Imaginary Girls(74)

When the car came to a stop and I left the tree’s shelter to stand with London, the both of us drenched, he got a lopsided grin on his face. “A threesome?” he said, leaning over to open the car door. “Hells yeah. Get in.”

“Don’t be disgusting,” I said, expecting London to also tell him to shut it, but she slid into the backseat, shaking out her short wet hair all over the leather, and let me take the front seat beside Pete. Which meant I had to be the one to talk to him.

“You’re soaked,” he said, only half-approvingly. “If you two go and mess up my car, I’ll . . .” He tapered off before any threat came out, distracted by what happens to a girl’s shirt when rain soaks it through.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest so he’d have to look me in the eyes. As I did, the rain enveloped the car for a moment, one thick sheet swirled around us to keep us from seeing out, and then it opened, and lightened, and stopped its pounding, and though it was still raining, at least we could see.

“How’d you find your car keys, anyway?” I asked. I remembered how, it seemed so long ago, Ruby had lost them.

“You knew where my keys were?”

I shrugged.

He let out a sigh and played with the ugly protruding tuft of his goatee, which he should have shaved, and stat, because Ruby hated unruly goatees or any kind of attempt at a beard, and you’d think he’d know that. He just said, “I looked. I looked everywhere. I had to order a whole new set of keys—for my car, for the garage, my house, everything. But that’s Ruby.”

He said all that, and he didn’t even seem mad. He hacked up a cough, scratched at his old, wrinkly concert T-shirt for a band I’d never heard of, and swung the car around to drive us toward town.

I kept peeking in the rearview at London, like she’d get more substantial the closer we got to town. Fleshier, harder to break. More real.

But she was only herself. She was here, in another car, and this time she wasn’t trying to scratch my eyes out. She was leaning over the front seat, reaching for the stereo. She was rolling down the back windows even though it hadn’t stopped raining, letting the wind blow-dry her hair and the rain make it wet again. She was asking Pete if he had any smokes on him. She wasn’t any more real than she’d been before—the same girl, nothing different about her that I could make out, except that her anger at Ruby had disappeared and her memory had been erased.

Pete went to drop off London first. He got us close to town and made the turn around the bend, coming up on the thicket of trees near where I remembered Ruby said London lived. Only, just the same as last time, we didn’t end up taking her all the way to her house. London thumped Pete on the shoulder and said she wanted to get out here.

“What for?” Pete said. “I’ll drive you home.”

“Nah, here’s fine,” she said. She whipped the door open into crushing rain and stepped out onto the road. She flicked a hand at me, barely an attempt at a wave, and then she took off for what looked like a patch of trees, disappearing into the storm the way she’d vanished from sight in my hands.

Pete didn’t seem to care. He spun the car around to take me to Jonah’s and didn’t even suggest we go after her.

But I eyed the dark thicket of trees, the shadows growing blacker as the rain came down. “Pete. She’s going into the woods.” I realized then how close we were to the flap in the fence that Ruby used as her own private entranceway. It was around that bend a little ways, wasn’t it? Maybe London had her own private way in, too.

“Do you know what’s through those woods, Pete?” He’d been here before, tons of times. He knew the only thing out there was the reservoir.

“She’s not going in the woods,” Pete said. “She’s walking home. Her house is just over there.” He pointed, but at nothing. It was too dark to point at much of anything.

“She’s going in. Look.”

He stopped the car on the slick road and looked back. We both did, though there was no light on anywhere to catch her.

“It’s a shortcut,” he said at last.

“Wait here,” I said, before he could stop me.

I was running then, running through the rain and skidding in the mud in my sandals and scrambling over the gulley and into the trees. I was pushing through branches and stumbling over rocks, and there wasn’t a piece of me that wasn’t sopping wet and dripping.

The waterfall of rain from my forehead to my chin kept me from seeing all I could. Even so, I was able to make out London slipping into the dark pocket of a sagging fence, her feet the last two pieces of her to vanish. I watched her go in and not come out.