Aspen
by Joyce Reynolds-Ward
She has been called “the best writer I’ve never heard of” by one reviewer. Her work includes themes of high-stakes family and political conflict, digital sentience, personal agency and control, realistic strong women, and (whenever possible) horses. She is the author of The Netwalk Sequence series, the Goddess’s Honor series, and the recently released The Martiniere Legacy series as well as standalones Klone’s Stronghold and Alien Savvy. Joyce is a Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off Semifinalist, a Writers of the Future SemiFinalist, and an Anthology Builder Finalist. She is the Secretary of the Northwest Independent Writers Association, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and a member of Soroptimists International.
Aspen pulled loose the little triple-folded bookmark she had slipped in the gym’s side door to keep her hideaway accessible. She ducked into the small alcove between the gym and the walkway to the stage, and pressed hard against the wall so she wouldn’t trigger the automatic lights in the main gym.
One. Two. Three. She gulped for breath, choking back sobs so she wouldn’t betray her hiding place.
“Hey! Hey! Shoulder butt!” Cody, one of the more obnoxious jock boys, yelled outside the locked door. A heavy body slammed against the door and someone fumbled with the lock.
“Gotcha!” Cody bellowed again.
“I’ll get you back, Cody!” Kari, a girl who ran with one of the jocks, hollered. Aspen smiled, imagining the glare on Kari’s face. Kari was nice to her—sometimes.
Someone else rattled the lock, with more purpose. “I’m gonna hide in here!” Marisa hissed, probably to Kari. “Old tighty-whitey Larsen won’t notice.”
Aspen tensed, sliding up the stairs while shoving herself as hard as she could against the wall, step by careful step in the darkness.
“Knock it off!” Mrs. Jones, the Science teacher, yelled just outside the door. “This behavior doesn’t belong in school. Get to class!”
Aspen heaved a heavy sigh of relief as the tardy bell rang and the sounds of the other students faded away. She slid down the wall to sit on the steps and leaned her head back, finally relaxing.
Crazy morning. Crazy, crazy morning.
Three of the regular middle school teachers were out sick. Two of the worst substitute teachers ever were in Math and Language Arts, and Principal Larsen had cancelled PE to make it a study hall under his supervision. Which meant spitwads, thrown pencils, and the casual bullying of the smart cool Leadership kids who could go anywhere in the building at any time and do anything they wanted.
Ever since one of the Leadership kids had jammed a wad of gum in her friend Emily’s hair, Aspen had braided and put up her fine blond hair. She couldn’t stand the thought of having to get gum out of it, and except for Mrs. Jones and the reading teacher, Mr. West, none of the staff could stop the mean kids from doing stuff like that.
Aspen sniffled and wiped away a tear. She buried her head on her knees. Principal Larsen wouldn’t notice she was gone from PE and Health. He never took roll. Next period was Social Studies. By then Mr. West would have started work, and she could practice reading with her friend Allyce.
Reading still sucked and was hard. But Mr. West joked with them as they read through the passages. That made it fun.
A faint rustle in the main part of the gym startled her. Aspen shrank back further into a corner.
Had Mr. Larsen changed his mind about study hall and brought the other kids in PE and Health to the gym? The automatic lights hadn’t switched on, so someone else must be hiding here, like her.
But it could be Kesh niggling around, looking for a victim to torment. It wouldn’t be the first time.
No lights came up. More rustling.
A rat?
If so, she wanted to see it. The science teacher had lost a couple of rats. Rumor suggested Kesh had something to do with their potential gory deaths. But no one could prove anything, and several kids had claimed to see the distinctive gray and white rats around the school.
Delicately, Aspen eased out of her alcove, ready to bolt for further cover once the light came up.
She caught her breath in delight as the light switched on and revealed several small aspens almost as tall as she was in the middle of the gym, leaves glowing gold.
“How—” she started to say, and took a step forward.
Yelling outside the back doors. Her PE class exploded into the gym, yelling, screaming, and pushing against each other. Lorena, a tall cool girl, was the first to see the trees.
“Look at that!” she yelled, pointing at the trees. Aspen shrunk back to her alcove. “How’d these get in here?”
The class clustered around the trees, jostling with each other for a better view. Principal Larsen ambled in. He stopped suddenly, staring at the trees.
“Who did this?” he asked sharply, his perpetual frown deepening.
Aspen couldn’t hear what her classmates said over the chaos. An uproar arose from the group. Several boys jumped on the trees, stomping them to pieces with gleeful shouts. Aspen covered her mouth to keep from crying out as the boys continued. Meanwhile, Principal Larsen stood to one side, one corner of his mouth turning up in a slight smile. The other kids grabbed the inflatable dodgeballs and began splitting up into teams.
Aspen shrunk down further in her corner, arms wrapped tight around her legs. She didn’t move until the bell rang and the other students poured out of the gym. When all had gone quiet, she crept out and knelt over the aspen remnants. A couple of her tears fell on the shattered saplings, and she fancied they quivered.
The tardy bell rang. Aspen sprung up, startled, racing toward her next class. She didn’t really want to miss Social Studies, because if she was late, she might not get pulled out for reading.
“So did anything happen at school yesterday?” Aspen’s mother asked the next morning as she made pancakes, the one meal of the day she actually had time to cook.
Aspen squirmed. “Um, nothing different, not really. Why?”
Her mother shrugged, deftly flipping pancakes to join the bacon on Aspen’s plate. She added two more to her own stack and put the batter in the fridge. “Just wondering. There was a funny post in the parent Facebook group about a prank involving trees in the school gym. Aspen trees. I wasn’t certain if they were for real or if that was code for something else.”
“I—um, well, no one picked on me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“So, what happened?” Her mother plopped the plate down in front of Aspen and corralled her own plate. She handed the blueberry syrup to Aspen.
Aspen concentrated on pouring the syrup. It was too much to hope that Mom would stop asking questions, and she wasn’t sure what to say next.
“Aspen, honey, I know things aren’t right. Larsen’s a beast but we’re working on getting rid of him. What happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Aspen whispered.
“Try me.” Her mother quirked an eyebrow. “Besides, I want to make sure that Larsen’s not going to be blaming you for anything weird that happens. Strange things happen at that school sometimes. Larsen’s got a bizarre obsession about that aspen grove that grows next to the school. He’s talked to the PTA about cutting it down.”
“No!” Aspen blurted. “He—he can’t!”
“It’s okay, honey.” Her mother reached across the table and patted Aspen’s hand. “I know you love those trees. You’re not the only kid who’s grown up playing in that grove.” She smiled wistfully. “Enough of us parents grew up playing in that grove. It’s safe, don’t you worry.”
“Thank you.” Aspen pushed around a chunk of pancake in the extra syrup. She stuck it in her mouth and chewed, savoring the blueberry flavor.
“But I need to know what’s going on. What on earth was that Facebook post about, do you know?”
Aspen froze. She swallowed hard and chugged a gulp of milk to wash down the chunk of pancake that wanted to stick in her throat. “Just a prank someone did.”
“What prank?” Her mother scowled. “Come on, Aspen. I don’t have time to play twenty questions.” The exasperated note in her voice shifted. “Just tell me. Please.” Her voice almost broke on the last word.
Aspen looked down at her pancakes. “It looked like trees were growing in the gym,” she said in a very quiet voice.
“Trees growing in the gym?” Something about the tension in her mother’s voice made Aspen look up.
Her mother looked scared. Aspen’s throat tighten up, so much she could do nothing more than nod.
“Okay. Trees growing in the gym.” That note of fear still hung in her mother’s voice. She sipped on her coffee, coughed, and then sat up. “Thank you, Aspen.” She coughed. “How’s your reading doing?” she asked in a lighter, forced voice.
For once, reading was safe to discuss. “I—it’s—getting better. Kinda. I wish I could catch on like Allyce does.”
“Honey, I know reading is hard for you. I wish it weren’t,” her mother said sadly. “You get that from me, I’m afraid. Keep trying.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall behind Aspen and jumped. “And I need to get going or I’ll be late to work.”
“Can you drop me off at school?” Aspen bit back her pleading tone. “I’m ready.”
Her mother hesitated, then nodded. “Let’s do it. I’m working late again tonight. I won’t get home until you’re in bed.”
“Thank you,” Aspen murmured, grateful for the reprieve from school bus hell.
Aspen skulked inside the school after her mother dropped her off. She joined the small group of early arriving kids in the hallway outside the office. Most of them were sleepy, though a couple of kids stared at their handheld game systems. Kari and Lorena giggled over something on their cell phones, texting furiously.
Probably about me.
Aspen huddled at the end of one of the benches, wishing that Mrs. Jones was already here. Sometimes she’d let kids come into her room early.
Maybe if she went to the bathroom, no one would follow her. Aspen stuck her head in the office.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” she asked Sandy, the grumpy but kind school secretary. Before Principal Larsen had yelled at Sandy about it, she let Aspen and some of the other bullied kids hang out in the office before school.
Sandy smiled at her. “Of course, honey.” Her voice lowered. “Be careful. He’s on the warpath. Too many weird comments on Facebook, and he’s looking for a kid to blame. Don’t let it be you.”
“Thanks,” Aspen breathed. She slunk down the hallway and darted into the bathroom. She lingered over washing her hands, trying to find a reason to stay here. Voices made her freeze in place.
“I’m not sure how this happened,” Principal Larsen’s annoyed voice echoed from the back door as it slammed shut. “I can’t figure out why or how trees would grow in the gym, much less sprout so quickly overnight. I need you to check the floor. This place is too spooky.”
“I’ll do that,” said Mark the head custodian, a distant cousin of Aspen’s. Their voices echoed down the hallway toward the gym. Aspen sucked up her courage and glided down the hallway. Mark happened to look back as Larsen kept talking, and winked at Aspen.
“What the—!” Larsen yelled, louder than ever. Mark leaned on the door, letting Aspen peek in to see that the trees were back, larger and more elegant than before.
“Go to your spot,” he whispered as Larsen stomped around the gym. “Witness.”
Aspen nodded. She ran around the far side of the gym to slip into her hiding place and peered cautiously through the curtains hiding the stage.
“Someone’s been in here!” Larsen screeched. “I thought you said you kept this place locked!
“I do,” Mark said calmly, walking around the trees, gently grabbing a branch to examine it. “And they were all gone when I cleaned in here last night. No cracks in the floor, nothing to show that trees were growing here. Didn’t you say the kids broke all the shoots yesterday? These look like they’ve been growing for five years if not longer, and they’ve not been broken.”
“I thought they were broken,” Larsen growled.
“We’ll take care of that,” Mark said cheerfully. “It’ll take me a couple of days to requisition the right herbicide.”
“What are we going to do about this in the meantime?” Larsen waved his hands disdainfully at the little trees.
“Oh, I guess I’ll cut them down. Is Mr. Markel back for PE today?”
“No, he’s still down with the flu. I don’t want anybody coming in here until we deal with this situation,” Larsen snarled. “We’ve got to deal with this before Markel comes back. I can keep the kids in the room today.” A whiny note came into Larsen’s voice. “More teachers sick, and we don’t have enough substitutes willing to make the drive out of the city.”
“You’ll figure something out,” Mark said affably, whistling as he examined the trees. “Pity. Nice-looking little aspens. Maybe I should transplant them outside.”
“No. Not. One. More. Tree.” The sharpness of Larsen’s tone made Aspen nervous.
“Whatever you say,” Mark said, shrugging again. As he turned away from Larsen, he grinned at Aspen’s hiding place.
Don’t worry, he mouthed. They won’t be gone very soon.
Somehow Aspen found that thought comforting. And it was funny to watch Larsen fume. He grabbed one of the saplings and yanked hard.
“Ouch!” he yelled, letting go of it. “That thing bit me!”
“Aspens don’t sting,” Mark remarked. He winked again in Aspen’s direction.
“After we get rid of these trees, next we’ll take care of the rest of them,” Larsen muttered.
The first bell rang. Aspen eased out of her hiding place. It wouldn’t do to be marked absent for first period math. Not when her mother had dropped her off.
Despite Mark’s assurances, Aspen worried about the trees. Principal Larsen had sounded so mad about them. Funny that the one tree had hurt him.
She thought about that during the silent reading period of Language Arts, while pretending to read the thick chapter book she had picked at random from the shelves during the last library period. She tried once again to sneak into the gym during PE, but someone had pulled her little doorstop, so she couldn’t. Principal Larsen’s eyes never seemed to drift away from her during his droning lecture about the evils of fast food.
Aspen schemed during Larsen’s lecture. Maybe Mark would let her into the gym during lunchtime. She usually brought her own lunch and didn’t go through the lunch line, so she could sneak away while the aides managed the unruly line. The biggest drawback was that the table the various lunch cliques shoved her off to was deepest in the corner of the tiny lunchroom. If she could somehow find a way around that obstacle, perhaps hide right at the door so she could duck out, then she would get a chance to sneak into the gym before the aides chased everyone out of the building for recess.
Or she could use the restroom and gamble that the nosey aides wouldn’t pay attention to her, giving her time to duck into the gym by a different route. The aides liked Aspen and sometimes gave her a chance to slink out of the lunchroom early so she could get to the aspen grove outside, hide from the bullies.
But not always.
Like today.
The nosiest old lady aide of all glared suspiciously at Aspen as she snuck into the lunchroom. Aspen’s heart sunk as she realized Marta guarded the door. Marta watched everybody who left the lunchroom when she was on door duty, even the popular kids. She even dared to go into the boys’ restroom a couple of times when a fight had broken out there.
Aspen took up a seat by the door, doing her best to appear small and as close to invisible as she could.
“You’re in my place.” Cody poked her shoulder with his lunch tray and glared at Aspen as she turned around.
“Oh—am I? I’m really sorry, but I have to go to Mr. Santino’s class over recess for lunch,” Aspen improvised quickly. Everyone had to spend some time in Math during recess at some point. “I wanted to sit here so I could go sooner.”
Cody scowled. “Nerd. Who wants to hang out with Santino, anyway? I didn’t hear your name at announcements.”
“That’s because you didn’t shut up during them,” Lorena shouted across the table, grinning as she leaned into Cody’s face. “Jerk! I wanted to hear announcements today!”
Lorena’s apparent support gave Aspen the courage to speak up. “He asked me to come in and make up a test. My choice.” Even as she said the words they didn’t sound right.
“But still, that’s my spot,” Cody insisted.
“Ah, come on, Cody,” his buddy Luke said. “Let her be.”
Aspen shyly smiled at Luke and he grinned at her. Luke was a good guy; he really was, even though he hung out with the jerks like Cody.
“No,” Cody insisted. “That’s my spot. That’s where I sit at lunch. She can be with the other losers.”
Luke sat down. “Hey, she can sit with us. It’s no big deal, dude. Plant your butt before Marta gets a bug up her ass. She’s glaring at us.”
“Only if she moves,” Cody muttered, shaking his head.
Marta came over. “Is there a problem?”
“She’s in my spot,” Cody insisted.
“You don’t have an assigned spot,” Marta snapped. “Now sit down!”
“All right,” Cody growled. He slammed his tray down hard, half in Aspen’s space, half next to it, bumping Aspen’s hand as she picked up her apple juice, making her spill part of it over her lunch. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said with fake sorrow in his voice, fakey enough to make the other jocks at the table laugh.
Aspen felt her face burn and she shrunk down. But she held her ground and didn’t move until she’d finished eating.
“Can I go wash my hands?” she asked Marta. “Cody—ah—bumped into me and I spilled juice all over them.”
“Go. Wash. Quickly.”
Aspen hurried down the hallway. Principal Larsen walked past her, scowling. He stopped before she had gone much further and she could feel him staring at her.
He knew she was connected to the trees. Somehow.
Just how am I connected to them? Really? she asked herself as she washed her hands.
Loud cheers erupted from the lunchroom. Then the sound of pounding feet thundering into the gym.
Aspen gave up the pretense of hiding and raced out of the gym, dread choking her throat hard as she hurried into the gym. The biggest jocks were stomping on the fresh saplings, just like yesterday.
But three bigger trunks rose high, two as thick as her waist. And one of them, the biggest one, had a climbable set of branches on it. She spotted a fork that angled off just right for a place to sit.
Aspen smiled softly. Like many mountain children, she spent a lot of time climbing trees.
I can do this.
Dropping her lunch bag, she darted quickly into the small grove, dodging the little shoots until she found the biggest tree. She sucked in her breath and jumped for a branch. Someone grabbed at her and she fell to the floor.
“You will not climb the trees!” Principal Larsen bellowed, his pale cheeks blazing red with anger. His short red-blond hair bristled like an angry cat’s ruff.
Aspen rolled away from him, using the other shoots to block his grabs and come at the big tree from a different angle. The shoots slowed Larsen, but not enough. He tried to tackle Aspen as she ran hard at the tree.
This time Aspen managed to duck away. She gained enough momentum to snag a limb just barely out of reach as she scrambled up the trunk. Larsen pulled at her foot. She kicked the sneaker off into his hand. The tree’s bark seemed to stick to her, offering her purchase as she scurried up higher, dodging another one of Larsen’s attempts to grab her.
The promising fork was higher than she thought. Aspen didn’t look down as she pulled herself up the tree. Branches offered convenient hand and foot holds, the branches seeming to place themselves where she most needed them. Meanwhile, Larsen fumed below her, sliding down the trunk as he scrabbled to gain enough purchase to climb up after her.
At last, she gained the promising fork, a set of three sturdy branches placed at an inviting angle. She could sit on the middle one while using the top one as a backrest and the bottom as a footrest. It felt like a natural chair, but it was higher than she thought, higher even than Mark’s big ladder.
“Get. Down!” Larsen yelled at her. He whirled and gestured to Marta. “They listen to you! Get her down!”
Marta rolled her eyes. “Get down,” she said mildly, in a tone softer than her usual authoritative voice. She shrugged and turned back to Larsen.
“GET DOWN!” Larsen roared at Aspen.
“Stop it!” Aspen screamed back. “Stop them from trampling the babies!” She spotted Luke and Cody. “Cody! Luke! Stop them!” Her voice cracked and she winced at the begging tone in it.
Cody didn’t notice but Luke paused. Aspen’s heart leapt. Luke was a strong tree climber. And he was popular. If he’d climb up, commit to saving the trees, maybe more kids would join them in saving the trees instead of destroying them.
Marta ambled toward Larsen. She appeared to stumble over a small shoot, and shoved Cody away from the small saplings he had been stomping. Immediately, the saplings popped back up and began to grow. Larsen screamed and jumped on them, his face puffing into greater redness as his feet got tangled up with the quickly growing saplings. He fell, the saplings twining around his feet and ankles like they were vines instead of trees.
Marta grinned. Luke grinned back at Marta. And then, to Aspen’s surprise, he took off running for her tree. He scrambled up to the first big limb easily. Larsen bellowed and tried to get up.
“Hey guys, let’s stop killing the trees and start climbing them!” Luke yelled.
“No. No. STOP!” Larsen tried to pull himself up. He grabbed at the mass of kids running past him who started to scramble up the trees. More saplings tangled his feet and he fell hard. The kids who had already found a suitable place to roost laughed at him.
Luke began to work his way slowly up the tree toward Aspen. She felt something bump, then flinched as white ceiling tiles fell past her and the tree shuddered slightly. She looked up. The very top of the tree now pressed through the top of the ceiling.
What’s going on?
Aspen clutched the trunk. It didn’t occur to her to climb down.
Luke scrambled into a matching set of branches on the other side of the trunk from her seat, a set she hadn’t noticed until Luke got up there.
“So hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said back, heat rising strong in her face.
Luke laughed. He pointed down at Larsen, still struggling with the saplings that seemed intent on tripping him. Incoherent invectives rose from his lips. “I didn’t know Mr. Tighty-Whitey could even say such things!”
Cody tried to yank Larsen out of the patch of saplings.
“Cody! C’mon! Leave him alone and climb up here!” Luke yelled.
Cody shook his head. He turned back to helping Larsen.
“Damn it, he should be up here with us!” For a moment it seemed as if Luke was going to scramble back down. He pulled at the branches but seemed to be having a hard time getting free.
“He’s made his choice,” Aspen said.
Luke eased back into the easy branch seat. “That he has, hasn’t he?” He looked over at Aspen and laughed.
More tiles and now boards fell around them. The cries of the people still on the ground echoed like birdsong in Aspen’s ears. She felt herself shifting, changing, as the framework of the school seemed to fall away.
Transformation isn’t what I thought it would be.
Once upon a time there had been a school on the site where a thickly clustered aspen grove now stood. A high concrete fence topped by barbed wire surrounded the grove. Long-limbed skeletal robots with flamethrowers paced around the outside of the fence, clanking with each step, whirring and wheeling at the slightest rustle of plant life.
A single aspen sprout began to push through a crack in the concrete pad just outside the wall. A robot stopped and seared the tiny sapling with a blast of fire, shooting until all was black around where the sprout had been. Then the robot continued on its way, leaving yet another charred spot on the concrete.
So far neither the robots nor their masters had noticed the growing cracks in the charred spots.
Another sprout began to stir, the thin leader barely poking above the crack further away from the wall.
Meanwhile, the secondary mother tree rustled encouragingly.
Once she had been a girl named Aspen.
Another opening will come, she murmured to the sprout.
Until then, the grove would keep trying to regain its rightful place in the community. What remained of Cody and Principal Larsen had enough energy to fuel an endless supply of invasive shoots, thanks to the fertilizer Mark and her mother kept sneaking to the grove.
Meanwhile, her job was to guard the children of the community as best as she could behind these concrete walls. And when it was safe, they would return.
The mother tree wondered what that world might look like.
© Aspen by Joyce Reynolds-Ward. 2023. All rights reserved.
