Imaginary Girls(15)

Now I rolled my eyes. She was right, though.

“Because if anyone knows how to look out for you, it’s me. He has no idea what I’d do for you. No idea.”

This was true; then again it wasn’t. It was true because I wanted it true, made it so by stowing it in a picture frame on the wall of my mind where I reminded myself of things, the things I knew about Ruby, the things I knew about myself. One and the same, all hung on the selfsame wall. But it also wasn’t true because I was here. She let me stay here in Pennsylvania, and it had taken her two years to come.

“If he says I can’t go, I can’t go . . .” I told her. “He’s only remembering what happened to London.”

I had finally said the name and I swear, for a second there, she stared blankly back at me as I had when she’d uttered the name Sweet Sue’s. She just stared.

“London,” I reminded her.

Nothing. Her stare was especially intense, like she was trying to shove a noise signal into my head—but I could think and hear just fine.

I tried again. “What happened . . . with London?”

She blinked, broke the stare, and said, “Oh, yeah. That.”

“That’s why he doesn’t want me to live with you. Even for the summer.”

“Hmmmph. What happened to that girl could never ever happen to you. Like I said, I wouldn’t let it.”

I’d turned away from her here, somehow, on that narrow bed stuffed up over the wheel, the compartment so small our four feet were hanging off the end. But she wasn’t letting me stay turned away; she wasn’t letting me not face her. She wanted me to look at her, to see her mouth as she spoke. She climbed over me, she rolled into me, she did a series of swift jujitsu moves on me that tangled me up in her arms and locked me to her, elbow-to-elbow, one bare foot held fast in the crook of my neck, and then, calmly, hardly even breathing heavy, she said:

“I wouldn’t. Let it happen. To you.”

She rolled away. Far enough away that I immediately wanted her back.

“I want to go home with you,” I said, the words coming true the moment I said them. I didn’t do everything she wanted, not every little thing. But I wanted to do this. “I want to,” I repeated.

“I know,” she said.

“I’m going.”

“Not tonight. You’ll have to sneak out. After finals. Whenever you’re ready, when they’re not looking—that’s when you’ll go.”

“Like how?”

“I dunno,” she joked. “Hijack a hot-air balloon?”

Ruby had a thing for heights—being up in them and looking down. She liked imagining herself soaring through the sky higher and higher until she was so high up she’d need a telescope to look back to ground.

Even so, she’d never been on an airplane. And there were no high-rises in our town, so she couldn’t dangle out their windows to count the dots of cars and people below. She didn’t bother to climb our tall, spindly pine trees, since that was an awkward feat to maneuver while wearing a dress.

The highest Ruby had ever been on this earth was Overlook Mountain, which at its summit showed off a bird’s-eye view of our town and not much beyond that, since all the trees got in the way. She once wanted to rent a hot-air balloon to test out our town’s clouds, though I told her that I was pretty sure, from science class, she wouldn’t be able to poke donut holes through them like she hoped to. She wanted to be able to spy on everyone, she said, from the cloud cover, and shoot them with jets of rain when they misbehaved.

But we could go anywhere, I remember saying. If the hot-air balloon was ours for a whole day, imagine how far we could travel. We could make it to the ocean maybe, or up to sightsee the clouds over some cool northern state like Maine.

But Ruby didn’t like to travel far—she needed to be able to see home, she said. She had to stick around, just in case.

She believed this wholeheartedly, which was why it was shocking to see her here, in Pennsylvania, untied and cut loose from her usual haunts upstate. And it also explained why she wanted to get home right away. With me.

“Be serious,” I told her. “Please.”

“Okay,” she said. She took one last look up and I followed her gaze, like together we could cast our eyes skyward and see the way out of here—but mere inches above our heads was the camper’s plastic pockmarked ceiling, and the camper itself had legs of cinder blocks, not wheels.