Imaginary Girls (3 page)

“I’ll never leave you,” Ruby used to promise. She’d cross her heart with me as a witness; she’d hold my hand hard in hers and hope to die. “I’ll never leave,” she said, “not ever.” Not like Mom, she didn’t have to say. Not like my dad, who left me, and her dad, who left her. No, she’d promise. Never.

I guess we didn’t expect I’d be the one to leave her.

Away from the town where we lived, I tried to forget the details of my life with Ruby. I had a new life now. Wednesdays, I no longer snuggled up on the couch to mock girl movies or laced on old roller skates to ride the ramps behind the Youth Center; I spent my hours alone doing homework. There were no weekend sprees for new sunglasses, no taking turns with the scissors to slice out fashion models’ painted lips and eyes from magazines to tape to our walls. After the last bell at school, there was no white car waiting for me—no detour down the old highway alongside the real highway, no windows open wide so the wind could dread my hair. I had to take the bus.

But I thought of Ruby constantly. Of being with her, of what we did.

How at all hours we’d lounge on the hard stone benches on the Village Green, which marked the dead-center point of our town, watching the cars go around, watching them watch us, and only now did I wonder if Ruby sat there just to be seen? Did I know how the universe revolved around the spot wherever Ruby happened to be, be it out on the Green or at home, or did I pretend I didn’t know, like a sun that’s gone lazy and slips down from the sky to lie out on the rooftop in her favorite white bikini only because she can?

I tried not to think about that.

I thought about our town. The exact blue of our mountains, the certain green of our trees. The Cumberland Farms convenience store where Ruby worked, pumping gas and filling in at the register, her hand dipping in the till, shortchanging tourists. Her apartment by the Millstream, her big, old-lady car. The store where she got her signature shade of wine red lipstick, how they held her color behind the counter so no one else could wear it. The rec field where we took to the swings, the spillway where we had parties. The reservoir, worst of all the reservoir. Every night I walked the unmarked path to Olive’s edge and couldn’t stop if I tried.

Always, in my dream, it was dark. Always the stars above held the same pattern, because it was the same night, and time had wound back to let me take my place in it, where I belonged.

I had the same aftertaste of wine coating my throat, could hear the same voices echoing from shore. My body made the motions to swim that great distance, even though I knew I’d come to the cold spot soon enough.

Even though I knew I’d reach the boat. And her.

But the cold surprised me each time. The fear felt new.

Because there she was, the girl in the boat, drifting at the exact point in the reservoir where I’d stopped swimming the first night and stopped swimming every night I dreamed it since. Ruby always said she’d protect me, but I couldn’t keep myself from thinking the worst thing I could, since she wasn’t around to bend my mind her way.

She didn’t protect me that night.

The girl who’d been buried could have been me.

The longer I stayed away from town the more I thought about the girl who sat in the last row of my French class, London Hayes. How she’d cut her hair right before the summer, chopped it off like a boy. How I’m pretty sure she had long hair before that, long and without bangs like so many of the girls in town because that’s how Ruby wore her hair. But now I remembered how London’s ears stuck out after she’d chopped it, like maybe she should have considered her ears before going ahead with that haircut and I guess no one thought to tell her.

London once got called to the front of the classroom because Ms. Blunt, our French teacher, had spied what she was doodling in her notebook. She made London show the entire class: through a crosshatch of shaded scribbles, a naked girl with bloodthirsty eyes and sharp, serrated ribs, nipples dangling like extra fingers, toes black with disease.

It was grotesque, offensive even. Ms. Blunt glared at the lined page, the blue ballpoint put down so hard it left gashes, and in her dramatically accented, overloud French she asked London,
“Qui est-ce?”
Violent pointing motions. Enunciation galore.
“Qui est-ce?”

And we all racked our brains trying to remember what that meant—this was remedial, not Regents-level French—but London knew the question and knew how to answer. She shook her head sadly and said,
“C’est moi.”
It’s me.

Something was wrong with the girl—clearly.

Other than that, I didn’t know too much about her. There was this rumor that she once took five hits of
LSD
and went to school on purpose, like a walking biology experiment, which I guess failed because she didn’t make it through fourth-period gym. She started drinking in sixth grade, people said, too, but that was mostly a compliment.

I must have seen her outside school sometimes. She knew Ruby’s friends, could be spied in the backseats of their cars as they spun their way around the Green. Plus she was friends with Owen—I couldn’t help but notice—the boy I tried hard not to hold in my heart as he barely ever looked my way. Also, I’m pretty sure one time she borrowed my pen and never gave it back.

I knew she was at the reservoir that night, even though she wasn’t invited.

That’s all I knew.

Just weeks into living at my dad and stepmother’s house in Pennsylvania, my mom mailed me a package. She was sober again and must have realized she should show a stab at missing me, for, I guess, my sake. But the box was no attempt at amends. It was more a junk drawer than a care package: a spilled cache of feathers and beads from the craft store in town where she worked weekends; a rock from, I figured, the Millstream, dusted in our town’s dried mud; some menstrual tea (seriously?); a dog-eared book on power animals (hers was the sparrow, she said, which she’d also taken on as her new name; Ruby said it was actually the vampire bat); and nothing whatsoever from Ruby.

You might say my mom was harmless if you didn’t know any better. Hair down past her waist like she was going for some world record, beaded necklaces, gypsy skirts. She really did force people in town to call her Sparrow. But that was only the role she liked to perform for whatever audience hadn’t slipped out the back; it was her aria in the shower for whoever needed to pee and got stuck listening.

In reality, my mom had a hard side, made of tin and pounded flat to deflect all emotion, thanks to the poison she poured down her throat. That’s why, in the care package, she’d also included one last thing: the obituary. Like she wanted to make sure I didn’t forget.

Ruby would have shipped me the severed tip off her own finger before sending that. She would have guessed about my reservoir nightmares: the rowboat bobbing, knowing that at any moment the floating inhabitants of Olive could pull London down to their waterlogged Village Green by her rotting, black toes, and then my toes, and then me. We didn’t need to talk about it for her to know the last thing I’d want was a reminder.

My mom barely knew me. If Ruby hadn’t witnessed me come out of her body, I would’ve thought I’d been picked up on the side of Route 28 in the spot where we found that couch.

The obit had been neatly scissored out of a newspaper from the township across the county line. My mom had gone out of her way to get this one for me special, going so far as to cross the Mid-Hudson Bridge to check the papers there. In it was a photo of London with her former long hair and the complete absence of a smile. You couldn’t see her ears. The text about her was short and vague: lost too soon, mourned and by who, in lieu of flowers donate to this cause, the usual. No mention of how she died, or where.

It didn’t say what kind of drugs she’d been on; that was tacky to tell the world, I guess. It was also tacky for my mom to send it to me.

Ruby, she would have torn the obit to shreds and burned it in the fireplace. She would have cranked up the stereo to forget it, played something vintage, like Rick James or 2 Live Crew, something raunchy and loud and undeniably
alive
to get those words out of our heads. She would have, if I’d stayed.

That was the last I heard of London for a long time. My mom didn’t send another care package—she slipped off-radar, as she tends to—and Ruby’s sporadic text messages filled me in on other subjects entirely.

dreamed we rode wild horses dwn the mntain. u lost yr hat but i found it don’t worry

dreamed we shared a phantom boyfriend & his name was Georgie. cute but made of vapor. smelled like lemons

dreamed we lived in a big blue blimp. the clouds had berries for snacks & u were always hungry

my boots miss your feet

my head misses your hairbrush

my car misses your warm butt

And sometimes, deep in the middle of the night when she had to know I was sleeping, she texted a simple two characters: xo

I missed her, too.

My dad never spoke of what propelled me to move in with him after all these years. Still, he’d look at me sideways sometimes, as if waiting for the first sign of mutation. Like at any moment I could hiccup, have a spasm, pop out an extra head, and then he’d have one more mouth to feed. There was therapy, for a while—the freebie kind with the school guidance counselor—and there were chores. Taking out trash. Cleaning the garage. Dishes, landfills of dishes. Distractions, all.

The physical labor worked for a time, though when I was elbows deep in soapsuds, scrubbing at a stubborn pot, I was reminded of Ruby’s way of doing dishes—leaving them piled in the sink and on the stove for a week at a time until there was no other option but to crate them over to the bathtub for a good soaking. Then how, after we gave the dishes a bath, we’d sail them like Frisbees to the couch, and if any dishes broke in the tossing that was just fewer to have to wash next time.

This would have been my life. At my new school, I was nobody special; I wasn’t even related to anybody special. I could have stayed there, gotten mostly Bs, the rare B+, studied through study hall, dodged balls through gym, blanked out on my locker combination, passed Algebra I, passed Earth Science, six points away from failing art. Sat on the bleachers and didn’t dance at the Halloween dance, stood in the corner and didn’t dance at the homecoming dance. No story worth telling past next Tuesday.

And soon enough, as time passed, I let myself forget the details of that night. Why I’d ever been so scared. Even why I’d left town in the first place.

That’s when she made a move.

One day, Ruby reached out and shook me. Even from across state lines she could.

The day it happened began like any other (bus stalled on the way to school; pop quiz in first period; ball to the face in gym), but then the stars shifted. The backdrop got picked up and moved offstage for the scene change. That must have been when she decided it was time, the weight of her decision sailing out of our town in the Catskill Mountains, beyond the reach of our river and our roads, finding me in this flat valley of highways and fast-food signs built taller than the treetops, this new town where I’d come to live.

Because this wasn’t a day like any other day.

During lunch, a random cheerleader smiled at me. My art teacher called my lump of clay “inspired.” My locker popped open on the very first try.

It was late afternoon when I stepped out of Music Appreciation to find the boy in whose Subaru I’d left my underwear, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

We hadn’t talked for weeks, yet, after all that time, here he was. Waiting for me.

The way he looked at me—it was as if I’d stepped into Ruby’s body, slipped on her longer legs, her greener eyes. As if I’d taken possession of her, or she’d taken possession of me.

“Hey, Chloe,” he said.

The rest of my classmates streamed out around me, leaving me alone in the music hallway. He moved closer, and I moved away, and soon he had me backed up against the wall. Was this sexy? Was I supposed to go with it, arch my back and part my lips a certain way? I tried to channel Ruby, but I lost her for a second there when his eyes took hold of mine.

“Long time no talk,” he was saying.

I was going to say, “I know.” Say, “So how’ve you been?” Dumb things to say, dumb, dumb. I don’t know what would have come out of my mouth had the thought of Ruby not turned me. Because what I said instead was, “Really?” Like I hadn’t even noticed how long it had been.

It was as if she stood beside me, whispering deep into my ear.
Don’t tell him how you waited by the phone for three weeks,
she breathed.
Don’t say how you cried.

I thought of that windy February night up on Cooper Lake Road when her big white Buick ran out of gas. How we’d never run out of gas before in that car, even when the needle got stuck on
E
for days and we had no clue how much gas was left, so that was strange enough. But stranger still was how Ruby insisted we go on foot to the closest gas station—like she wanted us to really feel the cold. I thought of how our legs under our long coats prickled at first from the biting air, then burned. How, the longer we were outside, trudging through old snow, the sooner our thighs lost all feeling and went perfectly, senselessly numb.

In time, it felt as if we were hiking the road beside the icy lake on two sets of beating wings. We could barely tell we had legs at all.

It felt like we could have made it to the station in seconds, flown there and back with a canister of gasoline, our eyelashes glistening with frost, our bones weightless from cold. But then a truck stopped for us—some guy Ruby knew. And the heat in the cab brought our limbs back to life, stopped our teeth from chattering. We would not have to amputate our fingers due to frostbite; neither one of us would lose the tip off a nose.

We were grateful for the ride, but there was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.