45 Elena
Elena
Elena sweeps her arm across her middle as she walks toward the spell circle.
“She was right over there,” she says to herself, “waving goodbye to the children.” She pictures the scene.
Teacher Number Two. The sheriff watching her, listening to her account.
Curious children hovering nearby. Horses braying in the distance.
She thinks about her inflection and wonders about her character.
At this moment, is she more afraid of the wolves or the sheriff?
This woman knew the victim. She was probably friends with her.
Her friend was brutally attacked by wolves, and then the sheriff comes asking questions of the townspeople? It would have anyone rattled.
Rattled. That’s the word she needs. That’s what she will try to portray.
She looks up and pulls in a sudden breath. Someone is there, squatting on top of the crag.
“Sophie?”
Sophie lets out a terrified shriek when she hears her name. Elena inches toward her. “What are you doing?”
“Oh my god,” Sophie says, closing her eyes to recover.
“Get down from there.” Elena reaches out a hand. A smattering of raindrops has darkened the rock, making it slick.
“You just scared the shit out of me.” Sophie sounds defensive. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was trying to find a quiet place to rehearse. What about you?”
Sophie tilts her head back to look at the sky, which is slowly bleeding into darkness. “Where do I start?”
“Why don’t you just come off the rock and we’ll—”
“You know how there are people who get shot, but the bullet never comes out the other side and they have to live with the bullet inside them for their entire lives?” Sophie is staring over the jagged side of the crag.
Elena stiffens, suddenly aware that if Sophie slips, she will be required to access something instinctual she’s not sure she possesses.
“Sure,” she says carefully.
“It’s like ever since we found Quinn, I’ve wondered what she went through that day, how she must have felt. But we’ll never know. We’ll never get the answer.”
“Soph, please come down from there.”
Elena watches Sophie try to turn fully. But she’s unstable.
Her toes step on something wobbly, a loose pebble or something, and her momentum shifts.
Panic screams inside Elena’s head. Sophie is falling.
Shit, shit, shit. She’s falling. Her arms circle helplessly, and Elena moves toward her, but there’s nothing to grab.
Elena is too far away. One foot dangles over the edge, and she can’t seem to get purchase with the other.
Elena feels herself leap with everything she has, and in one desperate motion, she somehow gets her hands around the backpack. Careful not to slip, Elena hauls her back and into her arms. Sophie’s legs drag on the ground, and together they fall onto the dirt.
They stare at each other. Elena can see the fear and relief in Sophie’s eyes. Her heart feels like it’s going to lift off; it’s pounding so fast. She stands and reaches down a hand.
Sophie sits. She rests her elbows on her knees and bows her head to catch her breath.
Elena shifts her weight. “Why the hell were you so close to the edge?”
“We really let Quinn down. We really let each other down.” Sophie grasps Elena’s hand and pulls herself up. The aspens shudder around them as droplets of rain bounce off their leaves. “I’m sorry about what I said. I didn’t mean it. You’re not a bad mother at all. Gael is really great.”
Elena sighs and scrubs at her face. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.
They only take a few steps before Sophie says, “It did bother me that you didn’t think to ask me what the pictures meant. You just assumed.”
“I didn’t assume,” Elena says, but she’s not defensive, more cowed. “Quinn told me.”
“What Quinn told you wasn’t the truth.” Sophie sounds indignant.
“What’s the truth then?”
“Tanner McGrath took those pictures.” The smattering of rain has matted Sophie’s hair to her head.
Tanner McGrath. A human stain. Elena remembers letting him finger her once, in the woods behind the school, near where she used to go with Mark.
She only did it because she couldn’t stand the way his girlfriend Marissa shoved dippable tortilla chips into salsa at her house at their Wednesday Bible study, cozying up to Elena’s mother like she was the next prophet.
She lets out a long breath. “I’m assuming you didn’t want him to take them? ”
Sophie breathes out through her nose. It could be a laugh, but it is hollow.
“When was this?”
“Two weeks before Quinn died.”
“Why were they on her phone?” she asks.
“She told me she was going to make him take them off his phone. Said she was going to convince him.”
Elena tries to remember. Sophie must have lent Elena her phone a hundred times over the year between when she got it and Quinn’s death, since Elena’s mom forbade her from having her own.
At some point that number became stored in other people’s phones as “Sophie and Elena.” Sophie never once complained.
Suddenly, a memory sharpens into focus. “I texted him,” Elena says, breathless. “The day of that party, Tanner sent you something really pervy, and I wrote him back, pretending to be you.”
“What?” Sophie has stopped walking.
Elena doesn’t do naked emotions, even though they’re brimming now.
She tamps the feelings down and keeps explaining.
“I knew he was bullying you, and I was planning to show everyone what a creep he was. That night, I thought I’d lure him somewhere and leave him stranded with his dick out.
” She thinks back. She had a half-baked plan.
She doesn’t even remember what it was now, but she did intend to humiliate him in front of everyone.
“I just didn’t get a chance to see it through. I got distracted. That night, I got distracted, and…” She looks down at herself, and even now, even after so much time has passed, she has no idea if she’s a good person or a bad person.
Moments pass. They walk. “You’re not the only one who made mistakes,” Sophie says quietly.
Elena looks at her, thinking Sophie is about to offer her forgiveness, and she feels a vehement, almost physical rejection of it. Elena hates that Sophie relentlessly sees the good in people. And yet she also feels a deep sorrow that she has missed out on her optimism for fifteen years.
“I think I’m the reason Quinn died,” Sophie says.
“Of course you’re not.”
But Sophie explains what Marissa Berg told her, that Quinn went to Tanner’s house a couple of days before she died.
Then Sophie adds her own analysis. She thinks Quinn threatened Tanner, told him to stay away from Sophie.
Maybe she said she would go to the police or something.
Tanner, with his infamously short fuse, was probably enraged by Quinn’s threat and followed her out here.
Sophie thinks Tanner pushed Quinn. She hides her face in her hands and mumbles that it’s all her fault.
No, Elena thinks. If this is true, then it’s Elena’s fault.
She’s the one who encouraged Tanner that night.
She’s the reason Quinn had an injustice to avenge in the first place.
So she’s the reason Tanner retaliated. Elena marvels at her three best friends and their ability to take on guilt like they’re pack mules.
“There were more words in the journal today,” Sophie says eventually. “I feel like there will be answers in there.”
“Fair enough,” Elena replies. “But it’s starting to rain. Why don’t you go home and read? I’m going to find Joey and run this by her. We need to find out if our Tanner theory has legs. And we need Joey’s knowledge of that day to do it.”
Sophie agrees. They walk urgently, and Elena shoots a text off to Joey, asking if she’s free. Soon, she sees the buildings of town rising in front of them.
“Oh my god, I forgot,” says Sophie, breathless, at the intersection. “Did you know about Joey and River?”
“What about them?”
“They’re…” She doesn’t finish the thought, just raises her eyebrows.
“No shit.” Elena wonders about the demons Joey must be battling to keep such a thing under wraps.
Then, like a forceful wind, she feels an onrushing sense of disquietude.
This whole week it’s just been one secret after another.
Each secret has pushed the three of them closer to some unseeable cliff.
What happens when they reach the cliff’s edge? Soon, something is going to push them over. She can feel it. And then they will fall.