“Eat it before you go to sleep,” she said. “It’ll kick in by morning.”
I lifted the bag by the ziplocked edge and looked in at the sandwich. Ordinary. But it wasn’t; somehow it was a permanent sandwich. “How long will it stay good?”
She turned off the faucet and faced me, blush gone, only the usual guarded curiosity in its place. “As long as it takes. The bread might get stale but the cheese won’t spoil.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re not going to take it right away?”
I shrugged. She was the one who felt the need to scare me with tales of unbreakable spells. She was the one who hadn’t told me until the last possible minute that she was a raw amateur. “It’s my brain. I want to be sure.”
She wiped her hands on the dish towel and came over to stand directly in front of me. I thought she might touch me and goose bumps erupted all over my skin.
She didn’t touch me, simply stared at me. I didn’t like it, but couldn’t look away. Maybe a hekamist thing. “Promise me something,” she said.
“I’ll get the money.”
“No. Well, yes, get the money—but promise me this: if it gets to the point where it’s eating this sandwich or slitting your wrists, you eat the sandwich, okay?”
There wasn’t enough air in the room. My lungs burned. I could only nod.
She nodded back and sent me on my way.
Of course I gave Win the money. I would’ve done anything for him.
He asked me and I knew he was serious. He never asked for shit and I knew my entire life that he was poor. His mom acted like the rest of the moms and paid for dance for Win’s sister Kara like she could compete with the other girls of the dance world, but Win always had secondhand gear for baseball, generic cereal, houses that weren’t exactly dirty but always came with some sort of ground-in smell. He moved a lot and didn’t say why. Sometimes nicer places, sometimes real shitholes. I didn’t question that he needed the money.
And I didn’t ask for what. It was money. I had it, or at least could get it, and he didn’t or couldn’t. It wasn’t fair, but that was the way our lives fell out. Why should I insist on knowing his personal shit because I was in the position to do him a favor? I trusted him. That was enough.
That’s not to say I didn’t think about it—wonder why. I knew he was worried about something. He’d ignore my texts for days, and sometimes, like at poker night or warming up before a game, he would go—disappear from behind his eyes, leaving a Win shell behind.
When I let myself ponder what he might need the money for, I thought it was his mom or Kara—something serious. I figured when it got bad enough we’d all know, but for now they wanted to keep it quiet. I thought I was the only one he told.
And I thought that up until the day Ari came into the shop to ask for more. What a fucking chump I was.
I’d gotten hell from my mother about the money for Win, too, so it wasn’t like it was easy. Even with her ancient ledger, no way would she let that much cash slip away from the store without noticing. But I was smart. I didn’t take it from the store’s till or anything like that. Every four weeks Mom left a manila envelope in the store for the old hekamist to pick up. Must’ve been four or five inches thick, some months. I first noticed it years ago when I was watching the security monitor in the woodshop. Mom and the hekamist never talked, never even looked each other in the eye; Mom left the envelope in the power tool display, and an hour later the hekamist picked it up.
They acted like it was some big secret, black hats and espionage. Mom was probably paying to keep people coming to the store. A lot of struggling businesses did it. Or maybe it was a protection spell to keep me and Cal and Dev and Brian safe, something motherly. But it didn’t matter. I knew that the envelope would appear an hour before closing on every fourth Sunday. Win asked me for the money at the right time. When Sunday rolled around, I swiped it before the hekamist could come pick it up.
There was six thousand dollars in it, to my surprise. I didn’t think spells were that expensive, but then again I’d never bought one, so what did I know. I pocketed the extra thousand for a rainy day and gave the rest to Win at school the next day.
A few days after that, Mom stormed into my room.
“Where’s the money, Markos?”
I could tell from the look on her face there was no point in playing dumb or blaming one of my brothers. She practically vibrated with rage, all her gray curls quivering, and her face turned red and splotchy. But there was something else, too—something I couldn’t place right away.
“It’s gone,” I said.
She grabbed my arm, fingernails pinching, but I didn’t wince. “This is not a game. You need to give it to me now.”
Then it clicked. Mom looked scared.
“What’s so important? Afraid of a few more gray hairs?”
“It’s not for me, you idiot. Your brother—” And she stopped.
“My brother what?”