Imaginary Girls(71)

“I don’t want to go anymore,” I called back at the car.

The driver leaned out his window, all fed up, like now I’d gone and done it. “You can’t be serious,” he called to me.

“I’m going to walk home,” I yelled back. “Or call my sister to come get me.”

The car went in reverse and pulled up beside me. “Get in the car, Chloe,” the guy driving said. I looked past him at Owen, but Owen wasn’t the one saying it.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

I waited. Owen was about to open his door. He was about to step out onto the road with me, help me figure out how to get home. To at least make sure I was okay.

The driver turned to Owen, as if expecting the same thing. But Owen was staring out the windshield at the road ahead. “Fuck her,” he said. “Just go.”

I watched the car speed away, watched it as long as I could, until it went around the bend of trees and I didn’t see it anymore.

It would be a long walk back, but I was thinking I might have to do it. Ruby didn’t know where I was. She’d dropped me off on the Green; I hadn’t told her I was leaving town. And worse—how would I explain what happened to London?

I paused in the road, there for the flattening if any cars sped my way.

Darkness was falling. It had been evening when we’d left, but now it was undeniably becoming night. At some point a car would drive past, heading north. Maybe in it would be someone I knew, someone who knew Ruby. At some point or another, hopefully before Ruby texted to check in, someone would have to drive this road and give me a ride back to town.

For now, I was outside town limits, by myself, in the growing dark.

But then a light flashed. My phone was blinking—and the small screen on it was bursting with a series of missed calls. The notices kept coming: calls and texts and voice mails, scrolling fast across the screen. My cell phone was acting like it had been jammed for days and was now spitting out every piece of communication in a breathless rush before final detonation.

Clearly the thing was broken.

I was about to pull out the battery, to see if that would help, when my phone lit up once more—this time with an incoming call. I answered immediately—expecting Ruby. But I hadn’t checked the caller ID. If I had, I would have seen it was a call from Pennsylvania.

“Chloe! I can’t believe it, Chloe, is that you?”

It was a woman’s voice. She seemed distantly familiar, like a television character from some long-canceled show, someone I swore I knew but couldn’t come up with a name and place to fit to her. My mind searched for recognition.

Then the woman said, “Your father’s been worried sick! You’ve given him an ulcer. What were you thinking, Chloe!”

Then it came to me: my stepmother. That’s who was on the phone.

“Sorry,” I said. “I—”

“Your father’s been trying to reach you. We thought something happened! You never answer your phone!”

“I didn’t get any messages . . .” As far as I knew, I never even heard the phone ringing. But had all those missed calls eating up the memory of my phone just now been for real?

“We’ve been calling this number, Chloe. This number. Your father called. And I’ve called. Your voice-mail box ran out of space. We would have contacted the police if your mother hadn’t been in touch with us to tell us where you were.”

“You talked to Sparrow?”

“Yes. She called us. You know I don’t enjoy talking to that woman, but at least she could pick up a phone.”

Ruby must have forced our mother to call and be my alibi, that was all I could figure.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“There must be something very wrong with your phone, Chloe,” my stepmother said. “Your father was terribly worried.”

“Really,” I said. For sure I didn’t believe it. Even though my phone was being difficult now, it had worked fine in town—there were no problems with the service, at least before tonight. Clearly he was only pretending to call me. He must have been relieved to have me off his hands all summer, not cluttering up his lawn with my life.

“Yes, really,” my stepmother said. “Don’t be so sarcastic. Stay right where you are; I’m running to go get your father. Do not hang up, Chloe. He wants to talk to you.”

As I waited, I sucked it up and decided to start walking. Eventually this road would hit a more trafficked road, like a highway, and I’d come upon a car willing to take me the rest of the way into town.