Imaginary Girls(40)

I wore a navy one-piece, and I’d left my new sunglasses in the car.

“Hi, Ruby,” London said, wading through the water to reach us. “Hi, Chloe.”

I tried not to look at her bare arms and legs; even in daylight her skin had a sickly sheen of blue, as if she couldn’t breathe and was standing here drowning and we were made to witness it.

I mumbled something about doing laps. At the deep end, I dove in, the tips of my fingers cutting through the warm water first, then my face, and then my shoulders and the rest of me with a smooth, enveloping splash.

The pool wasn’t empty, but I was easily able to avoid people as I went from the deep end to the shallow, then back again into the deep. From underwater I could see their legs kicking as they, too, tried to swim. I could feel it, the motion they made, the wind. If I stayed under, I could hear them screaming from far off in the distance, like from behind walls and locked doors, houses and whole towns away.

I was still under, at the far edge of the deep end, when I decided I didn’t feel like doing laps anymore. I took hold of the filter and stayed there, drifting. Seconds passed, though they felt like minutes. Minutes like hours.

And, really, I could have stayed down there till nightfall, couldn’t I?

Ruby used to say I could.

I wondered if my sister could make anything happen, if she put her mind to it. Like, right now, here I was skimming my hand along the bottom of this dirty public pool. Maybe I could stay under for the rest of my life, or at least the whole summer, never needing air to breathe. I’d scavenge for supplies to make it through—like if someone dropped a stick of gum, I’d retrieve it and it would be cinnamon-flavored, and it could sustain me for years. It wasn’t reservoir ice cream, but it would do. I’d adapt, the way the people of Olive adapted after their town was taken away. Ruby would make it so.

Maybe I really could breathe down here, become whatever she wanted, even some impossible creature long still alive when I shouldn’t be . . . like London was.

It was when I let my eyes come open again underwater that I saw her.

London Hayes.

She was down here with me. She’d swum the length of the pool to share the deep end with me, far enough away from Ruby so she couldn’t see. London skimmed the bottom of the pool closer to me. There were her thin legs drifting. Her skin so pale as if rubbed in blocks of ice. I noticed that she had a small scar on one knee. I watched the short, bleached strands of her hair reach with electric intensity for the surface. Her eyes blinking and on me.

She stayed still, limbs floating, mouth pressed closed.

Were we seeing who could stay under the longest?

I held my breath, held it till my lungs burned. I kept my hand locked to the filter, not letting myself up though all the rest of me begged me to go. I forced myself to believe in it, in my sister, to stay down at the bottom, to stay.

I didn’t want it to be me, but my body wouldn’t listen. My lungs were about to burst with the effort—I had to break free to the surface. I needed air.

It was here, before my all-too-human body took over and flung me upward, gasping and spluttering and spitting up chlorine, that London opened her mouth. She breathed without struggle. She stayed under like she could, easily, for years.

She let me see her do it. She wanted me to know.

What is she? my mind screamed, needing answers, but then I was up, unable to think anything more, up in the air choking on the edge of the pool, and she was still down at the bottom.

She didn’t come up for air for the longest time.





CHAPTER TEN


  I COULDN’T FORGET


I couldn’t forget what I saw in the pool. Ruby and I were in her car not too much later, driving back to the house, and all I could picture was London opening her mouth underwater and letting me see her breathe. Ruby had misled me when I’d asked if London was alive again.

She was more than alive. She might outlive us all.

Ruby, though, hadn’t seen London in the deep end. She’d run over in a panic when I’d emerged, choking, at the edge of the pool, and she was still admonishing me over it.

“Why’d you scare me like that!” she shrieked as she skidded through a red light and narrowly avoided a four-car collision. “How could you do that, Chlo!” She was more frightened by the idea of me holding my breath in the pool than she should be. She was acting like I’d taken a running leap off a cliff.

Then she said the strangest thing. “How do you think I felt, having them pull you under like that? When I was too far away to get to you? When I couldn’t even barely see!”