The Cost of All Things (10 page)

“I’m going to be fine, you know,” Diana said. We were sitting in Diana’s car watching Kay walk up the steps to her house and then wave enthusiastically from behind the inset glass. “To be honest, it was kind of the best bonfire ever.”

I shuddered at the thought of Echo demanding her money, and the sound of Diana’s scream. “I’m glad you think so.”

“Yeah. I got to talk to Markos, and you seemed . . . better.”

I rubbed my temple. It felt like a long time ago, the idea that I would run off to New York and tell Diana the truth about Win and everything would be perfectly fine. It wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. What did I imagine she could do—conjure five thousand dollars from nothing?

I made nine dollars an hour selling ice cream at the Sweet Shoppe, twenty hours a week. To earn Echo’s money I’d have to work for a year, nonstop, and probably much more when you factored in taxes and school and the fact that the Sweet Shoppe was closed October through April. Or I’d have to use our New
York money, which was the last of my parents’ life insurance. But I couldn’t use that; I needed it to live on while I danced with the junior corps.

So I had to keep Echo from telling anyone until we left for New York. Which was so obviously impossible the idea squeezed me, like trying to plié in new leather pants.

“Where was Kay all night?” Diana asked.

“Saw her with Cal Waters.”

“Like . . . talking?” she asked.

“It looked more like flirting.”

“Wow. Seriously?” I nodded, and Diana’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to warn her away from him like you always warn me away from Markos?”

“Cal’s the nice one.”

Diana gave me a withering look, which must have hurt the bruise on her face, because she winced.

“All right, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll make sure she’s properly cautioned about getting involved with the Waters boys.”

Diana shifted in her seat and raised a hand to her face, but didn’t touch the bruise; she held her hand over it like it radiated heat. I backed the car out of Kay’s driveway and started for home. “Did you have an okay time, Ari?”

I’d been blackmailed and my best friend had bashed her face in.

In my mind, we ran up the dune again and again. I stumbled over and over; I couldn’t find my footing. It was funny at the time. The sand slid and reshaped itself.

Was I holding on to Diana’s arm when she fell? Could I have tipped her over? Did I make her as unstable and uncoordinated as I was?

Was she better off without me?

I managed to smile at Diana, though it didn’t feel right. My smiles had become as clumsy as the rest of me. I pushed harder, and the effort hurt my cheeks, my teeth, and the very back of my neck. “Sure. Very memorable.”

Diana dropped me off and promised to call later. I went to my room and did my exercises like usual, which is to say, I did them terribly.

The only way I was going to get better was to push through it. This was my plan: keep practicing until I could re-teach myself grace.

After that first attempt at ballet the Friday after I’d taken the spell, I had tried to get the side effects reversed. It seemed obvious. Whip up another spell and make it go back to the way it was. Whoever this dead boy was, there was no way he was worth screwing up my career.

So I had gone straight from that disastrous dance class to the hekamist’s house. The familiar middle-aged woman with curly gray hair and a foggy look in her eye answered the door.

“I know you,” she said.

I blinked. “I was here yesterday,” I said.

“Was it yesterday?” She smiled and made a gesture with her hand like she was waving away moths.

“So,” I said. “About that spell . . .”

The hekamist leaned against the doorframe. Behind her I could see the crowded living room and a dingy kitchen. I knew I’d been there the day before, but it looked familiar in a distant way, as if I’d only seen photos of it in a book.

“I hope it worked,” she said. “No refunds.”

“The spell worked. But I can’t dance anymore.”

“You’re a dancer? Oh. How lovely.”

“It seems like I’m dancing, like my brain is telling me to move, to be graceful, but my body won’t listen.” I shifted on my feet. “I fell down in class.”

She shrugged. “Some side effects are to be expected. I’m sure I mentioned it.”

“This isn’t ‘some side effects.’ I can’t do anything I used to be able to do.”

“But you’ve forgotten your dead boyfriend. You feel better.”

“I guess. I don’t remember how I felt before.”

“True, true. So strange, memory spells. When they work, everyone always wonders why they got them.” She looked up and down the road behind me, blinking. It occurred to me that she was going crazy. Hekamists lose it when the rest of their coven dies. I’d heard about it, but I didn’t know what it looked like until then. She pressed her cheek into the door frame, covering one eye and letting the other one focus in and out slowly. “You’re unhappy about your side effects. Hmm. Have you had other spells?”

I wanted to scream with frustration, but instead I gripped
my swollen left wrist and pinched the pain down. “Yes. I had one when I was eight years old. Permanent trauma removal.”

“Oh. I see. You didn’t say that yesterday.” She kept her face smashed into the door frame, still staring at me closely. “Trauma spell. That means memory, too. Boyfriend dead. Memory gone. Two permanent memory spells. Sad, sad, sad, aren’t you?”

My wrist throbbed. “My parents—died. In a fire. I saw the house burn down. Apparently I had nightmares.”

“A fire. An accident?”

I gritted my teeth and squeezed my toes in my shoes. “Someone broke in. Lit fireworks in the fireplace.”

Her mouth dropped open and she moved away from the door frame. “Oh.”

“Listen, you have to undo this spell. Please. I’m going to New York in August to study ballet and I can’t even—”

“No,” she said. “Those memories are gone and there’s no way to get them back.”

“Fine. Whatever. I don’t care about the memories. I want my body to work right. Can you fix that?”

Her mood had shifted. Instead of looking out at the street, she glanced back into her house and shrank away from me. Afraid. “A hekamist could fix you. Add another spell to counteract the side effect. You’d be as graceful as a gazelle. But then that spell comes with its own set of side effects, and then you’re up to three permanent spells—very bad. Very risky. Side effects cascading.”

I bit my lip. The other girls had talked about spells at the
Summer Institute last year. Rumor had it that one of the prima ballerinas at the Manhattan Ballet had gotten a spell to make her a star, and that was why she was so dull to talk to. Or there was the girl who couldn’t nail a double pirouette—kept losing her balance right at the end—and then one day she came in and did fourteen in a row flawlessly. She cried every morning when she woke up because she couldn’t remember where she was, but she could dance. Last I heard she was an apprentice at the San Francisco Ballet.

I’d always thought those were selfish spells—shortcuts to greatness. The prima ballerina and the pirouette girl could’ve practiced and maybe they would’ve gotten where they needed to go anyway. I couldn’t even practice. I looked like a fool. The side effects bent and twisted me. I needed a spell to get me back to normal, to be
me
again.

But would I really be myself if I couldn’t remember my own name?

“Not me,” the hekamist said, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?”

“Not this hekamist. Silly me, silly me. No no no. I can’t. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She started to close the door, and I put a hand out to stop her.

She took a deep breath and seemed to gather herself together. “You are a sweet girl. I can tell. And you seemed sad the other day about your dead boyfriend. I think you made the right decision.”

No one who knew me would have ever described me as sweet. And I knew I didn’t make the right decision.

“No, there’s no way. . . . Please. I love dance more than anything.”

“
Now
you do.” She pushed the door hard against my hand. “Yesterday you loved your boyfriend more. Try to think that you’ve done yourself a favor.”

With a final shove, the door closed. I knocked on it a couple more times, but she didn’t come out again.

Even if I decided to risk the compound side effects, she wouldn’t do the spell, and she was the only hekamist in town. Plus there was the question of payment—no way another five thousand dollars would show up in the back of my closet. Especially since Echo told me Win had put it there.

So I had to keep practicing.

The morning after the bonfire, July fourth, I bent at the waist and reached for the floor. I used to be able to flatten my whole torso against my legs and wrap my arms around them so that my hands touched the sides of my face. Now, the tips of my fingers barely grazed the carpet. I squeezed my eyes closed and willed myself not to start crying. I had another hour to get through.

I was stuck in this uncooperative body. And Echo was going to tell the truth about Win to everyone I knew unless I figured out a way to stop her.

The day after the bonfire I woke up with a hangover beating at my head and an urge in the pit of my stomach to burn down the world. At a certain point during the bonfire, after Diana had hurt herself and then gone off with Ari to recuperate, I’d gotten drunk enough that I’d forgotten Win was gone. I remembered that feeling of security, knowing—but not dwelling on—the fact that my best friend was out there somewhere and any moment he would emerge from the crowd, dump my drink in the sand, and drive me home. But of course he didn’t, so I kept drinking. More than the alcohol hangover there was the hangover from forgetting. I was paying for my lobotomized night.

I could hear my brothers gathering in the kitchen before I got out of bed. My back clenched, but I went down the stairs like usual, ready to be the usual Markos.

“You look
rough
,” Dev declared as soon as he saw me.

“Yikes!” Cal echoed.

“Oh, Markos,” my mom said, and hurried to pour me an orange juice.

Brian leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his uniformed chest. “You make it hard for me not to arrest you sometimes, dude.”

“Whatever.” I opened the cabinet door and stared at the boxes of cereal.

“Don’t ‘whatever’ me. If someone else at the party had called the cops on you, I would’ve been in big trouble.”

“No one did, did they?”

Dev spoke through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “If you’re going to binge, at least be a funny drunk.”

Cal cackled. “You told me I was a phony, selfish dickpocket. What’s a dickpocket?”

“Like a pocket for your dick, duh,” Dev said.

“What, like a pouch? Or a sock with a pocket sewn on it?”

“Boys . . .” Mom murmured from her seat by the window. She didn’t care what we said, but occasionally felt the need to remind us that she could hear that we were saying it.

“Regardless,” Brian said. “Maybe try to have a little self-control next time.”

I slammed the cabinet door shut. No one even flinched. They all blinked at me—Brian, Dev, Cal, and Mom—as if I hadn’t done anything at all.

It didn’t matter what I did. I would always be the youngest, the baby, the fuckup. They didn’t see me when they looked at me; they saw a Markos-shaped animatron. I could slam doors
and scream and tear the place apart and they’d barely look up from their cornflakes.

“I’m going out,” I said, and left before anyone could stop me.

I called Diana North. We hadn’t hooked up, so I didn’t have to wait a few days. I hadn’t been an ass to her, which meant she actually answered the phone. She met me at the bagel place with a patio out back, and we bought bagels and sat at a table in the sun. The light was too bright and hot—it was past noon already and my head ached—but I did not suggest moving to the shade. The hurt was what I deserved for forgetting Win the night before.

She looked prim in a dress with a collar, though her long, thick hair was still a color red not found in nature and the bruise on the side of her face looked both tender and angry. She ate her bagel in tiny bites, wincing when she had to move her right cheek, and stared at me with her bloodshot eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“How’s your face?”

She shrugged, which made her wince again. “Nothing broken.”

“You could tell people you got into a fight.”

She snorted. “Yeah. Very believable. Did you have a good time the rest of the night?”

“Fine,” I said. I didn’t mention my brothers, and I didn’t say the thing about forgetting Win was dead, but I must’ve been thinking about Win because of what came out of my mouth next. “Usually Win would come by with coffee and donuts. On July fourth, I mean.”

Diana scraped cream cheese off her bagel carefully. “Usually
Ari would sleep over. I guess we sort of did because we slept in my car. My mom’s car.”

“What?”

“I didn’t feel like going home.”

“Why not?”

Diana spoke to the bagel. “My mom kind of freaked out over my face. Knew she would.”

“It’s not like it was your fault.”

“She’s super protective. I didn’t want to have to hear the whole routine: should’ve been more careful, should’ve watched where I was going, shouldn’t have been running—or at a party—to begin with.”

“That’s crazy. Tell her to shut her face.”

Diana looked up from the bagel, her good eye wide. “I could never do that.”

“Why not?”

“You tell your mother to shut her face?”

I thought of my mother, who’s been distracted most of my life. By the store, by one of my brothers, by a series of disasters—illnesses, injuries, money troubles. But when it was your turn to have a crisis, she would claw anyone’s eyes out for you. If I came home with a bashed-in face, she’d toss me a bag of peas and demand to know who it was she should be suing for damages. “My mother doesn’t think anything’s our fault.”

“You guys are saints, then?”

“Yup.”

“My mom’s okay. She’s always looked after me—too much,
probably. Trying to keep me safe and happy always. Between her and Ari—sometimes it felt like they were living my life for me.” She stopped talking and flushed.

I thought of my brothers with their endless reams of advice, and the expectation that I would be exactly like them. “But you don’t feel that way anymore?”

“No,” Diana said, seemingly surprising herself. “No, I don’t. Actually—it’s because of Win. Ari started spending so much time with him . . . I was on my own.”

I swallowed half a bagel in three bites. “What’s up with Ari anyway?”

Diana looked at me out of the corner of her eye, like I was setting a trap. “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me much anymore.”

“Well, she hasn’t talked to me much either.”

“Really? But you were such good friends.”

I shifted on my metal seat. It burned the backs of my knees. “She was Win’s girlfriend.”

“Come on. You were friends, too.”

“Yeah, but what’s the point now? We’re going to sit around and share our feelings?”

Diana picked at her bagel. “It might be good for both of you to talk about all this stuff.”

“Doesn’t seem fucking likely. Ari having a heart-to-heart? Come on. That’s one good thing about her—she’s not a sappy romantic. Thank god. If she’d been needy with Win he’d have been needy right back and it would have been unbearable. He
was so—” I threw the rest of my bagel down onto my plate. “He was so damn nice all the time.”

Diana didn’t look startled, but I felt strange—like on the beach: heart racing, breathing coming in weird gasps. I made myself inhale and hold it for five seconds before opening my mouth again.

“Do you think about what happens when you die?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Not like heaven or angels or whatever—that’s stupid—but the end of everything. How nothing matters after that.”
How nothing matters now
, I wanted to say, but I could tell that would bring on the weird breathing, and she wouldn’t understand anyway.

“I think about how upset my parents would be,” Diana started to say, “and my little cousins, and Ari. She’s been through enough, with the fire, and then Win. But you know—” She stopped suddenly, looked at me like she was remembering who I was, then continued more slowly. “It doesn’t make me sad to think about it. It’s, like, I almost want to see it, because then I’d know what people really thought of me. If they really cared.”

That should’ve made me angry, because of Win. Because Win didn’t ask to die, and we all really did go through that torture, and it wasn’t part of some selfish, self-centered fantasy. But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t panicking anymore, either.

“That’s messed up,” I said, and smiled, and Diana drank that smile up like it was sunlight and she was a fucking flower. Even the bruise on her cheek seemed to shrink in her glow.

That was a nice feeling. I thought about the night before and how I didn’t want to kiss her and it seemed stupid now. Why shouldn’t I? Seeing her in the bright morning light of the bagel shop backyard, seeing how her happiness shone, I figured if that made me feel okay, there was no harm in making her more happy. We were both getting something out of it—so what if it wasn’t the same thing?

We left the bagel place and started walking down the street toward the beach. There were tourists everywhere; it was the height of the season, the biggest holiday of the year on the Cape. We passed my family’s hardware store and I turned away from the windows. There wasn’t much chance of anyone inside seeing me through the mounds of junk on display, but I didn’t want to risk making eye contact with my brothers or mother.

“Ari’s afraid to go in there,” Diana said, nodding at the store.

“It’s a hardware store.”

“Yeah, but she hates it. Says the walls crowd in on her.”

“Maybe it’s me.”

She elbowed me jokingly. I hadn’t ever thought that mousy Diana North, the one who laughed at Ari’s jokes and wore polos buttoned all the way up to her neck, would be capable of joking with me.

“I’m telling you,” she said. “If anyone could talk to her, you could.”

“Maybe,” I said, and smiled again.

The look on her face was so perfect—surprised and pleased—that I laughed, and she started turning red all around the black
and blue of the bruise. “I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m laughing because . . .”

But I didn’t know why I was laughing. Because I was alive? Was that the big joke?

Or was it funny—surprising—to remember that I scared people or made them glow or whatever? In my house I felt sometimes like a broken TV: people looked at me then turned away because I was always the same. The same mistakes, the same disappointments. Nothing I did made a dent to them.

Not like with Diana. Everything I did with her was new, everything mattered. She didn’t expect me to be one way or another, and what I did affected what she did in return.

With her I could put a dent in the world.