Imaginary Girls (19 page)

“Are you going to get that or should I?” I said.

“Go ahead. And while you’re at it, tell him to go back downstairs, please.”

I was already at the window when she said that last bit. In a low voice I said back, “But it’s
his
house . . .”

“I don’t want him upstairs,” she said. “Upstairs is for you and me.”

I turned to face the window. The glass wasn’t shaded or anything and I could see Jonah right there—my face inches from his face, one thin, translucent sheet between us. He could see us, and he could probably hear us, too.

I undid the latch and pulled up the window. Before I could open my mouth, Ruby called from the railing, “Tell him I didn’t put the gate up for nothing. Did he step right over it like it wasn’t there? Ask him.”

The gate? She put up a gate?

I asked, my voice faltering. “Ruby wants to know . . . Did you, um, step over it?”

He nodded. There were wood shavings in his hair, little flecks, so many he’d have to dunk his head in the shower to get them all out, and some scattered and got on me when he moved.

“She says . . .” I started, trying to find the words, polite words, words that wouldn’t make him hate me, seeing as I was his guest, technically, eating his food and sleeping my nights in his bed. But I couldn’t finish that sentence. I turned back to let her do it. “You should tell him yourself,” I said.

But Jonah said, “No need, I got it.”

He slammed the window shut, almost on my fingers. Then he retreated down the stairs and I saw the gate there—a barricade, really, one made from two dresser drawers stacked up and propped across the floor, plus the long handle of a kitchen mop, stretched across, plus a picture frame with no picture in it. It looked like something a child would build, to keep a dog out. But Ruby used it on Jonah.

“How long has that been up?” I asked.

She shrugged and her expression didn’t soften. “He has the couch to sleep on.”

“He’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s really, really mad.” Never before were we in the precarious position of making a boyfriend mad who we still had to face the day after. Previous boyfriends we could kick out. Or drive away from. Previous boyfriends didn’t live downstairs.

“He’s fine. He can’t get mad,” she said. “Not at me. Besides, he’s not the one we have to worry about.”

Her bright, glowing green eyes flicked out at the water in the distance, the water hiding what had once been Olive. But then her eyes weren’t on the water at all, they were on the sky, on the clouds, on her red-tailed balloons making their way toward town.

I believed in her. I even believed in those balloons.

I’d seen what she could do, hadn’t I?

For barely a flicker of a second I thought otherwise. I thought about how maybe this wasn’t happening at all, except in some locked-off part of my mind where sane people retreat only when they’re dreaming or doped up on cough syrup.

It could be that somewhere off Route 80 in Pennsylvania you’d find a trailer propped up on cinder blocks and in it a girl who’d lost her mind. She’d be forced to stay out there because her dad wouldn’t let her in the house. Her trailer door would be padlocked from the outside. But if you found that trailer and peeked in through the peephole you’d find her eye staring back. An eye darkly circled, sunken. A crazy eye. That girl would call herself Chloe. She’d say her sister was magic. Her sister brought people back to life, made them into more than people, made them something other. Her sister could force you to do things and think things and bend to whatever she said. This Chloe had seen it; she was watching it happen right now. She’d scream this at you and claw at the trailer door and you’d do the smart thing and run away.

Because this was impossible. Ruby was, and London was. And yet, somehow, here we all were, as Ruby decided we would be.

And now the balloons were on their way.

R
uby still said there was no reason to worry about Jonah. See? There he was down in the yard, building up the railing around the back porch so she wouldn’t slip off. Hammering hard at it. Measuring to keep it straight. Sanding it smooth.

There he was ignoring the real, paying work he had in his shed so he could keep remodeling the house for her—because he knew it was what she wanted.

Ruby was dressing for her evening shift at Cumby’s while keeping an eye on him out the window. She was dropping a short black vintage slip over her head and dipping bare feet into motorcycle boots, combing out her damp hair and letting it air-dry into loose curls down her back, coating her lips in wine, her favorite lipstick color and her favorite drink, then pressing her lips on the small white square of a store receipt to blot them dry. She looked like she was going out dancing rather than to restock and restyle the candy aisle by color (white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown) and fill a few gas tanks. Every other employee wore a uniform smock to work at Cumby’s; Ruby wore the smock once, on her first-ever shift, said it pinched, and never put one on again.

She dropped the receipt in the general direction of the trash can, but it missed, fluttering to the floor, the flower print of her lips captured for always.

“I’m forty minutes late,” she said, glancing at the time. Even so, she didn’t rush. She took a moment to observe herself in the mirror over the dresser—mostly checking for food in her teeth, as we’d feasted on a tub of roadside-stand blueberries and whippets of whipped cream for dinner. Then, as if in preparation for the harsh fluorescent lights in the store, she perched a pair of sunglasses on top of her head and left the room.

I followed her out into the hallway and climbed after her over the gate. “What if I went with you?” I said.

“What, to
work
? To help me at the pumps and tell people to take-a-penny, leave-a-penny, though all anyone ever does is take? I know you love me, Chlo, but you’d be too bored and I couldn’t do that to my baby sister. I’ll be back later tonight, with treats.”

Ruby didn’t go to her job often, and she rarely worked through the hours of a full shift, but she never seemed to consider quitting. She’d made it clear to me that a girl should always have a job, gainfully employed boyfriend or no. A girl needs her own money, just like she needs her own car. But I was sixteen this summer and still didn’t have my learner’s permit or my first job. The difference was, I had Ruby. That’s what she told me. When she was growing up, she had no big sister. Imagine that.

Downstairs, I could see the full reach of the porch. It ran to the bank of the hill, and if there wasn’t a fence and city property in the way, I was sure it would have bunched up into an arching bridge over Route 28, then climbed down, step by step, to the water’s edge. Now, it stopped where it stopped. It made it so you could walk from the house to the hill without touching your feet to earth.

“He’s been good,” she said, eyes out the window. “They’ve all been so good.” She meant the other guys out there helping under the falling sun, as Jonah wasn’t the only one. Other guys from town had been coming over, some who were former exes and some who’d maybe become future exes. A couple of guys were way too young to become her exes; they were boys my age, boys I used to know from school. One of these boys was Owen, but she made no comment about that. It’s not like she would have noticed any one boy among all the others.

“There’s a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge if you want to bring it out to them,” she said. “I made it from a can.”

I watched her long white car chug out of the driveway, muffler groaning unchecked because she seemed to like the noise it made, and then she was out of sight.

I went out with the pitcher and some glasses just as Jonah decided they were done for the day. No one felt compelled to keep working, now that Ruby had left.

Or maybe it was that she’d taken her influence with her off the property and down the road—as if the radius of her charms had gotten smaller and more concentrated, and she had to give up the guys at the house so she could shine a spotlight on Cumby’s, casting her spell over coworkers and regulars and innocent tourists.

I’d assumed the house had cleared when I almost walked into him on the landing. “I thought there was another bathroom up here,” Owen said, “but all this junk’s in the way.”

“That’s, you know”—thinking madly of how to explain the gate without making my sister sound cruel—“we haven’t gotten around to moving that stuff yet. Just step over it. The bathroom’s right there.”

He stepped over the gate and leaned against the wall, in the shadows, so I couldn’t decipher what he was thinking from his face. And maybe it was better that way. Ruby told me it didn’t matter what a boy was thinking about you, so long as you had a good hold on what you were thinking about him. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out, he was still here in the house, though his ride must have gone away because there was just one vehicle left in the driveway and it was Jonah’s pickup truck.

Owen took a step toward the bathroom and then stopped. Backed up, came close. “Hey, Chloe? Could I ask you something?”

Then I knew. Or thought I knew. I’d gotten caught up in my sister’s fog, but all the while Owen had been piecing it together. He’d noticed something off about his friend London, too.

“Yeah, sure,” I told him, waiting for it. Maybe all it took was one other person to say it aloud for everything to shatter. The walls would come down first; they were flimsy enough. The ceiling would collapse in and crumble. In the sky the sounds of balloons popping, then a rainbow of brightly colored carcasses and limp red ribbons as they fell.

But all Owen said was: “You mind if I take a shower here?”

I had no ready response for that.

“We were working out there for hours,” Owen was saying, “and it’s so hot. . . . You don’t mind, do you?”

I shook my head. “Use the blue towel,” I said. “It’s clean.”

I went to my room and closed the door—or, really, moved the door to the closed position and let it lean.

I sat on the edge of the bed and thought some as I heard the shower running. I thought how my sister was gone, and wouldn’t be back for hours. I thought how, ever since Jonah had come up to talk to us on the widow’s walk, he hadn’t crossed the barrier. I thought how all the other guys had left. How Owen and I were alone, practically.

I thought about how he wasn’t worth liking. No. How he wasn’t for me—I knew it as well as if he had those three words
Not for You
eye-penciled across his chest in Ruby’s distinctive handwriting. Ruby said no, and I always did what Ruby said.

But Ruby had never asked me what boys
she
could be with. Ruby took for herself the things she wanted, and she didn’t wait for anyone’s permission. This summer was proof of that.

Then I heard my name. Owen was calling my name from the shower.

The door was cracked when I approached, steam pooling out. It was a hot day for such a hot shower, but I was glad for the steam—it made it next to impossible to see inside. “Yeah?” I said into the white. “Did you call me?”

“There’s no soap,” he said.

“There is, it’s up on the shelf.”

Through the fog I saw his hand reaching out from the shower curtain, a blind hand with fingers splayed, totally off-target. I took hold of it, my fingers guiding his fingers, leading them up for the shelf, to the bar of soap. When his hand found it, I let go. He pulled the soap into the shower, but not before I saw inside. Saw a glimpse of him in there, saw him seeing me.

I retreated back to my room, my skin slick with sweat, my lungs brimming with hot steam, forced to catch my breath on the end of my bed.

I was still there, breathing, when he came in. He’d dried off and put his clothes back on, but his chest was still damp—his T-shirt stuck to it—and his hair dripped darkening spots onto his shoulders.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.” The voice that came out of me wasn’t one Ruby would use in front of a boy. Ruby wouldn’t offer him her one clean towel and let him use her bar of eucalyptus soap, the same one she’d used on herself that morning. Ruby wouldn’t sit on the bed staring at her hands. Ruby wouldn’t be turning pink, right there with him watching—to her, that would be like racing him up a mountain and trying with all my might until the very last second, when I slowed to let him win.

I was giving myself away. Boys should be left guessing, Ruby always told me. Boys should never know how their night will turn out, because you—here, she’d tap me in the chest, dead center—you hold the power. It’s your night, not his.

But, with Owen, I’d lost control as soon as I let him step over the gate.

His hair hung in his face, mostly brown today. He didn’t know how long I’d liked him. Since before he had the mohawk, since before he grew it out into the fauxhawk, before that one time he shaved his head. I liked him when his hair was all brown, plain as could be, and maybe he didn’t remember how far back that was, but I did. I liked him when his hair was green. When it was red, then when it faded out to pink. Now the tips of it were blue again, the palest blue, like it had been dyed a long, long time ago but had mostly washed out. Like in the two years since I’d been gone he’d dyed it blue and didn’t bother to redye it—like all the time I’d been gone was written right there in his hair.

“Should I call my ride?” he asked. “Or . . .”

I shook my head, meaning he could stay.

“Should I . . . close the door?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t lock, but, yeah.”

Soon he was wedging the door into the frame to keep it closed, looking back at me to be sure it was okay. Then he ruined it by sitting beside me on the bed and pulling out a bowl, packed full of weed and ready to light. For a moment, I saw him for who he was—this big nothing, thinking he was something—and then I blinked and saw what the younger me had seen, this beautiful, careless boy who acted like he needed no one and how I’d always been drawn to that for some reason, wondering what could have been.