Imaginary Girls(19)

She had to know I’d be inches away from him for however long it took to drive to the quarry. That maybe I’d have to talk to him, that maybe he’d talk back. I could see the shape of her smile hovering in the seat beside me, so very smug and amused.

Only, there was something Ruby didn’t know: Not even she could make Owen like me.

“O,” Pete said, “you remember Chloe. Ruby’s sister.”

Owen took a second to respond. He let out a breath, which I didn’t know how to read—a sigh of annoyance or a grunt of acknowledgment; it could have gone either way—and then with great effort he turned a millimeter in his seat and said a word to me, just one, “Hey.”

He didn’t turn any more than that, so my only view was a partial profile and the back of his neck. In the time I’d been gone, he must have given up on another mohawk and let it grow in again, because his hair was sticking up, longer in some spots than others. It was too dark to see what color he’d dyed it now.

“Hey,” I said back. Then his brother gave the car some gas and pulled out of the parking lot.

Ruby would want a story of the drive to the quarry; she’d expect it. What she’d want was something fantastic: an action-adventure moment to get our hearts pounding.

I had to imagine one, there in the car. Imagine something worth telling.

First, we’d have to get Pete out of the picture—a given. Ruby wouldn’t want Pete in the story, so maybe we could stop for gas and he’d take forever to pump it. Or we’d be driving along like normal, but then we’d hit this patch of road where the sky opens up and this shadowy, flapping thing we wouldn’t know what to call would swoop down and pull him out by the throat, and Owen would have no choice but to take the wheel. Something impossible like that, pure fiction. Something to hold Ruby’s attention.

Pete would be long gone, who cares how, and I’d slip up into the passenger seat next to Owen, the only things between us the Big Gulp in the cup holder and the stick shift.

It would be when we were speeding down Route 212 that Owen would look at me, like really look at me, for the first time since forever. Maybe he’d remember how he ignored me in school, and he’d feel bad about that.

I knew I shouldn’t care. I was like my sister, wasn’t I? I was made of her snide comments about what all the boys were after and her brick walls built up and up to keep the boys out. I should act the way Ruby did with a boy she no longer wanted, like her heart had crawled up inside her rib cage to die, and you’d never know it was up there, as it had climbed so far in, you couldn’t even smell it rotting.

But I didn’t want that.

If this were a story I was telling, if it were my story and Ruby let me tell it, Owen would turn in his seat and he’d say—

A buzz sounded. I looked down to find my phone blinking.

didnt forget you chlo. just wanted u 2 come see

See what? I was in the backseat and Pete was still driving and all I saw of Owen was the back of his head.

When we reached the quarry, Owen leaped out as soon as we stopped. A jumble of cars crowded the gravel lot out of sight of the main road, but Ruby’s big white Buick wasn’t among them. Knowing her, she’d volunteered some poor sap for the position of designated driver and secured us a ride.

There was smoke in the air—faint, I could feel it in my throat—and a flicker of warm light filtering out through the woods. A bonfire.

I left my bags in Pete’s car. I had to: The party was deep in the quarry and the only way to reach it was down a freshly trampled path through the trees. Pete led the way, with me close behind, and then Owen. I stopped short once, and Owen, who was nearer than I expected, stepped on the back of my shoe.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Sorry,” I mumbled back.

And in the night beneath oaks and pines and other trees I’d never bothered learning names for, he and I were closer than we’d ever gotten, close for three, four, five countable seconds, until he stepped away and went slipping past and his arm brushed my arm and he smelled like cigarettes and I wished he smelled different and he was gone.

I’d lost Pete, so I walked the rest of the path with my arms out, feeling my way until the trees broke open. My feet found gravel and the noise hit and I started sliding down the declining slope toward the bottom. It was a pit, a cavernous hole filled with people I used to know. Or people who knew Ruby, so they had to at least pretend they knew me because I was her sister. Here, back home, that’s the first thing I was.