Imaginary Girls(70)

And maybe it happened then, maybe it was in that instant of passing the sign and entering the next town when her screams went quiet and her cold, bony face was no longer smashed against the palm of my hand, this moment when I couldn’t feel her anymore and I fell back onto the seat and found it empty beside me.

I wasn’t clutching her mouth any longer; there was no mouth to clutch. There was no one in the seat but me.

When I turned, the boys in the car were arguing over what CD to slip into the stereo. Owen had his back to me, his eyes out the window. High Falls was maybe ten, fifteen minutes away.

I patted at the seat. I sat up and stared at my reflection in the rearview.

All I knew is that we’d crossed town limits and the girl crammed into the backseat with me, the girl whose mouth I’d just been squeezing shut, whose name I’d been cursing, London—was gone.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


  STOP


Stop!” I shrieked at the top of my lungs. “Stop the car!”

The guy at the wheel swerved to the right and we landed on the shoulder with a jolt. I felt my arms still attached to my hands, my head on my shoulders, my body intact as it should be. I looked around the car wildly—she wasn’t in the seat beside me, not in the front, and not in the back, which was jammed full of the enormous speakers. I twisted in circles, looking at the empty expanse of road behind us. Had she . . . leaped out the window when I wasn’t looking?

Because there was no other place she could have gone.

The music had been shut off and all four boys were staring at me. Over the silence you could hear the wind rustling the leaves of the trees, a calm yet hair-raising hush of a noise, and every once in a while this low whimper, this terrified and truly awful sound, and it took me forever to realize it was coming from down in my own throat.

“What the hell!” the guy driving shouted.

“What’s she on? What’d you give her, O?”

“I didn’t give her shit. Maybe she took something, how am I supposed to know?”

They talked about me as if I wasn’t there.

“Why’d she scream? I think she busted my eardrum.”

“Dude, what’s wrong with her?”

I finally spoke up. “Where are we?”

“Outside Rosendale, I think,” the driver said, eyeing me warily. “Stone Ridge maybe.”

We’d driven a few feet over some arbitrary line outside town, and London had vanished. And not one of them was acknowledging it.

Why wasn’t anyone else shocked into a stupor over this? Wondering where she’d gone? Wondering if she was hurt and bleeding on the road? Wondering how a girl could disappear right before your eyes? Why weren’t we all screaming?

I had to ask it. “Where’d she go?”

“What? Who?”

“London!”

The driver threw up his hands. “Where’s the closest psych ward is a better question.”

I turned to Owen. I reached out, whispered it. “She was sitting right here.” I indicated the empty sliver of seat next to me.

He wouldn’t even meet my eyes. He was looking north and to the left of my forehead when he said, “This is a joke, right?” He hesitated. “Right?”

I looked them all in the face. No one had seen her vanish; no one had a clue.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. It wasn’t funny.”

One of the guys in the backseat laughed awkwardly, and the other guys went along with it. Except for Owen.

“No,” he said, his eyes dull. “Not so funny.”

So much of it made sense to me, right there in the back of the red car, perfect sense. If she wasn’t lying in the two-lane road, then I’d know for sure. If she hadn’t jumped out the open window, she’d disappeared instead. Almost as if she’d ceased to exist once we left the confines of our town.

Exactly if.

I opened my door and stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked for a body, but there was no body. Of course there wouldn’t be a body—because here, outside town, London wasn’t alive. Here, where the car was splayed crooked across the road, where my door was gaping open and I was looking for any trace of her, she lived only in my imagination. She died two years ago, out here.

I couldn’t get back in the car. Who knew what would happen if we kept driving and made it to High Falls. How far was too far? The farther we got, I couldn’t be sure what else would start to crumble. Flashing through my mind were images from a zombie flick, fingers and ears and noses and other bits of protruding flesh rotting off when we moved, hair shedding in clumps, arms and eyes coming loose from sockets, tongues fish-flopping on the ground. Would that happen to me, to my tongue? I couldn’t risk it.