The Cost of All Things Read online

  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 the 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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  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 Win’s sister 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 Kara—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 was 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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Two weeks before moving day, a Friday mid-July, Echo found me at work the Sweet Shoppe, a tourist spot on the main drag down the block from Markos’s family’s hardware store.

  The best part of the Sweet Shoppe was the cold, which sank into my bones and numbed them. And once I got into a rhythm, time passed quickly. Bend, scoop, plop, extend. Bend, scoop, plop, extend. I didn’t have to think about it or anything else. Like the fact that Markos refused to give me five thousand dollars. Like the fact that I botched another practice session that morning and managed to twist my ankle on a wobbly balancé. Like the fact Diana seemed guarded and mysterious since the bonfire, but claimed nothing was going on.

  Echo arrived like a black cloud, a blight on the tourists’ pastel lives. I could feel her approaching, though I kept my eyes down on the ice cream case. Rocky Road. Peanut Brittle. Mint Chocolate Chip.

  A black-painted fingernail tapped on the glass.

  “Oh, hi,” I said.

  “I’m here to collect.” Her glare was even more potent than I remembered, fierce enough to melt the ice cream between us, but for some reason I got that partial memory again: lightness, like feathers.

  That inexplicable feeling made it easier to pretend to be tough. “I don’t have it.”

  “It’s been two weeks,” she said.

  “Twelve days.”

  “Sure, argue with me. You must really want everyone to know your secret.”

  “I don’t, but I also don’t have five thousand dollars. So I’m kind of in a tricky situation.”

  “Doesn’t seem that tricky to me.”

  I squeezed the metal handle of the ice cream scoop and rotated my wrist. It cracked and popped from when I’d fallen and bruised it the day before. Curve, I told myself, and then Echo and I watched as my wrist bent ninety degrees and my elbow refused to bend at all. That wasn’t a curve. It was a dead end. I tried to shake it out, but only succeeded in hitting myself in the side. I could’ve sworn, for a half a second, Echo was going to say something sympathetic.

  “Look,” she said finally, expression a hair softer than before. “I’ll give you a break. If you can come up with four thousand, we can call it even.”

  I thought of the money I’d saved working at the Sweet Shoppe, and the money I’d pocketed from not buying new pointe shoes all the time. Still, I didn’t even have a quarter of that. “I might be able to get you a thousand.”

  Echo bit her bottom lip and ran her right hand up and down her left arm. Finally she shook her head. “Not good enough. I need at least four to be sure, and I need it now.” She muttered to herself something that sounded like, “Running out of time.”

  “You should take my thousand and leave me alone. Four thousand imaginary dollars is the same as five thousand imaginary dollars. Might as well make it five hundred thousand. I can’t pay.”

  “How do you think this is going to go?” she asked, leaning onto the glass countertop so she could whisper. There was a line forming behind her, but I didn’t dare tell her to leave, even with my manager glaring from the register. “I was at the funeral. It was packed, but I saw you up front with his mom and sister, pretending to be sad. Pretending you gave a shit. Everyone saw you. Everyone felt so bad for you. The whole town came out, all of them pitying poor Ari Madrigal. People with real grief. People who were actually sad—who are still sad, and who don’t know what to do about it.” The tremor in her voice came through despite the whisper. She blinked rapidly and leaned in closer. “What do you think’s going to be their reaction when I tell them all that you were faking it all along? That you took a spell to make things easier for yourself? That you never deserved someone like Win in the first place?”

  “Please . . . don’t,” I said. The pointlessness of asking made me wince.

  “It’s not up to me. I’m already giving you a break.”

  “I’m trying!”

  “People pity you, but everybody loved Win. You may not remember, but I do. Everyone. Loved. Win. Are you ready for people to hate you instead of pity you?”

  The people in the line behind her started to grumble. I could see my manager out of the corner of my eye, frowning. “I don’t have it.”

  “Really? No spare insurance money lurking around? Nothing your aunt couldn’t lend you?”

  “We’re moving to New York in two weeks. We need that money.”

  Her face twisted. “Right. New York.”

  “To dance. I got accepted to the Manhattan Ballet junior corps.” I was going to New York. I had to go to New York. I didn’t know why I was explaining myself to Echo, but I repeated myself to make the words sound true. “I’m going to be a dancer.”

  “So get out, then. Leave.” She said it like a dare. “Doesn’t matter if everyone knows your secret if you’re gone, right? Go ahead.” I didn’t say anything, and she tapped the glass once more for emphasis. “If you’re still here, though, you’re going to owe me. One more week.”

  She left, and I should’ve gone straight back to bend, scoop, plop, extend. The line of customers approached and made their orders, expecting me to ob
ey. My manager turned back to the register, content now that the black cloud was gone.

  But I didn’t keep working. My mind raced, totally out of the rhythm. I dropped the scoop into a tub of chocolate and took off after Echo, not even bothering to remove my pink frilly apron.

  I followed her past the downtown shops, through the residential neighborhood where Markos and Diana lived, past the high school, across the playing fields, and straight to the old hekamist’s house. Echo unlocked the door and went inside.

  Echo lived there too.

  The hekamist’s daughter. She’d said she had one—I remembered her mentioning it, in one of the only full memories I have of the day I got my spell.

  I sat across the road and watched the house. Sad, shuffling people came and went, but no Echo. When the door opened, I caught sight of the hekamist.

  So that was how Echo knew about my spell. Maybe the whole thing was some sort of con they were running, a mother-daughter grift, the hekamist making spells for people and then the daughter asking them to pay to keep the secret.

  At one point, Echo left the house again. But the hekamist kept answering the door, ushering people in and out. Probably offering them a cup of tea.

  When it started to get dark, the hekamist opened the door to no one, and stood on the front steps staring at me.

  After thirty seconds of eye contact, she began to cross the street. She took every step deliberately, watching me the whole way. I tried to stand, but my balance was all off and my feet tingled painfully, and so I wobbled in the dirt.

  “I thought it was you,” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “The ballet dancer. Are you ballet dancing again?”

  “No. I still can’t.”

  “Traded it in. Lost and gained. Prices paid.” She spoke casually, with the intonations of a regular conversation but none of its meaning.

  I took a deep a breath. “I know what’s going on with you and Echo.”