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Yes, I thought. Let’s go to Ari’s house, distract Ari, and get the money from the back of Ari’s closet. Then let’s go to the shitty house at the edge of town, into my tiny hole of a bedroom that smells like sweaty socks, dig below my underwear, open the Tupperware container, and scarf down that cheese sandwich. I had reached that point. This was it. The lowest moment. Enough.
I walked over to Ari and touched her shoulder. She moaned, and I whispered into her ear. “Ari, I forgot something at your place.”
“So go get it.”
“Why don’t you come? The fun’s over.”
“Seriously, your voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Go get your whatever.”
“You could come—”
“I said go away!” she shouted. “Leave me alone. I don’t want you here, Win.”
“Would you shut the hell up already?” Markos said, then coughed so hard he nearly barfed again.
I left her and went back to Echo. “I can’t leave them here like this.”
“I can stay with them. Go get it and come back.” She grinned and hugged me quickly, a flash of arms in the dark.
I handed her the flashlight and bent over Ari again, intending to kiss her on the cheek. Before I could, she threw a handful of sand in my eyes. “Get out of here!” she screeched, then covered her head with her arms and wailed.
I didn’t try again. That was the goodbye I felt I deserved, even if, somewhere distant in my brain, I knew it was just her side effects talking.
I walked to the truck in the dark. It felt farther than it should have, like the parking lot was shrinking away with every step, but eventually I reached it and my truck and started home.
The road home. This is the important part. No witnesses, only me. A road I’d driven hundreds of times before. It was a wet night, yes, but the road was empty. No other cars. No animals, no nothing.
Did I have a moment of weakness? See the tree and let go of the wheel? Could I have planned this, somewhere, in a dark recess of my mind, while Ari and Markos floated overhead and Echo watched me too closely?
That’s one way this could’ve ended. The other is the randomness of the universe: something so small so as to be functionally unmeasurable distracted me and a series of inevitable events pulled me toward the tree. No human intention or reason had any part in it.
Or it could’ve ended through hekame. I’d been joined in the truck by something invisible, fathomless and unmovable. And that thing pushed my arms. A force bore down on them and turned the wheel turned to the left, off the road, into a tree. Straight into oblivion.
But those are only theories. Only I know what happened.
In the moment that the crash became inevitable and unavoidable, I had enough time to notice the tree and my course, and to remember Mom and Kara and Ari and Markos perfect and loved and to hope that I had somewhere to go after this—somewhere where I was weightless, careless, free—before the truck crashed.
One of the strangest parts of being depressed is how it affects memory. When I was depressed, I couldn’t remember anything particularly happy ever happening to me. Things I had previously assumed were happy seemed false and empty. The good past faded epically far away, and the good present, well, that was pretty much an oxymoron.
But when I hit the tree, all that cleared away—the sadness filter my memory had been set to—and I remembered moments of pure happiness.
Playing catch with Markos as kids.
Holding Kara when she came home from the hospital.
Ari laughing at something I’d said.
Birthday cakes. Big wins. Stupid jokes. Surprise As.
Lying in a sleeping bag in the backyard. Which house, it didn’t matter, because the sky was the same at all of them, vast and cold, twinkling brightly, beautiful and remote.
For a second I remembered it all and loved it all with my whole heart.
And then I died.
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I took the bag from Echo’s outstretched hand.
It wasn’t a spell to forget, like I had hoped for, and it wouldn’t fix anything Cal had done, but it was something. It would get me out of town.
“If this works,” I said to Echo, pressing the plastic together between my fingers, “you can come with me to New York, stay on the couch in our shitty apartment. There’s got to be a ton of hekamists in New York, right?”
Echo touched her face where I had hit her. “Why would you do that for me?”
“Because . . . otherwise me taking this spell is charity. And I don’t need your pity.”
That wasn’t the only reason, of course—there was the fact that she’d probably die if I didn’t help her, and the fact that I owed her doubly for this because I’d stolen Win’s money, and the fact that I liked her, despite myself. She’d kept Cal’s secret, she’d tried to blackmail me, but she’d also tried to help, even though she had no reason to. Plus she cared about Win and I used to care about Win, so she must have had good taste.
She looked at me for a long moment. For a second we didn’t worry about Cal out in the store or Diana in the cage or Markos still knocked out on the floor. She smiled, tentative as if I might change my mind. “It’ll work. You’ll be beautiful.”
I pulled open the seal on the plastic bag and several things happened at once.
Kay pushed Echo into a stack of buckets and tackled me to the ground, grabbing the bag from my hand.
Just as the shelf behind me—right where I had been standing—creaked and toppled over, sending a pile of PVC pipes clattering to the floor.
When the pipes stopped rolling, I pushed Kay off me. Echo groaned and sat up. “What the hell?”
Kay spoke frantically, words tumbling over each other. Though she wasn’t whispering I had to lean in close and concentrate extra hard in order to make out the words. “I figured it out. There’s got to be a spell. Echo’s spell. I mean the spell affecting Echo. A hook!” Kay flapped her arms in frustration. “Remember when you and Diana tried to leave me at the bonfire, and Diana busted her face?”
“Your hook’s balanced out now,” Echo said.
“And thanks so much for that,” Kay said, bitterness souring the words. “But I’m not talking about me. I think there’s a spell affecting Echo. A hook. One that her mom gave her, probably years and years ago. Think about it—that’s why Echo can’t seem to get anyone to pay her for their spells, why she doesn’t just leave. It’s exactly like my spell—it keeps her close to her mom.”
Echo frowned. “My mom wouldn’t do that.”
“But Echo—all your bad luck,” I said. “What if it’s not luck?”
Echo kicked a piece of pipe and it rolled away. “She wouldn’t. Hekamists don’t spell other hekamists.”
“You give your mom spells for her pain,” I said.
“That’s different. That’s for her own good.” Echo’s eyes widened when she heard her words out loud.
“She would’ve thought she was protecting you,” Kay said.
“Keeping you from being discovered and going to jail,” I added.
“Watching over you. Because she cares about you.” Kay sounded defensive.
“Wait—hold on,” I said. “All I did was offer you our couch in New York if the spell works, and the shelf fell down on us. So if someone tries to help you, or gives you a way out . . .” I stopped, looking at the plastic bag in Kay’s hand.
A little thing—the thing that would let me dance again and go to New York as planned. I wasn’t attached to Kay’s hook anymore, so that wouldn’t keep me in Cape Cod.
And if I left, Echo could leave, too.
She’d been close to leaving once before. She’d told me she was waiting for Win to pay her the night that he died.
I leaned across the fallen pipes and grabbed Echo’s arm. “Echo—Win owed you money, right?”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh.” Her chin shook, which made her look ten years younger. “Win was on his way to bring me the money when he crashed.”
“If you had his money, you could go,” Kay said.
“So if there was a hook on me . . . Win . . .” She hugged her arms close to her chest, as if to keep her heart inside her body.
“It could be a coinc
idence,” I pointed out.
“That’s how hooks work,” Kay said. “With coincidences and luck and chance. Your mom told me that when I got mine.”
“Oh god.” Echo took a deep, shuddering breath. “I killed him.”
We’d never know. Not for sure. No one was there with him in the truck; no hekamist could do a forensic analysis and tell us the truth. But it felt true, like how Cal setting the fire at my house felt true, like how Kay’s hook explained so much about my friendship with her.
“Everything I’ve done has backfired,” Echo said. She stared at her hands and spoke in a monotone. “Every spell I’ve ever done has made things worse.”
I knew that feeling. I was about to tell her it wasn’t her fault, and that I had made plenty of the terrible decisions that brought us here, too, but we heard sirens in the distance, and Kay grabbed our arms.
“They’re not going to be able to find us back here,” Kay said.
She started for the woodshop’s door, my spell still clutched in her hand. I was still trying to decide if I should follow her or stay with Diana and Markos when she stopped suddenly and backed up, stumbling over fallen PVC pipes.
Cal walked in after her.
That blank look on his face. He’d forgotten so much—to have it all come crashing back at once, every terrible feeling and thought, must’ve made him lose it.
Or maybe he was always a little bit off, and this was his real personality finally clawing its way to the surface, freed from the cage of spells he’d been given.
He held out an arm, his silver lighter in his fist. With a metal snap, he lit the flame.
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I stepped right up to Cal and took the lighter from him.
It wasn’t particularly brave. In the hour since I’d balanced out my hook, I’d almost gotten used to being mostly invisible, and I figured he wouldn’t notice me. Sure enough, he had to blink a couple times before his eyes—his strange, wild eyes—focused on my face.
“You don’t need that, Cal.”
He frowned, those terrible eyes darting all over the room, a bird crashing against windows looking for the sky. “You shouldn’t have spelled me,” he said distantly, as if recalling a dream.
The Cost of All Things Page 26
