Imaginary Girls (17 page)

“The
old
cemetery.”

And, here, before I had the question on my tongue, she was saying, “The one that used to be in Olive. My favorite one.”

“So you knew about that?”

“Sure. Parts of Olive got moved before the water was flooded in. Roads got rerouted, and some houses were picked up and stuck somewhere else, and then there were the cemeteries and what they did with them . . . I’m sure I told you before. What did you think, all this time we were swimming on people’s graves?”

“I—I don’t know.” The way she’d told it, maybe I had thought that.

“Oh no,” she said. “All the graveyards were relocated first. Sometimes people did their own families, and could you imagine? One of us having to dig up our mother?”

“No,” I said. I couldn’t—didn’t want to—imagine that.

“So you were in the graveyard,” she said. “I’m glad you two stayed in town like I told you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But when I was up there . . . I saw . . .
the mayor
.”

“What do you mean you
saw
him?”

I turned and caught everyone still eyeing me. They couldn’t know what we were talking about. Maybe they thought I was inviting Ruby here, or that Ruby was inviting herself. Their eyes said something I couldn’t quite decipher because none of them were Ruby and I wasn’t used to reading anyone’s eyes but Ruby’s. Something about . . . about how I should try to keep Ruby from coming if I could.

“Ruby?” I said into the phone.

“Don’t worry, Chlo. I know what you’re thinking, and stop it. I don’t want you scared. Because there’s nothing here that could hurt you. I made sure.”

Just hearing her say that made me think she’d once thought something here could. Hurt me. That this had been a real and viable worry in her mind and, without warning me first, she went ahead and found a way to be certain it couldn’t.

“Is Lon still there with you?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re keeping an eye on her like I asked?”

“Yeah,”
I said, immediately annoyed. “I’m looking at her right now. She’s fine.”

“At least there’s that,” Ruby said. “As for you, Chlo, we’ll talk later, after London drives you home. Your curfew is midnight. I’ve never believed in curfews for myself—like I would’ve listened if our mother gave me one.” She laughed, sharply, and I held the phone away from my ear as she did. “But,” she went on, and I pulled the phone back, “I’ve decided I now believe in curfews for you. Midnight.” And at that she cut the line.

I turned around to face everyone. “I have to be home by midnight, London.”

“No problem,” she said. “Ruby knows I’ll drive you.”

London took a step forward now, like she’d been voted the one to speak.

“So,” London said, as I walked closer, “does that mean Ruby’s not coming?” She suddenly looked so fragile, as if I could knock her over into the dark, damp grass with the tap of a finger and she wouldn’t have the strength to pull herself back up.

“She’s not coming,” I said.

“Sweet,” Laurence said.

“Good,” Owen said.

But Asha said, “Know what was weird? Your sister like totally freaked when she thought we were all at the reservoir, didn’t she?”

I tried to be nonchalant about that. “She’s protective. She worries.”

“Was she worried about Lon? ’Cause of what we were talking about before?”

“No, she just doesn’t want me swimming there, that’s all.”

Asha wouldn’t let it go. “But why would she worry about you swimming in the reservoir? That makes, like, no sense.”

I didn’t get it.

“Yeah,” Damien called from a dark spot in the grass, “didn’t you swim all the way across back in the day?”

“In the middle of the night,” Asha said with awe in her voice, “from one shore to the other and then back again—everyone talks about that night.”

“The night I
tried
to swim across,” I corrected her.

“Yeah, right,” she said, as if I were being modest. “I heard it was amazing. Everyone says so. Ruby said you could swim it, and no one believed her. But Ruby was like, ‘Just watch.’ And so you dove in. And you went deep under. And you made it to the other shore and everyone saw and you waved and then you came all the way back across with, like, proof or something, and it was amazing, everyone says.”

“What proof?” I asked.

Her face went blank. “I dunno. You were there. Don’t you remember?”

People in town remembered what they did because that’s the story Ruby told them. It’s the story she wanted everyone to remember, so she must have recited it again and again, jamming their ears with it till they knew it by heart. Until they thought it true.

“How old were you?” Asha said.

“Fourteen,” I said quietly.

“Wow,” she said. “You know no one’s ever done that, before or since?”

I could say,
It was no big
, act like I could do the butterfly stroke back and forth across the giant expanse of the reservoir if I wanted to—and more. Pretend like I could swim to the end of the Hudson, slip into the bay, circle the Statue of Liberty, cross the ocean, backstroke the English Channel, come home kicking with a Mediterranean tan and an armful of undersea shells for souvenirs.

But I didn’t. I shrugged off any more talk of the reservoir and took my turn at the swings. We didn’t stay in the rec field for much longer—the guys got bored fast—but I gathered up enough speed on the swings to rise as high as I could before I had to jump down and follow them to the cars.

All I kept thinking was that I was Ruby’s sister. In this town, I could do whatever crazy and impossible thing I wanted. Everyone already believed I had, simply because Ruby had made it so.

And if she could do that, she could make them believe anything.

W
hat London remembered was being asleep for a week. Eyes crusted closed, limbs too heavy to lift, she slept until she couldn’t sleep another minute and then she woke up.

The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes were curtains. She remembered those curtains, blue she said, or green sometimes, one day one color, one day the other color, some days both colors at once. The curtains moved, she remembered, always, caught in gust after gust of wind. Besides the curtains, she remembered being cold all the time and that her sneakers squished. She remembered how she had trouble hearing anything anyone said to her. How at first it was only lots of mouths talking at her, and hands with fingers pointing, and then, one day, her ears popped and she could hear fine.

This was rehab.

It was now close to midnight, and London was driving me to the house, back to Ruby.

I’d figured “rehab” would be this blank, cavernous space of time in London’s mind, like how when someone overdoses they’re not yet dead but the next step to it, and so there’s nothing to remember. But London remembered. Did this mean she hadn’t ever been dead?

Some things she’d said were sticking with me.

The moving colors.

The ears popping, like water had gotten in them.

And then there was the lack of clocks.

Ruby used to say that time stopped down in Olive—that there was no point in trying to keep track. The poor people of Olive couldn’t even wear wristwatches, since the hands got glommed up and the thick, murky water leaked in. There was a clock on the old Village Green, she said, and it always read eleven past two, the exact point in time the flood levels reached the clock face, so forever after in Olive that was the time, day or night, eleven past two for eternity.

Ruby also used to say how cold it was down there. How the people of Olive shivered so, their knees knocking, chattering their algae-gummed teeth. Their liquid sky was too thick to let in more than a hint of sun, so in their underwater village they grew paler, and their hearts grew colder, and the memories of their surface lives drifted up and away.

London was turning the car onto the road that ran alongside the reservoir—the same road that led to Jonah’s house—but she didn’t steal a peek through the trees. We drove past the reservoir without a word about it, as if it were any other thing: a garbage dump or a gas station or the guy who sells roses out of a bucket on Route 375.

“Ruby said I shouldn’t tell anyone about rehab—it’s not good to dwell, she said—but it’s okay to tell you, right?” She’d asked me this before, but I hadn’t answered.

Now I said, “Right,” even though I was lying.

“So I don’t know how long I was there,” she was saying as we came even closer to the house where Ruby and I now lived. “It was only when I got out that I knew how long. Ruby was there, and she drove me home, and she said everything was back the way it used to be, and—”

“Wait,” I said, stopping her from saying more. We were in the driveway now, long and winding and carved out of gravel and dirt, seconds from having to stop this conversation, and I wanted to be sure I had it right. “Ruby was there when you got out? She picked you up?”

London drove slowly, thinking at the same slow pace. “I remember her there,” she said. “I think.” She shook her head and the car made it around the last curve and we came to a stop. “But it’s weird because I also remember going swimming that night, like before I even saw my parents. I must have been really out of it to go swimming first, right?”

The door of the house was coming open. The light inside showed Ruby, as if she’d waited at the hole where the doorknob should have been, peering out of it like a peephole. She wore a thin, pale dress, her hair down to cover where it was see-through. The headlights were so bright, they about illuminated her insides.

“My parents used to wait up for me like that,” London said. Her face had drawn in and closed up, and I could see she regretted telling me about rehab. She must have realized that telling me was just like telling my sister, but with a ten-second delay.

“They don’t wait up for you anymore, your parents?”

She shrugged. “Everything’s different since I got back,” was all she said.

Ruby didn’t come out to the car. She simply held the door to the house open, knowing I’d be right in. “See you later, London,” I said, so casual, as if she were a regular girl and not something entirely other. Something I had no name for.

Ruby hugged me close when I came through the door, and we watched London until she backed out of the driveway, watched until the car slipped around the bend and there was nothing to see. Ruby sniffed my hair and knew all, at once, without me having to confess to it. Her green eyes had gray in them and her mouth had gone grim.

“Look at the time, Chlo.”

I glanced at my cell phone to see that the display read 12:02.

“It’s midnight,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “it’s
after
midnight. It’s twelve-oh-two.”

“But I—” She shook her head, so I stopped talking.

“Did you leave town?” she asked.

“No, I told you where we were.”

I stepped into the lamplight of the living room, and when I did she saw what I was wearing, a mistake because she saw my feet.

“Hey, those are my good boots,” she said. “You took them from my closet.”

I denied it—but only the part about the closet. The boots had been jumbled in with the mess on her bedroom floor, one by a window and one under the bed.

She changed the subject. “Chloe, you should have told me boys were going to be there. You never said anything about any boys being there.”

“But I didn’t know.” I was utterly confused at how she was acting—like she was tallying up all the things I’d done wrong, and I’d only gone out without her this one night, and it had been her idea to send me. Was she being a parent now? What would she do next, ground me?

“Did that boy touch you? Don’t look at me like that, you know who I mean.”

“Owen? No! He barely even came near me.”

“I’ve never known a boy who didn’t at least
try
to touch me.”

“But, Ruby, you’re
you
.”

“And you’re you,” she said.

She sighed, and I sighed, and we both couldn’t fathom what the other was trying to say. Something inside her had come unhinged while I was out, and it was running wild, cornering me near the standing lamp in the living room and blathering ridiculous things.

But then she gathered herself together, gave me space, and said, “It’s only that I want what’s best for you. Only that I know things you can’t know.”

“What things?”

She shook her head. Slowly she lifted an arm to point up the stairs.

I started upstairs, but she stayed down at the bottom. “Aren’t you coming up?”

“Not yet,” she said.

I climbed to the landing and looked down, teetering at the edge where, in a finished house, there’d be a railing so you couldn’t fall through and break a leg. She kept to a dark spot in the living room, hovering in a gap of space where I had trouble seeing her. There was also a giant fern, a tall chair, and a love seat in the way.

“Go to bed, Chlo. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Why are you treating me like a child?”

“Because you’re acting like one. Getting stoned—you reek,
FYI
. Not telling me where you were. Not meeting your curfew. Not to mention filching my boots—those ones with the heels are almost my favorite pair, Chlo. Like my second or third favorite.”

I tried to protest, but she had a hand raised. A shut-your-trap hand, one like she’d never raised up to me before. Just like we’d never had a fight before. Not ever before this, not even once.

“This isn’t why I wanted you home,” she said. “You won’t turn into her, Chlo. I won’t stand here and let it happen.”

“You’re the one who told me to go!”

“I did,” she said, more to herself than to me. “It seems like everything I do has consequences now. I do one thing and something else falls apart. I fix that and”—she heaved a sigh—“never mind. Go to bed, Chlo. Tomorrow we’ll have dessert for breakfast and breakfast for dinner. Tomorrow we’ll talk. All right?”

I nodded.

I left her then, half hidden behind the love seat and the chair and the towering fern, but I watched from the window in the hallway upstairs as she went outside and walked the section of porch Jonah had been building for her. Watched as she walked it like a runway, the wind billowing up inside her translucent dress and spooling out her dark hair, making it seem like she was the one we should really be keeping an eye on. Watched as she walked to the end, studied the stretch of darkness for some minutes, poised as if she were about to do something fantastic and I’d be the only one awake to witness it, then watched as she turned around and walked all the way back.