We’d heard that hekamists couldn’t cure people, but we’d also heard the rumors: that you had to find the right hekamist. That covens gave their members an extended lifespan. That hekamists stopped curing people in retaliation for the government making joining covens illegal twenty years ago. And Mina was sick—possibly dying, we didn’t know—so we had to try.
“None of that’s true,” the hekamist said. Her face was so full of lines her eyes almost disappeared. She wore a white lab coat and spoke in a dry, lecturing tone. “A hekamist operates like a spiritual accountant. We operate in three areas—traditionally, the body, mind, and soul; or the physical, mental, and the aura, as I prefer. Say your budget has plenty of smarts but nothing allocated in the beauty department.” I could have sworn that everyone in the room looked at me, except Mina. “We rearrange the way that resources are allocated so that some of the brains stockpile is converted to beauty. When someone is as sick as Mina is—and I’m so sorry, my dear—the cost to her mental abilities could be catastrophic.”
“She’d live, though?” my mom asked. Mina had inherited our mother’s sleek black hair, dark smooth skin, and elegant nose, though not her tasteful fashion sense and obsessive gardening habit. I’d inherited my dad’s sallow, acne-prone skin and small eyes, and I didn’t know what else, since he spent most of his time in Boston earning us a lot of money so my mother could garden in peace.
The hekamist shook her head. “She’d be a vegetable.”
Mina sighed and my parents started to argue between themselves in whispers. “If there was even a chance, the doctor would’ve told us,” I said to Mina.
“And lose all his future business?” she answered, running her hand over her newly bald head. She hadn’t yet found a hat that didn’t itch like hell. She whispered so the hekamist wouldn’t hear us. “I hate this place.”
“What do you mean? It’s fine.”
“Don’t you feel weird? This is where people go when they’re desperate.” The hekamist was watching us, and Mina smiled at her as she lowered her voice even more. “They can’t live with themselves.”
“Tons of people get spells.”
“People do extreme things when they hate themselves.”
“I hate cancer,” I said. “You hate cancer, right?”
“That’s like hating snow or the color red.”
She didn’t explain what she meant by that, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think she meant cancer was simply a thing, like snow, and there was no point hating it because it didn’t care about you. Hating it wouldn’t change it, it only meant you were holding on to hate. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything to say back to her, and then we were getting up and thanking the hekamist for her time and fleeing to our car in the lot across the street.
I thought of that conversation when I went for my beauty spell three years later. Mina hadn’t said much when I told her I was doing it. Not surprising, with half the world between us. Her response email was only a line long—“No time here. Good luck. Love you.”—like she was sending a telegraph and paying by the word, instead of dealing with spotty internet cafés in Uttar Pradesh. She could’ve written more, but she didn’t care. She’d left me.
And I thought of it again when I got the friendship binding spell. While I waited for the hekamist to make the spell, in a small living room totally unlike the antiseptic faux-doctor we’d gone to for Mina, I remembered what Mina had said: Everyone who sat in this chair was desperate, and they hated themselves.
I thought about it, and as much as I wanted to disagree with Mina, it was true. I was desperate, and I hated myself. Everything she said about spelltakers was true.
The hekamist unwrapped a new box of cookies and shook out a handful onto the counter. “We call this kind of spell a hook,” she said, fiddling with the cookies and a jagged stone. “You eat one, and you give one to each of your friends, and they won’t be able to leave you.”
“How long will it last?”
“Good question. Good, good, good. How much can you pay?”
“I’ve got four thousand dollars.” I’d taken out the daily max from my savings account and emptied my mother’s wallet for four days in a row. Mom hadn’t even noticed. The tall stack of crisp bills sat in the middle of the table, incongruous in the dingy house.
The hekamist stopped moving and turned to look at me. “That’s enough to make it permanent.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“People grow up. People change. Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.” I pushed the stack of bills so that the money fanned out over the table. “I won’t be alone.”
The hekamist didn’t say anything else and turned back to the counter. Eventually she presented me with a plate of four cookies. I poked at them. “There’s an extra one,” I said.
She looked down at the plate, as if trying to focus and count moving objects. “Ah . . . I see. Well, keep it. You never know.”