The Cost of All Things Read online

  “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 end 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, etcetera. 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 they 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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  THE DAY BEFORE

  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 that 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, rubbin
g 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 some business?”

  “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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  PART II

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  My favorite memory of Ari is from a dance—no surprise. Not one of her performances, which were beautiful and complicated like moving sculpture, but the Homecoming dance junior year. We’d been going out for a few months, and I knew I liked her—a lot—but Homecoming changed everything.

  It didn’t start out great. The suit my mother had found at Goodwill and the homemade corsage my sister Kara had made for Ari from a neighbor’s rosebush—they made me feel like an imposter, like a con man who’d lied his way into someone else’s life. I blamed that for the black cloud that followed me into the gym, even though the truth was I’d been under the cloud for days—maybe weeks.

  (Maybe even my whole life. For as long as I could remember there’d been a weight attached to me. Some days it barely registered on the scale; others it felt as heavy as sandbags. This started out as a sandbag day.)

  It didn’t help that dating Ari felt like the biggest act of fakery of all. She was so beautiful and talented and strong and blah blah blah. Those were the things that had drawn me to her, but now that we were together, her beauty and talent and strength seemed to keep me at arm’s length. I was average in every way. I played shortstop (decently) and the trumpet (badly). I had a sister and a mother who I loved, plus good grades and loyal friends. Ari was exceptional. She was one of the best ballet dancers in the country. She had overcome a tragic past. She was vivid, the part of the painting the artist spent all day on before hurriedly sketching me into a corner.

  On the night of the dance, once we arrived at the gym, Ari found her friends and went off to dance. Markos and I stood in a corner trading Markos’s flask back and forth.

  “Hottest girl in the grade?” Markos asked.

  “Ari.”

  “Come on. For real.”

  “I’m for real. What are you saying about my girlfriend?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I’ll rephrase. Hottest girl who I could hook up with?”

  “Serena Simonsen.”

  “You came up with that quick! You sure you don’t want to go for her yourself?”

  “Dude, come on. You know I wouldn’t.”

  He saluted with the flask. “Always such a good boy.”

  Across the room I spotted Ari dancing, and I could tell she was really trying to let loose—stop counting the beats, stop spotting her turns. She wanted to fit in with the rest of us normals. The fact that I knew her well enough to know what she was thinking hit me with a pang right between my ribs, and I felt sorry for Markos that he thought being a “good boy” was a bad thing.

  “How about Kay Charpal?” I said, since she was dancing right next to Ari.

  Markos shook his head. “Too Frankenspelled.”

  “Half the girls here have had a spell touch-up. Who cares?”

  “Most of them looked fine before. You remember Kay’s old face . . .” He twisted his own into a sour expression.

  “You are such an ass.”

  “I’m honest. Not my fault if people can’t handle the truth.”

  “I’d say Diana, but then Ari would kill you.”

  “Plus I require a bare minimum of a personality.” He laughed and checked his watch.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “What?” His eyes opened wide, as if that might make him look innocent.

  “Please tell me you didn’t plan something.”

  Markos grinned. “I’ve got a legacy to uphold.”

  Markos’s older brothers had been telling us for years about their Homecoming pranks. Brian brought a goat in a tuxedo as his “date,” Dev rigged the basketball hoop with a laser light projector that spelled out insults onto one of the walls, and Cal replaced all of the DJ’s music with the Jackson 5’s “ABC.”

  “Didn’t they do theirs senior year?”

  Markos tapped the side of his nose. “The admin will be watching me like a hawk senior year. This is all about the element of surprise.”

  He peered into the crowd intently, and I watched the dancing, trying to see what he saw. Everyone seemed normal and happy to me. They all belonged exactly where they were. W
hen I turned back to Markos, he’d gone. I thought about trying to find him but figured it would ruin the surprise, so I took a deep breath and elbowed my way into the crowd to join Ari. She shouted “Win!” and tucked her arm into mine, still dancing. I shuffled back and forth, trying not to step on her.

  She had on a strapless blue dress, longer in the back than the front. I’d seen her bare, slightly freckly shoulders before—in her performances—and maybe that’s why I pictured her being lifted up overhead, arching her back and soaring. I couldn’t do that for her, so I shuffled.

  When a slow song came on, she turned to face me, putting her hands on my shoulders. I placed mine on her waist and swayed back and forth. The blue material of her dress was warm from her body but so shiny I thought my hands might slide off. I was afraid to hold her too tight—not that I thought I’d hurt her, because I knew she was way stronger than me, but because it might give away how much I wanted to hold her, and she’d have to pull back, and it would become clear that she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her. Our dancing—our relationship—balanced on a seesaw. If I put my full weight into it, I’d go crashing down and she’d fly away.

  “Feel the music in your core,” Ari said in a European accent—her “ballet master” voice. “What does the music say to you?”

  I listened. “It says, ‘I am a boy-band ballad with nonsensical lyrics.’”

  Ari laughed. “How dare you. I’m thinking of getting these lyrics tattooed on my butt.”

  “‘Waking this spire for you’?”

  “It’s ‘quaking desire for you,’ actually.”

  “Well, of course when you say it, it’s poetry.”

  She smiled at me, a welcome kick in the ribs. Before I could chicken out I leaned in and gave her a kiss. She was still smiling when I pulled back, and maybe her cheeks were redder than before.

  “You’re kind of the best, Win Tillman,” she said.