“A few days ago. I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry, Markos. She lied to me—”
“You lied to me. You lied to my face. You told me to give her a call, for fuck’s sake!” I was screaming, then, on my knees in the middle of the sidewalk, tourists parting like the seas to get around me. The air around me felt charged, poisonous.
“I wanted to tell, but she promised—”
“And you believed her? After she told you what she did, you believed a single word she said to you?”
“Markos, I am so sorry—”
“Don’t ever call me again. This will be the last time you hear from me, you lying bitch.”
I jabbed at the phone to hang up. A call came in, and several texts. My heart bled out my fingers onto the sidewalk. Cement clogged my lungs. I gulped down air.
When I could control the shaking in my hands, I turned the phone off.
I started to head for the Sweet Shoppe where Ari worked but balked. I knew that if I saw her face something terrible would happen. A too-big part of me wanted to hurt her, reach out and bruise her, make her feel, bring back some of the pain she threw out like garbage when she erased my best friend. That anger scared me. Another part of me thought I’d break down. None of it would do any good, anyway.
Nothing would. Not really.
There were so many things that Win and I did together that I somehow thought were safe because Ari had a mental backup. But I was the only one, now. Only I remembered Win. All this shit—all this getting over it—I was the only one who had to do it. I couldn’t let the pain go now, could never get over it. Not when it was only me keeping Win from being forgotten forever.
One moment I was standing in front of the hardware store and the next I was at home. A girl sat on my porch and at first I thought was Diana and almost took off running. But this girl had dark hair, not Diana’s red, and as I got closer I recognized Diana and Ari’s beauty-spelled friend—Kay. Katelyn. Something like that. It didn’t matter.
She held opposite elbows over her nice chest when she saw me, but then as I got closer she relaxed. I tried to think of something to say that would make her go away quickly, but my mind was blank. I could almost hear the rushing wind between my ears. Or was that a roar?
“Hey. I was looking for Cal,” she said.
I stopped a couple feet from her. She was between me and the door. But there was nothing inside of the house that was better than anything out here.
“Are you okay?” Kay asked. “You look bad.”
“I guess I’m bad, then.” I put my hands in my pockets to keep them from shaking. Everything felt impossibly far away. “I bet you know, too. The three of you being such good friends and all.”
“Know what?”
“That Ari took a spell to forget Win. That she’s only been pretending to be grief-stricken. She told Diana—you didn’t know?”
Kay’s mouth dropped open, and an expression filled her generically pretty features that looked almost as pained as the monster eating me up inside. “She was lying to me?”
“To everyone.”
“But . . . I’m her best friend.”
I laughed at that, and she recoiled as if I’d spit on her. She wasn’t a bad person, and she hadn’t done anything to me, but I needed to push some of this bad feeling out or it would collapse in on me. “Look, I have a lot of shit I have to take care of, and none of it includes talking to you, so why don’t you get out of my face.”
She snapped out of her surprise and hurt and put on her generically pretty mask again. But I could see how the mask didn’t quite fit, and the anger and the pain pushed on its edges and crevices, threatening to break through. “I’m here to see Cal,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because . . . we’re friends.”
I laughed again. “What, you think you’re dating or something?”
“We might be dating.”
“Yeah, right. Waters boys don’t get serious. Don’t you know that?”
She stepped closer. As close as a girl had been since the night in the diner parking lot, since Diana—but this wasn’t Diana. This girl had black shiny hair and a good face and body but I felt nothing from her. Like a dead zone where your cell phone doesn’t get reception, or an ice-cold patch of the ocean.
“Do you ever feel like a pathetic phony?” I asked. “Because everyone knows you’ve shellacked on some spells. You think we can’t remember what you looked like before?”
She flushed with anger or humiliation or whatever and it actually improved her whole plastic appearance. It jolted down my spine, too—not her hotness but what I could do to someone.
I caused that.
“You’re the phony,” she said. “Trying so hard to seem like you don’t care.”
I made a face. “So insightful.”
“You’re only being a dick to me because you’re mad at Ari.”
“I am mad at Ari, but maybe also I don’t like you.”
“You wouldn’t be such an asshole to me if you knew what I could do,” she said.