“But you wanted to know about Win,” she said quietly. “Not about me. I wish I had something to tell you. But I knew him so briefly—I didn’t get a chance . . .”
I wished I hadn’t asked. It was a stupid, selfish impulse from that same part of me that studied the tapes of my dance performances, digging up proof of . . . what? The secrets and kisses and looks didn’t mean anything to me. It all had no context. I searched for clues about Win clinically, selfishly, while the people who knew him mourned.
“He never even got to use the spell I made him,” she said. She glanced at her mom, asleep on the couch, then sat back in her seat at the table and leaned her face into her hands. “I think, well, if he had taken it . . . I don’t know. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead.”
“So the money was for a spell? What type?” She shook her head and wouldn’t answer. “How could your spell have prevented an accident?” I pressed.
She didn’t say anything. Another secret, then—another thing I didn’t know about him.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. She crumpled her head down onto the table again, and I could hear her jagged breathing.
“I hate to admit it, but . . .” She took a deep breath and spoke straight into the tabletop. “I can see why you’d rather forget.”
I squeezed my wrist with the opposite hand so hard the muscle ached. “You’re probably the only person who will say that.”
“People are dicks.”
“I bet they’d hate me less if they knew I probably won’t ever dance again.”
As soon as I said it I wished I could take it back, grab the words out of the air and cram them back in my big stupid mouth. Moving to New York was the only thing I had to look forward to.
But now that everyone knew I’d erased Win, there was no pretending anymore: I hadn’t been to class in weeks. I could barely stretch my arms over my head. I’d lost all the blisters and calluses that make you a real dancer, because I wasn’t a real dancer.
I couldn’t dance.
“How bad is it?”
I pushed back my chair and stood in the middle of the kitchen, feet in fourth position, one arm over my head, one extended in front of me. I saw a pirouette in my mind. I’d done thousands. Easy. Deep breath. Arms out. Weight on the front foot. Let the momentum carry you through the turn. I barely made it halfway before I stumbled into the refrigerator.
Echo looked at my knees and my arms and my torso, calculating. “A brute force spell to fix that much clumsiness would have major side effects.”
“That’s what your mom told me. Said I’d have extra trouble because of the effects of my previous spells, too.”
“A careful hekamist could figure a way to make it work.”
“But there are side effects upon side effects. Aren’t there?”
She examined me. “It’s a risk, for sure. But if it’s done right, you’ll be a bit of mess, but basically you.”
“And it costs five thousand dollars for a permanent spell, right?”
She shrugged. “When you’re a famous ballerina you can pay me back.”
My heart jumped in my chest, a wobbly grand jeté. “What?”
“I’ll help you. If I can.”
Now my heart was leaping in a circle, pirouetting with each landing. Spinning, dizzy, I struggled to stand. “Don’t make fun of me, please. I know you must hate me—”
“I don’t hate you.”
“—but don’t mess with me, okay?”
“I’m not making fun of you.” She stood, brushing invisible crumbs off the kitchen table. “I’ll consider it a favor to Win.”
I looked around the room as if I would find someone to tell the news: everything had changed. I came to Echo furious, ready to blame her for everything that had gone wrong this summer. I lost my memory, dance, and my best friends.
But now I had hope that I could get one of them back.
So a better person, a smarter person, a less-fucked-up-in-the-head person would tell you that he ate the damn sandwich, begged and borrowed the money, and then lived happily ever after. But because it’s me telling the story, I’m sorry to say it didn’t happen like that. You know the ending, anyway: pure tragedy.
First of all, I didn’t eat the sandwich. I found a Tupperware container with a snap lid and placed the sandwich in it and then put the container in my underwear drawer. Every day, if I managed to get out of bed, I’d look at it while getting dressed. And every day I decided not yet.
Maybe it was what Echo made me promise—that I’d take it rather than kill myself. I figured if I didn’t actively want to die while putting on my boxers, I didn’t need it yet.
And I started to think more about how permanent the spell was. If I ate this sandwich, I’d be changing “real” me forever.