“Not like heaven or angels or whatever—that’s stupid—but the end of everything. How nothing matters after that.” How nothing matters now, I wanted to say, but I could tell that would bring on the weird breathing, and she wouldn’t understand anyway.
“I think about how upset my parents would be,” Diana started to say, “and my little cousins, and Ari. She’s been through enough, with the fire, and then Win. But you know—” She stopped suddenly, looked at me like she was remembering who I was, then continued more slowly. “It doesn’t make me sad to think about it. It’s, like, I almost want to see it, because then I’d know what people really thought of me. If they really cared.”
That should’ve made me angry, because of Win. Because Win didn’t ask to die, and we all really did go through that torture, and it wasn’t part of some selfish, self-centered fantasy. But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t panicking anymore, either.
“That’s messed up,” I said and smiled, and Diana drank that smile up like it was sunlight and she was a fucking flower. Even the bruise on her cheek seemed to shrink in her glow.
That was a nice feeling. I thought about the night before and how I didn’t want to kiss her and it seemed stupid now. Why shouldn’t I? Seeing her in the bright morning light of the bagel shop backyard, seeing how her happiness shone, I figured if that made me feel okay, there was no harm in making her more happy. We were both getting something out of it—so what if it wasn’t the same thing?
We left the bagel place and started walking down the street toward the beach. There were tourists everywhere; it was the height of the season, the biggest holiday of the year on the Cape. We passed my family’s hardware store and I turned away from the windows. There wasn’t much chance of anyone seeing anything through the mounds of junk on display, but I didn’t want to risk making eye contact with my brothers or mother.
“Ari’s afraid to go in there,” Diana said, nodding at the store.
“It’s a hardware store.”
“Yeah, but she hates it. Says the walls crowd in on her.”
“Maybe it’s me.”
She elbowed me jokingly. I hadn’t ever thought that mousy Diana North, the one who laughed at Ari’s jokes and wore polos buttoned all the way up to her neck, would be capable of joking with me.
“I’m telling you,” she said. “If anyone could talk to her, you could.”
“Maybe,” I said, and smiled again.
The look on her face was so perfect—surprised and pleased—that I laughed, and she started turning red all around the black and blue of the bruise. “I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m laughing because . . .”
But I didn’t know why I was laughing. Because I was alive? Was that the big joke?
Or was it funny—surprising—to remember that I scared people or made them glow or whatever? In my house I felt sometimes like a broken TV: people looked at me then turned away because I was always the same. The same mistakes, the same disappointments. Nothing I did made a dent to them.
Not like with Diana. Everything I did with her was new, everything mattered. She didn’t expect me to be one way or another, and what I did affected what she did in return.
With her I could put a dent in the world.
Echo said she needed to practice the spell a couple times to be sure but she’d let me know when it was ready. I said I’d work on the money, and I fully intended to work on it immediately, but it’s a funny thing about being depressed: it’s pretty fucking hard to make and follow through with a plan.
I had no money. My mom had no money. My sister Kara was eleven—and she had no money. Ari had enough savings from her parents’ life insurance to get her life started in New York, which was one of those almost invisible but huge differences between us, and though she might’ve given me the money, I couldn’t ask. It was her parents’ life insurance, for one thing. And she and her aunt needed that money. I couldn’t take New York away from her. Nice Win, upstanding boyfriend, Good Guy, definitely couldn’t do that. Asking for it would mean admitting I wasn’t Nice Win Good Guy anymore. Plus, if she knew what I was doing she would blame herself, and seeing that on her face would make me feel worse.
I loved her. But it was like loving someone through six feet of bulletproof glass. She was muffled, distant.
That left Markos. Markos himself had no money, and his mom had constant problems paying suppliers for the hardware store and covering their mortgage, but at least she had the store—people came in every day and handed them cash. I didn’t know how to ask him for it, though.
Knowing that the spell was on its way, I got my appetite back some, and I even managed to play a few baseball games without faking knee pain and sitting in the dugout.