The Cost of All Things Read online

  I closed the door behind me and sat across from him. “What happened to you?”

  “I’ve been sick. Where have you been? You haven’t answered any of my texts.”

  “Oh.” Maybe the spell needed me to actually answer him. Whoops. “Sorry about that.”

  “I don’t know who else to talk to. I stopped eating at home for now, which means I’ve been sick and starving, until I realized I could just go grocery shopping and keep the food locked up, but that’s not even the problem.”

  He spoke normally, as if I should understand the words, but I didn’t. I glanced back into the house. “So what is the problem?”

  “It’s my head. And this spell.”

  I sucked in a breath and scrambled to my feet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He laughed, which turned into a bitter cough. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, either. I thought it was just that I couldn’t hit Markos, but things are shifting around in my head, like the paint’s running, or dirty windows are smashing up, and I can’t tell what’s real and what’s—”

  “You tried to hit Markos?”

  “He’s sulking. I think he wanted me to hit him. I might be able to now. I haven’t tried.”

  “What spell are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. A spell. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  I backed toward the door. “Well, I don’t know either. But you’ll feel better now, okay, Cal? We’ll talk later. You can call me in the middle of the night, I promise to pick up.”

  Cal shook his head. “That’s the other thing. I’ve been sleeping right through the night.”

  “Good!”

  “No, not good. I always thought I had insomnia. . . .” He shook his head, almost angrily, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t know why I came here. I won’t bother you anymore.”

  I watched him walk away, clenching my teeth as he went down the steps, expecting to see him trip and fall. Then I unhooked the worry and hung it up with all the rest of them; they were not useful to me. Cal didn’t trip, anyway. He walked away fine. He was sick, but he’d be all right now that we’d talked.

  On my way back through the house to the deck, I could hear laughter. Maybe my pep talk had worked; maybe Ari and Diana were ready to let bygones be bygones and go back to normal. Then, as I got closer, I heard three voices instead of just two. And I knew the third voice.

  “—found that it was totally different, and scary sometimes, and crowded and unfamiliar. I was lonely, too.”

  “But it was worth it?” Ari’s voice.

  “Oh, yeah. It’s good to be lonely. You get to know yourself.”

  Tears stung the back of my eyes and I clamped my hand over my mouth. Mina didn’t know anything about being alone.

  “I sound like such a cliché when I talk about it, but I don’t think I understood before how big the world was. And how old. I saw forts that had been around for centuries. Mountains that had been there for eons.” She laughed a little bit. “It was sort of comforting to be around all these places and people who didn’t care that I’d been sick, and who didn’t look at me as if I were about to die.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ari said. “Not that people think I’m going to die. But my whole life—everyone’s looked at me like I’m fragile. Like I might start sobbing my guts out any second.” She paused. “Except when I’m dancing.”

  “I don’t look at you like that,” Diana said.

  “And that’s why I love you.”

  I knew I should stop listening and walk out there. The spell wasn’t supposed to bring me my friends so that Mina could hang out with them. But I leaned on a kitchen chair and held my breath.

  “Did you ever actually sob your guts out?” Mina asked.

  “No!” Ari’s voice dripped scorn.

  “I cry enough for both of us,” Diana said.

  “Crying’s not as bad as it sounds. I cried in India for a week. Around the third or fourth month, I was totally overwhelmed with the trains and the weird hostels and everyone looking at me like I should know Hindi, and I missed home. And then I’d feel guilty for being annoyed, because I’d made it, I was out, not sick, living my dream, so who cared if I was uncomfortable, right? But you can’t go around peaceful and grateful and zen every second of the day. It’s just not possible.”

  “I love that you guys are talking about letting yourselves cry,” Diana said, and I could hear the tears in her voice, as if talking about crying was enough for them to spring to life. “Like there’s a moment in your lives when you say ‘oh, I’m so upset, but I think I’ll not cry, not today.’”

  “Diana!” Ari said, and there was scuffling and laughing, and I could tell that Ari had thrown herself into the hammock with Diana. The sky was completely dark now. I’d been hiding way too long; they should have at least wondered where I’d gone by now. But they hadn’t.

  I pushed the chair I was holding, which clattered to ground, and rushed onto the deck. Diana and Ari looked up from the hammock where they lay head to toe. Mina sat in a deck chair, the lights from the house glinting off her eyebrow piercing. I started talking before she could make another sound. “Hey guys, sorry about that. Oh, Mina, what are you doing here?”

  “Just saying hello.”

  “Well, hello. We were kind of in the middle of something, though.”

  “No we weren’t,” Ari said. “Mina, are you back for good or just home for the summer?”

  Mina leaned back in her chair, making herself comfortable. “Finished my freshman year at University of Michigan this May. Should be a junior, but chemo slows you down on the APs.”

  “As does backpacking around the world,” I said, but they all took my cheery tone at face value. Mina, who should’ve known what I meant, smiled at me.

  “I wasn’t aware there was a schedule in place,” she said, completely missing the point for the millionth time.

  Here’s the point: it wasn’t just cancer that could take people away from you. Sometimes it was fucking India, too. Mina got better and then she left me. That’s all there was to it.

  “Who was at the door?” Mina asked.

  “Cal.”

  All the muscles in Diana’s face stopped moving. “Are you still dating him?”

  “You were dating Cal Waters?” Mina asked.

  “No—I mean, yes, maybe we were, but we’re not anymore.”

  “Oh my god, Katelyn, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell.” Except that I kissed his brother, Diana—sorry about that.

  “So what did he want? You didn’t break up just now, did you?” Mina asked.

  “No, of course not.” They all looked at me, expecting for more detail. But how could I explain that he was sick and didn’t know why but had to see me? “He . . . he said Markos tried to punch him.”

  “What? Why?” Ari asked. Diana looked as if she wanted to melt through the hammock and into the ground.

  “He said Markos was sulking. Maybe . . . maybe he misses Di. That would be good, right? Because he cares?”

  Diana’s face crumpled, and she turned it toward the ropes of the hammock.

  “Cal came over here to tell you that Markos misses Diana?” Ari asked.

  “Um . . . yeah.” I knew that didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would. “Hey, so, listen—you all are coming out for my birthday dinner, right?”

  “Jeez, Kay,” Ari said.

  “What?”

  “Sensitivity.” Ari pointed at Diana, who had started crying silently. For a moment I felt awful, like a failure of a human being, but then I thought of the spell and how it was working fine and how it didn’t care if I was good or bad and I felt better.

  “I’m definitely coming to your dinner,” Mina said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re not invited.”

  “Sure I am,” Mina said. “You just said ‘you all.’ I’m part of ‘you all.’”

  �
��Yeah,” Ari said, grinning. “She’s ‘you all,’ too. Right, Diana?”

  Diana wiped her eyes and gave Mina a shaky smile. “She’s as ‘you all’ as I am.”

  I took a deep breath. Birthdays used to be our thing, me and Mina. We would eat cake and do each other’s makeup. She would write me a story that made me laugh, and she’d read it to me, doing all the voices. Even when she was sickest. Even the year she gave me four stories and told me that if she wasn’t there next year I should read them one a year and pretend she was doing the voices, and she apologized for not having time to write more but she was too tired, and we cried and fell asleep in her bed.

  If she wrote me a story this year—which she wouldn’t; she hadn’t in years—I would scream and run away.

  But it didn’t matter that Mina horned her way into dinner, and it didn’t matter that Mina bonded with Ari and Diana, because she would inevitably leave—that was what Mina did. It didn’t matter that Cal was a little bit crazy and I had kissed Diana’s crush and lied to her and made her cry and that I couldn’t hang out in hospitals or on carnival rides. None of that mattered.

  The spell worked, and nothing mattered at all.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  I’m the only one of my brothers who has no memory of our dad. None. Not even something hazy like being lifted onto a giant’s shoulders or some other touching Hallmark moment. I was two and half when he died of a heart attack. Cal was six, Dev eight, Brian ten.

  I don’t want pity or weeping or group hugs about it. It’s a fact: I am the youngest. I never had a dad.

  The missing-a-dad-I-never-knew part isn’t what messed me up, though. That’s, like, okay—he seemed like a great guy and it would’ve been nice but I managed to be basically fine anyway. The part that got to me was that the rest of them—Brian and Dev and Cal—got to be in this club together. The Remember When Dad Club. As in, Remember when Dad made us boiled hot dogs every night for a week? Or Remember when Dad built the treehouse in the backyard? Even next-youngest Cal, six years old when Dad died, remembered the Christmas everyone got Legos and we all went to Legoland. My brothers all got to pool those memories together, trade them back and forth. They helped each other reinforce the ones they already had stored. But I was no help with that. Even when I was in these stories, I was mostly asleep on Mom’s lap or crying horribly in the background.

  In a way it felt like we were in two different families: the three of them, who once had two parents, and me, who’s only ever had one.

  And what I wanted, more than Dad, was to be let into that family, the ones who had two parents. I wanted it so bad. I watched them and kept trying over and over to belong with them. The Waters brothers.

  I got pretty good at pretending to be one of them. Confident, funny, flirty but never serious. Steady Bs and the occasional C. Pick a sport, be a team player. Don’t get angry, or sad, or impatient, or excited. Stay cool. They could tell I was a fraud and they gave me shit for it, but no one on the outside could ever tell that I didn’t belong.

  The weird thing was—or, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t all that weird if you thought about it—was that I hadn’t thought about my dad much at all this whole summer. You’d think being confronted by the specter of death and grief and all that shit I might’ve spared a couple minutes for Dad. He was my first major loss, but like I said, it’s not much of a loss when there’s nothing there to remember.

  After I found out Ari erased Win, I started thinking about my little soft baby brain that could barely handle eating and shitting, let alone the death of a person. Ari was like baby me, babbling and oblivious. She couldn’t remember someone who should’ve meant everything to her, like I couldn’t remember my dad.

  She and I, we had been a family of our own: those who loved Win. I was finally a member of an exclusive club—what I’d always wanted with my brothers. And then she’d gone and had herself purposely thrown out of the group.

  I could understand now why my brothers had closed off that part of themselves from me. It wasn’t because they were selfish or mean. They wished I could be in the club, too, to better hold the shared memories. But you’re either in or you’re not. You can’t fake it.

  The worst thing is to be alone with it.

  When she showed up in my living room, I was lying on the couch wrapped tightly in a red fleece blanket, watching a blond man demonstrate amazing 100-percent-guaranteed, stronger-than-steel ceramic knives, set of twelve for $49.99. She turned off the TV and stood in front of me, scowling.

  Part of me wanted to leap off the couch and strangle her for forgetting Win, but the rest of me was too exhausted to move.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I heard you were sulking. I wanted to see it for myself.”

  “What? From who?”

  Ari didn’t answer. I saw her looking over the couch and half-empty bottles of Gatorade and my face, which was probably greasy and pale, not that I’d looked in a mirror in a long while.

  “Why did you mess with Diana?” she asked.

  I swallowed. As bad as I looked, she looked terrible, too, dark circles under her eyes and hands bent awkwardly at her sides, not lithe and bendable like she used to be.

  “She thought you were being real,” Ari said. “You must have gone to a lot of effort to convince her. Why bother?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Shut the fuck up, Ari. Me and Diana, that’s not the issue. You forgot Win. You went in and ripped him out like a cancer. But you weren’t going to die from the memory of him. He wasn’t a cancer. He . . . loved you. And you didn’t care.”

  “I think I must’ve loved him a lot to do what I did.”

  “That is such pathetic bullshit.”

  She shrugged. “You’re right,” she said. “Old Ari was full of shit.”

  My eyes closed, but the blackness didn’t mean she was gone. I could sense her there, breathing. I didn’t know what to say, so we sat in silence.

  “Tell me why you broke Diana’s heart,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. “What do you care?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “You’re a shitty friend, which I think we’ve already established.”

  “And you’re being more of an asshole than usual. Why’d you do it? Was it only so you could feel loved and special for five minutes? That’s inhumane.”

  I sat up straighter on the couch, blanket bunched around my shoulders. “That’s who I am, Ari, in case your memory needs refreshing. I’m the one who messes around. I’m not serious. What did she expect?”

  She kicked my shin. It hurt, but the pain was sharp and red and satisfying. She stumbled, as if kicking me knocked her off balance.

  “I get that you’re mad at me,” she said. “Hell, I’m mad at me, too. But breaking Diana’s heart is a stupid way to get revenge.”

  I froze for what felt like years, and then I burst out laughing. Nothing had been that genuinely funny in weeks.

  And then I had the feeling, for a fleeting moment, that the Ari I used to be friends with was the same one as the one in front of me now, and any second now she would start laughing, too. And she’d sit down and we’d make fun of daytime TV together, and she’d tell my brothers to leave me alone, and I’d make her snort soda out her nose.

  But she didn’t laugh. She wasn’t that girl.

  “This isn’t only about you, you psycho,” I said, pretty nicely, all things considered. “Why don’t you tell me, though, just for fun—what is it that you want me to do? Because here are the options: I leave Diana alone, which is pretty much what I was doing before you showed up. Or I apologize, and I’m not sure I see the point in that. She would know I didn’t mean it and that you’d made me.”

  Those were the best options she could’ve hoped for, but she still looked disappointed. “I want you to be different,” she said.


  I snorted, though it was no longer amusing. “Yeah, well, that makes two of us.” I turned the TV back on.

  “Markos . . .” she started, raising her voice to be heard over the infomercial, but oddly hesitant. “Why do you think I did it?”

  Because you’re a bitch.

  Because you never loved Win.

  Because you were weak.

  “You spared yourself,” I said.

  She shook her head, but I knew I was right.

  “If you really loved him, you would’ve wanted the memories and the pain. You excused yourself from being a human being.”

  I didn’t look at her. My eyes followed the slice of a knife down the screen.

  “What do you know about love?” she asked.

  When I didn’t answer, she finally left me alone.

  But something she’d said wormed its way into my head and I couldn’t get it out. It made the infomercial seem stupid; it made my plan to stay on the couch and never leave seem childish.

  She wanted me to be different. Well, I wanted to be different, too. For real, like different down to the DNA. I wanted to be someone I’d never met before. I wanted to be someone who’d never met me.

  I went upstairs, took a shower, and fell asleep in my own bed. The next morning I snuck out of the house before anyone else woke up and started walking to Diana’s.

  —She’s going to slam the door in my face.

  —Think positive.

  —She’s going to throw a lamp at me and then slam the door in my face.

  —Or maybe she’ll listen.

  —Yeah, right. It’s like I told Ari: I’m not the apology guy. Diana knows that. She knows me.

  —And that’s bad?

  —Yeah. Because I ruined it all like I always knew I would from the night of the bonfire. There were only ever two options: stay away, or complete devastation. I went through door B.

  —Why even go over there, then?

  —Because I need to.

  —Why?

  —Because . . . maybe she’ll forgive me.

  —But you said—

  —If there’s even a chance she might forgive me, I have to try.