And I was happy. So happy.
At that moment, I would’ve spent the rest of my life in the hospital wrapped in bandages if it meant I could have her head next to mine forever.
But all the same, I felt my chest caving in, because I missed Win.
It hurt that I could not tell him about this. That he wasn’t here to see it. It killed that I couldn’t talk to him anymore.
I had loved him so much. I never imagined that I would have to grow up without him.
Was I a coward for admitting it? I don’t know. It felt brave, actually, no longer keeping up appearances.
I cried all over Diana’s red hair, heart breaking with the bigness of Win gone, and she didn’t move away. She stayed with me all night.
I could tell you about the aftermath. How we went to the hospital—the big, familiar hospital—and they patched us up. I could tell you how Cal became infamous and his mother pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and filed for bankruptcy. I could tell you about the weeks and weeks it took for my ribs to knit back together. All that did happen, and I was there, but no one looked at me.
I could tell you more about my spell. No one listens to me anymore, which is how it used to feel in the hospital with Mina. I would ask something of a doctor or nurse and it was as if no one had spoken; Mina used to have to repeat my questions. Yes, I could use the bathroom. Yes, food was coming soon. Yes, that’s what “carcinogen” meant. It makes you feel like a speck on the wall, an irritating stain, something to frown at and sigh heavily and hope no one else notices. With my side effects, I feel all of those things a hundred times over.
I could tell you how Echo’s mom faded fast once Echo died. She could no longer spell, she was in a great deal of pain, and then she stopped eating. She died before the last of the tourists left in September.
I could tell you that Diana and Ari were so grateful that I saved their lives that we went back to exactly the way things were before—no, better—but that would be a lie.
I am not alone, though. I have Mina. Mina loves me so she can see me despite the spell. She stayed home from school for a semester and took care of me. “What’s another year?” She laughed, and for the first time, I saw what she meant. Some things are more important than schedules and plans. Some things you have to do now.
Ari tries, too. She calls me; we talk. We’re honest with each other. It’s real. She gives me what she can afford to give, and I don’t expect or demand any more.
It’s okay. All I ever wanted was two good friends.
The good thing about my side effects is that it’s not just the bad emotions that are amplified. When I’m happy—which is not infrequently—I can feel it clearer and sharper than ever before. When good things happen I can squeeze every last drop from them. And good things happen all the time. Even to me.
Still, some nights I dream I’m stuck in the hardware store, but instead of a locked-up Diana and knocked-out Markos, there’s everyone I’ve ever loved, even a little bit, behind a chain-link fence in the woodshop. Mom and Dad and Mina and Echo and Markos and Ari and Diana. I’m the only one there to save them, and I keep running into traps that break my legs and sting my lungs and turn me around in circles. I never see any sign of Cal, only the traps. I get more and more frantic until I’m ripping the chain-link with my bare hands, and my loved ones stare at me, horrified, speechless, desperate, and I realize I am Cal—I am the bad guy—and they are scared and imprisoned because of me. The horror chokes me as bad as the smoke filling the room—and there’s no hekamist there to save us—and then I wake up, gasping.
Glad to be invisible.
A week after Waters Hardware burned down, I went to Echo’s funeral with Echo’s mom, Diana, Markos, Kay, Mina, and Jess. None of us knew what a hekamist funeral should be and Echo’s mom couldn’t tell us, so Kay’s parents paid for something simple at the local Unitarian church.
As I sat there in silence—except for Echo’s mom’s weeping—I thought about how blind and bewildered I’d been at Win’s funeral, stuck on my own pain. Rows and rows of people behind me, grieving Win, staring at me as I tried to make up some words to say. And I thought of my parents’ funeral. Jess had been a stranger, I hadn’t yet befriended Diana, and I’d taken a spell that had plucked out a terrible memory and made my wrist sore. Like at Win’s funeral, people filled the church. I may have felt alone, but my parents hadn’t been lonely in their lives.
But we were the only ones there for Echo, and most of us had met her in the past few months, if we’d known her at all. She’d spent her whole life in hiding.