The Cost of All Things (9 page)

I would’ve stayed with Diana, talking, avoiding my brothers, but Ari came and found us—found Diana, that is. She wasn’t looking for me. She said hello and pulled Diana away, and I knew I had no right to complain, so I stayed sitting in the sand.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ari said, linking her arm with Diana’s. “Let’s drive to Boston and get tattoos.”

“Really?” Diana said.

“No, tattoos are too expensive. Let’s go to New York and dance in the Lincoln Center fountain.”

Diana laughed as if something heavy had been lifted from her shoulders. She glanced at me for a second—with regret, maybe, or disappointment—but she was already following Ari up the dune.

I didn’t watch her go.

What was there to regret? All we’d done was talk.

I watched the crowd as if it were alive, expanding and contracting like a heart. Then I heard a scream. Before I knew I was
doing it, I was standing and running to her.

Diana had tripped and fallen and bashed one side of her face on a cooler so badly it formed an immediate bruise, visible even in the dim light of the bonfire.

She started crying. Ari stood next to her, just looking, stricken.

Somehow my arm wrapped around Diana’s shoulder, all tangled up in her long hair, as I kneeled next to her in the sand. I comforted her.

“It’ll be okay. Shhh, it’s not so bad. That dumbass needs to move his shit, I’m going to kill him. Shhh, shhh. It’s okay.”

I kneeled next to her, touching her but only to comfort and not because I wanted something, and maybe that meant I was the fakest faker out of all the fakers at this party, in this town, in the world: I was pretending to be someone who gave a shit.

I never thought I’d need to go to a hekamist. I’d heard of people getting spells for looks or luck or brains, but if you ask for those things, you must believe you don’t have any to begin with. I wasn’t ugly or dumb or unlucky at all. I was Win Tillman. Varsity shortstop. Boyfriend of the prettiest girl in school. Good grades. Good skin. Good all around. Other people went to hekamists. Not me.

I mean, Ari had her spell, of course, but she didn’t choose to get it, and she was so young and it was such a long time ago that it wasn’t the same. (For the record, I would’ve gotten a spell to erase the sight of my house burning down with my parents inside, too. It’s not something anyone needs in their brain.)

On one side, there were the spelltakers: kind of silly, kind of sad. On the other side, there was me.

But then it started changing. The world, or the way I understood it.

The day after Ari broke down in her bedroom after getting
into the Manhattan Ballet, I had a panic attack and couldn’t go to school. I thought I was dying. I thought I’d absorbed Ari’s misery—Ari, who after that one day, never shed another tear. I was pretty sure my heart was exploding, but I figured my panic would go away as fast as hers did. Faster, because it was only borrowed.

Then I had another panic attack in band when I couldn’t hit the note. Then, over the next couple of weeks, I had panic attacks in my car, in the shower, and on the floor of my bedroom. The floor of my bedroom, the floor of my bedroom, the floor of my bedroom again and again and again. I got to know the bedroom floor very well. Just the feel of the scratchy wall-to-wall carpeting could make me start to lose my breath.

I couldn’t sleep.

Three days in a row, I stayed in bed until two or three p.m. and my mom called me in sick, but I wasn’t sick, I was crying. I cried so much I got dehydrated and fainted. My mom took me to the walk-in clinic, but when I was there I felt fine and looked like myself.

I’d always been prone to sad periods, days of introspection, thinking about things so hard they disassembled and broke into pieces. Markos would call me morose, but he could always cheer me up. This was different.

Nothing was wrong. I was wrong.

I looked up pills online. Sometimes when you’re young the pills have the opposite effect—they make you sadder, more likely to kill yourself. I also heard they make you fat, and I was scared to not
be me both inside and out. So I didn’t tell my mom how bad it got.

I told Ari. Of course I told Ari; we told each other everything. But I probably didn’t tell her completely. I never said, “I think about killing myself.” I said, “I think about dying,” which is totally different because everyone thinks about death sometimes, but not everyone imagines going through with it, picking a belt and beam or a razor and tub.

Not that I thought about that every day. No. Most days I was pretty much fine. I was best with Markos. Pretending was easiest with Markos because I’ve known him forever, and everything’s a show with him anyway.
The Markos Waters Hour
. All I had to do was show up and recite my lines.

It was hard everywhere else. So hard. It hurt to breathe sometimes. My mom took me to an allergist that she couldn’t afford because it was out-of-network, but it wasn’t allergies or the environment or gluten. It was all in me. My mind wouldn’t cooperate. Wouldn’t recognize all that was wonderful about being Win Tillman.

In the fall of junior year, this girl Katelyn had come back from summer break beautiful, and looking at her successful spellwork after my panic attacks came on, I started to consider it. Going to a hekamist, that is. I’d barely made it through a week where I thought I was literally drowning and this girl Katelyn—Ari and Diana called her Kay when they started spending time together—tossed her newly shiny hair at me and seemed fine. I asked Ari what she thought about it.

“I guess if it makes her happy,” Ari said.

“Everyone should do it if it gives you that rack,” Markos said, but I know how to speak Markos, and that actually meant
she’s desperate
.

But I was desperate, too.

There weren’t that many hekamists left—they were dying off. It had been illegal to join a coven for twenty years. There were probably only ten thousand left in the United States and only the one in Cape Cod, an old lady who’d been there forever. So I was surprised when I went to the hekamist’s and the only person in the house was my age.

The girl said her name was Echo, and I liked her right away. Not liked her in a romantic way—those days I couldn’t even make it happen with Ari, who I loved—but she seemed kind. On her kitchen table there was a half-eaten apple next to an array of playing cards; I’d interrupted a game of solitaire. There was something normal about that, I thought. Something human.

I sat opposite the solitaire spread. Echo sat across from me. I wasn’t very good at noticing my surroundings, but I could tell this place was run-down and barely big enough for one person, let alone a family. The couch separated the kitchen from the living room, sitting crooked in the open space. I remembered that because it seemed like you’d always be tripping over it. I knew about small spaces and furniture that didn’t quite fit. I knew about the cheap construction and old carpet that never smelled quite right. Those things made me feel at home.

“Where’s the hekamist?” I said in order to stop thinking about anything else.

“Out,” she said.

“Oh.”

A pause, seconds dripping like a leaky faucet.

“So you’d like a spell.” With her fingertips, Echo picked up the apple core and tossed it in the trash. “What’s wrong with you?”

I could feel something crack and break in my chest; I was going to start crying again for sure. “I’m . . . sad,” I said.

Ridiculous. Such a small, stupid word that in no way touched upon the truth. She should’ve laughed me out of her tiny apartment.

She didn’t. “How sad?”

“Sad enough that I’m sitting here,” I said.

That was almost a joke, but still she didn’t laugh, and not laughing made me feel like I was doing the right thing, and that she was listening and hearing me in a way I hadn’t been listened to or heard in a long time.

“My mother could make you something that would wipe all that away.”

“Great,” I said. “Great.”

“Or I could make it for you.” She glanced up at me. Her eyes were ringed with dark makeup that made the whites seem extra white. “And we could keep it between us.”

I swallowed. She was too young to be a hekamist, which meant she was illegal. If anyone found out, she and her mom and anyone else in their coven would go to jail.

But what did that matter? I needed a spell.

“It’s fine,” I said.

My indifference didn’t seem to make her feel better. Her frown deepened, as if I wasn’t getting something. “My mom charges five thousand dollars for permanent spells.” I didn’t have anywhere near that much money, but I didn’t think about that. “If you wanted to feel okay for a day or week or two, that would be a couple hundred since you’d have to come back every once in a while and re-up, but I won’t do that to you.”

“Great. Thanks,” I said.

“You have five thousand dollars?” she asked, and I sort of half nodded.

“I don’t have it on me, but I can get it.”

“I want to practice some before I give it to you, make sure it’s all right.”

“Fine.”

“Win, I’m going to be in your brain. You’re going to have to be okay with that.”

“Okay. I’m okay with it.”

She frowned and pulled her long sleeves over her hands, clenching them into fists. “You don’t even know me.”

I looked at her and the cards laid out on the table in front of her. I looked at the couch sticking into the room, then back at Echo. Even with my dampened emotions I felt for Echo. Something in the way she held herself, or the depth in her eyes. A young hekamist. She shouldn’t even exist. How did she go anywhere? Meet anyone? For a stark moment I forgot my own drowning and felt how it would be to live in this house, to live Echo’s life.

It would be lonely.

“I trust you,” I said.

Finally she let her face relax into an expression of pure sunshine, a strange contrast with the black leather and fierce makeup. “Great. I’m going to fix you, Win Tillman. You’re going to be as good as new.”

She had me describe how it felt, then, and I tried to tell her. How the world seemed dimmer than it used to be. How when Ari kissed me I didn’t feel anything, or I felt only a crushing panic. She made notes and flipped through cupboards and listened, and I found myself—not happy, but relieved.

I told her about faking normal with Markos and my wariness of drugs and my fear that I wasn’t strong enough to live through it all.

“You are,” she said, and I believed her.

I woke up with sand in my mouth, head resting on my balled-up jacket, Cal Waters’s legs tangled with mine. The light was gray and misty, and the waves hitting the shore sounded like someone retching. No, that
was
someone retching—fifty feet down the beach, on her hands and knees in the wet sand. The bonfire had dimmed to a couple of red embers in black.

I extracted myself from Cal and shook out my jacket. He woke up and rubbed his eyes, which only ground more sand into them. Nothing about this seemed romantic or fun anymore.

“Hey, so, goodbye,” I said.

“Yeah, okay.” He stood up and reached for my hand. To shake it? I clasped mine behind my back, and he dropped his, grinning cheerfully. “Nice to meet you, Kay.”

“Same.”

He leaned forward faster than I could step away in the sand and kissed me, but both of our mouths were flavored with rotting alcohol, and I could see—because I was too startled to close
my eyes—that his eyes weren’t closed, either. He was staring at me while our dry tongues and dirty mouths pressed together like pieces of raw bacon.

Definitely not romantic.

But at least he remembered my name. At least I hadn’t been so bad at kissing that he couldn’t bear to look at me. I waved goodbye to him, already back on the ground and half asleep again, and then made my way up the beach to the parking lot.

A year ago, when I used to hear people talking about the aftermath of some awesome party, I always pictured it brightly lit and hilarious. I never would’ve pictured this group of sad, tired leftovers. I needed to find Ari and Diana and tell them what happened; maybe that would make it real and exciting. Maybe they’d missed me and had stories of their own to tell.

In the parking lot I saw Diana’s car where we left it. Ari was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead.

“Have fun?” she asked when I opened the passenger-side door. Diana lay curled up in the backseat, asleep.

“Yes,” I said, and waited for her to ask more so I could tell her about Cal.

She turned to me, and I could see there were tears on her cheeks, and her normally tough face was quivering. “Something happened,” she said.

My Cal story flew out of my head. She hadn’t even cried at the funeral. “What’s wrong?”

“Diana . . .”

As if Diana sensed she was entering the story, she stirred in
her sleep, turning her head toward the front of the car. I gasped. The left side of her face was a solid bruise, purple and black and mottled.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She fell,” Ari said.

“Oh my god.”

“We were running up the dune. I had this idea. . . . We were going to go to Boston or New York . . . just drive.”

“You were going to go without me?”

Ari had the grace to look guilty, although there was a little anger mixed in, too. “It was spur-of-the-moment.”

“How would I have gotten home?”

“Didn’t seem like you wanted to go home.”

So she’d seen me with Cal. It didn’t seem like such a fun story to share anymore.

“Still, I would’ve gone with you guys,” I said. “If you’re going to go somewhere you should tell me.”

“I’m sorry, Kay. It was just a dumb idea. We would’ve called from the road.”

“Calling from the road isn’t good enough.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re friends.”

Ari pushed her hair out of her face and wiped at her tears roughly. “I don’t know why you’re giving me a hard time. We didn’t go anywhere, did we? We were heading up the dune, Diana fell, and we stayed here.”

I blinked slowly, trying to keep all the muscles of my face
from jumping. They’d planned to leave. They were going to go without telling me. A hundred miles to Boston. Three hundred miles to New York.

But in the end they couldn’t leave. Diana had gotten hurt and they stayed.

Unlike Diana’s horse camp and Ari moving to New York, the idea to drive to New York or Boston had come on suddenly. In order to keep them here, the spell had to act fast and make sure they didn’t even reach the car.

It could’ve been an accident, but it fit too neatly, and anyway the spell worked through accidents and coincidence. They wanted to leave, but they couldn’t. My spell had done that. My spell had hurt Diana.

“Why didn’t you go home?” I asked.

“Didn’t want to scare Diana’s parents.”

“And we waited for you,” Diana said.

I glanced back at her. She was touching her bruised cheek with a finger and working her jaw silently.

I couldn’t believe the spell was that strong.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

Diana nodded, and Ari started the car.

They had tried, but they couldn’t go without me. It was exactly what I’d wanted.

Yes. Exactly what I wanted.

“It’ll be okay,” I said to them both. “It was an accident.”

Of course I didn’t want Diana to get hurt, but a part of me was glad that the hekamist was so good at her job, and that the
spell was working so well, and that they didn’t leave me alone on the beach. It gave me this opportunity to show them who I am. Why they should care. Why we were meant to be friends after all.