In the parking lot I saw Diana’s car where we left it. Ari was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead.
“Have fun?” she asked when I opened the passenger side door. Diana lay curled up in the back seat, asleep.
“Yes,” I said, and waited for her to ask more so I could tell her about Cal.
She turned to me, and I could see there were tears on her cheeks, and her normally tough face was quivering. “Something happened,” she said.
My Cal story flew out of my head. She hadn’t even cried at the funeral. “What’s wrong?”
“Diana . . .”
As if Diana sensed she was entering the story, she stirred in her sleep, turning her head toward the front of the car. I gasped. The left side of her face was a solid bruise, purple and black and mottled.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She fell,” Ari said.
“Oh my god.”
“We were running up the dune. I had this idea. . . . We were going to go to Boston or New York . . . just drive.”
“You were going to go without me?”
Ari had the grace to look guilty, although there was a little anger mixed in, too. “It was spur-of-the-moment.”
“How would I have gotten home?”
“Didn’t seem like you wanted to go home.”
So she’d seen me with Cal. It didn’t seem like such a fun story to share anymore.
“Still, I would’ve gone with you guys,” I said. “If you’re going to go somewhere you should tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Kay. It was just a dumb idea. We would’ve called from the road.”
“Calling from the road isn’t good enough.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re friends.”
Ari pushed her hair out of her face and wiped at her tears roughly. “I don’t know why you’re giving me a hard time. We didn’t go anywhere, did we? We were heading up the dune, Diana fell, and we stayed here.”
I blinked slowly, trying to keep all the muscles of my face from jumping. They’d planned to leave. They were going to go without telling me. A hundred miles to Boston. Three hundred miles to New York.
But in the end they couldn’t leave. Diana had gotten hurt and they stayed.
Unlike Diana’s horse camp and Ari moving to New York, the idea to drive to New York or Boston had come on suddenly. In order to keep them here, the spell had to act fast and make sure they didn’t even reach the car.
It could’ve been an accident, but it fit too neatly, and anyway the spell worked through accidents and coincidence. They wanted to leave, but they couldn’t. My spell had done that. My spell had hurt Diana.
“Why didn’t you go home?” I asked.
“Didn’t want to scare Diana’s parents.”
“And we waited for you,” Diana said.
I glanced back at her. She was touching her bruised cheek with a finger and working her jaw silently.
I couldn’t believe the spell was that strong.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
Diana nodded, and Ari started the car.
They had tried, but they couldn’t go without me. It was exactly what I’d wanted.
Yes. Exactly what I wanted.
“It’ll be okay,” I said to them both. “It was an accident.”
Of course I didn’t want Diana to get hurt, but a part of me was glad that the hekamist was so good at her job, and that the spell was working so well, and that they didn’t leave me alone on the beach. It gave me this opportunity to show them who I am. Why they should care. Why we were meant to be friends after all.
“I’m going to be fine, you know,” Diana said. We were sitting in Diana’s car watching Kay walk up the steps to her house and then wave enthusiastically from behind the inset glass. “To be honest, it was kind of the best bonfire ever.”
I shuddered at the thought of Echo demanding her money, and the sound of Diana’s scream. “I’m glad you think so.”
“Yeah. I got to talk to Markos, and you seemed . . . better.”
I rubbed my temple. It felt like a long time ago, the idea that I would run off to New York and tell Diana the truth about Win and everything would be perfectly fine. It wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. What did I imagine she could do—conjure five thousand dollars from nothing?
I made nine dollars an hour selling ice cream at the Sweet Shoppe, twenty hours a week. To earn Echo’s money I’d have to work for a year, nonstop, and probably much more when you factored in taxes and school and the fact that the Sweet Shoppe was closed October through April. Or I’d have to use our New York money, which was the last of my parents’ life insurance. But I couldn’t use that; I needed it to live on while I danced with the junior corps.
So I had to keep Echo from telling anyone until we left for New York. Which was so obviously impossible the idea squeezed me, like trying to plié in new leather pants.
“Where was Kay all night?” Diana asked.
“Saw her with Cal Waters.”
“Like . . . talking?” she asked.
“It looked more like flirting.”
“Wow. Seriously?” I nodded, and Diana’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to warn her away from him like you always warn me away from Markos?”