31 Joey
Joey
Joey yanks her hair into a tight ponytail.
The night sky is swollen with clouds, exaggerating the darkness.
She clicks on her headlamp and runs beneath the streetlights to start, then dips onto a darkened trail where she can see nothing outside a five-foot radius.
Her legs burn with the effort as the terrain begins to slope upward, and she pushes harder, over rocks and branches and winding through trees and along the arterial path.
The run is working. Only a few brave thoughts dare enter her mind. Her body is practically ablaze. Endless stamina comes from somewhere down deep. Her lungs press against her ribs, taking up all the space inside her that exists. The darkness around her is a thrill.
Thirty minutes later she is at a lookout point.
She stretches her hands above her head and drinks in the sky.
It’s so close, she feels like she could reach out and grab clouds.
They pillow and overlap above her, deeper in the night’s shadow the higher up they get.
She tugs an electrolyte shot out of her waistband and chugs it.
It’s sticky sweet. There’s an energy bar in there too, and she unwraps it and sits on a rock.
Its jagged points stab her in the pelvic bones.
This is when the thoughts come. She has to let them.
She has no choice now. And they go right for the soft spots, as she knew they would.
First up is River and the heart-hammering idea that he could have been lying to her for their entire adult lives.
He’s careful and warm and sometimes obstinate, but she didn’t think—she had no idea—he could be a liar.
Until she found the antler in his closet, labeled with her name on it and that word again, bloodspell, just like underneath the deck, just like Quinn’s journal.
How could River not have known such a haunting thing existed in his house?
She feels a roll of nausea deep within her.
She’s just realized that the antler she found would have been an effective way to stab someone, say, in the abdomen several times.
It was sharp enough and was covered in what looked like old dried blood.
She takes a sip of water and spits it into the dirt.
But it couldn’t be River. Joey spoke with lots of people in the year after Quinn died, and of them all, River’s was the only alibi that she knew for certain to be rock-solid. She hadn’t had to ask him where he was the night Quinn was killed because she knew exactly where he was.
From four in the afternoon until eleven that night, he was with her.
He was with Joey.
She no longer wants to sit, so she heaves herself up and makes her way to the edge.
The mountains are powerful shadows pressed against the dark sky.
She has a view of the town from here too.
It’s illuminated by yellow streetlights.
She traces the streets she knows by closing one eye and trailing a finger through the air.
Immediately, she finds Aspect Coffee and the inn.
The Hollywood dirt they poured along Front Street looks odd from up here.
It makes the town look plasticky, Disney-ish, and surreal.
She keeps tracing. There’s the house where she grew up, and the house she lives in now.
There’s Quinn’s and Sophie’s and Elena’s.
On the other side is River’s. It’s all there, her whole life, her entire thirty-two years in miniature.
With her finger, she traces Elk Horn Road out of town to the approximate location of Tom Winter’s.
She can’t see the house, but she wonders if Tom is there, passed out on the lumpy floor mattress or praying before his Quinn shrine.
She thinks again of the sweatshirt. Should they have taken it to the police?
Maybe they could have found out whose blood it was.
But then Elena’s voice is in her head, dismissing this idea.
It was the cops who decided not to mention the seven stab wounds in the police report.
Another wave of nausea. Another sip of water.
Are they digging into some kind of police cover-up?
A cold wind bites at her bare ankles. Quinn was always her dad’s biggest advocate.
“He doesn’t want to go,” she told Joey once about rehab, while they sat hip-to-hip in the cafeteria, sharing a bag of vending machine pretzels.
Joey had the acute awareness back then that Quinn didn’t talk about her dad to everyone.
She was compassionate, empathetic to a fault, but she was also a teenager.
The day Tom rolled his truck into a streetlight and puked onto the sidewalk was one that Joey would never forget.
She wonders if that day, the public humiliation of it, was the turning point.
It was right around then, Joey realizes, that Quinn started acting strangely.
The lies began. The sneaking out. The avoidance.
They were all close—Joey and Elena and Sophie—but Quinn was like a mother duck.
She kept them all together, and after she dipped out of their friendship, they never unified.
If they had, they would have had enough awareness to convince her to come back to them or force her to tell them what was going on.
But they didn’t. And then Joey made a choice on Quinn’s last day that would haunt her forever.
To make a stupid, insignificant point, as if their friendship meant nothing to her at all, she chose a boy. She chose River over Quinn.
Joey is starting to feel cold. Spent. She wishes she didn’t have to run back down. Waiting for her down there is a decision she doesn’t want to make, a conversation she doesn’t want to have.
Quinn died that day, and Joey never got the telling off she deserved. There has been no punishment for her but the slow decay of guilt. And guilt is a pillar holding up her grief. It’s why she will never be able to let go of Quinn’s death.
A sudden sound from behind her shakes her out of her reverie.
The rev of an engine. A dirt bike, maybe, from somewhere down the mountain, but still close.
It’s after eight. Usually, she has the whole mountain to herself at this time of night.
She sits perfectly still, listening as it seems to approach slowly.
All her muscles tense. She prepares to stand, to run.
And then, just as she’s about to launch to her feet, the sound fades and eventually dissolves into the natural sounds of night.
She waits a minute, listening to the wind whistle through the trees. Then, she wets her lips and rubs at her face and runs back down the mountain.