The Cost of All Things (26 page)

Echo’s skin, always pale, seemed clear and fragile as glass in the shop’s harsh bare-bulb light. When I slapped her and the bright red hand mark appeared, it only made the whiteness seem brighter. She swallowed and did not break eye contact.

“You knew this about my parents and you still blackmailed me.”

“I . . . You don’t understand. I’d been alone for nearly twenty years. Win was important to me. I was . . . upset . . . about what you did to him.”

“Why do people say I did it
to
Win?” I asked. “I did it to myself. No one can do anything to Win anymore.”

“That’s not how it feels.”

“Things you do to yourself do have an effect on other people,” Kay said from where she was kneeling with Markos and Diana. I hadn’t noticed she was there, and it was hard to focus on her. Even her voice sounded muffled.

Echo wrapped her black-clad arms around her stomach. “I
have done some bad things, and I’ve done some good. But the world isn’t fair.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

Echo exhaled and spoke gently. “There’s nothing I can say to make it not true.” She reached into one of the many pockets of her jacket and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag. It was filled with crackers and cheese; she held it out to me warily, as if I might swat it out of her hand. “I made you your spell.”

“Is that supposed to be an apology? Here’s your dancing spell, everything’s better now?”

“Everything’s
not
better. Win’s still dead. Your parents are dead. My mom will be dead in a few weeks, since I don’t have the money to leave her and get a new coven.” She shook the bag; the cheese smeared the plastic. “But you can dance again, if you want. I promise.”

I took a step closer to where she stood near the door to the woodshop. She did not flinch away, just left the plastic bag hanging in the air between us.

I turned from her and stared out the woodshop’s door into the mess of a store as if trying to clear it all away with my mind. Wanting to erase what was right in front of me. Wishing to deny the truth.

Cal was out there.

The person who killed my parents.

There it was: the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about. The thing I wished more than anything not to be true, but that Echo had confirmed wholly and completely.

I lost my parents.

It was a long time ago. It was today. It was all the time. I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t contain it. They’d been taken from me, and I missed them, and the hole in my heart was a fatal wound.

I shuddered and saw that I was holding my sore wrist. For once, I didn’t feel the usual isolated ache. Instead the pain covered all my skin, paper-thin, and sank into muscle and bone and blood.

It didn’t make it any better that the memory of the day they’d died had been removed. In fact, it was worse. Instead of knowing exactly what terrible thing had happened, I imagined a thousand different ways of it happening, each worse than the last. I saw them die over and over, their faces surprised or angry or sad. I wore my headphones or I didn’t. I slowed them down or I didn’t. I cried or I didn’t. In each one, Cal ran from the house and hid. He’d been hiding ever since. Until now.

Now I knew what had really happened.

My last night on earth, a Saturday, began like many others. I picked up Ari and Markos and we went to the beach in my truck. It was raining and tourist season wouldn’t start for another couple of weeks, so we had the place to ourselves.

It had been a bad day. I hadn’t left my room, not even to eat, and so my tongue felt fat and heavy in my mouth, my stomach pinched with hunger, and my mind filled with sludge. Like the wet sand that worked its way between our toes as we picked our way down the shore.

“Remind me why we aren’t at the diner or someone’s clean, dry basement?” Ari asked. Her shirt was wet and sticking to her body in a way I know I should’ve found attractive—Markos took a couple of long looks—but it seemed clinical, like a diagram of a female body in health class.

“I’ve arranged a special treat,” Markos said. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”

Ari sighed and swung my arm over her shoulder. Knowing
Markos, his surprise could’ve been legitimately great—a barbecue dinner, or a nighttime whale-watching cruise—or it could have been nothing at all, and he wanted to own us for the evening.

It could’ve even been that he wanted to cheer me up.

Ari and Markos riffed back and forth as the sun started to go down. Since it was raining, there was no subtle sunset; it got grayer and grayer until it was black, and Markos flipped on a flashlight.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” he said, pointing the light at his chin.

Ari grabbed it from him. “And a douchebag prowled the beach, slowly drowning his friends to death.”

Ari handed the flashlight to me and I looked into the bulb. It was my turn to continue the scary story, but all I could think to say was the scary truth, so I didn’t say anything. I shone the light at Markos: grinning, confident, reliable Markos, hair blackened by rain and falling into his eyes. Then I shone it at Ari: funny, dedicated, tough Ari, skin even more glowing with rain dripping over it and the flashlight making her squint. I couldn’t see it then, but I see now: they loved me. Wholly, completely. And not like Kara and my mom. Ari and Markos loved me because they
chose
me. How incredible.

At the time I saw their faces and felt their love like a burden. As if each of them had installed their own iron ring around my heart, and when they wanted to punish me all they had to do was make eye contact and the iron would cinch a little tighter.

So I flipped off the light.

Markos “hey”ed and grabbed it from me in the sudden dark. Dark on the beach, this far out, was different from dark in town. The ocean was pure blackness and suddenly loud, like the light had been keeping it in check and now it could scream. The dunes seemed endless, a desert to cross back to cars and people and life.

“Dude, we need the light,” Markos said, half laughing, as he fiddled with the button. “That’s how she’s going to find us.”

“She?” I said as Markos’s beam hit a girl’s figure not ten feet away. Ari screamed and I grabbed her hand, but not to comfort her—to steady myself. The girl now stepping closer to our small circle was Echo.

“Hey, you’re here,” Markos said. He immediately adopted the tone he took with waiters and cleaning ladies and other service staff: self-important, chummy. “You’ve got it?”

Echo held up a bag filled with three small, round white pastries. “As you ordered, sir,” she said.

Markos laughed and grabbed the bag out of her hands, but she wasn’t amused. She kept staring at me. I must’ve looked terrified, because she shook her head slightly.

“What are they, Markos?” Ari asked. She didn’t sound entirely pleased.

“Why don’t you try one and find out?” Markos said. He opened the bag and ate a pastry in one bite, then handed the package to Ari.

We watched him, all of us—even Echo. He crossed his arms over his chest, waiting. At first it happened so slowly I didn’t
notice. But then I heard Ari gasp, and I shook myself out of my fog, because Markos was floating five feet above the ground and rising fast.

At ten feet he let out a yell and zoomed over our heads, swimming through the air.

“You’ve only got a few minutes, so don’t go too high,” Echo said, but Markos was already climbing, flapping his arms like a butterfly and disappearing into the dark and rain.

“Get up here, Win!” he called.

Ari looked at the bag and then at Echo. “Are these safe?”

Echo shrugged. “They’ll let you become impervious to gravity for a while. Nothing about that sounds safe to me.”

“And side effects?”

“Unpleasant. But since it’s a temporary spell, they won’t last long.”

“I have a memory spell from way back. Will the side effects be a problem?”

Echo considered her. I had a brief, terrified worry that she would lie to Ari to hurt her—I thought of nearly kissing Echo in the truck, and what Echo must think of Ari, my girlfriend—but then I shook it off. Echo wouldn’t do that, even if she was jealous. “No. You should be fine.”

Markos whooped and Ari looked at me, eyes sparkling. “Well?” she said.

“How could we not?” I asked.

Ari laughed, trying to sound unworried, and ate her pastry. “Mascarpone. Delicious.”

“Thank you,” Echo said.

Ari handed me the bag from shoulder height. “Holy shit! Win, hurry up!”

She spun away into the sky. Already she was more graceful than Markos. Her ballet training showed as she twirled and tumbled in the rain. I opened the bag, but Echo grabbed it out of my hands before I could fish out the last pastry.

“What the hell?”

“Have you taken your other one yet?” she asked quietly. I shook my head. “Then you can’t do this, Win. The side effects—”

“Come on!” I said. It came as something of a shock that I wanted to fly. I hadn’t wanted anything in so long. “I’ll take the other spell as soon as I get home.”

“Please trust me.”

“You said it wouldn’t mess with Ari’s side effects. Why am I different?”

She looked at me for a long moment, rain making her hair stick to her forehead so that her eyes seemed bigger. “Because you are.”

I reached for the bag but she turned away, quicker than me in the wet sand. Markos yelped and then landed nearby with a thud.

He hoisted himself to his feet, swayed, and then barfed. On his side now, he moaned. “I feel like shit,” he said.

“It’ll wear off,” Echo told him.

“Oh man. Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you.”

“The spell makes you weightless physically. Mentally, it
brings you down. Way down.” She said it loud enough for Markos to hear, but she was staring straight at me.

“What am I supposed to tell them?” I muttered. Ari buzzed by my head, lightly tapping me with her pointed toe. Markos swore loudly, a string of uninterrupted curses.

“Not my problem. I can’t let you have this.” She shook the bag.

“What, because of some sort of hekamist’s code of ethics?” I meant it sarcastically, but she nodded.

“Something like that.”

“Please for the love of god kill me!” Markos shouted. Echo looked at me pointedly.

“But Markos paid you for three. . . .”

“I’ll take it out of your tab.”

Ari floated to the ground, as graceful as always, until both feet touched sand. Then she shuddered and sank to her knees. Very slowly she lowered her forehead straight down until it rested on the sand, like someone praying.

“I hate you, Markos,” Ari said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m going to hold my breath until I stop breathing forever.”

“Ari?” I said.

“I hate you, too, Win.”

Something flared in my chest, and it took a second to figure out why my back clenched up and my jaw ached. I was angry. Not at Echo for denying me flight. At my supposed friends, for—what? Co-opting my sadness?

Aching and moaning on the ground, wailing and gnashing their teeth. This wasn’t the same as Ari’s freakout over the Manhattan Ballet, which at least was genuine, even if it didn’t last very long. This felt like a parody of what I was living, day in, day out. I knew they weren’t doing it on purpose, but it didn’t matter. They took what was horrible and secret and
mine
and lurched around like drunks, proclaiming it to the world.

And what was worse, they got to fly. I never got to fly, so why did I feel like shit? Where’s the balance in that?

“I have your money,” I said to Echo.

Her face lit up and she grabbed my wrist from excitement. I thought she might try to kiss me, and so I yanked my hand away.

“I’ve got to go get it.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Yes, I thought. Let’s go to Ari’s house, distract Ari, and get the money from the back of Ari’s closet. Then let’s go to the shitty house at the edge of town, into my tiny hole of a bedroom that smells like sweaty socks, dig below my underwear, open the Tupperware container, and scarf down that cheese sandwich. I had reached that point. This was it. The lowest moment. Enough.

I walked over to Ari and touched her shoulder. She moaned, and I whispered into her ear. “Ari, I forgot something at your place.”

“So go get it.”

“Why don’t you come? The fun’s over.”

“Seriously, your voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Go get your whatever.”

“You could come—”

“I said go away!” she shouted. “Leave me alone. I don’t want you here, Win.”

“Would you shut the hell up already?” Markos said, then coughed so hard he nearly barfed again.

I left her and went back to Echo. “I can’t leave them here like this.”

“I can stay with them. Go get it and come back.” She grinned and hugged me quickly, a flash of arms in the dark.

I handed her the flashlight and bent over Ari again, intending to kiss her on the cheek. Before I could, she threw a handful of sand in my eyes. “Get out of here!” she screeched, then covered her head with her arms and wailed.

I didn’t try again. That was the goodbye I felt I deserved, even if, somewhere distant in my brain, I knew it was just her side effects talking.

I walked to the truck in the dark. It felt farther than it should have, like the parking lot was shrinking away with every step, but eventually I reached it and my truck and started toward Ari’s.

The road to Ari’s. This is the important part. No witnesses, only me. A road I’d driven hundreds of times before. It was a wet night, yes, but the road was empty. No other cars. No animals, no nothing.

Did I have a moment of weakness? See the tree and let go of the wheel? Could I have planned this, somewhere, in a dark recess of my mind, while Ari and Markos floated overhead and Echo watched me too closely?

That’s one way this could’ve ended. The other is the randomness of the universe: something so small so as to be functionally unmeasurable distracted me and a series of inevitable events pulled me toward the tree. No human intention or reason had any part in it.

Or it could’ve ended through hekame. I’d been joined in the truck by something invisible, fathomless and unmovable. And that thing pushed my arms. A force bore down on them and turned the wheel to the left, off the road, into a tree. Straight into oblivion.

But those are only theories. Only I know what happened.

In the moment that the crash became inevitable and unavoidable, I had enough time to notice the tree and my course, and to remember Mom and Kara and Ari and Markos perfect and loved and to hope that I had somewhere to go after this—somewhere where I was weightless, careless, free—before the truck crashed.

One of the strangest parts of being depressed is how it affects memory. When I was depressed, I couldn’t remember anything particularly happy ever happening to me. Things I had previously assumed were happy seemed false and empty. The good past faded epically far away, and the good present, well, that was pretty much an oxymoron.

But when I hit the tree, all that cleared away—the sadness filter my memory had been set to—and I remembered moments of pure happiness.

Playing catch with Markos as kids.

Holding Kara when she came home from the hospital.

Ari laughing at something I’d said.

Birthday cakes. Big wins. Stupid jokes. Surprise As.

Lying in a sleeping bag in the backyard. Which house, it didn’t matter, because the sky was the same at all of them, vast and cold, twinkling brightly, beautiful and remote.

For a second I remembered it all and loved it all with my whole heart.

And then I died.