Imaginary Girls(30)

“This one’s yours,” Ruby said.

I went to the door, but it didn’t swing open. It was propped there, leaning against the frame and not secured by hinges. A single push, and it could topple.

Here, for the first time, she acknowledged the state of the house. Maybe she was getting worried, now that she could see my reaction.

“Jonah’s going to build it up to something great,” she said. “He is. It takes time, I guess. But I told him. I told him, ‘My sister’s got to have her own room.’ And so he made sure. He should’ve gotten this door working first though.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I was thinking how Jonah knew about me, building this room for me before he ever met me, and tonight was the first I’d heard of him.

“I wanted you to have a room that’s all yours, Chlo. There’s a bathroom up here and everything. And it’s bigger than your old room at the Millstream, too. And your old bed’s in there, and your furniture.”

She picked up the door in both her arms and moved it aside so we could enter. She made a motion that I should go in first and then hovered behind me, close enough to step on my heels if I backed up even one inch.

“I know this room isn’t like that little truck-thing you were living in at your dad’s, but you weren’t thinking of leaving just yet, were you?” she teased. She’d practically whispered this up against the scalp of my head, so I couldn’t see if she was smiling as she said it—though I felt sure she was. Smiling.

Then she backed up and continued, cautious now, timid even. “You won’t leave because things are just like they were . . . that summer. Before . . . everything. Right, Chlo?”

She meant London was back the way she was, because she sure couldn’t mean the mysterious new boyfriend and the slapdash house.

“Is she alive?” I said, bursting out with it. “Can everyone see her?”

“Pete saw her,” Ruby said. “You saw her, I saw her, everyone at the party saw her.”

“Then she’s alive.”

Ruby opened her mouth and let it hang for a second too long—but she didn’t end up denying it. “She’s not a ghost, if that’s what you’re saying. You know we don’t believe in ghosts, silly.”

“How?” I said.

“How what?” she said.

“How is she alive?”

Right then, Ruby held up a hand to stop me from saying more and shot her gaze over my shoulder, to the open doorway behind me. There was a thump coming from out in the hallway. Then another as a heavy weight was dropped.

Was that Jonah?

I stayed very still as she checked outside the room.

But when she returned from the darkened hall she held in her arms a framed mirror that must have slipped down from the wall—and somehow didn’t break.

“Maybe we do have a ghost,” she teased.

“That wasn’t Jonah?”

She shook her head. “It’s the house settling, that’s all.” She held the mirror facing out at me and for a brief moment it caught a bare corner of the room and I didn’t see myself in it—like I was the one whose existence we should be questioning. But it was only the angle. When I shifted, I was back in frame and made a reflection as usual. She plunked the mirror on the floor, careful not to get a crack of bad luck in it, and asked me what she’d asked me before.

“So,” she said, “you’ll stay?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

How could I leave? Now back, I couldn’t picture anywhere else. Literally—like my mind had been wiped clean of all other towns clear from here to Route 80. Places that weren’t this place had lost their names. Here was home, because Ruby was here.

“And didn’t you notice?” she said. “I decorated. You like?”

Tacked to the walls in random spots were photos of the two of us. We grinned and pursed our lips and dangled candy-colored tongues over the electrical outlets. We posed with faces mashed together, nose to nose, or cheek on cheek, the flash deviling our eyes, on a windowpane. There was one of me in her lap posted halfway up a wall, but I wasn’t a baby, I was twelve years old. There was one of the two of us in her bright white car, sunglasses on and lenses reflecting white-hot sun, above the light switch. There were no boys in any of the photos. And it went without saying that there were none of Mom.

The last of the photos was taken the summer I was fourteen. There we were, cooling ourselves off in the Millstream, Ruby at the edge of the frame with a diamond-shaped fleck of mud on her nose, and me in the center, too many flecks of mud on my body to count, about to splash her.