Imaginary Girls (27 page)

Ruby lit up each face until she reached mine, then she lowered the beam to show everyone my black bra and blue-flowered panties, mismatched and cotton on the bottom, like a little girl.

“You forgot a bathing suit, Chlo,” she called out. She stepped onto shore and waved at the spot beside her, to show I should take my place in it. “I have one for you, in my pocket. Just come down here and get it.”

I could see her smile. I wished I hadn’t, because it was the kind of smile she never gave to me. It was a smile for a boy who wanted to know her and never would. A smile for a girl who wanted to be like her and never could be. A smile for a perfect stranger.

I climbed off the rock and went to her. I felt everyone watch me go. Then I felt everyone look away before I reached her, as if they weren’t allowed to keep looking anymore. I patted her pocket, right side first. She wore jeans with the cuffs folded up to her knees; it was strange to see her in jeans. And only the bottom half of her legs were wet. She’d been in the water, but she hadn’t been swimming.

In her right pocket was a rusty nail, a quarter, a nickel, a penny, her naked hula-lady lighter, a loose strawberry candy, and a smashed pack of cigarettes with one left inside. I confiscated that; she knew I wanted her to quit.

She shrugged, kept smiling.

I tried her left pocket, and in it I found a bottle of violet nail polish, a tube of wine lipstick, and her car key. Really, I don’t know how she kept so much in her pockets. Her jeans were pretty snug already. Still, I didn’t find any bathing suit.

“Where were you?”
I whispered.
“Where’d you go?”

“Keep checking,” she answered without whispering.

She turned, and poking out the back pocket of her jeans was a bathing suit. It wasn’t one of mine though; it was hers. It was her favorite white bikini, the one she’d never before let me wear.

“I said I’d be back,” she said, her voice low. “You should have stayed at the house.” Then, once I’d pulled the bathing suit from her pocket, she spun around to face me. “But, since you’re here, that’ll look cute on you. Sorry it took me forever to get here, I got pulled over.”

“But how’d you know we were here?”

“You can’t do anything in this town without me hearing about it. You should know better than that, Chlo.” She shook her head, disappointed. “But it’s adorable. I mean, look at all the kids who showed up.”

“I didn’t . . .” I hadn’t meant for all these people to show. But I realized what she’d said before. “Ruby, did you say you got
pulled over
? Like by cops?”

She sighed. “No, polar bears. Yes, cops. One cop. A mustachioed state trooper who told me I was driving too fast. He untucked his uniform and pulled up his shirt to show me his tattoo—I don’t like that I was naked in it, but I did like the colors and I liked my hair—so I thought he’d let me go. But then he was all business and took his time writing up this little piece of paper for me and it wasn’t a love note or anything.”

“So it was a ticket.”

She shrugged.

“A cop with a tattoo of you gave you a ticket and you . . .
let him
?”

She saw where I was going with this, how in the world where Ruby lived, where I thought we still lived, she didn’t get speeding tickets, or, for that matter, white hairs. She didn’t have problems the way normal people did. She lived the way a dream might, if it grew legs.

“It wasn’t a very nice tattoo,” she said, and sighed. “Just go put that bathing suit on, Chlo. I almost got arrested driving it over here.”

She pointed into a thatch of trees, where I’d have some privacy. Then she smiled, the wide and dazzling kind that was all teeth. Something was very wrong and she wasn’t telling me what. Instead she was showing teeth. When I looked up beyond the dazzle of the smile, she moved the beam of flashlight away so I couldn’t see her eyes.

All everyone else had noticed was that smile. I sensed how they responded to it, visibly relaxing and going back to the party. As if they now had her permission.

I went to go get changed. It didn’t matter to me, swimming in my underwear, but for some reason she wanted me to wear this bikini. It took a long time to get the suit untied from the knots that held it together and longer to get it on my body. It wasn’t until I had the white bottoms on and was tying the strings that held together the white top that I thought about it. I’d expected her to tell me to go up to the house, and instead she was dressing me in her clothes and letting me stay.

When I got back, she wasn’t where I could see. Then I spotted London. She came out from behind the same trees that had hidden my sister, her legs and feet muddied, her clothes as soaked through as when we’d stood together under the falling rain.

Had she gone off again with my sister when I was conveniently out of the way?

She had. I could tell by how she was looking at me. All her friends were there asking where she’d come from and how long she’d been out there and yet she looked only at me. She said to me, “Thank you,” like I was doing something for her now. It sunk into me only as she thanked me for it.

She’d taken my place once, and it was my turn now to take hers. My turn originally and my turn once again.

She’d gone off with my sister when I wasn’t looking and something had changed.

Then she pattered across the rocks toward her friends, and they enveloped her and left me there to gaze out at the water alone.

Soon, Ruby walked out of the water, from the same shadowed spot that London had come from. She was motioning me backward with her hand, like I should stay where I was on the rocks and she’d come to me. There was ten feet of water between us—dark and dank and seeming deeper than it was, if it only came up to her knees—and then there were a few inches between us and then she was on dry land.

“I don’t know how to say it,” she started.

She pointed at London, who’d plunged in already with her friends, unafraid of the water. London, who splashed and screamed in delight, naked and drenched to the bone and dipping her whole head in, and she didn’t even care.

Ruby’s eyes were brackish black without a hint of color in them. The night had swallowed all color up.

“They don’t want her anymore, Chlo,” she said. “They want what they had before, Chlo. They want what I wouldn’t give them.” I could tell she was helpless now, more helpless than I’d ever seen her. “Chlo, don’t you understand? I tried to give her back, but it didn’t work. They knew I’d been tricking them all this time. What they want is
you
.”

R
uby knew what to do. She told me to go, now. Go to the house, pack whatever stuff I wanted from our rooms. Or, better yet, head straight to her car, since it was parked in the brush over the fence, sit on the hood and wait for her there. Never mind my clothes scattered on the ground and wherever I left my shoes, just go.

But we couldn’t leave, I protested. We couldn’t leave town.

She ignored me and pulled off her shirt, and I saw the bathing suit she had on underneath, a plain navy one-piece I recognized as mine.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“I can’t,” she said. She said no more, but I felt sure she was staying because Olive wouldn’t let her leave—as if they’d reached up and tied a rope around her ankle to keep her at bay. It was a thick rope, heavy and wet from lying for ages in coils at the bottom of the reservoir, and not even my sister could free herself from its knots tonight. She was barely even trying.

She was letting go of my hand and I was stepping away from her toward the trees—away from the body of water at our backs, the one that plunged deeper than usual due to the rain, leaking far from its normal shoreline, covering rocks and rock walls the way it never had in other summers, even bigger than I remembered, too big—when I grabbed back and got hold of her arm and said, “I think I should stay.”

She had this way about her, my sister, this innate talent at getting people to do what she wanted—to leave cash-register drawers gaping open, to tattoo her likeness like a Madonna across their ribs. How many times had I been witness? So I should have known how it felt to have her do it to me.

She locked my eyes up in her eyes and secured the deadbolt. She caressed my arm, her touch softer than air. “Chloe,” she said, my name music on her tongue. “You don’t want to stay, do you? No. No, you don’t. That’s right, Chlo. I know. I know, I know, I know”—her hands in my hair here, her whisper in my ear—“you want to go.”

I did as I was told. I must have. Because, before I knew it, I’d found the white Buick parked beneath the tree cover and I was sitting on the slope of its hood, waiting for her to come out and say it was time to go. Then two things happened that brought me back. The first was when Owen stumbled through the trees.

He slowed and let his friends go ahead. “What are you doing?” he called to me, not getting close. “I thought there was a party.”

“There is,” I said, and we heard it sounding out in the night, and he wanted to run to it, I knew, but still he stayed because maybe I had some magic in me, too.

I was about to get him to do something terrible to himself, like stab a stick in his eye, or bash his head with a rock, to see if I could, the way Ruby could, just to see, when he said, “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I did something to you. Like you cared. Like I’m the asshole.”

“But you’re the one who—”

“Guess what?” he said, cutting me off. “I did. Like you. I used to. But you’re not who I thought. I imagined you were . . . someone else.”

“Who am I really, then?” I said. Because I was sitting on the hood of my sister’s car in her favorite white bikini, the night stars peppering my skin, and though I had no idea where we’d be living tomorrow, I knew that the one thing I did have in the universe was Ruby, and that Ruby had me.

“You’re just like her.” He spat it out like an insult. “Guess I’ll see you out there.”

He pushed through the trees and was gone, and I had no influence over him, none whatsoever. I hadn’t even had the chance to tell him I once liked him, too. I used to. But now I never would—not him, and not anyone—not again. For the first time, I felt truly like my sister. My heart had grown and twisted into the exact same shape as hers. We were mirror matches, on the inside.

That’s when the second thing happened.

I heard the whistle blow.

The sound of it was faint at first, hard to discern from the wind. Then when I turned my ear to it, when I concentrated and sought it out, I heard it clear. The hiss of a steam whistle. A faint, faraway, years-buried scream.

It was coming from the direction of the water. Where my sister was.

When I reached the rocks, I found her where I’d left her. The air had quieted, no whistles carried here on the wind, and something in Ruby had turned calmer, colder.

I noticed Owen catch sight of me, stop, then walk straight for the rock where London was perched, as if he’d been heading for that rock the whole time and hadn’t at any point in history been heading for me.

Ruby spoke up. “So London told me something I refused to believe. A rumor. A lie. You and Owen. Do you know the one I mean?”

I nodded.

“Is it a lie?”

I was careful not to make any sudden movements. “I guess that depends on what she told you.”

Her neck snapped to where Owen was with London and this was how, with my sister’s hand now lightly circling my wrist, the hush of water at our feet, I happened to see what he looked like kissing someone who wasn’t me. How his mouth got on hers and then ran down to her neck, and how his hand pushed through her pale scratchy hair, and how he didn’t want me at all, even if he said he once did for like two seconds.

I turned around, physically, to face the water. And I guess that said to my sister all she needed to know.

I didn’t realize then how this changed everything. Her attention was diverted now, the spotlight wobbling over to center on me.

“I’ll be right back,” she said from behind me. She didn’t tell me to go sit on the hood of her car and wait for her there, not again. This time, she let me stay.

After she left, I felt it. How something was slipping. The moon pulsed in a perfect half, begging to be punctured if you only had fingernails that were sharp enough and long arms to reach.

I sat on a log, away from the water, near where some boys tried unsuccessfully to build a fire. While they rubbed sticks in the dirt, grumbling about a pack of wet matches, Pete took a seat on the log beside me and slung an arm around my shoulders. It was too dark to see him, but I knew what I’d see if I could. A guy Ruby had and didn’t want anymore. A guy who loved someone who’d never love him back.

“What do you want, Pete?”

“Just saying hi,” he said. “Chill.”

“Hi.”

“Guess your sister’s back.”

“She was always coming back.”

We sat there in awkward silence until he said, “Hey now, I saw that before. Sorry about my brother. He’s a dick, what can I say. Here, have some of my beer.”

I grabbed it, though Ruby could have been out there watching, and I took a swig, downing more than I should. Not even Pete’s spit on the mouth of the bottle stopped me.

“Thanks, Pete.”

He patted my leg.

“Listen, you don’t really like my brother. Between you and me, he’s a loser. He wet the bed till he was nine. The kid’s selfish as shit. Take, for example, tonight. He’s got a stash in his bedroom like you wouldn’t believe, and he won’t share a little with me?”

I shrugged and still he kept talking.

“Not to mention that he left you on the side of the road. I heard about that.”

His hand, as he said this, kept patting its way far up above my knee.

“Um. Pete. If my sister sees, she’ll bite that hand off.”

He snatched it away.

“You know something?” he said, slurring just enough to let me know he was about to say something uncomfortable. “In this light, you look just like her. Did I ever tell you that?” He leaned in and took a sniff of my hair. “You even smell like her.”