The Cost of All Things (19 page)

I woke up hungover and with a bitter acid taste in my mouth. For five days in a row.

It reminded me of the day after Win died. I was low from spell side effects and then I drank half a bottle of vodka and tore down the treehouse in the backyard. I was lucky I didn’t break my neck, crying and drinking and ripping rotting boards out of the branches, tearing up the skin on my hands, but it was hard to feel lucky about anything when the unluckiest thing in the world had happened.

See, I remembered that horrible last night. The alcohol only dims so much. In the morning everything’s crystal clear again.

After the hekamist told me about Ari’s memory spell and I kissed Kay, I stopped going to the hardware store. Stopped going anywhere, really, except the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. It was too much trouble to climb the stairs to my room. Besides, there would be another terrible movie on TV or someone to kill in a video game or beer to steal from the fridge instead.

My mom tried to cajole me into doing something, but she was easy to ignore. She’d bring me a hamburger or sit on the couch next to me or shout at me from the doorway. Boring.

“Here’s some corn on the cob,” she said one night, or day, I wasn’t quite sure. She placed a plate on the coffee table next to my bare feet. “You should eat something other than chips.”

I pushed the plate away with my heel.

“This Howard Hughes act is getting old, Markos. Eat.”

“I’m not eating anything you bring me.”

She drew back. “Why not?”

“What if you put a ‘get happy’ spell in the butter?”

She went white; it felt . . . not good, but satisfying.

“When you stole that money from me,” she said, shards of glass in each word, “I let you off easy. I regret that. You’ve been through a lot, but we are not discussing that money or what it’s for or
who
it’s for. Ever.”

“Like I give a damn.” I pulled the smelly fleece blanket over my head to block out the rest of whatever it was she’d come to say.

Then my brothers descended on me, oldest to youngest. Brian came in his uniform and lectured on “manning up” and “letting go.” Dev tried to joke with me, going after my fat ass sitting doing nothing, then my wussy feelings getting in the way of life, then the unlikelihood of my ugly face getting a girl even if I did manage to find the shower—and then he stopped, because I threw a stone coaster at the wall next to his head.

When Cal finally came to see me, I was tired of it. I didn’t
give him a chance to try to cajole me out of my chair. Knowing Cal, his tactic would probably be smiling and tripping over something for a laugh. That was Cal—probably the most easygoing of us. Never held a grudge. Didn’t deserve my black mood.

I mean, when we were kids, after our dad died, he went through a period where he scared the shit out of me—jumping off the garage roof onto his skateboard, stealing stuff from the hardware store, trying to impress Brian and Dev’s friends by drinking until he puked—but by the time he was in high school and I was in junior high, he’d mellowed. Became a real Waters brother like the rest of them.

And he’d been hanging out with Kay. He’d gone to the carnival with her. She thought they were dating. Just the thought of her stirred a sick feeling in my gut that I quieted with half a can of beer.

Cal looked as shitty as I felt, skin clammy and eyes unfocused. He swayed in the doorway to the living room.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

He coughed into his arm, a rattling, wet noise.

“Dude, what’s wrong with you?”

“Cold,” he said.

“Go take a nap.”

“Supposed to talk to you. Because you’re so sad.”

I threw my half-full can of beer down. It spilled onto the carpet. “I kissed your girlfriend. You gonna do something about it?”

Cal shrugged. “She’s not my girlfriend. Haven’t even seen her in a week.”

I hated how easy it was for him to say that. Like it was obvious. Of course she wasn’t his girlfriend. Of course it didn’t matter. I wanted to not care, too.

But wanting to not care is just another kind of caring.

“Tell me what’s going on. We’ll figure it out,” Cal said, wiping his nose on his sweatshirt.

Maybe some other guy—maybe Brian or Dev—would’ve taken him up on the offer. Talked it out. Analyzed the problem. Cried. Felt better. Maybe that would’ve helped a normal brother feel less alone. Maybe I would’ve done it, too, if they had bothered to try to reach out to me at any point in the past two months, and if I hadn’t been so committed to living on this couch and being pissed at the world.

I thought of my mom’s panic at the mention of the spell money. She really didn’t want me talking about it. So it was perfect. I didn’t know if the money and the spell were for Cal—or what the spell was for at all. But it was just awful enough to throw in his face and see if it stuck. Rag on Cal and piss off Mom, all in one shot.

“It’s probably not just a cold,” I said. “I bet Mom finally ran out of cash and didn’t get you your spells this month.”

“My what?”

“Your spells, dummy. It’s Sunday, isn’t it? So maybe you’ll get your spells today. All six-thousand-dollars-a-month’s worth. Are they to make you smarter? Because you should up the dosage.”

Cal’s face filled with confusion. “I don’t take any spells.”

“Bullshit,” I said, almost cheerfully. “Every month Mom pays for them. I’ve seen the money—stolen it, too. Maybe your spells make you less of a loser. I’d believe that, because you seem sort of desperate. Before she kissed me, you should’ve heard what Kay said about—”

He lunged across the room at me, arm bent, forearm across my throat, other hand pulled back to punch me in the face. But I didn’t grow up with three older brothers for nothing. I relaxed my neck—it hurts worse if you try to brace for it—and waited for the snap and the sting.

When it didn’t come, I opened an eye and saw Cal’s face twisted in concentration, his punching arm shaking with effort. He grunted. But he couldn’t make the arm connect with my face. Even the forearm over my neck seemed to be pulling back involuntarily, as much as he pushed forward with the rest of his body.

“Well, that answers one question,” I said. I raised my hands and pushed him away. He stumbled but didn’t come back at me.

He couldn’t.

His face drained of blood. He
was
the one being spelled. Lucky guess. The spells wouldn’t let him hit me, or probably anyone. He looked at me, bewildered, as if I was the one who’d just hit him.

I wished I could tell Diana.

And that was the moment—the shock making me weak-willed—when I thought her name and saw her in my mind and remembered how it felt to sit across from her at the diner or next to her in the car and I missed her, oh god I missed her. I
missed Win, too, but there’s a different way you miss a dead guy, and not only because I wasn’t hooking up with Win. I missed Win stupidly and pointlessly, because part of me understood the situation, which was that death is permanent and life finite and there are no angels, etc., etc. But Diana. I missed Diana like being punched repeatedly in the stomach, because she was out there walking around, talking to people, touching her hair, and worst of all probably miserable and broken because of something I did, because I cut her off completely and I made out with Kay and I did it all knowing I shouldn’t.

All this time, Cal was still in the room. Screwed-up Cal who didn’t even know he was on horse tranquilizers or whatever.

“Are you crying?” he asked, and I didn’t answer, because he had to be able to see for himself, and the question was asked to poke at me.

“I did a stupid thing,” I said.

When I looked up I expected him to nod, but he was staring at his hands, turning them over and balling them into fists. He pinched the inside of his left wrist with his right hand, frowning.

“Doesn’t matter about your spell,” I said. “You don’t need to beat the shit out of me because I’m punishing myself plenty.”

Cal shook his head. “I can’t believe Mom would do this to me.”

“She said she was looking out for you.”

“For how long?”

“A couple years. At least.”

Cal didn’t bother trying to cheer me up any more. He left,
and I was alone in the living room again.

But I could never be alone enough, because my brain kept whirring.

—This sucks.

—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?

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 ask me out with you? 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 truck.”

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 acting, 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 the silence. “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, show tunes. 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.”