I took a deep a breath. “I know what’s going on with you and Echo.”
“Echo?” The hekamist’s face flashed a moment of genuine surprise, as if waking up from a dream. “Have you two met?”
“Come on. Don’t make me laugh.”
“What’s funny?”
“It’s not funny. Echo’s blackmailing me. She wants five thousand dollars or she says she’ll tell everyone that I forgot Win.”
The hekamist’s eyes widened. She was afraid: good.
I went on, pressing my advantage. “I already paid you five thousand dollars. I should go to the cops.”
“The cops?” The hekamist’s face sharpened, like clay hardening into cracks and planes. “What would you tell them about Echo?”
I frowned. “That she’s blackmailing me, of course. That you both are. What else would I tell them?”
“Oh.” Echo’s mother sighed the word, and her face relaxed. “Oh . . . Echo, my Echo . . . Secrets are so powerful.”
“I know.”
“Because if you hadn’t kept the spell a secret, Echo would not be able to pressure you for money.”
“Yeah, I get it.” I started to feel like I’d let the conversation drift off track. “But I don’t have any money, so you’re both going to leave me alone or I will call the cops.”
“Yes, of course.” She looked through me with an empty smile.
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I clutched my wrist and shifted on tingling feet. “Okay then.”
“Ari Madrigal,” the hekamist said as I started to walk away. “You won’t give Echo any money?” It almost sounded like she was begging. But that didn’t make any sense.
“Right,” I said, and kept walking.
My brain told me I should be triumphant, having confronted my enemy and figured out her game. But Echo’s mother didn’t seem like an enemy, and if she wasn’t, then maybe Echo wasn’t my enemy, either. So I had the strange, inexplicable sense that I’d been the one who’d been played.
“Kay! You awake?”
“Cal? What time is it?”
“Two thirty-eight. What are you doing?”
“I was asleep.”
“Oh yeah.” He laughed. “Sorry. I was thinking of you.”
“You were?”
“Sure.”
“What were you thinking?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. I held my breath. “I’m not sure, exactly. I just thought: Kay Charpal. And then I called.”
“So . . . was there something you wanted to tell me?”
“I guess not. People don’t call just to call anymore, do they?”
“Not at two thirty in the morning, at least.”
Cal laughed again. He seemed extremely cheerful for two thirty in the morning. “I’ll let you go to sleep. Good night, Kay.”
I pressed End on my phone and lay back in the dark. I slept with a comforter because my parents kept the house ice-cold even in summer. Mina rebelled and stuffed towels over the vents and opened her windows, but I liked the feeling of the downy warmth all around me. I burrowed in more deeply, but a place under my heart and right above my gut still felt cold.
That call was the spell pushing Cal to me. We talked regularly now; we would soon hang out, too. Ari and Diana would see that I wasn’t a throwaway girl to Cal. He thought of me in the middle of the night. He wanted to talk to me. Exactly as I’d wanted.
Right?
Unhooked.
That was the word the hekamist used to describe my side effects. She said a part of me would dislocate. Unhook. I didn’t know what it meant to unhook. Maybe she didn’t know, either, or she might have explained it better.
Unhooking could explain this coldness in my chest, more than the air conditioning. Everything I loved most—Ari, Diana, even Mina, having friends who were close, who understood, and all the other things they meant to me—I could pull off like a cloak and hang on a peg. Underneath the cloak there was nothing. The people and things I loved most felt far away and foreign, the cloak beautiful but strange. I could pry the cloak up and try it on, but it still felt like an object, not a part of me.
Unhooked. Had to be. Because if it wasn’t my side effects, why wasn’t I happy?
Cal kept calling in the middle of the night. He never slept, at least not as far as I could tell.
“Can we talk tomorrow, Cal?”
“But then I’ll be awake for the next five hours by myself.”
“You could go to sleep.”
“Nah. I don’t sleep much.”
“What’s ‘not much’?”
“I haven’t slept a whole night through since I was twelve years old.”
I pulled the comforter all the way over my head and burrowed in. “Why?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I close my eyes like everyone else does. I’m tired, or at least I think I am. And nothing happens. I see the inside of my eyelids. Does that happen to you?”
“No. I fall asleep right away.”
“Lucky.”
“Except when you call, of course.”