Imaginary Girls(46)

The gravestones themselves were thin and plain. Many were chipped and blackened with mold, some growing mushrooms. Even now, one of the boys, Laurence—I heard someone call him by that name—did a running leap and knocked over a thin, tall stone under which no one we knew still lies, and he didn’t even go back to pick it up.

Laurence and Asha and Cate and the rest of them weren’t thinking of dying, not while they were racing up this hill. They didn’t know how close one of them had come. The taste in her mouth when it happened, the last sight of the stars overhead seared on the backs of her eyes.

Maybe London herself remembered—though how could she? The mind stops printing new memories once they’ve been flatlined away.

Before that night at the reservoir, Ruby and I used to talk about dying—about how it might happen, what we’d do if it did. She had a whole plan for her afterlife, which involved haunting certain blood relatives, playing poltergeist on former landlords and schoolteachers, and playing chicken with cars. She’d have a road in town named for her, or better yet a bridge, and leave me every last thing she owned in her will. She acted like she would stay forever the way she was, never marrying and never having kids, and surely never leaving our small mountain town, and that I’d be the only one left to remember her, though really everyone would, I told her, especially if she got her name on a bridge.

Ruby wanted me to know that her headstone should be pink granite, even if it cost extra. Pink or no headstone at all. And she’d already written out the inscription, handed over to me a long time ago for safekeeping:

  Ruby



  Beloved Sister of Chloe

Gas Station Attendant

Phenomenal Kisser

(ask anyone)

Lies Here





For those leaving flowers, she wanted a small directive added at the bottom, to show her preference:

  Poppies Only, Please





She was very specific in letting me know what her headstone should say, but she didn’t like it when I tried to figure out what I might want for mine. I couldn’t pick a color, and I couldn’t tell her what should be written on it, because she never wanted to read those words, not in this lifetime, and not in our next lifetime, if there were such a thing as multiple lifetimes, which Ruby happened to think there were.

Up at the mausoleum, London’s friends were passing around a joint. I accepted it when it came my way for politeness’ sake, and took the tiniest puff of a hit before passing it on. I didn’t know if Ruby would have let me go if she knew we’d be smoking and sharing spit up on this hill full of headstones like we were, that I’d be coughing out smoke longer than anyone, unable to get that dry tickle out of my throat. Ruby smoked weed, but that didn’t mean I could. She did a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to imitate. She did them in the room with me, but I guess she expected me to look away.

I was here now, without her, and I wasn’t looking away. My eyes were starting to come clear.

That’s why I found myself staring at London.

Her friends acted like she was nothing unusual. But, to me, she was a shrill and shrieking fire alarm in a quiet library, and not a single person seemed to hear it. Were they deaf? Was everyone?

“Right, Chloe?” someone was saying—I hadn’t been paying attention.

“What?” I said.

“Your sister drew that, right?” Cate asked.

“Yeah, guess so.” Only a single glance told me it was one of hers.

Because there it was—a masterpiece à la Ruby—covering an entire side of the mausoleum. She’d used chalk, the kind made to scribble slogans on sidewalks, the kind that washed away to nothing when it rained. She liked to scrawl her name to show she’d been somewhere. Practically our whole town was tagged. But this mural was more of a mark than she usually bothered to leave. In fact, it was enormous.

“I love it,” Vanessa breathed.

“It’s, like, really beautiful,” Asha said.

Cate nodded. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

And there I was—I mean, anyone would assume it was me—a chalk stick figure in blue, since Ruby said that was my color, and with my hair in bangs, since Ruby had always liked my hair in bangs. I didn’t look like that now, so clearly she’d drawn me as she remembered me before I went away.

In the drawing, my stick hand was holding the hand of another, far taller figure. This one was drawn to be the size of a mountain in comparison to me—with a head made of swirls and enormous green orbs meant to be her all-seeing eyes. Her hands alone dwarfed my stick body, dwarfed the yellow smudge of the sun. Her feet in tall boots walked the water, touching only the tips of her toes to the blue squiggles meant to be undulating waves. She carried me above it all, my toes touching only air. Her dark hair made a long, flowing cape behind us both.