Imaginary Girls(65)

After it went down, she sat on the floor and spoke.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“It’s just a gray hair,” I said.

“I feel like I’m fading. Like I’m so very tired from all this effort and that”—she pointed at the toilet, where we’d flushed the long strand—“that’s just the start. And what’s next? Sunspots?”

“What effort?”

She glanced at the dress. “Everything takes at least an ounce of effort,” she said cryptically. “I’m not magic, you know.”

I couldn’t tell if that last part was a joke.

She continued. “I’m exhausted. It’s like we just climbed up to the very top of Overlook Mountain—we used to skip school and do that, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember how we’d get to the top, finally after climbing forever, and catch our breath and look down and we could see the whole entire town from up there?”

I nodded.

“I feel like that. Like we’re up at the top and I should be able to see everything. Only, the clouds have come in, and now it’s raining or whatever, and I’m not seeing town like I should. So we climbed all the way up there for nothing. And I’m too tired to climb back down. That’s what I feel like. Something’s in my way and I don’t know what it is.”

She met my eyes, and this propelled me from the room and away from her, afraid of what she’d see. Maybe the words revealing what I’d done were written on me from the inside out, like a phantom finger pressed to a fogged-up car window.

Anything was possible around my sister, I was guessing, if balloons could summon her clothes to wear and food to eat.

I went downstairs; she followed. We bypassed Jonah in the living room, didn’t waste a word on him, and wound our way into the kitchen.

I went to the fridge; she drifted to the table and played with the salt shaker. The dirty cereal bowls in the sink towered to great heights. There were no clean spoons anywhere in the world, it felt like, and there never would be, so we’d have to learn to slurp cereal without.

Knowing she was hiding things from me—while I was hiding things from her—made us dance around each other. It was almost time for dinner, so I took a cherry ice pop and she took a tropical fruit ice pop, which was blue, though we didn’t know why, and she unwrapped hers and I unwrapped mine, and we each took a lick off each other’s out of habit, and left the room through separate exits.

It wasn’t long before she was knocking on my door. Ruby never knocked and waited for an answer; she just knocked and went right in, which defied the logic of knocking. She knocked, and then moved the door aside.

“Hey,” she said, and perched on the end of my bed. I had a chunk of ice pop in my mouth and couldn’t talk back until I swallowed. When I looked up, I saw her lips were blue from hers. “Are you going to tell me?” she said. “Or am I going to have to wrestle it out of you with my bare hands? I’m strong, you know. And extremely flexible.”

She was joking, and stuck out a dyed tongue to prove it, but I couldn’t know anymore what my sister could accomplish once she set her mind to it.

And I did want to tell her about Owen. Or maybe she was the one making me want to reveal it, and it wasn’t what I wanted at all. Getting the words to climb up my throat by command, jostling into position behind my closed teeth—she was doing that. I kept my teeth mashed together. My cherry-red tongue intact.

Normally she didn’t have to force a thing from me. Sisters told each other every last thing; especially the younger sister. The youngest sister couldn’t have secrets. She was who she was because of who came first.

She waited for me to say it. She knew there was something.

And if that was all that stood between us—some boy—maybe I would. But someone else was blocking the way. I could see her in the room even if she wasn’t here in the flesh. I couldn’t help but picture her skinny legs, one long arm bent at the hip. Her veins showing through, blue as Ruby’s ice pop. Her hair with the bleach left in too long and her ears sticking out.

So I said only half the truth: “I’m worried about London.”

“Why?”

“She seemed so out of it last time I saw her . . .”

Ruby took a long lick, considering. “Really? How so?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep wondering”—Ruby’s interest was piqued—“what if she goes away?”