But then it started changing. The world, or the way I understood it.
The day after Ari broke down in her bedroom after getting in to the Manhattan Ballet, I had a panic attack and couldn’t go to school. I thought I was dying. I thought I’d absorbed Ari’s misery—Ari, who after that one day, never shed another tear. I was pretty sure my heart was exploding, but I figured my panic would go away as fast as hers did. Faster, because it was only borrowed.
Then I had another panic attack in band when I couldn’t hit the note. Then, over the next couple of weeks, I had panic attacks in my car, in the shower, and on the floor of my bedroom. The floor of my bedroom, the floor of my bedroom, the floor of my bedroom again and again and again. I got to know the bedroom floor very well. Just the feel of the scratchy wall-to-wall carpeting could make me start to lose my breath.
I couldn’t sleep.
Three days in a row, I stayed in bed until two or three p.m. and my mom called me in sick, but I wasn’t sick, I was crying. I cried so much I got dehydrated and fainted. My mom took me to the walk-in clinic, but when I was there I felt fine and looked like myself.
I’d always been prone to sad periods, days of introspection, thinking about things so hard they disassembled and broke into pieces. Markos would call me morose, but he could always cheer me up. This was different.
Nothing was wrong. I was wrong.
I looked up pills online. Sometimes when you’re young the pills have the opposite effect—they make you sadder, more likely to kill yourself. I also heard they also make you fat, and I was scared to not be me both inside and out. So I didn’t tell my mom how bad it got.
I told Ari. Of course I told Ari; we told each other everything. But I probably didn’t tell her completely. I never said, “I think about killing myself.” I said, “I think about dying,” which is totally different because everyone thinks about death sometimes, but not everyone imagines going through with it, picking a belt and beam or a razor and tub.
Not that I thought about that every day. No. Most days I was pretty much fine. I was best with Markos. Pretending was easiest with Markos because I’ve known him forever, and everything’s a show with him anyway. The Markos Waters Hour. All I had to do was show up and recite my lines.
It was hard everywhere else. So hard. It hurt to breathe sometimes. My mom took me an allergist that she couldn’t afford because it was out-of-network. But it wasn’t allergies or the environment or gluten. It was all in me. My mind wouldn’t cooperate. Wouldn’t recognize all that was wonderful about being Win Tillman.
In the fall of junior year, this girl Katelyn had come back from summer break beautiful, and looking at her successful spellwork after my panic attacks came on, I started to consider it. Going to a hekamist, that is. I’d barely made it through a week where I thought I was literally drowning and this girl Katelyn—Ari and Diana called her Kay when they started spending time together—tossed her newly shiny hair at me and seemed fine. I asked Ari what she thought about it.
“I guess if it makes her happy,” Ari said.
“Everyone should do it if it gives you that rack,” Markos said, but I know how to speak Markos, and that actually meant she’s desperate.
But I was desperate, too.
There weren’t that many hekamists left—they were dying off. It had been illegal to join a coven for twenty years. There were probably only ten thousand left in the US and only the one in Cape Cod, an old lady who’d been there forever. So I was surprised when I went to the hekamist’s by school and the only person in the house was my age.
The girl said her name was Echo, and I liked her right away. Not liked her in a romantic way—those days I couldn’t even make it happen with Ari, who I loved—but she seemed kind. On her kitchen table there was a half-eaten apple next to an array of playing cards; I’d interrupted a game of solitaire. There was something normal about that, I thought. Something human.
I sat opposite the solitaire spread. Echo sat across from me. I wasn’t very good at noticing my surroundings, but I could tell this place was run-down and barely big enough for one person, let alone a family. The couch separated the kitchen from the living room, sitting crooked in the open space. I remembered that because it seemed like you’d always be tripping over it. I knew about small spaces, and furniture that didn’t quite fit. I knew about the cheap construction and old carpet that never smelled quite right. Those things made me feel at home.
“Where’s the hekamist?” I said in order to stop thinking about anything else.
“Out,” she said.
“Oh.”
A pause, seconds dripping like a leaky faucet.
“So you’d like a spell.” With her fingertips, Echo picked up the apple core and tossed it in the trash. “What’s wrong with you?”