I laughed. “Oh great and terrible one, please spare me.”
“Shut up already!” she said. Then she leaned forward and kissed me.
I should’ve gotten pissed. Pushed her away. Told her that she wasn’t going to prove anything by making out with me. She’d still be a phony and I’d still hate her. I should’ve come back with something even crueler to crush her properly into oblivion.
But there wasn’t anything left in me to get angry.
While I was angry, Ari felt nothing.
While I was in pain, Ari felt nothing.
While I looked for ways to make the pain worse, Ari felt nothing.
While I waited for it to all make sense, Ari felt nothing.
Nothing would ever affect her the way Win’s death was killing me.
Now I felt nothing. Or maybe this feeling was everything, like how white is all the colors combined.
“Why’d you do that?” I said. Kay shrugged. I grabbed her arm and pulled her closer and kissed her, hard. She kissed back.
“You’re going to regret this,” she said when we took a breath.
“I’m looking forward to it,” I said.
I didn’t care about her—I didn’t even like her—which meant that what was happening didn’t matter. I wasn’t Win, stuck with one girl forever. I was me, the Markos Waters of legend, one of the carefree Waters boys, life of the party, and I sank back into the role with relief. Easier than drowning.
When Kay left a while later, I turned on my phone to text Ari to tell her if I saw her I’d kill her, then I blocked Diana’s number and deleted all her messages. I sat in front of the TV with a bottle of Jack Daniels and proceeded to get shitfaced, which is the temporary, normal, nonhekamist way to obliterate your festering, gut-wrenching memory.
PART III
I walked away from the Waterses’ house different. The world was different. It was almost dark instead of bright midday, but also the air smelled like fall and the sky pressed down on my shoulders.
And me. Inside. I’d gone over to check in on Cal, do my duty to the spell. Instead I’d kissed his brother.
Markos had been so mad. And so mean. I wanted to kiss him to prove that he didn’t actually think I was a fake ugly liar. Or at least prove he was as bad as me, and we both knew it.
It didn’t even end up proving anything to Markos. It only proved to myself what type of person I was.
A bad one. A person whose best friends hated her and kept secrets from her—for good reason, even if they didn’t know it.
That was the problem with my “relationship” with Cal, too. I agreed with Markos; I agreed with Diana and Ari: I didn’t belong with someone cheerful and inclusive and popular like Cal. I knew exactly what I looked like inside, and it wasn’t girlfriend material. No. I deserved to be called names by Markos, and disrespected, and tossed aside when it was over. That was who I really was.
A person who had to get a spell to keep her friends.
I walked from Markos’s to Ari’s. She answered the door wearing her ballet outfit—tights, leotard, gray shrug—but she didn’t appear winded or sweaty. She let me in and we sat on the couch in her basement for five minutes without speaking. She was distracted, eyes hollow. We could hear her aunt singing off-key as she walked around the kitchen upstairs.
“I’m kind of having a bad day, Kay,” Ari said after a while. “So maybe we do this some other time?”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“It’s just . . . bad.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Why?” I asked. I pushed my back into the far corner of the couch and my heels into the space between two cushions. “You sad about Win? Because it isn’t good to bottle it all up, Ari. You should talk about him more. Let us in. Share some of those precious memories.”
Her expression emptied, a beach house left vacant for the winter. “So . . . you heard.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“How?”
“Markos told me.”
“When did everyone start hanging out with Markos without me?”
I could feel my face heating up. “What do you mean, everyone?”
Ari pressed the heels of her hands into the black shadows under her eyes. “Diana thinks they’re dating. That they’re in love.”
“Who’s in love?”
“Markos and Diana.”
“Shut up,” I said. Ari shrugged. “She never said anything about it to me!”
“Sorry you didn’t get the bulletin.”
A flash of anger made me forget for a moment how both Ari and Diana had lied to me. “You know, while you were off with Win doing whatever, Diana relied on me. Because you were nowhere to be found.”
“I’ve gathered that.”
“She used to get upset about it. That you were abandoning her for some boy. But I was there for her.” Ari didn’t say anything. She wrapped her shrug tighter around her shoulders. “Then, you know what? After a few months she stopped being upset. She moved on. She didn’t need you anymore.”