Imaginary Girls (22 page)

But the next time I looked up, there she was, my mother, across the street outside the jewelry store, a few doors down from the tavern. She called herself Sparrow now, I reminded myself; I didn’t even have to think of her as Mom.

She was pretending to look into the display window, but when I caught her there, her head turned and I had a full view of her face. Her hair wrapped down around her shoulders like a shawl made of hair and not hair itself. She never used to wear makeup—Ruby once tried, and failed, to teach her how to put it on—and I guess she still hadn’t learned, so her lips were paler than her cheeks, her eyelashes nonexistent from this distance. She made up for the washed-out face by being all color everywhere else. Her long skirt was woven in shiny, multicolored threads and the summer tank top she had on was bright pink and way too tight, like something a girl my age would wear.

It was impossible to not see her there; I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.

She lifted a hand and gave a tight-lipped smile. She motioned to indicate something down the street. My eyes drifted, following the path, and landed on the glowing light advertising beer. She wanted me to meet her in the bar.

Then I heard, “Hey, Chlo!” And London was rescuing me by sidling up and collapsing on the bench. “What’re you looking at?”

She scratched at her lanky arms and followed my eyes to . . . the spot of sidewalk in front of the jewelry store. There was nothing blocking the glass case; no one was there.

“That place sucks,” London said. “They jack up prices for the tourists. But I bet Ruby’d get you something from there if you asked her. . . .”

“Nah,” I said.

I knew I should be feeling some kind of emotion—that flurry of color and hair retreating down the sidewalk was my mother, biological and all else. I wanted nothing to do with my dad, so if I didn’t have Ruby, she was really all I’d have.

She wanted to see me; I should want to see her.

“So everyone’s at the rec field now, c’mon,” London said.

She had me by the hand, and I realized how my hand turned colder just by being in hers, the joints in my fingers locking up. She led me away from the Green, and from my mother, who I didn’t want to talk to anyway, and we’d already reached the rec field before I got up the guts to ask who “everyone” was.

Then there was my answer: Owen, who stood huddled with his friends.

I remembered then that the rec field was where kids often went to hook up. Ruby said you could come here on any summer night, walk up the softball field to the dark tiers of the bleachers, and hear the sounds of sucking face in tune with the crickets.

Maybe that’s what Owen was thinking; maybe he’d asked London to get me here for this reason. With his back to his friends, he flashed a grin, like he assumed I’d be up for it, like even though it wasn’t dark out yet he expected to slip with me under the bleachers and not talk about what it meant and what would happen tomorrow.

Maybe he thought I was someone other than me. Maybe I’d given him the wrong impression.

Ruby wouldn’t have suggested I come to town if she’d known about this. I was treading on dangerous territory—the kind Ruby wouldn’t want me stepping on. But she didn’t know how far I’d gone already.

“Hey,” he said, walking over and getting me at some distance from everyone else. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?” We were near the gazebo now, a favorite place of my sister’s. I thought of how she’d talk to boys, how she’d barely have to utter a word and how they’d follow. Any boy would do. Sometimes she’d pick the ones she shouldn’t. She’d swoop in, pluck them from their girlfriends, and then set them back down after, heads full of fog.

But Owen didn’t go inside the gazebo. He stopped, and glanced back at the guys, then said, “What I wanted to say is, we shouldn’t tell anyone what happened.”

“I . . . I wasn’t going to.”

“Like you shouldn’t tell London and you shouldn’t tell your sister, or you know, anyone else.”

“Your friends, you mean.”

He nodded. “Mostly your sister.” For a second, he looked scared. Then he hid his eyes with his hair so I couldn’t see.

“What do you think she’d do?” I asked.

He wouldn’t answer. “We should get back. Before they think something’s up.”

I had this image of him—gone before I blinked—him, belly-up under a night moon, broken and not breathing. Or better yet, the same moon and him, but this time he’s sinking into deep water and there’s no boat to hold on to. Then I shook it away and I wasn’t thinking anything violent that involved him, nothing that would get me sent to prison.

“What?” he said. He saw I wasn’t moving.

That’s when we heard a horn honking and spotted the red car at the edge of the field. There was London, leaning out of the window, arms out. The car she was in was filled with boys and smoke; their sound and smell leaked out to us from across the grass.

“O! Chloe!” she yelled, trying to get our attention. “You guys coming or what?”

Owen didn’t need more than that. He was in the car, taking shotgun without anyone fighting him for it, and I was soon crammed in the backseat beside London. We took up one seat, with two other guys in with us. It happened fast, that’s what I’d have to tell my sister, it happened so fast that I didn’t realize we were headed out of town until we made the turn onto Route 28, and the car veered away from the reservoir, not toward it. I didn’t realize until I looked up and saw us speed under the traffic lights. We were leaving town and I’d promised my sister I wouldn’t—I’d promised her London wouldn’t leave, either.

“Where are we going?” I asked London.

“That party,” she said, like I knew.

“What party?”

“You know. The one at the cliffs in High Falls. Why’d you think I texted? We may as well drive out there now and start drinking early.”

Everyone in the car seemed to know where we were headed. The guy driving was someone I didn’t know but who seemed to know me by the way he asked after my sister. I’d call her when we got there, I told myself. I’d tell her then.

I had London’s elbow in my side, could feel her hip bone cutting into mine. When I touched her, she was hard ice, and even skinnier than she looked, as if her one layer of skin was her only cushion.

Our town had a small center, but the township itself stretched up the mountain and down into the valleys that touched the mountain’s edges. It spread out along the reservoir, which had once held the town of Olive, and also other towns, though I’d never bothered to know their names because Ruby never bothered to tell me.

This party we were headed to was beyond the town limits. The town of High Falls was in a whole other school district. It wasn’t a place Ruby went to often, if at all.

As we drove, London whispered: “What’s going on with you and O? Are you hooking up?”

I averted my eyes.

“
Are
you?” she said, loud enough to be heard over the music.

I shushed her, but Owen hadn’t turned around. He hadn’t turned around in his seat up front even once.

It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about right there, with Owen close by, but before I could think up a good answer, I realized the conversation in the car had turned when we weren’t paying attention. Even with the music up and the wind rushing in the open windows, I could hear the guys talking about her, my sister.

“—saw her the other day,” the guy driving was saying, “it was sweet.”

“—swear she was naked—” said the guy squeezed in beside me.

The wind kept clipping their words; I couldn’t catch it all.

“—told her to come out of the water—” the guy near the far window said, adding a few recognizable hand motions.

Owen’s voice was noticeably absent; he stared out his window at the passing trees. He wasn’t defending her, but at least he wasn’t talking about how he wanted to get in her pants. The others, though—they showed no signs of stopping.

The wind tossed their laughter around the car, shoving it in my face.

“Are you talking about my sister?” I yelled over the wind.

They didn’t deny it. “You can’t blame us,” one of the guys in the backseat said, “she’s smokin’ hot.”

“I heard she’s a freak in bed,” another said.

I covered my ears, hummed out the nasty words and the nastier pictures drummed up at the sound of them. The lies. The lies and lies and lies.

I was used to guys saying they loved her, confessing how they wanted her to marry them and have their babies, mushy things you didn’t expect guys to admit to, but this was only physical. They made her sound like an ordinary slut, nothing special about it. And Ruby was many things, more than any of them could know, but she wasn’t that.

“Shut up!” I yelled. “Stop it!”

The boys stopped, but when London saw how upset I was, she came alive in a way I’d never seen her. Her eyes had a whole new light in them, and a cruel smirk touched her lips. She spoke in a low voice right up against my ear. “Haven’t you ever heard anyone say that? They say that kind of stuff about her. They say it all the time.”

As she admitted this, some of Ruby’s own words entered my mind, slithering inside me as I felt London’s cold lips at my ear. “Stay in town,” Ruby had said, me and London both. “Don’t go anywhere else.”

Was this why? Outside my sister’s influence, did London turn into someone else, someone closer to who she was inside? Someone mean?

And the boys, too? Did everyone, absolutely everyone, turn against her?

I couldn’t get away from London’s mouth if I tried; the car was too small.

“Why does it bother you so much, what they say about Ruby?” London was saying, getting louder now over the wind. “Everybody in town hates her, don’t you know that?”

“Not true.”

“It is true.” I barely recognized her, lit up with lies about my sister, spouting them out of her skinny face. “She’s all up in my shit constantly,” she said. “You have no idea what she makes me do. She’s ruining my life. Sometimes I hate her, too.”

That’s when I said what I shouldn’t have said.

“She could have sent you back,” I said. “You don’t want that, do you?”

“Back where?”

“Back to . . .”

She held herself very still, waiting for it.

“. . . rehab,” I finished.

She laughed. “She couldn’t do that.”

But I kept going. “You can’t hate her. Without her, you wouldn’t even be here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not supposed to be here, London!” I shouted at her. “You should be kissing Ruby’s feet right now. You should be
thanking
her and calling her a saint. You’re not even supposed to be
alive
.”

London didn’t get it because all she said was, “Thanks, bitch,” and then she was laughing, like this was a huge joke the whole car was in on, and then she was saying what a ho I was for hooking up with Owen, and how everyone knew, and everyone said so, and I was just like Ruby except barely half as pretty, and then I lunged at her and grabbed her by the mouth and told her to shut up, not because she said I was half as pretty but because of what she said about my sister, and I thought she was going to bite me, but she just started screaming.

The guys yelled beside us, egging us on. The wind was rushing through the open windows, throwing my hair in my face. The guys in the back were telling us to stop fighting and go ahead and make out already. Even Owen was involved, looking at me for the first time since we’d gotten in the car, asking what the hell was going on.

I couldn’t be sure myself. I happened to look out at the road we were speeding down and I recognized the sign for the old turnpike. It had a weirdly bent squiggle on it to warn drivers how the road curved, but in the quick flash that I saw it and lost it, it showed me how far we were from anything I knew, so far I worried I’d never find my way to Ruby.

And maybe it happened then, maybe it was in that instant of passing the sign and entering the next town when her screams went quiet and her cold, bony face was no longer smashed against the palm of my hand, this moment when I couldn’t feel her anymore and I fell back onto the seat and found it empty beside me.

I wasn’t clutching her mouth any longer; there was no mouth to clutch. There was no one in the seat but me.

When I turned, the boys in the car were arguing over what CD to slip into the stereo. Owen had his back to me, his eyes out the window. High Falls was maybe ten, fifteen minutes away.

I patted at the seat. I sat up and stared at my reflection in the rearview.

All I knew is that we’d crossed town limits and the girl crammed into the backseat with me, the girl whose mouth I’d just been squeezing shut, whose name I’d been cursing, London—was gone.

S
top!” I shrieked at the top of my lungs. “Stop the car!”

The guy at the wheel swerved to the right and we landed on the shoulder with a jolt. I felt my arms still attached to my hands, my head on my shoulders, my body intact as it should be. I looked around the car wildly—she wasn’t in the seat beside me, not in the front, and not in the back, which was jammed full of the enormous speakers. I twisted in circles, looking at the empty expanse of road behind us. Had she . . . leaped out the window when I wasn’t looking?

Because there was no other place she could have gone.

The music had been shut off and all four boys were staring at me. Over the silence you could hear the wind rustling the leaves of the trees, a calm yet hair-raising hush of a noise, and every once in a while this low whimper, this terrified and truly awful sound, and it took me forever to realize it was coming from down in my own throat.

“What the hell!” the guy driving shouted.

“What’s she on? What’d you give her, O?”

“I didn’t give her shit. Maybe she took something, how am I supposed to know?”

They talked about me as if I wasn’t there.

“Why’d she scream? I think she busted my eardrum.”

“Dude, what’s wrong with her?”

I finally spoke up. “Where are we?”

“Outside Rosendale, I think,” the driver said, eyeing me warily. “Stone Ridge maybe.”