Imaginary Girls(53)

Ruby also used to say how cold it was down there. How the people of Olive shivered so, their knees knocking, chattering their algae-gummed teeth. Their liquid sky was too thick to let in more than a hint of sun, so in their underwater village they grew paler, and their hearts grew colder, and the memories of their surface lives drifted up and away.

London was turning the car onto the road that ran alongside the reservoir—the same road that led to Jonah’s house—but she didn’t steal a peek through the trees. We drove past the reservoir without a word about it, as if it were any other thing: a garbage dump or a gas station or the guy who sells roses out of a bucket on Route 375.

“Ruby said I shouldn’t tell anyone about rehab—it’s not good to dwell, she said—but it’s okay to tell you, right?” She’d asked me this before, but I hadn’t answered.

Now I said, “Right,” even though I was lying.

“So I don’t know how long I was there,” she was saying as we came even closer to the house where Ruby and I now lived. “It was only when I got out that I knew how long. Ruby was there, and she drove me home, and she said everything was back the way it used to be, and—”

“Wait,” I said, stopping her from saying more. We were in the driveway now, long and winding and carved out of gravel and dirt, seconds from having to stop this conversation, and I wanted to be sure I had it right. “Ruby was there when you got out? She picked you up?”

London drove slowly, thinking at the same slow pace. “I remember her there,” she said. “I think.” She shook her head and the car made it around the last curve and we came to a stop. “But it’s weird because I also remember going swimming that night, like before I even saw my parents. I must have been really out of it to go swimming first, right?”

The door of the house was coming open. The light inside showed Ruby, as if she’d waited at the hole where the doorknob should have been, peering out of it like a peephole. She wore a thin, pale dress, her hair down to cover where it was see-through. The headlights were so bright, they about illuminated her insides.

“My parents used to wait up for me like that,” London said. Her face had drawn in and closed up, and I could see she regretted telling me about rehab. She must have realized that telling me was just like telling my sister, but with a ten-second delay.

“They don’t wait up for you anymore, your parents?”

She shrugged. “Everything’s different since I got back,” was all she said.

Ruby didn’t come out to the car. She simply held the door to the house open, knowing I’d be right in. “See you later, London,” I said, so casual, as if she were a regular girl and not something entirely other. Something I had no name for.

Ruby hugged me close when I came through the door, and we watched London until she backed out of the driveway, watched until the car slipped around the bend and there was nothing to see. Ruby sniffed my hair and knew all, at once, without me having to confess to it. Her green eyes had gray in them and her mouth had gone grim.

“Look at the time, Chlo.”

I glanced at my cell phone to see that the display read 12:02.

“It’s midnight,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “it’s after midnight. It’s twelve-oh-two.”

“But I—” She shook her head, so I stopped talking.

“Did you leave town?” she asked.

“No, I told you where we were.”

I stepped into the lamplight of the living room, and when I did she saw what I was wearing, a mistake because she saw my feet.

“Hey, those are my good boots,” she said. “You took them from my closet.”

I denied it—but only the part about the closet. The boots had been jumbled in with the mess on her bedroom floor, one by a window and one under the bed.

She changed the subject. “Chloe, you should have told me boys were going to be there. You never said anything about any boys being there.”

“But I didn’t know.” I was utterly confused at how she was acting—like she was tallying up all the things I’d done wrong, and I’d only gone out without her this one night, and it had been her idea to send me. Was she being a parent now? What would she do next, ground me?

“Did that boy touch you? Don’t look at me like that, you know who I mean.”

“Owen? No! He barely even came near me.”

“I’ve never known a boy who didn’t at least try to touch me.”