Imaginary Girls(13)

I don’t know what happened during her walk down the driveway that made her decide she had to have me back immediately—she didn’t say. It must have been really important to leave right then, though, because otherwise she totally would have put a dress on over that slip.

Once Ruby decided on a thing, it was like, in her mind, it grew legs and turned real. She could write on a piece of paper the color underwear I’d have on tomorrow and fold it up a dozen times and hide it down deep in the toe of her boot, and even if I searched through my dresser drawers blindfolded, picking out a pair I hadn’t worn in weeks, she’d have known, somehow, that I’d pick red. Almost as if she’d willed the color on my body by writing down its name.

“What did my dad say?” I asked. We’d convened in my camper, climbed up to the bed compartment wedged over the wheel, even though it was pretty humid up there, to discuss in private.

“He said you have school,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

She pressed her palm to the screen of the porthole window that looked out over my stepmom’s garden and, outside, a bumblebee flew up close to it, then flitted away. She tapped the screen, but it didn’t come back, not even to be near her.

“I do have school,” I said. “For three more weeks.”

“He said you have finals and if you don’t take them you’ll fail out or whatever and have to repeat the tenth grade.” She flipped over to study me. “You lost your bangs.”

“They grew out like a year ago,” I said, but softly, because I wasn’t mad. I was thinking that this was the moment she was seeing me after all this time without bangs, and I’d always been thinking about this moment, wondering if she’d like me this way.

“I’ll cut them again for you if you want,” she said.

She folded up my hair and held it above my forehead to create the illusion of bangs, that curtain over the eyes to hide things you don’t want to have to see. The world closer in, less inhibiting, easier to deal—and that was all she had to do to make me miss them.

“When we get you home, that’s the first thing we’ll do,” she said, “cut your bangs, then get veggie lo mein at the Wok ’n’ Roll, and I’ll give you all the baby corns like always. There’s been no one to eat my baby corns. I’ve had to throw them away.”

“I thought you were on a liquid diet. A cleanse.”

“I wouldn’t need to cleanse anything anymore if I got you back.”

She let her hand fall, and my hair was the same length again. My eyes could see all. I made a face. I was thinking of driving into town, where the Wok ’n’ Roll was, of who we might see—or not see. “We don’t have to get lo mein . . .”

“What, you don’t want Chinese? Do you want pancakes at Sweet Sue’s?”

“That’s a drive,” I said. “You mean the place way out past the high school, right?”

She looked at me funny. “You don’t remember Sweet Sue’s? The pancakes at Sweet Sue’s? The strawberry-banana pancakes?”

I did—I remembered everything about the town and about Ruby. Or I used to. Maybe it was being so close to her now, but I felt like I’d been spun around and around with my head bagged in a mosquito net and then asked to give street directions.

“I remember . . .”

I was going to bring her up. London. That’s who we were talking around, not haircuts and what to eat for dinner.

The girl who died.

The reason I was here in the first place.

London.

The girl whose name I couldn’t make my mouth say.

So to Ruby, what I said was, “Yeah. Of course I remember Sweet Sue’s.”

We were talking like I was already coming back, like my dad hadn’t said no. Like I had no dad and there was no such thing as no. Like I would be stuffing myself full of pancakes tomorrow.

“Also . . .” she said, eyes on me now, eyes in all my wrinkles and corners, eyes up inside my clothes, “something’s different about you, and it’s not just the hair.”

I let her look, though I wondered what she was seeing.

“What size do you wear now, a B?” she asked.

“Um, yeah,” I said, blushing. She was looking at my chest.

She smiled softly. “Well, you are only sixteen. Don’t worry, that’ll change.”

I flipped over onto my stomach so she couldn’t keep looking. But she was sitting up now, staring deep into me, her body between me and the ladder, the only way down.