The Cost of All Things by Maggie Lehrman Page B

for you. If I came home with a bashed-in face, she’d toss me a bag of peas and demand to know who it was she should be suing for damages. “My mother doesn’t think anything’s our fault.”
    “You guys are saints, then?”
    “Yup.”
    “My mom’s okay. She’s always looked after me—too much,probably. Trying to keep me safe and happy always. Between her and Ari—sometimes it felt like they were living my life for me.” She stopped talking and flushed.
    I thought of my brothers with their endless reams of advice, and the expectation that I would be exactly like them. “But you don’t feel that way anymore?”
    “No,” Diana said, seemingly surprising herself. “No, I don’t. Actually—it’s because of Win. Ari started spending so much time with him . . . I was on my own.”
    I swallowed half a bagel in three bites. “What’s up with Ari anyway?”
    Diana looked at me out of the corner of her eye, like I was setting a trap. “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me much anymore.”
    “Well, she hasn’t talked to me much either.”
    “Really? But you were such good friends.”
    I shifted on my metal seat. It burned the backs of my knees. “She was Win’s girlfriend.”
    “Come on. You were friends, too.”
    “Yeah, but what’s the point now? We’re going to sit around and share our feelings?”
    Diana picked at her bagel. “It might be good for both of you to talk about all this stuff.”
    “Doesn’t seem fucking likely. Ari having a heart-to-heart? Come on. That’s one good thing about her—she’s not a sappy romantic. Thank god. If she’d been needy with Win he’d have been needy right back and it would have been unbearable. Hewas so—” I threw the rest of my bagel down onto my plate. “He was so damn nice all the time.”
    Diana didn’t look startled, but I felt strange—like on the beach: heart racing, breathing coming in weird gasps. I made myself inhale and hold it for five seconds before opening my mouth again.
    “Do you think about what happens when you die?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Not like heaven or angels or whatever—that’s stupid—but the end of everything. How nothing matters after that.” How nothing matters now , I wanted to say, but I could tell that would bring on the weird breathing, and she wouldn’t understand anyway.
    “I think about how upset my parents would be,” Diana started to say, “and my little cousins, and Ari. She’s been through enough, with the fire, and then Win. But you know—” She stopped suddenly, looked at me like she was remembering who I was, then continued more slowly. “It doesn’t make me sad to think about it. It’s, like, I almost want to see it, because then I’d know what people really thought of me. If they really cared.”
    That should’ve made me angry, because of Win. Because Win didn’t ask to die, and we all really did go through that torture, and it wasn’t part of some selfish, self-centered fantasy. But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t panicking anymore, either.
    “That’s messed up,” I said, and smiled, and Diana drank that smile up like it was sunlight and she was a fucking flower. Even the bruise on her cheek seemed to shrink in her glow.
    That was a nice feeling. I thought about the night before and how I didn’t want to kiss her and it seemed stupid now. Why shouldn’t I? Seeing her in the bright morning light of the bagel shop backyard, seeing how her happiness shone, I figured if that made me feel okay, there was no harm in making her more happy. We were both getting something out of it—so what if it wasn’t the same thing?
    We left the bagel place and started walking down the street toward the beach. There were tourists everywhere; it was the height of the season, the biggest holiday of the year on the Cape. We passed my family’s hardware store and I turned away from the windows. There wasn’t much chance of anyone inside seeing me through the mounds of junk on display, but I didn’t