The Cost of All Things (2 page)

When most people think of Cape Cod, they think of beaches and boardwalks, sand and sun, families and friends eating ice cream and playing volleyball. And for four or five months every year, that’s exactly what it is. Tourists fill the towns and hotels and restaurants and beaches, the sun shines and waves crash, and we have a reason for existing.

But it’s not like that at all in the middle of January. The hotels and rentals empty out. It’s cold. The beach isn’t a beach, it’s just the edge of the land, and the ocean’s always there, hemming us in. Cape Cod’s an island, you know. Two bridges let us on and off, but for the most part we’re trapped, shut up in a narrowing strip of land that no one should’ve found, let alone settled. Windy, plain, brown and yellow and gray, the sky matching the ground.

In the gloom and early dark of January, Diana and Ari and I were celebrating. I’d stolen a bottle of Grey Goose from my sister Mina’s secret stash, and we toasted each other and shivered in
the wind. The road was covered in half-melted snow and dead leaves. We slipped and slid over them in our sneakers, laughing and holding each other up.

“To New York!” Diana said to Ari.

“To horse camp!” Ari shouted back, even though they were standing right next to each other.

“To summer!” Diana’s voice rose to match Ari’s.

“To freedom!”

“Yay!” I said. I couldn’t think of anything to toast to, but if I didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t be a part of the celebration.

And, actually, I wasn’t technically celebrating anything of my own. But I was happy to be out with Diana and Ari, and happy for them. They were leaving right after school ended for their dream summers. Their happiness should have been enough for me to celebrate after the past few years.

“You’ll be the queen of those stuck-up horse chicks,” Ari said. “Maybe find a nice stable boy to seduce.”

Diana blushed and covered her eyes with her hand. “More like, I’ll spend a lot of time with my horse and halfway through the summer discover that none of the humans know my name.”

“Their loss.”

Diana pointed the bottle at Ari. “You’re the one who’s going to be the queen, anyway. Take those other girls out.”

“Ballet assassin. That’s me.” She grabbed the bottle from Diana, planted her foot, and spun in a circle, ending balanced on the planted foot, the other shooting straight up behind her like a bow string. She took a drink and didn’t wobble once.

“What if I dyed my hair?” Diana held out a strand of her thick, long hair and squinted in the low light. “Something bright.”

I started to agree, but Ari interrupted me.

“Oh, don’t,” Ari said. She lowered her foot and passed me the bottle. “You’re perfect the way you are.”

“I guess,” Diana said, and let go of her hair.

“Where’s Win?” I asked. Ari spent most of her weekend nights with her boyfriend, Win Tillman, which was why Diana had started calling me back in September.

“He’s home sick. Markos is having a party but I wanted to celebrate.”

“We couldn’t celebrate with Markos?” Diana said, attempting to sound casual.

“But it’s more fun just us.”

Diana didn’t argue. She had a crush on Markos Waters, Win’s best friend, but Ari always said he wasn’t boyfriend material. Ari hung out with him and Win all the time when she wasn’t with us, so I guess she would know.

I felt a pause descending. A dreaded pause, where someone might say “It’s time to go home,” or “I’ve had enough to drink.” I didn’t want the night to be over. I’d only been friends with Diana and Ari for four months, since Diana and I sat together in English and started hanging out on nights when Ari was with Win. Ari and Diana had been inseparable for years, whispering in class and peeling out of the parking lot in each other’s cars, and I’d wondered what it would be like to be a part of a friendship like that. Someone you chose, instead of being born with,
like me and my sister, Mina.

I’d made friends with Diana first, but soon I was invited out with Ari, too, and we became a threesome. Four months of friendship. Six months since my beauty spell, which gave me the confidence to start talking to Diana in the first place. And two years since Mina got better and left me behind. I could remember each of the important dates exactly.

I didn’t want the night to end, so I rushed to fill the silence.

“Look, the hekamist’s house,” I said, pointing down the road.

Diana and Ari turned to look at the house. It seemed normal from the outside, if a bit run-down. Back when we were in elementary school someone made up a story that there was a force field around the house that would zap you or curse you if you got too close; only years later did anyone stop to think that wasn’t how hekame worked at all. You had to eat something to be spelled. So they changed the dare to eating the hekamist’s grass from the front lawn. When I’d gone there to get my beauty spell six months ago, I could still see bald patches of the lawn, as if new generations of kids were still daring each other to get close.

“What’s it like inside?” Diana asked.

“Diana!” Ari said, as if Diana had just said something offensive.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Everyone knows I got a spell. Lots of people get spells, actually, you just can’t always see the results.”

Ari rubbed her wrist, and I remembered, too late, about her
parents and the fire and her old spell. Diana stepped closer to Ari as if to comfort her, but Ari shrank away. I’d never seen Ari hug or touch anyone except Win.

“The spell was in a microwave burrito,” I said. Stupid. The silence stretched open and I stepped into it blindly. “I thought that was so weird. Have you ever heard of anything so weird? Ari, what was your spell in—no, never mind, that’s not what I wanted to—um—I think it’s so crazy all the stuff people get spelled for, because I only wanted a little, uh, you know.” I gestured at my face and twisted the ends of my always-smooth hair. “The hekamist was so nice about it, actually. Didn’t try to flatter me and tell me I didn’t need it. I appreciated that. When you’re ugly you’re ugly, you know?”

Sometimes when I’m talking I wish I’d gotten more spells than beauty. Wit, for example. Ari spoke so fast I couldn’t always follow her. Then when I’d try to keep up, I ended up saying nonsense.

“You weren’t ugly,” Diana said.

“Oh, yeah, well, you have to say that.” I laughed, and the sound was whipped away by wind almost immediately.

“Hey,” Ari said. Her expression turned fierce, and even though she’s half a foot shorter than me, I shrank back. “Don’t be like that. You’re great. We’re all great, okay?”

Diana giggled. “I’m so awesome I can hardly stand it.”

“Yes! Diana gets it.” Ari turned to me, her face set. “The thing is, Kay, I’m awesome and I’m not friends with people who aren’t awesome, ergo, et cetera. Can you be on board with that?”

I didn’t really have any idea what she was talking about, but it sounded wonderful, whatever it was—it sounded like a promise—so I nodded and said, “Yes.”

We kept walking, three friends, out late celebrating on our miserable little island.

And I could picture the next few months so clearly, I nearly burst with it. I had friends who liked me and who’d be there for me and who’d defend me—even against myself.

We had almost turned the corner away from the hekamist’s house when the full picture of the future came into focus. We would be best friends, and summer would come, and they would leave me. Diana for horse camp. Ari for the Manhattan Ballet.

Meanwhile, it would be summertime in Cape Cod. Happy people spilling out of the hotels and rentals and beaches and shops.

Only I’d be alone.

I stopped walking.

They stopped a step or two later. Turned and faced me. Ari’s small, sharp, dramatic face and Diana’s smooth skin and large eyes and long, thick, dark blond hair. They were naturally beautiful; they would never quite understand what it was like to not be. But I loved them for not understanding, for insisting that their worldview was the right one, despite my years of evidence to the contrary.

“You okay, Kay?” Ari asked, and elbowed Diana at her own joke.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine. Actually, I’m awesome. I know that now.”

Reassured, they kept walking. I looked back at the hekamist’s house and made a decision.

When it was light, I would come back. I would knock on the door and not be afraid. I would take the cash from my mother’s wallet and ask for exactly what I needed.

And I did. Four days later, I gave Ari and Diana each a cookie baked for friendship and got to keep my best friends.

Once they’d taken the spell, they couldn’t leave me. Within the week, Diana’s horse camp closed because of bedbugs and Ari’s aunt decided they wouldn’t move to New York until the beginning of August, right before Ari’s apprenticeship started.

I didn’t want to change who they were—didn’t want to force them to feel things they didn’t feel. The spell wasn’t about making something out of nothing and inventing a whole relationship. Instead, I could be me and they could be them, only the spell would nudge them to me at least once every three days, and they wouldn’t be able to go more than fifty miles away, and luck and chance would bend them to me like flowers growing toward the sun. The hekamist called it a hook.

They would be loyal. They would be constant. They wouldn’t leave me to go traveling the world. They
couldn’t
leave me—the spell kept them near.

My spells worked better than I could’ve ever imagined. I had Diana and Ari and a better face and I was happy. As long as their lives went a little bit badly, we were together.

I first noticed her the way you notice hot girls: out of the corner of your eye, a flash of dark hair and eyes, an urge to turn your head and stare. It was only when I followed that urge and looked closer that I recognized her. The hekamist’s daughter.

The old hekamist came around my family’s hardware store regularly and sometimes this girl came with, trailing behind her, staring suspiciously at everyone. She always wore dark black eyeliner and a long black coat with lots of buttons that swung around her hips, and she had short, messy black hair.

From my position at first base I watched her walking behind the bleachers. She was hot, but who had the time and energy to go after a hekamist’s daughter? You’d have to be looking over your shoulder and guarding your food every second. Besides, there were a hundred other non-hekamist-daughters enrolled in school whose hotness wasn’t as . . . complicated. So I can tell you absolutely that wasn’t why I approached her. My reasons were purely altruistic. Well, mostly.

Win hightailed out after practice, barely waving when I called out “Tomorrow night!” As his best friend, I had his Saturday nights on lock, even when he was lame and didn’t want to come, or was brooding when he did.

He’d been brooding a lot recently, and I knew, as his best friend, it was my job to cheer him up. Ari’d been trying, too, and usually with our powers combined we could pull him out of any funk. He’d always been prone to falling into dark periods, ever since we were kids, so I knew the secret to making him better: You couldn’t ask him to be happy. You had to
do
something.

Fortuitously, I had almost a thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket. If I didn’t offload the cash no doubt my mother would discover it and kill me. So watching Win with his head down, silent, tires of his pickup squealing on his way out of the lot, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend it.

The hekamist’s daughter looked like she might be leaving, too, so I jogged her way. The rest of the guys stayed away. They knew better than to interrupt me when I was talking solo with a girl.

“What’s up,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“I’m Markos. You are?”

“I’m wondering what you want.” She didn’t say it angry, but I got the picture. She was a woman of business.

“I was hoping you could help me out.”

“Oh, I doubt it. You seem fine on your own,” she said. She turned and started walking across the baseball field. My house
was in the other direction, but I followed her anyway.

“But you’re the hekamist’s daughter.”

“So?”

“So I want to place an order.”

I put a hand on her arm and she winced as if it stung and pulled out of my grip. Then she turned and faced me. Her hotness was of the variety that was slightly scary, like she might turn into a dragon and fire-breathe all over you, but in a sexy way. We were past the baseball field, past the soccer field, and a few steps into the scrubby no-man’s-land between school and a shitty low-lying part of town filled with cheap clapboard houses. It reminded me of the places where Win’s lived his entire life. Dead lawns. Peeling paint. Windows installed crooked. There’s always a broken trike by the back door and a tangled garden hose in the driveway.

“I want to have a little party tomorrow night,” I said. “Me and my best friend and his girlfriend.”

“Sounds like a ton of fun.”

“I want to make this a special party.” I pulled out the money, and the hekamist’s daughter’s eyes showed their whites. “I bet your mom could help me make this extremely special.”

She chewed on the side of her bottom lip, rubbing her sore arm with the opposite hand. “Did you have something specific in mind?”

I told her all about my idea, and she nodded absently, eyes on the cash.

“So you’ll let her know?”

Her eyes snapped back to mine and narrowed. “You’re Markos Waters, right? Waters Hardware? The one with all the brothers?”

“That’s me.”

“Noticed the family resemblance.”

That would be our black hair, blue eyes, and roman noses. Stand all four of us together and we look like time-lapse photography. “Thank you.”

She smiled and tilted her head. “It wasn’t a compliment.”

I smiled at her, because the conversation had gotten off track, and she might turn into a dragon any second. I enjoyed good banter as much as the next guy, but I got the sense she maybe wasn’t flirting and instead actually didn’t like me, which was weird. I was pretty great. Everyone knew that. “You can be kind of a bitch, you know.”

“Hang on, I’ve got to go write that one in my tear-stained diary.”

“What were you doing at practice, anyway, if not soliciting new customers?”

“None of your business,” she said, and took the money out of my hand. “But I’m a hekamist myself. I’ll do the spell for you.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Okay.”

She didn’t look the way hekamists were supposed to look. Not at all old like the crones you see arguing for hekamists’ rights on TV, or the villainous or misunderstood hekamists in movies; not decrepit and twisted and cackling, or willowy and braless and high on nature. There weren’t supposed to be any
young hekamists anymore at all. Twenty years ago a bunch of them tried to take over the government of France, and now supermarkets and restaurants are constantly under inspection, and it’s illegal to join a coven pretty much everywhere, and so the ones who are left are all going crazy and dying out.

So this girl’s whole life was illegal.

She counted the bills slowly and didn’t look up. “You’re not going to report me, are you?” she asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

“Oh definitely. This is a sting. I’ve got my brother on a wire—he’s a cop—and he’s
dying
to bust the underage hekamist trying to turn the high school baseball team into her sex slaves.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, I would never do that. I’m not a puritan; I don’t care what you do. This is business.”

The hekamist folded the money in half and put it in one of her jacket pockets. Her fire-breathing eyes softened. “Do you know anything about hekame?”

“No.” I grinned. “Are you going to teach me?”

“You wish.”

“So I take it we have a deal?”

She nodded, and I saluted her and backed away. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Echo,” she said. “That’s my name.”

“Echo. See you tomorrow.”

I knew she would do what I asked, and not only because of the money. She struck me as someone who did what she said
and said what she meant.

Also, back then, I assumed a lot of shit. I thought the world would bend to what I needed it to be. If I thought of something, I did it. If I wanted something, I took it. If reality didn’t quite line up to what I had in my head, then reality was the problem, not me, and eventually reality would cave to my demands, just like the hekamist’s daughter had.

I didn’t understand. I’d been nothing but lucky the whole time. The world doesn’t bend for anyone, not even Markos Waters.

The next night, Win was dead.