Imaginary Girls(81)

Ruby didn’t realize I was remembering it, though. She said, “And now I’m tired. Look at the bags under my eyes.” She lifted her eyes, and I did see bags beneath them, two purple and puffy foreign objects on her face. I saw how her hair frizzed out. How her elbows had dry spots and how a crinkle had set in deep above her brow. I saw how it had taken its toll, all of it. The effort of keeping this up was leaving physical strain on her body.

“We should sleep now,” she said. It wasn’t long before she fell deep in, drifting so far that I couldn’t rouse her.

In sleep, her face darkened. She didn’t sleep-talk at all.




We spent our last night in that house together, Ruby clinging to me like we were afloat on a raft in the boundless ocean—but we’d long run out of food and one of us would have to let go soon; one of us would have to go under before we ate the other.

I didn’t dream that night. What I did was remember. I remembered a night two years ago, on the rocks at the edge of the reservoir, a night I’d stuffed up in a paper bag crumpled up inside a sock that I’d balled up and shoved far in the back drawer of my mind, where the worst things go.

It was illegal to swim the reservoir, but we did it anyway. And it was impossible to swim across in the middle of the night, but I started to try. My sister would have propelled me all the way to the other shore—like she held a hand under my stomach, propping me up where no one could see she was doing it—except she thought too much of herself sometimes. She thought she didn’t have to help. She began to think I really could swim down to the bottom and grab hold of a souvenir.

Then I felt the water turn cold and, as the chilled spot enveloped me, the downward tugging pull.

A thought bubbled up about Olive. Had they sent an emissary for me—a cold pair of arms to put me in a sleeper hold and drag me down? Is that what was happening? Is that why I was choking on water and couldn’t get air?

Ruby is right, I was thinking. Because I felt their eyes on me, the eyes of Olive, heard them calling me, heard how they already knew my name.

And she was right about me, too. I didn’t need to breathe, the closer I got to Olive; there was enough air in my lungs to last me years.

That would have been the moment I drowned.

Because then there was dark.

Then there was nothing.

Not because I died, but because I didn’t. I didn’t die because my sister had a way to bend the world to her bidding, a talent of hers since she was small. In a panic, she did the first thing she thought to do: save me, even if it meant sacrificing someone else.

In a heartbeat, she lifted me up out of that cold, deep water. She’d sent something for me to hold on to, that rowboat drifting there at just the moment I needed to catch my breath.

I didn’t sink down to Olive, I remembered this for sure now. Someone else took my place so I could be here.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


  DON’T GO


Don’t go,” I would have said, if she’d only woken me up first. But what I woke to was the sun on my face and bright, shadow-free walls and an enormous expanse of bed, rumpled sheets tossed about like a windstorm, the room empty except for me.

It was morning, and she was gone.

On the pillow beside mine was a glistening strand of hair. Ruby and I shared a hair color, no thanks to having two different fathers: the same exact shade of deep dark brown, enhanced with equal parts henna used to bring out the red. But this strand of hair didn’t match our color. It was white, like all pigment had been stripped out in one suck. And when stretched out to flatten its curl, it reached, end to end, as long as my arm.

The unread text on my phone—I could picture her there in the room, messaging me from inches away instead of shaking me awake to tell me in person—said simply:

  brb xo





Wherever she’d gone was yet another secret she was keeping from me.

I checked the windows first, to see if we were still flooded in, but all that was left in the yard were scattered puddles and shallow slicks of mud. The reservoir wore an innocent face across the way, waterline still high, but not near enough to engulf the road.

Down in the kitchen, I could hear both Jonah and Pete being all perplexed about where she was, too. When I peeked in, I saw how they kept eyeing each other like they’d kick the table aside and scrap with their bare hands if she came back and said she’d pick only one of them.

“Her car’s gone,” Pete said.