Imaginary Girls(58)

I undid the latch and pulled up the window. Before I could open my mouth, Ruby called from the railing, “Tell him I didn’t put the gate up for nothing. Did he step right over it like it wasn’t there? Ask him.”

The gate? She put up a gate?

I asked, my voice faltering. “Ruby wants to know . . . Did you, um, step over it?”

He nodded. There were wood shavings in his hair, little flecks, so many he’d have to dunk his head in the shower to get them all out, and some scattered and got on me when he moved.

“She says . . .” I started, trying to find the words, polite words, words that wouldn’t make him hate me, seeing as I was his guest, technically, eating his food and sleeping my nights in his bed. But I couldn’t finish that sentence. I turned back to let her do it. “You should tell him yourself,” I said.

But Jonah said, “No need, I got it.”

He slammed the window shut, almost on my fingers. Then he retreated down the stairs and I saw the gate there—a barricade, really, one made from two dresser drawers stacked up and propped across the floor, plus the long handle of a kitchen mop, stretched across, plus a picture frame with no picture in it. It looked like something a child would build, to keep a dog out. But Ruby used it on Jonah.

“How long has that been up?” I asked.

She shrugged and her expression didn’t soften. “He has the couch to sleep on.”

“He’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s really, really mad.” Never before were we in the precarious position of making a boyfriend mad who we still had to face the day after. Previous boyfriends we could kick out. Or drive away from. Previous boyfriends didn’t live downstairs.

“He’s fine. He can’t get mad,” she said. “Not at me. Besides, he’s not the one we have to worry about.”

Her bright, glowing green eyes flicked out at the water in the distance, the water hiding what had once been Olive. But then her eyes weren’t on the water at all, they were on the sky, on the clouds, on her red-tailed balloons making their way toward town.

I believed in her. I even believed in those balloons.

I’d seen what she could do, hadn’t I?

For barely a flicker of a second I thought otherwise. I thought about how maybe this wasn’t happening at all, except in some locked-off part of my mind where sane people retreat only when they’re dreaming or doped up on cough syrup.

It could be that somewhere off Route 80 in Pennsylvania you’d find a trailer propped up on cinder blocks and in it a girl who’d lost her mind. She’d be forced to stay out there because her dad wouldn’t let her in the house. Her trailer door would be padlocked from the outside. But if you found that trailer and peeked in through the peephole you’d find her eye staring back. An eye darkly circled, sunken. A crazy eye. That girl would call herself Chloe. She’d say her sister was magic. Her sister brought people back to life, made them into more than people, made them something other. Her sister could force you to do things and think things and bend to whatever she said. This Chloe had seen it; she was watching it happen right now. She’d scream this at you and claw at the trailer door and you’d do the smart thing and run away.

Because this was impossible. Ruby was, and London was. And yet, somehow, here we all were, as Ruby decided we would be.

And now the balloons were on their way.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


  RUBY STILL SAID


Ruby still said there was no reason to worry about Jonah. See? There he was down in the yard, building up the railing around the back porch so she wouldn’t slip off. Hammering hard at it. Measuring to keep it straight. Sanding it smooth.

There he was ignoring the real, paying work he had in his shed so he could keep remodeling the house for her—because he knew it was what she wanted.

Ruby was dressing for her evening shift at Cumby’s while keeping an eye on him out the window. She was dropping a short black vintage slip over her head and dipping bare feet into motorcycle boots, combing out her damp hair and letting it air-dry into loose curls down her back, coating her lips in wine, her favorite lipstick color and her favorite drink, then pressing her lips on the small white square of a store receipt to blot them dry. She looked like she was going out dancing rather than to restock and restyle the candy aisle by color (white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown) and fill a few gas tanks. Every other employee wore a uniform smock to work at Cumby’s; Ruby wore the smock once, on her first-ever shift, said it pinched, and never put one on again.