Imaginary Girls(52)

“Good,” Owen said.

But Asha said, “Know what was weird? Your sister like totally freaked when she thought we were all at the reservoir, didn’t she?”

I tried to be nonchalant about that. “She’s protective. She worries.”

“Was she worried about Lon? ’Cause of what we were talking about before?”

“No, she just doesn’t want me swimming there, that’s all.”

Asha wouldn’t let it go. “But why would she worry about you swimming in the reservoir? That makes, like, no sense.”

I didn’t get it.

“Yeah,” Damien called from a dark spot in the grass, “didn’t you swim all the way across back in the day?”

“In the middle of the night,” Asha said with awe in her voice, “from one shore to the other and then back again—everyone talks about that night.”

“The night I tried to swim across,” I corrected her.

“Yeah, right,” she said, as if I were being modest. “I heard it was amazing. Everyone says so. Ruby said you could swim it, and no one believed her. But Ruby was like, ‘Just watch.’ And so you dove in. And you went deep under. And you made it to the other shore and everyone saw and you waved and then you came all the way back across with, like, proof or something, and it was amazing, everyone says.”

“What proof?” I asked.

Her face went blank. “I dunno. You were there. Don’t you remember?”

People in town remembered what they did because that’s the story Ruby told them. It’s the story she wanted everyone to remember, so she must have recited it again and again, jamming their ears with it till they knew it by heart. Until they thought it true.

“How old were you?” Asha said.

“Fourteen,” I said quietly.

“Wow,” she said. “You know no one’s ever done that, before or since?”

I could say, It was no big, act like I could do the butterfly stroke back and forth across the giant expanse of the reservoir if I wanted to—and more. Pretend like I could swim to the end of the Hudson, slip into the bay, circle the Statue of Liberty, cross the ocean, backstroke the English Channel, come home kicking with a Mediterranean tan and an armful of undersea shells for souvenirs.

But I didn’t. I shrugged off any more talk of the reservoir and took my turn at the swings. We didn’t stay in the rec field for much longer—the guys got bored fast—but I gathered up enough speed on the swings to rise as high as I could before I had to jump down and follow them to the cars.

All I kept thinking was that I was Ruby’s sister. In this town, I could do whatever crazy and impossible thing I wanted. Everyone already believed I had, simply because Ruby had made it so.

And if she could do that, she could make them believe anything.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


  WHAT LONDON REMEMBERED


What London remembered was being asleep for a week. Eyes crusted closed, limbs too heavy to lift, she slept until she couldn’t sleep another minute and then she woke up.

The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes were curtains. She remembered those curtains, blue she said, or green sometimes, one day one color, one day the other color, some days both colors at once. The curtains moved, she remembered, always, caught in gust after gust of wind. Besides the curtains, she remembered being cold all the time and that her sneakers squished. She remembered how she had trouble hearing anything anyone said to her. How at first it was only lots of mouths talking at her, and hands with fingers pointing, and then, one day, her ears popped and she could hear fine.

This was rehab.

It was now close to midnight, and London was driving me to the house, back to Ruby.

I’d figured “rehab” would be this blank, cavernous space of time in London’s mind, like how when someone overdoses they’re not yet dead but the next step to it, and so there’s nothing to remember. But London remembered. Did this mean she hadn’t ever been dead?

Some things she’d said were sticking with me.

The moving colors.

The ears popping, like water had gotten in them.

And then there was the lack of clocks.

Ruby used to say that time stopped down in Olive—that there was no point in trying to keep track. The poor people of Olive couldn’t even wear wristwatches, since the hands got glommed up and the thick, murky water leaked in. There was a clock on the old Village Green, she said, and it always read eleven past two, the exact point in time the flood levels reached the clock face, so forever after in Olive that was the time, day or night, eleven past two for eternity.