Imaginary Girls (12 page)

I went around the house, which, like a tree, grew out from itself, branching off at all angles and teetering up into the sky.

She was inside, through a sliding glass door, wide awake and choosing between waffle flavors, sundress and boots on. Her legs were gleaming and I couldn’t see any trace of dirt. The memory of caked mud was so out of place now, I wondered if I’d dreamed it.

“Buttermilk or blueberry?” she asked me. “You get first pick.”

“Blueberry,” I said without a second thought. “So did you hear? About the keys?”

“I heard.” She popped two waffles into the toaster and watched the coils go red. She pushed aside a stack of shoe catalogs and unopened envelopes on the table so I’d have room for a plate. She somehow wrangled up a clean fork, but only one, so one of us would have to eat the waffle with our fingers.

“I
wish
I could give Pete his keys,” she said, “since that would get rid of him faster.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because.” She held out her fists to show me. She opened each one to reveal her palm. On which, in both cases, there was no key.

“They fell,” she said. “The keys. They’re gone.”

“Fell where?”

The toaster gave a sharp
ping
, and at that Ruby turned to retrieve the waffles. Mine, she put on a plate; hers, she nibbled at from the empty palm of one hand, her mouth soon stuffed so full, she couldn’t possibly answer.

I ate my waffle and decided not to push further. I didn’t want her to say it, didn’t want to know for sure where she went out walking last night.

Finally she stopped chewing and said, “I wonder what he’s going to do about those keys.” She licked some crumbs off her fingers. “Poor Petey. He was one of my very first boyfriends—you remember. The first of them all, actually. Maybe I should go apologize or something. Make nice.”

I nodded, though she didn’t move for the door.

“Speaking of boyfriends . . .” she said. “I guess you met Jonah?”

I nodded once more but didn’t comment.

“He’s good with his hands, huh?”

I made a face.

“He’s useful, Chlo. Don’t you go and be mean to him yet. So who else is out there? I don’t want to let them see me till I know.”

“Some guy, Pete’s friend, I dunno. And . . . and I guess, uh, yeah, I saw Pete’s brother, Owen, out there with them, too.”

The heat of my cheeks warmed the kitchen, like she’d left the oven on. I wasn’t sure if she noticed.

Ruby never got this kind of heat in her cheeks. She didn’t have to stop short inside a doorway to catch her breath after she’d been standing near someone. Didn’t pause longer than she should, wondering if he’d followed her. Pause a long time wondering, until it was clear he wasn’t following, because why would he? Boys didn’t follow me the way they did my sister. A boy once followed her around town for miles, tailgating her car and trailing her cart in the supermarket, and when she whirled around to ask what he wanted, he said he only wanted to say hi.

Come to think of it, maybe that had been Pete.

Ruby headed for the door and slipped out. She was gone for awhile. She was gone long enough for me to shower and get dressed and put on a dab of her lipstick and make myself a second waffle. She was out there for so long that I wondered if maybe she wanted me to join her and I’d missed the signal or something.

But then I looked out the great window in the living room, a window as wide as the room itself and showing the full expanse of the reservoir as if our whole world was made of it. There, in the backyard, were Pete and Pete’s friend and Pete’s brother and Jonah, and they were all working together, lifting boards of wood in an assembly line, apparently inspired to do some work on the veranda.

My sister had her back to me and was caught standing in the dirt, the wind playing with the hem of her dress, tossing it like wild rapids around her clean, bare legs. She must have felt me looking because she turned then, to give me one of her smiles. A smile for me and me only. No boys had ever seen this smile. They thought they were close enough to my sister to be loved by her, but they couldn’t, wouldn’t ever get that close—not in the way I already was.

She came in through the sliding glass door and said, “It’s Wednesday. We should watch movies.” Because on summer Wednesdays that was what we used to do, and the day after, Thursdays, we did laundry, but only if we felt like it, and on Fridays we’d do some shopping and make a pit stop at the town pool.

For now, we sat on pillows beneath the ceiling fan and flipped on the cable.

“I forgot to tell you,” Ruby said. “I don’t like you going in the backyard when it’s still light,” she announced randomly. She lifted her face to the ceiling fan, which was on high, and let it cool her cheeks.

“Why?” I said. “Afraid I’ll get sunburned?”

“No,” she said, “though good point, you do burn easily, your skin is so much fairer than mine—I bet you my dad was Latin, like from Panama or Puerto Rico, didn’t Sparrow say he spoke Spanish? I bet he went back to whatever country he came from and it’s so gorgeous and sunny down there so that’s why we haven’t seen him since. And your dad speaks only English and he’s as pale as a newborn rat.”

“Are rats pale?”

She shuddered. “They live their lives in the dark, don’t they? Just don’t go in the yard in the daytime. Anyone could see you out there. And you know what? If you go out there at night, do me a favor and stay on the veranda. You could step on a nail. Also, I don’t like that boy, why’d he ask if you were coming back out? I told him it’s Wednesday and Wednesday’s the day we watch movies so, no, you were
not
coming back out. Plus, please don’t answer the telephone. Let it ring like I do. And”—here, a glance at the sundress I had on, a short blue one I’d helped myself to from her closet—“you look cute in that dress. It’s yours. I want you to have it.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I was still stuck on the thing about the boy who’d asked for me. But she didn’t bring him up again.

She just said, “Got it?”

And I said, “Yeah,” though I wasn’t sure I understood even half of it.

And then she rested a cold hand on my arm, and the air whipped up by the ceiling fan made it even colder, and she said, “It’s
Wednesday
, Chlo. What movie should we watch?”

That was how life returned fully to what it once was, this summer like other summers. The only difference was our vantage point in town. When I got up to make the popcorn—on Wednesdays, when we watched movies, we also microwaved popcorn—I could see the water, never still, always moving, if faintly, in the near distance. I could see it from every window downstairs, from each room in the house except the room Ruby called my bedroom.

And, who knew? Maybe down at the bottom, where my gaze couldn’t reach, the people of Olive were living out their own summer, seeking a breeze on the current, then running to play catch with Pete’s lost keys.

L
ondon didn’t exist for a couple days. We never left the house, so it was easy to forget her out there, doing whatever she was doing, wherever that was.

Or, no—it was like she existed the way she used to, two years before, when I’d never considered leaving town, especially not without my sister, and when I knew London Hayes as the girl in the back of my French class and not much more. When she was just a girl, one I saw around, on the Green or in the backseats of Ruby’s friends’ cars, and when I did we didn’t even say hello to each other or anything.

Knowing she was around somewhere was enough to keep the memories at bay.

By Friday morning, London was barely a thought drifting through my mind. Instead, Ruby had filled my head with pancakes at Sweet Sue’s, as we’d decided that for the rest of the summer we’d eat only breakfast foods, then skip the two courses in between and go straight for dessert. We went all out and ordered the “red monkey” special, pancakes made with strawberries and bananas, since Ruby said twice the fruit was healthier.

On the way back from Sweet Sue’s, we drove past the public high school—where she said I’d go for my junior year, once she convinced my dad to give me up for good—and we made sure to take the familiar detour down the old highway alongside the real highway, windows down so the wind could dread our hair.

And everything was the same—except Ruby hadn’t cut my bangs yet, so my hair got in my mouth and I had to spit it out to keep from chewing on it and puking it up like cats do. And I noticed, too, how the car was running on empty the whole way there and back, and either her gas gauge was stuck on
E
for good, or she really had been lifted to another plane of existence where she could drive a car with the power of her mind, in the way she could direct a man to build a house for her, staying up all night to hammer and buzz.

In town, Ruby sailed through red lights like they meant go. The other cars let her pass, and no one even honked when she took the wrong way down the road and almost caused a collision. As we drove alongside the Green, we saw kids hanging out on the benches like any summer afternoon, and all eyes went to our car, like we were part of a caravan carrying a celebrity or the president; in Ruby they had that person combined into one. But when anyone saw for sure she was in the car, they looked away fast, like they didn’t want to be caught staring. It was a wave of snapped necks, eyes averted to street signs and lampposts. If Ruby noticed, she didn’t say.

Ruby cut the brakes near the candy shop where she used to buy me the swirled cherry-mint sticks to suck on. This was our routine: candy first, then shopping for sunglasses. Then we’d lounge on the hard stone bench dead center of the Green, where Ruby would flirt with locals and tourists and curious squirrels. We always made sure to avoid the Village Tavern, a bar across the street that our mother was known to favor, which meant holding our breath when we passed, like the superstitious would beside a graveyard. Then, if we got hot enough, we’d do a few laps in the pool. Well, I would do the laps, and Ruby would stretch out her legs in the shallow end and watch. After that we’d go home.

But now she said we should skip the candy—we weren’t ready for “lunch” yet—and, this time, she’d buy me my own pair of sunglasses to keep me from borrowing hers.

We left the Buick with the windows down, as no one would ever dare touch it, and crossed Tinker Street for the boutique that had the best selection of sunglasses in all of town. The store had appeared to be open when we’d driven past, but once we got up close we found the glass door locked, the lights down, and a misspelled hand-scrawled sign that read:
Closed for Inventry Sorry!

Ruby was not pleased.

She pounded on the glass and in seconds two salesgirls appeared, all apologies, one glaring at the other as if she was the one responsible for the sign, and the bell on the door was tinkling as it opened for us. We went in and minutes later emerged with our purchases: a dark-tinted pair à la
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
for me and a pair of flashy gold aviators that Ruby wore perched on top of her head. The sunglasses cost fifteen each, but Ruby suggested two for five, and so that was what she paid.

Ruby was silent as we returned to the car. She didn’t want to lounge on the Green, and she didn’t want me to try on her aviators. “Everything is supposed to be perfect,” she said. “I don’t understand it. What’s up with today?”

“It is perfect,” I assured her. “Everything is.”

“Do you think I’m trying too hard?” she asked, dropping the aviators down over her eyes. “With these?”

They were gold-rimmed, polished up to searing in the sun—and too big for her head. But she was everything and more, even with those glasses marring her face. That was the magic of my sister.

“You can tell me,” she said.

“I . . .”

“You hate them,” she said, but she kept them on as if to punish herself, and clicked her blinkers, to merge the car into the lane. Then she clicked the blinkers back off, the car staying in park. “Do I look mean with these on? Sorta psychopath?”

I nodded, if reluctantly, since it wasn’t exactly the kind of compliment Ruby was used to hearing.

She gave a grin and said, “Then I’m going in.”

“In where?” With my new dark glasses on, I could barely see the sign across from the candy store for the Village Tavern. It could be that I was used to not-seeing it, used to imagining instead a sinkhole taking over that spot on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” Ruby said. “In there.”

“But what if she’s, y’know . . . inside?”

“Oh, but she is,” Ruby said. “Don’t you recognize the heap of junk over there?” She waved a hand at the brown hatchback parked at the corner. One taillight was busted in, and I knew how it happened: Ruby’s foot and a single, well-aimed shot of her pointy black boot.

Inside me, something sunk. I’d been back in town for however many days since the bus ride, and I hadn’t run into my mother yet. She hadn’t called; it was possible she still assumed I was in Pennsylvania. All this time, Ruby had been shielding me from her. Now she was yanking off the curtain and shoving me in.

“But—” I started.

I didn’t have to say it. Ruby knew the patterns my thoughts made before the words left my mouth. She knew even before the first syllable. She shook her head and, softly, told me to stay put. Only one of us was going in.

She crossed the street and stepped inside the tavern, out of sight for a few minutes. I don’t know what she told our mother, how she broke the news that I was home, but she must have found some words for it. Maybe she said I was in the car and not coming inside to talk and, ha, how do you like that, woman-who-calls-herself-Sparrow? Ruby must have said something good, though, because when she hopped back into the driver’s seat, she had the most delicious smile on her face, like she’d witnessed a thing of beauty and would remember it forever and always. She didn’t explain it, though—sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if put to words. Ruby taught me that.

As we drove away, the door to the tavern opened and a person stepped out. A warm, blinking sign for beer illuminated this person in patches, on and then off again, face aglow and then not. This person watching us go for a few seconds. Then this person giving up and heading inside. I felt so detached from this person who happened to be my mother.