Imaginary Girls (8 page)

Maybe this was meant to be a superstore, a Target. Or a hotel, a Radisson.

In some other time line, the one where London kept to her coffin, this place existed. If I concentrated on it, I could feel the crush of feet on me, the people in that other reality walking on this spot where I now sat, never guessing how close they’d come to being nothing. A woman digging her heels into my liver. Kids skating the asphalt, landing tricks off the curbs. A man wheeling his suitcase over my ribs. Their missed lives thrown in the incinerator so I could have mine.

Pete leaned down closer to me. He was going to say something, but I couldn’t concentrate on what.

In the distance, laughter. In the distance, music. In the distance, fire and light and everything I’d left behind when I took off for Pennsylvania. I could go toward the light and the laughter and the music—I could find Ruby, and I’d be fine. But if I turned around and saw London still there, what then?

Maybe she was about to disintegrate. Maybe I’d count to ten and look over at the fire and witness the air cyclone her to mist. I’d blink and see tree trunks straight through the solid space that had been her bones.

Because girls can’t come back to life. Not here and not anywhere. Any second now we’d see—

Pete was a breath away from me now, his clammy hand grabbing on to my knee. He gave an awkward shake to my knee and said, “Seriously, kid, you all right?”

“You’re asking for it, Pete,” said a voice. A girl’s voice. As she stepped toward us, the light from the fire made more stripes blaze up all over her skin. “You know that’s
Ruby’s
sister, right?” London said. Then she added, “So how’s it going, Chloe?”

I didn’t answer. When a dead girl says your name it’s shocking. A brick thrown at you, a brick through your bedroom window.

The light was behind her, hiding her face. “You need some help getting up?” she asked. She put an arm out, dangling one of her two hands before my face. The hand was so close, I could see all five fingernails. Even in the dark I could see them.

She locked her eyes on mine. (The whites of her eyes staring up at the half moon.)

She cracked a smile. (Her lips drained of color.)

I looked away. “Don’t touch me,” I heard myself say. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” she said.

And you don’t look dead,
I didn’t say.

“Just let her help you,” Pete said. So he could see and hear her, too.

The hand was still there, the fingers waggling. Her nails were painted a few different colors. Three were black, as they would be if left to rot in the ground. But three were magenta. Others were yellow. It was all so random.

I grabbed the hand. Her warm, living hand. It grabbed mine back. As it did a hiss of vapor didn’t pass through my flesh to reveal I’d grabbed on to nothing; I didn’t fall facefirst into gravel and lie there spitting up rocks. I was definitely touching something. And this something used its weight to get me up.

She was no ghost. She could be seen by others. She could be touched; she spoke full sentences; her breath reeked, but not with maggots, with plain bad beer. There was no smoke, no mirrors. If Ruby had made this happen, it was really and truly happening, not just to me but to every single person here.

Ruby reappeared once I got to my feet. She was there for me to lean on, there as if she’d been at my side all along and always would be. The wind played with her hair, making it sway over her bare shoulders. Her lips were painted her color—without a smudge. Her eyes borrowed stars from the sky, or seemed to. Even the fireflies came to lend her their glow, blinking sweet nothings all around her.

I wasn’t the only one staring.

“Hey there,” Pete said.

“Hi, Ruby,” London said meekly, eyes flicking to me as if she didn’t think she’d be allowed to tell my sister hi.

Ruby ignored them both. “That took forever,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Chlo.” She held out a water bottle for me and watched carefully as I twisted off the cap and took a long swallow.

When I was done, Ruby grabbed my hand in hers, so everyone could see. Then she asked, projecting as if she were wearing a wire hidden inside her dress, “London, how
are
you? My sister was wondering. Tell her. Tell her how you are.”

I was? But I was. Ruby knew I was wondering that and way more.

London gave Ruby an odd look. Then she turned the same look on me, seeing as I could have asked her how she was myself, and said, “I’m fine, thanks.” Her words wavered, like she wasn’t sure. Like Ruby could say no, she wasn’t fine, and then she’d have to change her answer.

“See?” my sister said to me. To London, her voice shifted and she said, “What are you doing over here with Chloe? What happened to the keg?”

“It’s empty,” London said.

“Damn,” Pete could be heard muttering behind us.

London was shifting from foot to foot. “I should go back to the fire,” she said, taking a step toward her friends.

“
Should
you?” Ruby asked this question with great concentration. Her gaze needled into two thin points, aimed with precision at London.

I saw the stabs. Saw how London flinched and then in one last-ditch effort to defend herself squeaked out, “I told them I’d be right back.”

“You did?” Ruby said. She had control of the conversation, tossing it high, bouncing it back and forth between her palms.

London’s forehead creased up. She put a hand to her head, thinking. The fireflies seemed drunk, glowing haphazardly in downward spirals toward the ground.

“I don’t know,” London said at last, her voice faint. “I don’t remember.”

Something was going on here, something between this girl who’d come back to life and my sister, who’d maybe possibly had a hand in it, and I couldn’t figure out what.

“Hey,” Pete called out, dumb to the world as usual, “is everyone high but me?”

Ruby tore her eyes from London. “Yes,” she said, “everyone but you.”

Pete looked down at his feet, crushed. It was so easy to hurt him.

“Oh, Petey,” Ruby said, softening, “c’mere.” She pulled him into a hug for a few lingering seconds. When she pushed him away, he seemed placated, so caught up in the moment and in her that I thought he might keel over—and then she did him one better.

“I have one hit left,” she told him sweetly. “And I’m warning you, Pete—Petey, look at me so I can talk to you—I’m warning you . . . you’ve never had anything like this. You might not know where you are when you come out of it. You might lose your head.”

She had him. “You don’t want it?” he said. “You sure?”

She nodded.

Pete’s eyes widened in anticipation as she slipped a hand into one of the small pockets sewn at the hips of her sundress. The pockets were triangular, meant for decoration. They could hold maybe a stick of gum if it was folded in half, or one key, if it was a small key for a small lock. But she took her time rummaging through that pocket as if it sunk deep down the length of her leg.

Then she pulled out her hand, keeping the treasure hidden from sight in a closed fist. “I guess you can have it,” she told Pete.

“Awesome,” Pete said, though as far as he knew it was a pill of lint.

Ruby pulled the fist close to her ribs as if considering keeping whatever it was for herself. But then she smiled.

“All right, Pete. Here you go.”

He opened his mouth and dangled a flabby pink tongue. Ruby, ever so careful not to touch the tongue, dropped the pill onto it and told him to close his mouth. He did, and swallowed. Then he hacked up lung for a minute and swallowed some more.

He was so trusting, so simple when it came to my sister. He’d do whatever she wanted, always had. Pete was the only one here acting like himself.

“Tastes sort of . . . chalky,” he said once he got it down. “What was that?”

“You’ll see,” Ruby chimed out. “Go over there, Petey”—she was pointing at a rusted bulldozer parked away from the fire, so far off that the flickering light barely reached—“put your head back and close your eyes. Wait a while. Think happy thoughts. Open your eyes. Then you’ll see.”

“Sweet,” Pete said, and stumbled off into the dark to follow her instructions.

Ruby sighed. “Sometimes I have to distract him.”

I motioned at the bulldozer. “Think he’ll be all right?”

“Do we care?” Ruby said.

“No,” I admitted. “Not really. But what’d you give him?”

She pulled it out of her tiny pocket: the leftover rind from a roll of foil-wrapped Tums. “For desperate situations,” she said, “and dire emergencies.”

And we laughed, knowing Pete was exiled at the bulldozer, eyes sealed shut, waiting for a thrill ride he wouldn’t get on any antacid. Laughed, seeing the deep night filled with fireflies and fire smoke. Knowing it was our night, and I was back now where I belonged, we laughed and kept laughing.

I didn’t know why I was laughing, but I couldn’t stop.

We laughed at everyone down in the gravel pit. Laughed that the keg was already empty. Laughed at the whole show Ruby had arranged for my first night home. Laughed the way we used to, for no reason and every possible reason, Ruby and me.

It was here that I realized someone else was still with us, and she wasn’t making a sound. London wasn’t laughing or even smiling, but she drifted at the edge of our small circle, like she wanted us to make some room so she could come in.

She was the hot center spot in a lightbulb; when looked at directly, she burned. And even when I turned away, I couldn’t not-see her. She was etched onto the backs of my eyelids, there undeniably if I could face it or not.

Ruby was talking to her, asking if she was tired, asking if she wanted to go home.

And all at once London was yawning, as if on command, lifting a hand to cover her gaping mouth. “What time is it?” she mumbled.

“Late,” Ruby said. “Really, really late.” She said this without checking the time on her cell phone. In reality, I think it was only ten o’clock. It was like she wanted London to leave and, simply by wanting it, she was well on the way to making it occur.

London’s eyes drooped closed. I wondered what would happen if she went to sleep right here, in the gravel at our feet, if she’d ever wake again. Maybe only one of us was dreaming, and the one who got to wake up would see the truth come morning.

“You should go home then,” I told London, my eyes on the toes poking out of her sandals instead of on her face, “if you’re so tired, I mean.”

“I . . . I will.”

The night shut up for a beat. The fire stopped its crackling. The kids beside it stopped talking. The wind stopped spitting up gravel and howling at the trees. You heard ground crunch under your shoes if you couldn’t keep your feet from moving, but other than that you heard nothing. Then, breaking up the absolute stillness, you heard a breath in and a breath out. You heard
her
.

London, alive and breathing: Ruby’s inexplicable gift to me.

“Lon,” Ruby said, “don’t worry. We’ll drive you home.”

My sister cast her eyes out at the rest of the party, as if testing to see if it was still worthy. I did, too, trying to see what she did. But then my gaze went somewhere else. It fell off track of hers and dropped to rest elsewhere.

She wasn’t looking across the way at the figure in the dark, but I was. I found him there without searching. She scanned past where he was standing with his friends, so she didn’t notice, either, how his head turned in response to mine, how our eyes met, somehow leaping the distance, how for some reason, with the length of two train cars between us, he was acknowledging my existence for real for the first time that night.

At least, that’s what it felt like. I was too far away to be sure.

All the guys in the distance, girls, too, had a clear awareness of Ruby, touching her legs and back and mouth and the plunging scoop at her neck with their eyes at random moments, as if they couldn’t help it. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they checked back on her, to see where she was and what she was doing. Owen, though, treated her like a black censored box over the screen, impossible to see past so he’d just ignore it. She was standing at my side and I swear he was looking at me.

No one showed much interest in London. I couldn’t decide what was stranger.

Then Ruby’d had enough and told me so with the purse of her lips and one quick, dismissive shake of her head. This party could last all night and be the talk of the summer. It could have—until Ruby decided she didn’t care anymore.

She turned her back on it and as she did I saw how dull it really was. The drained keg. The fire with the black, hissing smoke. The gravel dust. The kids sitting in dirt.

This party was done. We came, we saw and were seen, and now we’d go.

Only, not alone. It seemed we were taking London with us.

R
uby led us away from the party. Her hand was in mine, and she was pulling me toward the trees. Her other hand had taken hold of London’s striped elbow, but only to steer her in our direction. Once we reached the path, she let go and had London follow us, handless, away from all her friends.

We didn’t say any good-byes. We simply ditched the party and raced through the woods that skirted the quarry, Ruby and I never once losing our grip on the other, not tripping or slamming into gaping branches or getting a shot of firefly to the eye. It was just the two of us again, except for the girl trailing a few feet behind.

We reached the cars in no time. And in as little time, Ruby was opening the driver’s side door of Pete’s car, since he hadn’t bothered to lock it, and telling us to make ourselves comfortable. My bags and suitcase were where I’d left them in the backseat.

“Where’s your car?” I asked Ruby.

“I left it at the house.” When she said that—the house—it stuck out at me, as we’d never lived in a whole house before. This house was simply one more thing, along with the girl who’d climbed into the seat behind me, that was different this summer.

I took shotgun, my reserved seat in Ruby’s car, no matter who was riding with us or whose car it actually was. In a flash the engine was on, and I turned to her, shocked. “Did you hot-wire the car?”