Imaginary Girls(39)

Ruby’s stories changed when she told them—the tales grew more impossible physically, and legally, like how she said she picked me up at school in our mom’s car while sitting on a Webster’s unabridged dictionary so she could see the road. Like how she said we lived for a whole summer at sea, barely emerging from the bathtub. But no matter what miraculous way of surviving she chose for us, our mom was always conveniently out of the picture. It was better than the truth, really.

Ruby parked the car in the rec-field lot and removed the gold aviators. I thought we were going to get changed for swimming—we had bathing suits on under our clothes, so all we had to do was pull our dresses over our heads and find the beach towels—but something was holding her attention across the wide, grassy lawn. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

From where we were parked, all I could see was the stretch of the rec field. The swings, the sandbox, the jungle gym, the slides, the great lawn beyond, and past that the softball diamond. A game was going on, but Ruby didn’t like sports, so it couldn’t be that. Past the softball field was some kid’s birthday party, marked by a bouquet of balloons tied to the gazebo and fluttering wildly in the wind.

“What?” I said. “Do you want some birthday cake or something?”

“I wonder . . .” she said, frozen where she sat.

“You wonder what?”

A piece of her expression was unnerving me. Maybe it was the glassy green of her eyes. The hard set of her teeth. Maybe it was her knuckles, gone white on the wheel even though the engine was off and there was no reason to hold it for steering anymore.

“What do you think those people would do,” she said, “all the kids there at that birthday party, all the moms, the dads . . . what do you think they’d do if I walked over there and just let them all go?”

“Let who go, the kids?”

She shook her head. What she was staring at was the collection of balloons, watching them fiercely as their long tails whipped against the gazebo post, their brightly colored heads rising as high as they’d reach. It really bothered her to see them tied up like that.

“The red ones first, I think,” she said. “If I cut their strings, ripped them off, and let them fly? What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You might make the kids cry.”

She didn’t seem to care about that; she only looked off into the distance, absorbed in something I couldn’t decipher, as if living out some fantasy rescue mission in her mind.

Or maybe she was trying it right now. Trying to break them free by wishing for it.

But of course the balloons remained where they were, and no matter how hard the wind got—and it did seem to get a bit stronger, somehow; as Ruby held her eyes there, a few paper plates went sailing off the picnic table and some little kids lost their cake—but still, no balloons went free. They were tethered there and would stay put, forced to be guests at that party until someone cut them off after, or popped them and let them die.

“Ruby?” I said.

At the sound of her name, at my voice saying her name, she shook herself out of it.

Before I knew it, she was pulling her dress over her head and slamming the car door shut. “Let’s go for a swim. Do your laps. I’ll make everyone get out of the pool so you can have the whole place to yourself if you want me to.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. The wind had calmed as we walked the lawn—and as we got closer to the fenced-in outdoor pool, I saw we had company beyond the usual townie kids who came here to cool off on summer afternoons.

She was here, too. Her pale head could be made out in the shallow end, where she stood waist-deep, shivering in the sunlight. She was so thin, I could count her ribs.

“Does she know we go swimming on Fridays?” I asked. “Did you tell her?”

Ruby shrugged. “I may have mentioned it.” She called out, “Hey, London. Watch out, my sister’s gonna do some laps.”

When the townspeople at the pool saw Ruby coming, they cleared away from the stairs in the shallow end to make room for her. They knew she liked to sit there, letting the water pool up to the knobs of her knees, splashing at the surface with her fingers, letting the sun warm her face while she watched me swim. No one seemed surprised that we were here again, after a long absence. No one asked me where I’d been.

Like always, Ruby took to her perch on the descending steps and stretched out her long, bare legs as far as they’d go—which was far. She wore an anklet that glimmered as gold as her aviators in the pool’s bright, reflective light. Her bikini was black and white today, the top white and the bottoms black, and her aviators were drawn down over her eyes to keep just anyone from seeing in.