Imaginary Girls(22)

There went his reward.

“Crap,” he said. “Did I punch you in the tit?”

He had, but I wasn’t about to acknowledge that. “Don’t worry about it,” I heard my mouth say. My eyes were still on the bonfire.

“You okay? You sure? You’re not hurt?” His voice was dripping sap and concern like he’d just run over my puppy, but this concern was really only for Ruby.

Ruby, who’d kill him dead if she thought he’d hurt me, no matter what history they shared. Ruby, who’d duct-tape him to a tree with his pants to his ankles and leave him there through the night to let the wood creatures at him. The raccoons and skunks, the black bears that climbed these mountains, the animals that came out only at night with their sharp claws and rabies-soaked teeth.

Pete must have known all that. But I bet he also figured if he could get me on his side, he’d have a real shot with Ruby. That’s how it used to be: The way to Ruby’s heart, they’d all assumed, was through her little sister—it’s how I got my very first iPod. But I never did put in a good word for any of her suitors. It wouldn’t have worked. Ruby’s heart had room inside for me only.

I realized Pete was watching me. “You look so much like her . . . with your hair like that,” he said. This was something he shouldn’t say, we both knew it, so he changed the subject, fast. “Jonah doesn’t deserve her, y’know? How’d he get so lucky?”

This was the first I’d heard of any Jonah. Apparently, my sister had a new boyfriend.

Pete kept talking, all dejected. “He just moves to town and gets my girl and—” He stopped short. “Don’t tell her I called her ‘my’ girl. I know she’s not.”

I shrugged. “She’s not anyone’s.”

Pete didn’t matter. My eyes kept going back to the fire—to the girl beside the fire—to London.

“You see her?” I asked him. Ruby wasn’t there to stop me. She’d walked away.

The fire itself was made of tree branches, built up to a pyramid with a hot burning center, arranged for inevitable collapse. A bunch of people hung around watching. I recognized some kids from when I last lived in town, the summer after eighth grade and before the start of high school.

Names came from under water, bobbing up one after the other: Damien something. Asha something. Vanessa something. Allison and Alison; Kate and Cate. And, of course, London Hayes.

My finger went to her, pointing so I didn’t have to let her name touch my tongue. “There,” I said, “there in the stripes.”

Her stripes were black-and-white, horizontal. Prison stripes.

He craned his neck to find them. “That chick London? Yeah . . . what about her?”

“You see her?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You see her? Tell me you see her.”

“Dude, I said I see her. She’s right there.”

Pete was still on his feet. High up above me was his talking head. Above that were the mounds of gravel, like mountains of glittering black-eyed coal. And above them the real mountains, the Catskills, unreadable and flickering in the night like static on a busted TV.

This place had been a construction site. People had planned to build something here, in this patch of gravel where I was sitting; blueprints made and rooms measured, roads mapped out. I felt it around me in the night, what could have been. The walls and floors and windows taking shape, the roof closing in, the automatic doors automatically closing.

Maybe this was meant to be a superstore, a Target. Or a hotel, a Radisson.

In some other time line, the one where London kept to her coffin, this place existed. If I concentrated on it, I could feel the crush of feet on me, the people in that other reality walking on this spot where I now sat, never guessing how close they’d come to being nothing. A woman digging her heels into my liver. Kids skating the asphalt, landing tricks off the curbs. A man wheeling his suitcase over my ribs. Their missed lives thrown in the incinerator so I could have mine.

Pete leaned down closer to me. He was going to say something, but I couldn’t concentrate on what.

In the distance, laughter. In the distance, music. In the distance, fire and light and everything I’d left behind when I took off for Pennsylvania. I could go toward the light and the laughter and the music—I could find Ruby, and I’d be fine. But if I turned around and saw London still there, what then?

Maybe she was about to disintegrate. Maybe I’d count to ten and look over at the fire and witness the air cyclone her to mist. I’d blink and see tree trunks straight through the solid space that had been her bones.