Imaginary Girls(7)

I guess we didn’t expect I’d be the one to leave her.




Away from the town where we lived, I tried to forget the details of my life with Ruby. I had a new life now. Wednesdays, I no longer snuggled up on the couch to mock girl movies or laced on old roller skates to ride the ramps behind the Youth Center; I spent my hours alone doing homework. There were no weekend sprees for new sunglasses, no taking turns with the scissors to slice out fashion models’ painted lips and eyes from magazines to tape to our walls. After the last bell at school, there was no white car waiting for me—no detour down the old highway alongside the real highway, no windows open wide so the wind could dread my hair. I had to take the bus.

But I thought of Ruby constantly. Of being with her, of what we did.

How at all hours we’d lounge on the hard stone benches on the Village Green, which marked the dead-center point of our town, watching the cars go around, watching them watch us, and only now did I wonder if Ruby sat there just to be seen? Did I know how the universe revolved around the spot wherever Ruby happened to be, be it out on the Green or at home, or did I pretend I didn’t know, like a sun that’s gone lazy and slips down from the sky to lie out on the rooftop in her favorite white bikini only because she can?

I tried not to think about that.

I thought about our town. The exact blue of our mountains, the certain green of our trees. The Cumberland Farms convenience store where Ruby worked, pumping gas and filling in at the register, her hand dipping in the till, shortchanging tourists. Her apartment by the Millstream, her big, old-lady car. The store where she got her signature shade of wine red lipstick, how they held her color behind the counter so no one else could wear it. The rec field where we took to the swings, the spillway where we had parties. The reservoir, worst of all the reservoir. Every night I walked the unmarked path to Olive’s edge and couldn’t stop if I tried.

Always, in my dream, it was dark. Always the stars above held the same pattern, because it was the same night, and time had wound back to let me take my place in it, where I belonged.

I had the same aftertaste of wine coating my throat, could hear the same voices echoing from shore. My body made the motions to swim that great distance, even though I knew I’d come to the cold spot soon enough.

Even though I knew I’d reach the boat. And her.

But the cold surprised me each time. The fear felt new.

Because there she was, the girl in the boat, drifting at the exact point in the reservoir where I’d stopped swimming the first night and stopped swimming every night I dreamed it since. Ruby always said she’d protect me, but I couldn’t keep myself from thinking the worst thing I could, since she wasn’t around to bend my mind her way.

She didn’t protect me that night.

The girl who’d been buried could have been me.

The longer I stayed away from town the more I thought about the girl who sat in the last row of my French class, London Hayes. How she’d cut her hair right before the summer, chopped it off like a boy. How I’m pretty sure she had long hair before that, long and without bangs like so many of the girls in town because that’s how Ruby wore her hair. But now I remembered how London’s ears stuck out after she’d chopped it, like maybe she should have considered her ears before going ahead with that haircut and I guess no one thought to tell her.

London once got called to the front of the classroom because Ms. Blunt, our French teacher, had spied what she was doodling in her notebook. She made London show the entire class: through a crosshatch of shaded scribbles, a naked girl with bloodthirsty eyes and sharp, serrated ribs, nipples dangling like extra fingers, toes black with disease.

It was grotesque, offensive even. Ms. Blunt glared at the lined page, the blue ballpoint put down so hard it left gashes, and in her dramatically accented, overloud French she asked London, “Qui est-ce?” Violent pointing motions. Enunciation galore. “Qui est-ce?”

And we all racked our brains trying to remember what that meant—this was remedial, not Regents-level French—but London knew the question and knew how to answer. She shook her head sadly and said, “C’est moi.” It’s me.

Something was wrong with the girl—clearly.

Other than that, I didn’t know too much about her. There was this rumor that she once took five hits of LSD and went to school on purpose, like a walking biology experiment, which I guess failed because she didn’t make it through fourth-period gym. She started drinking in sixth grade, people said, too, but that was mostly a compliment.