Ari flinched, and my bad insides made me smile. “What’s your point, Kay?”
“I don’t have one. I’m telling you how it was.”
“Well, you can stop.”
I hugged a throw pillow into my chest. “I don’t know if you know this, but you and Diana act like you don’t even like me sometimes.”
Ari looked up at the ceiling. Part of me hoped she’d deny it, but she wasn’t in a denying mood. “It’s just that . . . you try too hard.”
“I make an effort. I took care of Diana. I take care of you both.”
“Yeah. Maybe we don’t want to be taken care of.”
“Well maybe I don’t want to be the pity case you both laugh at.”
The words came out before I could decide if they were a good idea. Yet Ari didn’t seem offended. She seemed—embarrassed? But I’d told her off. I wasn’t nice at all.
Jess belted a high note from the kitchen and we winced. I’d been spending the entire summer—the entire spring, too—making an effort with Ari and Diana. Trying to get them to treat me like a real friend.
But I didn’t have to do any of it. No taking care of Diana after her accident. No compliments, no thoughtfulness. I could be as mean as I wanted—I could hook up with Diana’s crush and tell Ari what I really felt—and they would still have to be around me. That’s what my hook gave me. I had them on the line.
The only reason to make an effort was to prove that my insides weren’t totally rotten. And my insides rotted anyway, so the effort was wasted.
“I made an effort,” I said again. “At least I don’t give up like you do.”
She shook her head, her eyes closed. “Sometimes giving up is the smart move.”
“Right. Forgetting Win’s really going so well, huh?”
The corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile.
I relaxed back into the couch. Everything was messed up, yeah, and I’d kissed Markos and not checked in with Cal and if any of them stepped out of line the spell would be there to push them back, violently if necessary, but Ari and I had had our first genuine interaction in months, and it was all because I’d stopped worrying about being a good person (because I wasn’t) and stopped worried about how great Ari was (because she wasn’t) and simply said what I thought.
Ari was right. I didn’t have to try so hard. I had to let the spell do its work.
Kay was right about one thing: I couldn’t give up yet. After she left, I put on civilian clothes and went to Echo and her mother’s house. I couldn’t dance, Diana barely tolerated me, Markos hated me, even Kay snapped at me, and soon the whole town would look at me like I’d personally turned the wheel of Win’s truck. Standing at their door, I braced myself, waiting for one of them to appear so I could unleash my self-righteous fury.
When Echo opened the door, I heard the wailing. It was steady and piercing, a single-note scream.
Echo’s face lit up when she saw me, and she waved me in before running back to the kitchen. I didn’t know what else to do, so I stepped inside the door. Echo’s mother crouched in front of the sofa, face stuck between two cushions. Her curly white hair was all I could see of her head. The noise leaving her was steady and piercing. I didn’t know how she was breathing. Other than the noise, she kept suspiciously still, tensed like a single touch would set off an internal spring and the noise and the couch and everything near it would combust.
I kept my back to the front door. Echo opened cabinets and poked into the refrigerator. She produced an apple and an instrument that look like a large hockey puck.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s dying.”
I froze. “Should we call the hospital?”
“It’s not that type of dying. Give me a minute.”
Echo put the puck on the kitchen table and the apple on top of it. The apple floated above the puck as if magnetized. She sat in front of the apparatus and stared at the apple, which was slowly turning from side to side.
The air pressure increased like we were in a plane about to land; my ears popped. The air turned hot, too, so that my shirt stuck to my skin. All the while Echo’s mother kept screaming wordlessly into the couch. “What are you do—”
“Quiet.”
I found my eye drawn to the apple, which I only realized later was because all the light in the room dimmed except for a spotlight over the puck.