River, on the other hand—he is full of emotion. So much so that tears are starting to fill his eyes. This takes Joey by surprise, and suddenly she is speechless. An inner voice is screaming at her to stop. His hurt looks real. But she steels herself. She cannot crack, not even for him. She has to know the truth.
His voice is thick when he finally speaks. He looks directly at Joey when he asks, “You think I hurt Quinn?”
Joey is hot, so hot. And her mouth is a desert. She wants to reach out and down the rest of her beer, but she can’t get her arms to move. She forces herself to stare back at his face. She has come to know it so well. There looks to be some vulnerability there, but she can’t tell if it implicates him for lying or if it implicates her for accusing him. If there’s a lie, she knows he will betray himself. And when he does, it’s going to hurt like hell, but that’s what happens. People lie. They leave, and you move on.
“Wait,” he says, leaning backward in his chair, which looks like a toy beneath his six-foot-six frame. “You don’t just think I hurt her. You think Ikilledher.” He turns to Sophie, then Elena. “Do you think this too, or is it just Joey?” He laughs sharply when they don’t reply. “I’m such an idiot. I thought this was a reunion. It’s been fifteen years. I didn’t realize this was…whatever this is. I honestly can’t believe you think I’d do something like that. Joey, come on. You of all people. I know it’s been a long time, but Quinn and I were… I cared about her too.”
Elena, who is inclined toward confrontation, looks about to respond, but Joey stands abruptly, hearing nothing but her pulse thumping in her eardrums. “Just tell me you didn’t,” she says.
They stare each other down like this for a second or a minute—it’s hard to tell how long. And then, exactly what she feared would happen happens. River says nothing. He throws her a look of such profound disappointment, she feels it beneath her skin, beneath her bones, in her very soul.
Then, he is gone.
35Elena
Elena watches Joey, who is still half-turned toward the door. Her face hangs slack in a way it didn’t before River arrived. She seemed to lose something in that exchange.
“It was him,” Elena says.
Joey seems to blink her into focus, and Elena presses on, committing now because she has information that might be valuable. “First, he was carrying a lie like a bad smell. It was all over him.”
Joey casts her eyes down at the table.
“Second—and this one is going to be a bit of a blow, so buckle up—he said he cared about Quinn as much as we did, but I know for a fact that’s not true.” She can feel the latent energy at the table increase. The bar around them is noisy again. Someone has put a song on the jukebox.
“Why do you say that?” Joey’s voice is gravelly.
“I just remembered this,” says Elena, tapping on the table with her fingernails. “Quinn and River may have dated those last few months of junior year, but it wasn’t what we thought. Quinn didn’t feel that way about him. At least, not toward the end.” She draws a breath. This is harder than she thought it would be, discussing Quinn’s love life whenshe isn’t here to give her side of the story.
“Why?” says Joey, tearing at the napkins again.
“Oh god, I started this, so I might as well finish it,” says Elena. And then she does. “Quinn had a little action on the side that she didn’t want River to know about. She was in love with someone else.”
Sophie asks, “With who?”
Elena blinks at her. “With you.”
36Quinn
May 2011
Two weeks before the fall
“What the hell is this?”
Elena is in my room when I get out of the shower. My skin is clammy, and the towel over my hair feels too tight. I knew she was here. I just didn’t know she would be looking through my things. She’s perched on the side of the bed. My mind instantly goes to the book, but as I step into the room, I notice it’s not the book she has but my phone. She’s scrolling furiously. It takes me a minute to process what she could possibly see there that would make her so upset.
Elena holds the screen out in my direction. I take in the curves of a human form in a picture I recognize. I start to speak, to defend myself, but then I realize I’d rather do it while wearing clothes. I slip on some underwear and tug a T-shirt over my head. My hair is slimy against my neck.
I turn back to Elena, who is scrolling back and forth. She can’t take her eyes off the images, and her mouth is open in shock. I’m about to tell her what happened, from the beginning. I’m about to tell her that while Collingswood was feeling her up in the woods, Tanner McGrath was assaulting Sophie. Suddenly, I’m so angry I can’t speak, but I’mangry because—why, exactly? I’m angry at Tanner for being a despicable human, angry at Collingswood, angry at Sophie’s mom for running out on her when she was a baby, angry at Joey’s mom for not getting the help she needs, angry at Elena’s mom for trying to snuff her fire out, and angry at my own dad for hiding behind his disease. It’s irrational and unfair, but I’m just angry in general—at the multiple, ridiculous ways people are awful on purpose and by mistake, the way their minds betray them and make them into bad people when we need them to be good. It can’t be that hard to be good, can it? And the magic…so far, it’s done nothing to keep my friends from getting hurt.
Mostly, I’m angry at myself. I tried to unlock the hidden spells in the book—the ones we’ve never been able to access before. It didn’t work. But I’m not giving up because I know, Iknowthere is a mind-healing spell somewhere in those pages. I take the phone from her.
“Are you two hooking up?” Elena asks.
I jerk my head up. That’s her takeaway? Then, I look at the picture again. Sophie sits on a bed with her arms folded over her naked chest. Her eyes are watery and unfocused from alcohol. Behind the camera, I know, is Tanner, who is not just a run-of-the-mill asshole. He’s a predator. My heart sinks. Sophie must still be feeling awful.
Elena doesn’t wait for me to respond. Instead, she asks, “Is this why you’ve been acting so weird lately?”
