“So the hook spell keeps you close to her?”
“If she gave one to me, which I don’t think she did.”
“Why not?”
“Hooks are for assholes,” Echo scoffed. “Pinning specimens under glass. Plus hekamists don’t spell each other. It’s bad form.”
“But she could have. . . .”
Echo shook her head. “My mother loves me, but she knows better. Sometimes bad luck is just bad luck.”
I scratched my arms and wondered if I’d ever be able to think bad luck wasn’t entirely my fault. If I were Echo, I’d want to believe that it was a hook keeping me from what I wanted—anything but “just the way things are sometimes.”
“If it was a hook, though, you could break it,” I said.
“You say it like that’s even possible.”
The thing about spells, Echo told me, is that you can’t break them, you can only wait for the them to run out (if they’re temporary) or try to layer another spell over them (if they’re permanent). It’s slightly easier to try to correct the side effects and not the spell itself, but even that gets complicated, because you’re adding another spell on top of the one you have, and once you start doubling and tripling up the side effects go totally wonky. And if you’re looking to reverse the spell itself, not the side effect, you’re mostly out of luck. Sometimes, if the hekamist was good enough and the moon was in the right phase and you didn’t bake the wrong kind of soufflé, a hekamist could come up with the right spell with the right side effects to nudge a person nearly back in their original direction. But trying that could be dangerous. A well-made spell protects itself. It will act on the world to prevent being destroyed, according to Echo.
A week later, I came back to collect my spell.
It felt weird thinking about the cheese sandwich in my hands as having its own will, but that’s what Echo had said. It will act on the world to protect itself. She sliced the crusts off the bread, cut it diagonally, and put it in a plastic bag for me.
“The spell’s in the cheese,” she said. Her face was hopeful, proud. Maybe even a little bashful underneath the slashes of makeup. “I like cheese.”
I held in my hands the answer to all my problems. It looked, however, like a boring cheese sandwich.
I could’ve run with it right then—or gobbled it down—and then dealt with the money later. But I couldn’t do that to Echo, who’d done nothing but try to help, and who had problems of her own—a sick mother and her own eventual madness. “I don’t have the money,” I said. “Not yet.”
Her pride drained away, disappointment taking its place. She sat at the kitchen table and pushed her hair off her forehead with both hands. She looked not just sad but afraid. Not that I could blame her.
I shifted on my feet, moving the sandwich from one hand to the other. “Should I give this back?”
Echo looked up. “You are going to get the money, right? You’re not going to leave me hanging?”
“Yes,” I said. Because what else was I going to say?
“Take the spell, then. Feel better. Bring me the money when you have it.”
“You trust me?”
She looked up at me, her black-rimmed eyes swimming. “I’m the one who made you an irreversible brain whammy. Do you trust me?”
“Hadn’t thought of it that way.” I looked at the sandwich. One corner had been pressed down where Echo’s thumb had held the bread. “Do your spells usually work?”
Echo didn’t answer.
“Echo? This—this isn’t your first spell, is it?”
She wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve cast spells before. Plenty. My mom taught me a few before she started to get too . . . lost. But no one actually took any of those.”
“Is that why the spell took you so long?”
“I’m being extra cautious. I want to get it right.”
I swallowed to relieve the sudden dryness in my throat. “If no one took them, you don’t know if any of those practice spells even worked.”
She stood up and looked me in the eye, daring me to argue. “It’ll work, Win. Your pain—gone. The side effects will be physical, so you might not get to play baseball for a little while, but you also won’t kill yourself, so . . .”
“How do you know I play baseball?” I wasn’t trying to accuse her of anything. I didn’t want to think about my brain/body connection, which freaked me out if I let myself ponder it for too long. (Was I good at baseball because I was bad at keeping myself happy?) But Echo blushed, a deep red rising from her neck to her cheeks.
“Research,” she mumbled, and in that second I knew she’d been to a game—she’d watched me without me knowing. She watched me, and she trusted me, and she blushed like a—I don’t know—like a girl.
I decided not to think any further along that path.
She must’ve decided the same thing, because she stood up and dumped the cutting board and knife into the sink, then started scrubbing them furiously, her back to me.