Imaginary Girls(41)

“Wait,” I said. “Them who?”

She shook her head as if shaking herself from a trance. “There were too many people in the pool, Chloe. I couldn’t see past them. Don’t pull a stunt like that again.”

We’d turned onto the road that led to Jonah’s house when Ruby slammed the brakes without warning. I lurched forward and was kept from flying through the windshield by the seat belt, which I had absolutely no memory of putting on.

“What the—!” I cried. I checked to make sure she was okay—she was—and checked to make sure I was okay—I was—and checked to see if we’d hit anything, like another car or an animal, and that’s when I saw her, standing in the road with her thumb out, having stumbled directly into traffic as if she were begging to be run over.

Ruby threw up her hands and said to the car’s ceiling, “Hitchhiking?! Sometimes I wonder if certain people are just meant to die.”

Before I could ask what that was supposed to mean, she’d leaped from the car and was dragging the girl out of the road. Just in time, too. Ruby moved her out of the way seconds before a truck took the blind turn and barreled straight over the spot she’d been standing in. It was so sudden, I didn’t know what to make of it.

All I knew is it looked like my sister had saved London’s life.

Again.




London was trying to explain how she ended up out there after her swim at the pool. She was talking fast, saying she’d left the pool and was driving her parents’ car home and it got a flat. She was only hitching because there was no spare and no one had stopped to help and her cell was dead and she had to pee—and because she was an idiot, Ruby broke in to say. It was only a coincidence, London swore, that she was on the road not a mile away from Jonah’s house, where we happened to live. Just as it was a coincidence that Ruby had leaped out in time to save her from the speeding truck. That Ruby was there whenever London needed her, as she used to be solely for me.

I watched from my window as Ruby talked to Jonah and London out in the driveway—Ruby whispering in London’s ear, Ruby plucking off a leaf that had gotten stuck to London’s shirt, London letting her—and then I left the window and waited on my bed for Ruby to come upstairs.

“Is she okay?” I made myself ask, once Ruby appeared in my doorway.

Ruby thought some. Then she said, “I don’t think she was ever ‘okay,’ even before, do you?”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her what I saw. But, more, I wanted to know if she had a direct hand in it.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, fishing to see how she’d answer that question—if she knew what question was being asked.

If I even did.

“That truck would’ve flattened her,” Ruby said. “She would have had a set of tire tracks permanently etched on her face.”

Her expression softened and she stepped inside to come closer to me. She lifted a hand, as if to pick something off my shirt, but then hid the hand behind her back, as if I wouldn’t want her doing it. Nothing had changed and yet something had—in the form of that living, breathing bleach-haired girl. “So,” Ruby said, “I told Jonah to go out to the highway and fix the flat.”

I knew she could have fixed it herself, if she felt like bothering, and I liked that she’d opted not to bother, and stay with me instead.

“London went with him,” she continued. “We have the house to ourselves. Wanna go up on the widow’s walk? Let your wet hair air-dry? If you want, I could do it up in braids like I used to when you were little? Remember? Then we could stay up there till the sun sets?”

The widow’s walk was Ruby’s most favorite part of the house, even if it wasn’t a widow’s walk, not technically. She’d had Jonah build the tiny platform of a porch as high as he could on the slope of the roof, reachable only through a window at the top of the last set of stairs. She could see everything from up there, she’d told me. She even had a straight view, over the treetops, into the heart of town.

“Sounds good,” I said.

She led the way down the hall, moving so fast she’d made the last turn before I reached the first one, and she was all the way up the stairs before I’d even started climbing.

That was when I caught sight of myself in the mirror she’d returned to its spot on the wall. The mirror was hanging crooked in a dark corner, and the face bobbing in the glass startled me. With my hair all one length and down to the middle of my back, and sixteen now to her almost-twenty-two, I resembled her more than ever before.