The Cost of All Things (13 page)

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

I brushed scrap metal off the table and took a step closer to her. “I should give you five thousand dollars—why? You basically already stole five thousand from me. You won’t tell me what you
spent it on. You won’t talk to me at all. Where have you been all summer?”

She frowned, a mulish expression on her small face. “If Win asked, you would lend him the money right away. You
did
lend it to him. Bet you didn’t give him the third degree, either.”

“You think we’re friends like me and Win were friends?”

Her stubborn expression didn’t budge. “I have your back. You should have mine.”

“Win was my
best
friend. There’s no one else I would treat the same, and no one else I ever will. Ever. You and I haven’t even hung out in weeks. You think I owe you what I owed Win? Because he loved you? No. In fact, as of right now, we’re not friends. You understand?”

“Come on, Markos—”

“No. I’m serious. Why keep pretending? We don’t have anything in common anymore. I’m not sure we ever did.” That wasn’t what I wanted to say, and probably wasn’t even true, but I couldn’t stop. “I don’t like you. I don’t like your jokes. I don’t feel sorry for you because you have such a tragic past. There’s nothing about you that’s in any way interesting to me.”

She seemed defeated, but not as completely as I’d hoped. I had hoped for a massive meltdown. I wanted her to feel on the outside as shitty as I felt inside.

“You could have just said no,” she said.

“And you can show yourself out,” I said, and turned my back on her. “Good luck finding the door.”

Win, I’d steal for. Win, I’d die for. Ari was not Win.

She left, stumbling a little through the woodshop door. On the flat screen, I watched her turn and double back through the store, always choosing the wrong way. Lost.

And I did not help her.

Echo had agreed to help me, but practicing the spell took time—hers and mine. She’d tell me when to come over and I’d sit on her couch and she’d ask me more questions about how I felt and how I wanted to feel, or she’d tell me what she’d read in one of her mother’s books about mental spells and what I might expect as far as side effects.

She also told me about her mother, who wasn’t well. “She’s forgetting things. Losing pieces of herself,” Echo said. I thought she meant dementia, but it was more than that: this was what happened when hekamists outlived their covens. Echo was the only one her mother had left. A coven had to have at least three—and ideally more than seven—in order to be stable. “When she dies, I’ll go totally nuts,” Echo said matter-of-factly.

“Are you mad at her for making you join?”

“She didn’t make me do anything. I joined when the second-to-last member of her coven got cancer. I wanted to. I couldn’t let my mother fall apart.” She grinned a red-lipsticked grin.
“Besides, being a hekamist has plenty of perks. If I hadn’t joined, I couldn’t help you.”

On one of these visits, while she frowned into pots and pans and made me taste tiny crumbs of cheddar and Parmesan and Camembert and Boursin, Echo told me how she’d gotten kicked out of college and fired from her waitressing job and how apartments had filled with rats and suspicious supers had torn up leases and forced her home again.

“It’s almost like my mom’s given me a hook,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“What’s a hook?”

“Type of spell to keep me close to her. It would make sense—she’s worried about me because I’m illegal. She’s afraid I’ll get caught and go to jail forever.”

“Would you?”

“Well. Yes.” She waved away the threat. “I’d go to jail, she’d go to jail. Anyone in a coven who makes a new hekamist goes to prison for life. Which is why I need to get out there and find another coven—convince them to take us on. They’ll need some persuading, maybe even some cash, because it’s such a risk to take on someone underage. But I have to do something to save my mother. Save me.”

I leaned forward across the kitchen table, surprised to find myself interested—not a word I’d use to describe myself often those days.

“So the hook spell keeps you close to her?”

“If she gave one to me, which I don’t think she did.”

“Why not?”

“Hooks are for assholes,” Echo scoffed. “Pinning specimens under glass. Plus hekamists don’t spell each other. It’s bad form.”

“But she could have. . . .”

Echo shook her head. “My mother loves me, but she knows better. Sometimes bad luck is just bad luck.”

I scratched my arms and wondered if I’d ever be able to think bad luck wasn’t entirely my fault. If I were Echo, I’d want to believe that it was a hook keeping me from what I wanted—anything but “just the way things are sometimes.”

“If it was a hook, though, you could break it,” I said.

“You say it like that’s even possible.”

The thing about spells, Echo told me, is that you can’t break them, you can only wait for them to run out (if they’re temporary) or try to layer another spell over them (if they’re permanent). It’s slightly easier to try to correct the side effects and not the spell itself, but even that gets complicated, because you’re adding another spell on top of the one you have, and once you start doubling and tripling up the side effects go totally wonky. And if you’re looking to reverse the spell itself, not the side effect, you’re mostly out of luck. Sometimes, if the hekamist was good enough and the moon was in the right phase and you didn’t bake the wrong kind of soufflé, a hekamist could come up with the right spell with the right side effects to nudge a person nearly back in their original direction. But trying that could be dangerous. A well-made spell protects itself. It will act on the world to prevent being destroyed, according to Echo.

A week later, I came back to collect my spell.

It felt weird thinking about the cheese sandwich in my hands as having its own will, but that’s what Echo had said.
It will act on the world to protect itself.
She sliced the crusts off the bread, cut it diagonally, and put it in a plastic bag for me.

“The spell’s in the cheese,” she said. Her face was hopeful, proud. Maybe even a little bashful underneath the slashes of makeup. “I like cheese.”

I held in my hands the answer to all my problems. It looked, however, like a boring cheese sandwich.

I could’ve run with it right then—or gobbled it down—and then dealt with the money later. But I couldn’t do that to Echo, who’d done nothing but try to help, and who had problems of her own—a sick mother and her own eventual madness. “I don’t have the money,” I said. “Not yet.”

Her pride drained away, disappointment taking its place. She sat at the kitchen table and pushed her hair off her forehead with both hands. She looked not just sad but afraid. Not that I could blame her.

I shifted on my feet, moving the sandwich from one hand to the other. “Should I give this back?”

Echo looked up. “You are going to get the money, right? You’re not going to leave me hanging?”

“Yes,” I said. Because what else was I going to say?

“Take the spell, then. Feel better. Bring me the money when you have it.”

“You trust me?”

She looked up at me, her black-rimmed eyes swimming. “I’m the one who made you an irreversible brain whammy. Do
you
trust
me
?”

“Hadn’t thought of it that way.” I looked at the sandwich. One corner had been pressed down where Echo’s thumb had held the bread. “Do your spells usually work?”

Echo didn’t answer.

“Echo? This—this isn’t your first spell, is it?”

She wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve cast spells before. Plenty. My mom taught me a few before she started to get too . . . lost. But no one actually took any of those.”

“Is that why the spell took you so long?”

“I’m being extra cautious. I want to get it right.”

I swallowed to relieve the sudden dryness in my throat. “If no one took them, you don’t know if any of those practice spells even worked.”

She stood up and looked me in the eye, daring me to argue. “It’ll work, Win. Your pain—gone. The side effects will be physical, so you might not get to play baseball for a little while, but you also won’t kill yourself, so . . .”

“How do you know I play baseball?” I wasn’t trying to accuse her of anything. I didn’t want to think about my brain/body connection, which freaked me out if I let myself ponder it for too long. (Was I good at baseball because I was bad at keeping myself happy?) But Echo blushed, a deep red rising from her neck to her cheeks.

“Research,” she mumbled, and in that second I knew she’d
been to a game—she’d watched me without me knowing. She watched me, and she trusted me, and she blushed like a—I don’t know—like a
girl
.

I decided not to think any further along that path.

She must’ve decided the same thing, because she stood up and dumped the cutting board and knife into the sink, then started scrubbing them furiously, her back to me.

“Eat it before you go to sleep,” she said. “It’ll kick in by morning.”

I lifted the bag by the ziplocked edge and looked in at the sandwich. Ordinary. But it wasn’t; somehow it was a permanent sandwich. “How long will it stay good?”

She turned off the faucet and faced me, blush gone, only the usual guarded curiosity in its place. “As long as it takes. The bread might get stale but the cheese won’t spoil.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re not going to take it right away?”

I shrugged. She was the one who felt the need to scare me with tales of unbreakable spells. She was the one who hadn’t told me until the last possible minute that she was a raw amateur. “It’s my brain. I want to be sure.”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and came over to stand directly in front of me. I thought she might touch me, and goose bumps erupted all over my skin.

She didn’t touch me, simply stared at me. I didn’t like it, but couldn’t look away. Maybe a hekamist thing. “Promise me something,” she said.

“I’ll get the money.”

“No. Well, yes, get the money—but promise me this: if it gets to the point where it’s eating this sandwich or slitting your wrists, you eat the sandwich, okay?”

There wasn’t enough air in the room. My lungs burned. I could only nod.

She nodded back and sent me on my way.

Of course I gave Win the money. I would’ve done anything for him.

He asked me and I knew he was serious. He never asked for shit and I knew my entire life that he was poor. His mom acted like the rest of the moms and paid for dance for Kara like she could compete with the other girls of the dance world, but Win always had secondhand gear for baseball, generic cereal, houses that weren’t exactly dirty but always came with some sort of ground-in smell. He moved a lot and didn’t say why. Sometimes nicer places, sometimes real shitholes. I didn’t question that he needed the money.

And I didn’t ask for what. It was money. I had it, or at least could get it, and he didn’t or couldn’t. It wasn’t fair, but that was the way our lives fell out. Why should I insist on knowing his personal shit because I was in the position to do him a favor? I trusted him. That was enough.

That’s not to say I didn’t think about it—wonder why. I knew
he was worried about something. He’d ignore my texts for days, and sometimes, like at poker night or warming up before a game, he would
go
—disappear from behind his eyes, leaving a Win shell behind.

When I let myself ponder what he might need the money for, I thought it was his mom or sister—something serious. I figured when it got bad enough we’d all know, but for now they wanted to keep it quiet. I thought I was the only one he told.

And I thought that up until the day Ari came into the shop to ask for more. What a fucking chump I was.

I’d gotten hell from my mother about the money for Win, too, so it wasn’t like it had been easy. Even with her ancient ledger, no way would she let that much cash slip away from the store without noticing. But I was smart. I didn’t take it from the store’s till or anything like that. Every four weeks Mom left a manila envelope in the store for the old hekamist to pick up. Must’ve been four or five inches thick, some months. I first noticed it years ago when I was watching the security monitor in the woodshop. Mom and the hekamist never talked, never even looked each other in the eye; Mom left the envelope in the power tool display, and an hour later the hekamist picked it up.

They acted like it was some big secret, black hats and espionage. Mom was probably paying to keep people coming to the store. A lot of struggling businesses did it. Or maybe it was a protection spell to keep me and Cal and Dev and Brian safe, something motherly. But it didn’t matter. I knew that the envelope would appear an hour before closing on every fourth Sunday.
Win asked me for the money at the right time. When Sunday rolled around, I swiped it before the hekamist could come pick it up.

There was six thousand dollars in it, to my surprise. I didn’t think spells were that expensive, but then again I’d never bought one, so what did I know. I pocketed the extra thousand for a rainy day and gave the rest to Win at school the next day.

A few days after that, Mom stormed into my room.

“Where’s the money, Markos?”

I could tell from the look on her face there was no point in playing dumb or blaming one of my brothers. She practically vibrated with rage, all her gray curls quivering, and her face turned red and splotchy. But there was something else, too—something I couldn’t place right away.

“It’s gone,” I said.

She grabbed my arm, fingernails pinching, but I didn’t wince. “This is not a game. You need to give it to me now.”

Then it clicked. Mom looked scared.

“What’s so important? Afraid of a few more gray hairs?”

“It’s not for me, you idiot. Your brother—” And she stopped.

“My brother what?”

“You have no idea what you could’ve done.”

“Who’s it for? Dev? Cal? Why? What’s wrong with them?”

Her eyes snapped to my face. “Nothing’s wrong with anyone,” she said. “Give me the money, Markos. I’m not joking.”

I crossed my arms and stared her down. “Tell me what it’s for.”

She blinked at me. She was considering telling me it, whatever it was. I had no clue and didn’t really care. It was convenient that she didn’t want to tell me, that’s all. And then if she did tell me—bonus. I wouldn’t turn down free information.

But she didn’t tell me. Something in her expression twisted and she actually smirked at me. She went over to my dresser and pulled open the middle drawer, where I keep some of the bongs I make in the shop before distributing them to customers. I didn’t know she knew about the bongs so it took a second for all that to filter through what passed for my brain.

“Uh . . .” was all I said before she pulled out a bong with a flourish.

“You don’t have secrets from me, Markos, I’m your mother.” She brandished the bong like a baton. “You think I don’t know about this? I know it all. I know who you talk to, what you do with them. I know how much money you have in your wallet. I know who your girlfriends are, and I know their parents. I know what type of porn sites you visit.”

“Mom, please—”

She pointed the bong at my head. “I know everything about you, Markos. You’re my child. If you think you can keep the money hidden . . .”

“Find it, then. If you know everything about me. Show me where the money is.” I kept my eyes on her and not on the pair of disgusting old sneakers in the bottom of my gym bag where I’d rolled up and shoved the extra cash. She stared at me, didn’t move. Seemed to be waiting for me to give away the money’s location.

“You know you’re grounded,” she said finally.

“Good luck with that.”

Tears sprang to her eyes, out of sadness or frustration, I didn’t know. “I would do anything for you boys. I have done everything, and I have no regrets.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but even I am not so cold as to feel nothing when my mom cries. “You don’t know how hard it is—every month—but it’s worth it. You ungrateful, spoiled little shit.”

“Aw, Mom—”

“Don’t touch that money again, Markos.”

As soon as I was sure she’d left the house I retrieved the excess cash from the shoe and shoved it in my pocket, and I committed myself to spending it as soon as humanly possible. So when I saw the hekamist’s daughter hanging around baseball practice the very next day, it seemed like fate. It would be a treat for us—my rainy day surprise.

My mom didn’t speak to me again until Win died, three days later.