“Oh, duh,” says Elena.
Joey bites her lip, praying she doesn’t say it out loud.
“RisRiver,” Elena says, answering her own question. “Quinn and River. This must be from junior year.”
Joey feels sick. Should she say something to them now? Rip off the Band-Aid? But she can’t; the words won’t leave her mouth.
“There’s something written right next to it,” Sophie says. “This one’s weird.”
Elena scoots closer. Joey is beyond relieved that they seem to have moved on, though she hasn’t. How can she?
“What is it?”
“Not sure,” says Sophie, keeping the light still until they all can read it clearly. “It just says…bloodspell.”
12Quinn
April 2011
Two months before the fall
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Joey sits at the corner of the bed hugging a pillow. Her long legs make neat triangles beneath her. My window is open, and a breeze snakes inside. The last tendrils of winter. I know Joey can tell I’m distracted. She’s right.
Joey’s not looking at me and instead seems focused on the closet door in the corner of the room. I turn to see if there’s a spider or something there, but there’s nothing.
“It was…good,” I say.
She laughs. “Well, River’s crazy about you, so of course it was.”
It’s freshly dark outside, just after eight. Last night, I dreamed that I was on a hill and Joey was on the other side, reaching her hand out and calling my name. Sophie and Elena too. Between us was this tumultuous, uncrossable whitewater. Waking up to that made the day seem bleak before it had even begun, and that mood has stuck with me all day. I have the sadistic urge to pass on my bad mood to someone else.
I lean on the side of the bed, and it squashes down beneath myforearms. My rings press into the flesh on my fingers. “Do you ever wonder if there’s more we should know about the magic?”
Joey’s lying on her side with her foot tucked behind her as she stretches her quad. There’s a shift in her demeanor now that I’ve changed the subject. “What do you mean?”
The wind picks up. I can hear it whistling through the trees behind my house, traveling down the slope of the mountain toward us. I watch Joey with her running shorts and bare toes. “Aren’t you freezing?”
She rubs at her knees in response, which seems insufficient to me because the cold is so present, it’s like a third person in the room. I close the window.
When we were all fourteen, less than a year after our initiation, we found a small alpine lake. I was the first to lower my body into it and swim out to the center. Minutes later, Joey came paddling behind me, dragging an inflatable inner tube. She didn’t say anything, just treaded water until I finally hooked an arm over the top. She didn’t make a big deal of it, just quietly rescued me. And the thing is, I was starting to ache from the cold. My breathing was speeding up, and my lungs were constricting; I was shivering uncontrollably. But part of mewantedto feel cold and alone out there. I didn’t want her to rescue me. And I don’t want to be rescued now. I want to know what it feels like to swim on my own, body numb and goose bumps like needles, all the way to the other shore.
“Do you ever think there’s more to it?” I ask. “Like, don’t you think it’s weird that the book we use for spells is completely blank?”
“I’ve never really thought about it.”
“Well, think about it now.” I’m needling her, gauging her reaction. I’m not sure of my aim—maybe I want her to guess what’s going on so I don’t have to lie.
She folds her arms. “I don’t understand.”
“Like, what if there is magic we don’t know about? Hidden in thosepages. What if we’re purposefully being shielded from its true potential? Our true potential.”
“Quinn, what are you talking about?”
Suddenly, my question feels urgent. I know I’m not explaining it correctly because Joey is smart. Born to work out puzzles.
“Okay, so we are the stewards of the magic, right?” I point, generally, to the woods beyond my backyard.
