Imaginary Girls(9)

The physical labor worked for a time, though when I was elbows deep in soapsuds, scrubbing at a stubborn pot, I was reminded of Ruby’s way of doing dishes—leaving them piled in the sink and on the stove for a week at a time until there was no other option but to crate them over to the bathtub for a good soaking. Then how, after we gave the dishes a bath, we’d sail them like Frisbees to the couch, and if any dishes broke in the tossing that was just fewer to have to wash next time.

This would have been my life. At my new school, I was nobody special; I wasn’t even related to anybody special. I could have stayed there, gotten mostly Bs, the rare B+, studied through study hall, dodged balls through gym, blanked out on my locker combination, passed Algebra I, passed Earth Science, six points away from failing art. Sat on the bleachers and didn’t dance at the Halloween dance, stood in the corner and didn’t dance at the homecoming dance. No story worth telling past next Tuesday.

And soon enough, as time passed, I let myself forget the details of that night. Why I’d ever been so scared. Even why I’d left town in the first place.

That’s when she made a move.

One day, Ruby reached out and shook me. Even from across state lines she could.

The day it happened began like any other (bus stalled on the way to school; pop quiz in first period; ball to the face in gym), but then the stars shifted. The backdrop got picked up and moved offstage for the scene change. That must have been when she decided it was time, the weight of her decision sailing out of our town in the Catskill Mountains, beyond the reach of our river and our roads, finding me in this flat valley of highways and fast-food signs built taller than the treetops, this new town where I’d come to live.

Because this wasn’t a day like any other day.

During lunch, a random cheerleader smiled at me. My art teacher called my lump of clay “inspired.” My locker popped open on the very first try.

It was late afternoon when I stepped out of Music Appreciation to find the boy in whose Subaru I’d left my underwear, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

We hadn’t talked for weeks, yet, after all that time, here he was. Waiting for me.

The way he looked at me—it was as if I’d stepped into Ruby’s body, slipped on her longer legs, her greener eyes. As if I’d taken possession of her, or she’d taken possession of me.

“Hey, Chloe,” he said.

The rest of my classmates streamed out around me, leaving me alone in the music hallway. He moved closer, and I moved away, and soon he had me backed up against the wall. Was this sexy? Was I supposed to go with it, arch my back and part my lips a certain way? I tried to channel Ruby, but I lost her for a second there when his eyes took hold of mine.

“Long time no talk,” he was saying.

I was going to say, “I know.” Say, “So how’ve you been?” Dumb things to say, dumb, dumb. I don’t know what would have come out of my mouth had the thought of Ruby not turned me. Because what I said instead was, “Really?” Like I hadn’t even noticed how long it had been.

It was as if she stood beside me, whispering deep into my ear. Don’t tell him how you waited by the phone for three weeks, she breathed. Don’t say how you cried.

I thought of that windy February night up on Cooper Lake Road when her big white Buick ran out of gas. How we’d never run out of gas before in that car, even when the needle got stuck on E for days and we had no clue how much gas was left, so that was strange enough. But stranger still was how Ruby insisted we go on foot to the closest gas station—like she wanted us to really feel the cold. I thought of how our legs under our long coats prickled at first from the biting air, then burned. How, the longer we were outside, trudging through old snow, the sooner our thighs lost all feeling and went perfectly, senselessly numb.

In time, it felt as if we were hiking the road beside the icy lake on two sets of beating wings. We could barely tell we had legs at all.

It felt like we could have made it to the station in seconds, flown there and back with a canister of gasoline, our eyelashes glistening with frost, our bones weightless from cold. But then a truck stopped for us—some guy Ruby knew. And the heat in the cab brought our limbs back to life, stopped our teeth from chattering. We would not have to amputate our fingers due to frostbite; neither one of us would lose the tip off a nose.

We were grateful for the ride, but there was something to be said for the bodiless feeling that came after the cold. Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.