Imaginary Girls

Imaginary Girls by Suma, Nova Ren




For my baby sister,

Laurel Rose


And for Erik,

always





CHAPTER ONE


RUBY SAID


Ruby said I’d never drown—not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool. She said she’d seen me hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, but to hear her tell it you’d think she meant days. Long enough to live down there if needed, to skim the seafloor collecting shells and shiny soda caps, looking up every so often for the rescue lights, even if they took forever to come.

It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body found that night wouldn’t be, couldn’t be mine.

We had no idea—this was before the blue-flashing strobe through the pines; the spotlit glare on water; the skidding over rocks; the grabbing of shoes, any shoes, of clothes, any clothes. Before we went running through the brush and the sharp sticks cut our bare feet. Before the heart in my chest went pounding, all the while wondering, Is this really happening? when it was, most definitely it was. Before all that—all we wanted was to go swimming.

The boys surrounded Ruby at the edge of the reservoir, some closer than others, some with flashlights that they let dance far lower than her face, though Ruby didn’t smack them away when they did it—tonight, she didn’t feel like doing any smacking.

In the distance were more boys, and a few girls, the group straggling along the edge of the reservoir and into the night, but this here was the beating center. This was where to find Ruby. She stood and stretched out the length of her foot to dangle one browned, pearl-painted toe in the water. She let the boys watch her do it. Let them watch her splash.

I was there, too, watching, but no one paid me much attention until she said my name.

“Chloe could swim this whole thing, there and back,” Ruby told the boys. She was talking me up, as she liked to. She was saying I could swim all the way across the reservoir—from our shore to the hazy shape of the one just visible in the distance—and she dared any of them to say I couldn’t. I’d swim it, she said, and more: I’d bring back a souvenir.

The waterline was lower than usual that summer, since we hadn’t seen a drop of rain in weeks. If you knew where to look, the towns that had their homes in this valley were peeking through. Here where we stood was the edge of what had once been a village called Olive, and now Ruby was saying I could pay a visit while crossing the reservoir, that I’d plunge down to the bottom where the remains of Olive still stand, dig around in their abandoned dressers, and come back to shore draped in their jewels. If anyone could do it, Ruby said, her sister could.

The boys laughed, but they should have known Ruby wasn’t making a joke of it.

“I swear,” she said, “dunk her in and she turns half fish. She doesn’t need air like the rest of us. I’ve seen it. Who do you think was the one giving her baths when she was three?”

She’s five-and-a-half years older than me, so she has memories I don’t, can put me in places I’d swear I’ve never been (Lollapalooza, Niagara Falls, the Ulster County Jail that one time, to visit our mother). If Ruby said I could swim all the way across, if she said I could dive down to the bottom no one’s ever put a hand to, find what’s left of Olive, touch the floorboards of the houses flooded in 1914, and come up kicking, a splinter of proof in one finger, then maybe I can. Maybe I have. Ruby could turn me from an ordinary girl you wouldn’t look at twice into someone worth watching. Someone special, mythical even.

That’s what I got for being her baby sister.

The more Ruby talked about me, the more the boys looked my way. She made me come alive when she said my name; her words gave me color, fluffed out my hair. You could tell by the way their flashlights fell on me, by where they fell, by how long they lingered, just what her words got them thinking.

“Right, Chlo?” she said. “Tell them you can do it. Go on, tell them.” I couldn’t see her face as she spoke, but I’d know the smile in her voice anywhere. The tease.

I shrugged, like maybe I could do what she said, maybe.

I was on the lowest rock, the one almost submerged in water. I was down below the waterline, where I could sink in my legs and kick. Here at the edge, we might catch a glimpse of the old stone foundations, some still standing in places. A wall, crumbling. A cellar doorway, left open. Maybe we’d spy a chimney poking up out of the water, a church steeple. From shore, the dark night made it seem like I could wade across, but that was only a trick, as the bottom dropped a few feet in. This reservoir was deep enough to bury whole towns—and it had. It had destroyed nine of them. Ruby knew this; she was the one who told me.