Inwardly, Joey flinches. She can’t look at him. “I’m sorry.” She turns abruptly.
“Wait,” he says. She hears him place his fingers on the doorframe above her head. “Look, I don’t want you to go, for whatever that’s worth. I was hurt last night. I couldn’t believe what you thought of me. But now, standing here with you, I understand. You’re looking for answers. I told you how I feel, and that hasn’t changed. It will never change. I love you. I still want us to move in together.”
A neat row of trees stands guard at the front of River’s house. She remembers when they were planted. They were in fourth grade. Now, those trees stand over six feet tall, all of them.
“Everything’s changed,” she says.
“Listen to me, Joey. You can’t carry this guilt forever. If Quinn were here today, she’d tell you to stop beating yourself up. You know she would.” He waits to see if she is going to respond, then clears his throat. “Besides, Walter needs you. If you leave, whose sweaty legs is he going to lick after a run?”
When he doesn’t get the laugh he was hoping for, he goes silent. The mention of the dog brings the days after Quinn’s death back to her, when between bouts of crying, the guilt for spending Quinn’s last living hours in River’s bedroom surfaced like a sewer rat. And then one cloud-white afternoon, River was there, at her front door. At his feet, a damp ball of fluff paced back and forth, not understanding the leash. River explained that he found the puppy wandering at the edge of the woods, looking hungry, and had eventually lured him into his arms with a few strips of beef jerky, then took him home and gave him a bath. The puppy, she believed then and still believes now, was River’s umbrella, intended to repel some of the shock waves of Quinn’s death. River invited Joey under it that day. At the sight of him with that squirming fluffball, she became lightheaded with pleasure. If she had to pinpointit, that was the exact moment she knew she couldn’t be with him. She closed the door that day and kept it closed for years. Even after her mother died, when she longed to sink into him, to smell him, to hear him tell her she’d be okay, she just couldn’t.
Until one snowy afternoon two years ago. It started with showing up to shovel the same elderly neighbor’s driveway and turned into microwave popcorn and half a bottle of tequila. A mistake that was a long time coming. In the end, it was his heartbeat that ultimately did it. It was so steady, so rhythmic. He asked her on a date, and with one ear pressed to his chest, she said yes, but she made him swear to keep it secret, as if doing so would absolve them both.
“I feel guilty all the time.” She says it so quietly, she wonders if he has heard her.
Behind her, he lets out a loud, long, frustrated breath. “Do you think…?” he says before lowering his voice. “Would you still feel this way if Quinn hadn’t died?”
“If she didn’t die, we wouldn’t be together.” She isn’t sure where this thought came from. But as she says it aloud, she wonders if it’s true. Has she been drawn to him all these years because he somehow makes her feel closer to Quinn?
“Ouch,” he says. “Not sure I agree with that.”
She knows she has wounded him, but defenses are hardening around her, brick by brick. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she says.
“Like what?”
“You can’t explain the antler, for one.”
“You’re right,” he says, pulling his fingertips off the doorframe and scratching his arm. “The antler is fucked up. I talked to my parents and my sister, and none of them know anything about it. I am literally clueless. In fact, I’m kind of freaked out because I’ve been in that closet a few times over the years, and I’d never seen it before yesterday.”
He pulls at a drawstring on his sweatshirt and studies it, like he’s not sure what her reaction is going to be.
She doesn’t turn away, but she can feel herself pulled in two very distinct directions. “So you expect me to believe it’s just a magic antler that appeared at random?” she says eventually.
He lifts one shoulder and then drops it. She watches him, playing back her own question in her head. Something about it gives her pause, but she’s not sure why.
That’s when the rain starts.
“Tell no one.”
–Rule #5,The Book of Aspens
41Quinn
June 2011
One week before the fall
I’ve done it.
I’ve discovered a whole world of hidden spells.
I’m running now, frantically putting one foot in front of the other, careful to avoid roots and rocks. My breath consumes me. Aspens whir past. Ideas try to wriggle free from my muddy mind because it’s not just late spring outside. It’s like there’s a kind of late spring inside me too. I know now. There is so much more that this magic can do.
Finally, my feet bring me to his doorstep, and he is there, watching me catch my breath. My hands drop to my knees, and my chest expands with the air I’m desperate for. He is patient, as he always is, and eventually, we go inside, where he brings me a glass of water.
“I did it,” I say. I tell him everything, how the book filled right up with spells that have been hidden for generations, spells my mom doesn’t even know about. The blood-inked words flooded every corner of every page with what I can only assume is the scrawl of past witches. Because I believe now that we really are witches. And this isn’t just a book. It’s a grimoire. It contains hundreds of witches’ spells.
He listens, nodding along, letting me spill my discoveries. It feelslike I’m offloading a heavy stone with every breathless revelation. I tell him about the curses and the hexes and spells to change the weather and spells to shapeshift into a bird and spells I don’t even know what they are for because I couldn’t read fast enough before they disappeared again. Some were written in clear, plain English, and others in languages I don’t know, in script that was barely legible. With every word I tell him, I feel more electric, like lightning itself.
