Imaginary Girls(35)

At the sound of her name, Jonah stepped up, listening. The other guy with them looked out at the house, as if expecting Ruby to appear there, on the crooked front steps, to open the door that didn’t have a knob and welcome them in. She didn’t. Even if she was awake she wouldn’t have bothered.

I turned to Pete, filling up with a kind of confidence I used to have from simply being her sister—because I still was that; more than ever I was. “You gave her your keys,” I said. “You told her to take your car, remember?”

He froze. “No, I didn’t.”

“You don’t remember?” I tried to give him the eyes like Ruby would, but I wasn’t sure if my eyes worked the same way as hers did.

“Yeah, I dunno.” He glanced at his brother, then at his friend, then at Jonah, who didn’t look pleased by any of this. “Maybe,” Pete said at last. “Maybe I did.”

“Man, who cares?” his friend broke in. “Just get your keys and let’s go.”

They all looked at me. “You mean from Ruby?” I said. “She’s not up yet.”

A beat of silence as everyone waited to see what Pete would do. Jonah, especially, seemed interested in what Pete would do—would he barge into the house, stomp up to the room Ruby slept in, grab her on the bed and shake her awake until she went looking for the keys? Would he go through her pockets? Would he make Jonah do it, or me?

That was when I felt the chill at my back. The sense of her, close by, eavesdropping from behind a tree maybe, idly twirling sausage curls into her hair as we talked about her.

Maybe she was trying to tell me something.

She used to come up behind me and whisper a little missive, then sneak off, leaving the words to drift in my ears like dandelion fluff. Stick out your tongue, she’d tell me—and, bam, I’d get in trouble with the bus driver. Or she’d feed me lines: There wasn’t any No Trespassing sign up on the gate. I swear on my mother, Officer.

She was here somewhere, sending over the words for me to say. I felt them tickle at my earlobe. She and I had been apart for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to use my mouth to talk for her—how she did it for me, and I did it for her, and no one ever knew the difference.

But I was also aware of Owen, who met my eyes—once—and then, fast, dropped his gaze down to his boots as if he’d gotten stung.

“I’ll do it,” I told Pete. “I’ll go find the keys. But don’t move. Wait right here.”

Ruby didn’t want him in the house. She wanted me to go around the side of the house where the boys couldn’t see. She also wanted other things besides, like toaster waffles, but I figured that would have to wait till after we dealt with Pete.

I went around the house, which, like a tree, grew out from itself, branching off at all angles and teetering up into the sky.

She was inside, through a sliding glass door, wide awake and choosing between waffle flavors, sundress and boots on. Her legs were gleaming and I couldn’t see any trace of dirt. The memory of caked mud was so out of place now, I wondered if I’d dreamed it.

“Buttermilk or blueberry?” she asked me. “You get first pick.”

“Blueberry,” I said without a second thought. “So did you hear? About the keys?”

“I heard.” She popped two waffles into the toaster and watched the coils go red. She pushed aside a stack of shoe catalogs and unopened envelopes on the table so I’d have room for a plate. She somehow wrangled up a clean fork, but only one, so one of us would have to eat the waffle with our fingers.

“I wish I could give Pete his keys,” she said, “since that would get rid of him faster.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because.” She held out her fists to show me. She opened each one to reveal her palm. On which, in both cases, there was no key.

“They fell,” she said. “The keys. They’re gone.”

“Fell where?”

The toaster gave a sharp ping, and at that Ruby turned to retrieve the waffles. Mine, she put on a plate; hers, she nibbled at from the empty palm of one hand, her mouth soon stuffed so full, she couldn’t possibly answer.

I ate my waffle and decided not to push further. I didn’t want her to say it, didn’t want to know for sure where she went out walking last night.

Finally she stopped chewing and said, “I wonder what he’s going to do about those keys.” She licked some crumbs off her fingers. “Poor Petey. He was one of my very first boyfriends—you remember. The first of them all, actually. Maybe I should go apologize or something. Make nice.”