Imaginary Girls(64)

Ruby lifted her eyes to mine and said, “Okay, if that’s what you want. I got you cherry. And there’s tropical fruit, too. Ice pops, I mean.”

“Thanks.”

I turned away. I couldn’t hear the whistling anymore, but I could still smell Olive. It was in the house now, in the air, rising up to the top floor, trapped inside with the rest of the thick summer heat.

“Are you sure nothing happened, Chlo?” Ruby called. “Nothing I should know about?”

“Nothing, really,” I called down.

“I’ll find out, you know . . . if something did.”

I kept walking, all the while knowing she would. She was Ruby, after all. She’d dig you up and spread you open and see what she wanted to see. In this town, she was the only one who thought she could have secrets. Everything was hers. Most of all, me.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


  I WOKE UP


I woke up past midnight to a ringing phone, one I felt sure had been ringing for a while.

It wasn’t my cell. I moved the door aside and peeked into the hall. The phone was close, out there somewhere, its bleating ring bouncing off the unfinished walls and wire-exposed ceiling. Ruby’s door at the end of the hall was closed, and a phone cord was wound up the stairs, over the gate, past my door and past the bathroom door and past the closet that didn’t have a door to within inches of her room. It was the kitchen phone, so archaic it wasn’t even a cordless, and that was as far as it reached.

It rang and rang. If Ruby was in her room, she wasn’t coming out to answer it.

I guess I could blame the fact that I was half asleep for why I answered it. I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

There was a gush of breath, and a voice said, “Finally. Took long enough.”

“Excuse me?” The person on the other end must have thought I was Ruby; not too many people could tell us apart, even still.

“You need to get voice mail. Or an answering machine. Or something.”

“Who is this?”

Another sigh. Then the voice mumbled, “I, uh . . . really love you.” And the next I heard was click, as whoever it was hung up.

That was the first.

The other requests Ruby had penned on the helium balloons filtered in, sometimes more than once, as if a balloon had landed in one spot only to blow away to somewhere else. By afternoon we had two large pans of foil-covered lasagna in the fridge, though it was too hot to run the oven and my sister said she wasn’t in the mood for lasagna after all and what she really should have asked for was a homemade cake.

The balloons were answered, one by one, and Ruby didn’t seem at all surprised. In her universe—which encompassed the fuzzy, far-reaching boundaries of our town, skirting up mountains and dredging the lowest point in the valley, dipping into the reservoir and running off on the rapids of the Esopus to other small towns that looked much like this one—she’d gone and asked for what she wanted and every single person here would try to give it to her. As if it was their duty.

Toward the end of the day, when I found a dress folded up on the steps—white eyelet to show bits of skin—I carried it up to our floor.

I found her at the mirror in an odd pose. She’d spotted a gray hair and was stretching out the strand to take a closer look in the light.

“I think this is for you,” I said, leaving the dress on the bed. “There’s no card.”

She glanced at the dress. “Nice,” she said absently. “It looked better in the dark, I think.” She returned her attention to the mirror, crinkling up her brows in concentration. “Look at me carefully, Chlo, and then please tell me you don’t see it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“But you do see it. You’re looking right at it.”

“You told me to say—”

“Do you see it?”

I nodded solemnly. The gray strand stood out against the rest of her dark hair. I also saw what may have been a second strand behind her ear, but I didn’t point it out.

“Get the tweezers. We’ll have to pull it out at the root.”

We performed the operation together and then carefully wrapped the long strand—up close I saw it wasn’t gray but perfectly white from root to tip, and glimmering at all angles, like a hair pulled from a royal Persian cat—in tissue to discard in the toilet. She flushed and watched to make sure it went down, then she flushed again to be safe, as if we were getting rid of evidence of a crime before the FBI stormed in.