1 Joey
Joey
Joey hears the trees whisper just as she starts mile seven.
She isn’t dressed well for the cold, but she curls her fingers into fists and lets her speed do the rest. She flies past slender tree trunks, one after another.
A climb up a steep hill makes her heart thunder; a hop over a downed tree sends blood pumping through her legs.
A runner’s high is one thing, but there is an extra pleasurable pain in the elevation changes of a wooded trail.
Since the moment she started running, before the sun rose and the trees were simply shadows blinking in and out of her headlamp, she’s heard nothing more than her shivering breath and the beat of her footsteps.
She is here to clear her head. To recalibrate. To forget about last night.
She picks up speed now as she nears the bend in the path.
If she makes a left and veers off-trail, she’ll end up in the aspen grove.
She can imagine the spell circle there, but she doesn’t look that way; she just keeps her eyes trained ahead as the light from her lamp bounces up and down.
The aspen leaves quake around her, and she feels a shimmer of magic.
It’s strong, even at this distance. She thinks she can feel it tickling her bones, but she shakes her head.
It’s been so long. She’s not even sure if it is the magic she’s sensing or just her subconscious remembering the feeling.
In a fit of recklessness, she flicks off her lamp and bounds down the trail—away from the aspen grove—at a full sprint, speeding up even more as the slope pitches down.
She tries to pretend she doesn’t know why she chose this trail today. She tries to pretend it was just a coincidence. She wants to shoulder away the thoughts that pulse in time with her quickening steps. Fifteen years. Fifteen years. Fifteen years.
The ground is dark and soft beneath her, but the faint light of morning is purpling the sky, and the trees blur gray around her.
Even her wide stride and expansive breaths—breaths that billow like smoke in front of her—can’t get her out of her own head.
Now that she’s here, the thoughts won’t leave her.
She’s come this way because, deep down, she’s a masochist. She has done it before, and she wonders, not for the first time, if she has some kind of psychological condition.
Being near here feels like pressing a bruise, a dull reminder of pain.
But she likes to press on that bruise. She needs to, if only to know that she can still feel.
Fifteen years.
Joey saw her first. Quinn’s lifeless eyes stared up at the empty sky. It was strange to see her there, so near where they often came together, except sprawled at the bottom of the rocky crag instead of above it.
The coroner’s conclusion was that she had died around five o’clock on Wednesday evening.
She left her mom’s that afternoon and wasn’t found until ten the next morning.
There was no moment of psychic knowing for Joey, no tug of an internal string that told her Quinn was gone.
And Joey would never forgive herself for that.
She’d never forgive herself for not paying closer attention.
In the end, they ruled it an accident. A snapped clavicle, broken shoulder and arm, and fatal trauma to the skull.
One misstep, an unlucky fall, and a single jagged rock in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The evidence was unmistakable. A careless slip while hiking alone, an accidental tumble down the ravine, and that was the end.
But Joey knew Quinn would never come hiking out here alone. Not here, where the woods were thick with magic only they could feel, where it buzzed, hive-like, beneath their feet. They weren’t ever supposed to come alone. They were supposed to stay together. It was one of the rules.
So no, Joey has never believed it was an accident.
After that day, the world stopped turning.
They couldn’t do magic, even if they wanted to.
Four best friends broken and scattered. Quinn was buried.
Elena left within days. Sophie left within a few months.
It all happened so quickly. Joey stayed but did not grow roots.
She was blindsided at first, ice-cold with grief.
But over time, her heart started to thaw, and all she could do was let time pass.
There were times she’d thought about starting fresh somewhere else, but she never did.
Someone had to stay here. Someone had to remember.
She did eventually find a sliver of relief, but that’s something she tries not to think too much about. The shame of it makes her feel sick. And after last night, it’s clear things have gone beyond her control.
A surge of wind kicks leaves up into Joey’s face, and she’s temporarily distracted.
As she bats the leaves away, she feels a sharp change in momentum.
She jolts as her toe snags on a rock. Her body hurls forward, launching through the air.
Her palms, her chest, and her thighs smack against the ground.
She bumps and skids over the earth. A rock slices into her knee.
She curses and wipes dirt off herself, examining the tear in her pants and trying to catch her breath.
She’s in the thick of the aspens here. The grove—their grove—is just behind her.
She closes her eyes and wishes she’d chosen a different trail this morning.
The memories and the pain are still unbearable, and yet, she cannot seem to let them go.
Then, without warning, the wind spirals. Leaves blind her, violently flipping and twisting, devouring everything beyond a one-foot radius.
The sound comes next. At first, she thinks it’s the wind, but soon her thoughts are drowned out.
It’s a shushing, like white noise, but so earsplittingly loud, it could be a jet engine.
She scrambles to her feet. Something else is there, intermingled with the wind—barely there, like it’s coming up from the ground, from the tangle of roots that reaches down into the earth and stretches beyond this trail, deep into the mountains. Is it a voice?
Then, in the way an orchestra finishes tuning before the performance, silence descends over the aspens around her. It’s a blanket, soothing and still. For a few moments, all she can hear is the in and out of her breath.
Her heart slams against her rib cage.
A voice—she is sure that’s what it is this time—comes from every direction. Softened by the whispering trees, it is raspy and wild. And so familiar, her knees almost buckle.
Quinn, Joey thinks. She looks around desperately, as if she’ll see Quinn standing behind her, as if that were possible. But it’s only the aspen trees standing guard, with their leaves that look blood-black against the morning sky.
She leans her back against the nearest tree to steady herself. The cold of the trunk seeps through her shirt, like ice against her skin.
Quinn’s voice is all around her now, above and below her, repeating and echoing from every direction. It sounds edged with fear, with a sharp inflection Quinn only used when she was cornered.
Two words. Joey hears them over and over again, a dozen times, maybe more.
And she looks around, over her shoulder, and then between the trees because she wants more than anything to see the real Quinn, to hear her real voice, but it’s not her.
Just a couple of words, whispered through the trees, again and again and again.
Before long, the whisper of shivering leaves grows louder than the words, and Quinn’s voice is hurried away with the wind.
Everything goes silent. Joey holds her breath. It’s in this space, this supernatural quiet, that she understands the significance of the two words she’s just heard.
She waits another minute, then sprints back down the trail.
Holy shit.