“I have your money,” I said to Echo.
Her face lit up and she grabbed my wrist from excitement. I thought she might try to kiss me, and so I yanked my hand away.
“I’ve got to go get it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Yes, I thought. Let’s go to Ari’s house, distract Ari, and get the money from the back of Ari’s closet. Then let’s go to the shitty house at the edge of town, into my tiny hole of a bedroom that smells like sweaty socks, dig below my underwear, open the Tupperware container, and scarf down that cheese sandwich. I had reached that point. This was it. The lowest moment. Enough.
I walked over to Ari and touched her shoulder. She moaned, and I whispered into her ear. “Ari, I forgot something at your place.”
“So go get it.”
“Why don’t you come? The fun’s over.”
“Seriously, your voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Go get your whatever.”
“You could come—”
“I said go away!” she shouted. “Leave me alone. I don’t want you here, Win.”
“Would you shut the hell up already?” Markos said, then coughed so hard he nearly barfed again.
I left her and went back to Echo. “I can’t leave them here like this.”
“I can stay with them. Go get it and come back.” She grinned and hugged me quickly, a flash of arms in the dark.
I handed her the flashlight and bent over Ari again, intending to kiss her on the cheek. Before I could, she threw a handful of sand in my eyes. “Get out of here!” she screeched, then covered her head with her arms and wailed.
I didn’t try again. That was the goodbye I felt I deserved, even if, somewhere distant in my brain, I knew it was just her side effects talking.
I walked to the truck in the dark. It felt farther than it should have, like the parking lot was shrinking away with every step, but eventually I reached it and my truck and started home.
The road home. This is the important part. No witnesses, only me. A road I’d driven hundreds of times before. It was a wet night, yes, but the road was empty. No other cars. No animals, no nothing.
Did I have a moment of weakness? See the tree and let go of the wheel? Could I have planned this, somewhere, in a dark recess of my mind, while Ari and Markos floated overhead and Echo watched me too closely?
That’s one way this could’ve ended. The other is the randomness of the universe: something so small so as to be functionally unmeasurable distracted me and a series of inevitable events pulled me toward the tree. No human intention or reason had any part in it.
Or it could’ve ended through hekame. I’d been joined in the truck by something invisible, fathomless and unmovable. And that thing pushed my arms. A force bore down on them and turned the wheel turned to the left, off the road, into a tree. Straight into oblivion.
But those are only theories. Only I know what happened.
In the moment that the crash became inevitable and unavoidable, I had enough time to notice the tree and my course, and to remember Mom and Kara and Ari and Markos perfect and loved and to hope that I had somewhere to go after this—somewhere where I was weightless, careless, free—before the truck crashed.
One of the strangest parts of being depressed is how it affects memory. When I was depressed, I couldn’t remember anything particularly happy ever happening to me. Things I had previously assumed were happy seemed false and empty. The good past faded epically far away, and the good present, well, that was pretty much an oxymoron.
But when I hit the tree, all that cleared away—the sadness filter my memory had been set to—and I remembered moments of pure happiness.
Playing catch with Markos as kids.
Holding Kara when she came home from the hospital.
Ari laughing at something I’d said.
Birthday cakes. Big wins. Stupid jokes. Surprise As.
Lying in a sleeping bag in the backyard. Which house, it didn’t matter, because the sky was the same at all of them, vast and cold, twinkling brightly, beautiful and remote.
For a second I remembered it all and loved it all with my whole heart.
And then I died.
I took the bag from Echo’s outstretched hand.
It wasn’t a spell to forget, like I had hoped for, and it wouldn’t fix anything Cal had done, but it was something. It would get me out of town.
“If this works,” I said to Echo, pressing the plastic together between my fingers, “you can come with me to New York, stay on the couch in our shitty apartment. There’s got to be a ton of hekamists in New York, right?”
Echo touched her face where I had hit her. “Why would you do that for me?”