Imaginary Girls (4 page)

This was what I was thinking as I stood there in the music hallway. I made my heart go numb, listened for the wind, and on it what she’d want me to say.

“You didn’t call,” he said.

I kept listening.

“You said you’d call,” he said. And then—the cinder-block wall at my back slick with its own sweat, or with mine—I remembered. Maybe I did say I’d call. Maybe he said he’d call me, and I said no, no I’ll call
you
.

Anyway, that’s something Ruby would have done.

He was still here, blocking my exit with a clutter of music stands and an old bassoon.

I surveyed him as Ruby would, had she been there across the corridor, near the cracked viola and crate of dusty sheet music, taking stock. Definite points on the hair: It was cut crooked and fell into his eyes. But his pants were too tight and slung too low. And his shoulders were set too cocky; he thought having me that one time meant he had me still.

He was talking, saying I’d been the one to ignore him, not the other way around. Acting like it’s the boy who’s supposed to stop talking to the girl after unmentionables are traded in the backseat of a car, not the girl. He’d obviously never met anyone like my sister.

“What’s the matter?” he was saying. “Didn’t you want to?”

I shrugged one shoulder. (Ruby, should I say I did?)

“You didn’t say you didn’t want to,” he reminded me.

I shrugged the other shoulder. (Ruby, should I say I didn’t?)

“So.” He took a breath. “What’re we doing tonight?”

That’s when my phone vibrated from inside my pocket. I was able to slip out from under his arm, through the jumble of music stands, past the bassoon, into the center of the hallway, to freedom. I checked my phone to find a text.

don’t get too comfy. im here 2 spring u. ps what’s up w yr room? where are the wheels?

It was Ruby—and somehow she’d figured out where I was sleeping at my dad’s: a tiny camper without tires set up on the back lawn, bed cavity overtop the steering wheel that looked out onto the flower garden, a net between me and the bees. It was pretty convenient; I’d even strung an extension cord from the garage so I could watch TV.

I wasn’t sure how she knew, and wondered if she’d been talking to my dad, or my half-siblings, or my stepmother, to find out that once the weather turned warm I’d vacated my room in the house in favor of the camper.

And what did she mean she was going to spring me? Was she here?

My answer came immediately after, with another text:

my pink glasses! been looking 4 these 4ever chlo!

No one had told her about the camper. She was
inside
the camper, going through my stuff. She must have found the sunglasses I’d swiped the summer I left—the ones with the pink-tinted lenses that she said made a person happy to see through, like a drug you could wear on your head.

The boy—his name was Jared—was eyeing my phone suspiciously, with a protectiveness he didn’t deserve. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“I have to go,” is all I said, because Ruby was here.

I didn’t know how things could be the same for anyone, how we could still be having this conversation, how anyone could be having any conversation, didn’t know how I could pretend to be content living my days in this ordinary life, in this ordinary hallway, with this ordinary boy, now that she was here.

R
uby tried to convince my dad. She tried in all the ways she was used to trying: her eyes staring him down until no light could escape and there was nowhere else to look but straight at her.

She tried with misdirection and misleading topics of conversation, with the subterfuge no one ever saw coming until days later, when they went searching for their wallet and thought they remembered it opening wide for one quick moment in Ruby’s hand. She tried talking low; she tried talking loud. She tried being sweet; she tried being mean. Behind the closed door, where I couldn’t see, I know she tried.

I waited outside his home office with my stepmom. She wasn’t anyone special—if Ruby and I ever happened upon her in conversation, we avoided calling her by name.

She had two children who, since we had the same father, carried half my blood in their veins, just like Ruby did, the exact same amount, though I didn’t feel connected to them in any real way.

They were like any two people I might pass in the halls at school. One boy, one girl. You see them and wave. Maybe you have on the same color sweater and you’re like, “Hey, look. We’re wearing the same color sweater.” But there’s nothing else to be said beyond that, so you each keep moving. You know you’d barely give it a thought if you never saw them again.

This is how I know blood is meaningless; family connections are a lot like old gum—you don’t have to keep chewing. You can always spit it out and stick it under the table. You can walk away.

Ruby was my sister, but she was so much more than that. She loved me. She loved me more than anyone else in the whole entire world loved me. More than Mom, more than Dad. More than friends. More than any guy ever had, because no guy had. No matter how far apart we’d been these past two years, there was no question she did.

My stepmom cleared her throat. She did things like that, she had to, or else I’d forget she was there. “Are you sure you want to go away with this Ruby?” she said.

“Ruby is my
sister
,” I said. “She practically
raised
me.”

“Well, this is the first time I’ve ever seen her.”

I didn’t feel like explaining how Ruby never left the state of New York, let alone the confines of our wooded county. Mostly she stayed in our town, where everyone knew her, where all you had to do was say her name and anyone in hearing distance would snap to attention, wondering if she’d been sighted around the corner and was coming this way.

Not just the boys but the girls, too. Did Ruby like this song? Then everyone had to hear it. Had Ruby worn this jacket? Then everyone wanted to slip arms into its sleeves.

Back at home, I got used to people knowing about Ruby, peppering me with questions about her, saying how this one time they talked to Ruby about really old French movies and did she say anything about it, do you think she likes Godard? How Ruby pumped their gas last Tuesday; how Ruby bummed their smokes, but they didn’t mind; how years and years ago Ruby saw them play live at the old Rhinecliff hotel, and how, after the show, they let her bang away at their drums.

Pennsylvania was a strange state. No one knew who Ruby was.

“It’s odd that she didn’t visit all this time and now here she is,” my stepmom said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. But that’s Ruby.”

“We invited her for Christmas and she didn’t come.”

“She doesn’t like Christmas. She says it’s too obvious. Plus she hates all the red together with the green.”

“Besides the fact that she never calls . . .”

“Ruby has this thing with her ear. Telephones make it buzz. I don’t mind if she texts instead of calls. I know all about her ear.”

Defending her came naturally. Usually no one asked such questions about Ruby, but I guess I had some answers lying in wait in case they did.

My stepmom, though, wouldn’t let it go. “All of a sudden she drives out here, without warning, lands on our doorstep, wearing . . . I’m sorry, but was that a nightie? Did she even bother to get dressed this morning? And then she marches in to tell your father she’s taking you with her. Just like that?”

“Yup. Like I said, that’s Ruby.”

“Did she even ask if you wanted to go?” my stepmom said, pushing.

(She hadn’t.)

“Didn’t she think there was a reason you came to live with us in the first place?”

(There was . . . but what was it?)

“And why now? Why today?”

(I hadn’t asked Ruby that, either.)

“Chloe?”

Ruby wasn’t here to tell me what to say or remind me of what I wanted. Maybe she should have coached me before going in to talk to my dad.

All I knew is she’d landed in Pennsylvania so suddenly—appearing in my camper, hoodie sweatshirt on over summer negligee, a new freckle I didn’t recognize on her nose, the pink sunglasses I’d stolen and she’d stolen back perched on her forehead, standing there sucking down the bottle of tropical fruit punch she’d found in my minifridge—and I hadn’t had a chance to decide how I felt about it.

If I wanted to go with her.

If I was allowed to go, if I even would.

But, before I had a chance to answer, Ruby emerged from my dad’s office. This was down in the basement of the house, wood-paneled and lit with dim, dull bulbs so it looked like we were lost in an alien forest, walled in on all sides by flattened trees.

She walked out and stood before me and my stepmom near the jaundice-colored couch. She didn’t sit. It wasn’t the kind of couch she’d ever sit on.

From the cloudy expression on her face, I knew it hadn’t gone well. She seemed . . . there was no other word to call it but surprised. He must have said no, which didn’t happen to her often. She probably had no clue what to make of it.

One time, I remember, a boy she was sort of seeing tried to say no when she told him she was craving a slice of cheesecake and he needed to go get her some, like right this minute. “Where’s the best cheesecake in the whole state?” she’d asked him, and when he’d said down in the city, she’d said, well, that’s where he needed to go. She was testing him, I knew, doing it only because she could. But he had to work early the next morning, he said. It was late, he said, too late to drive two-and-a-half hours to the city just for cheesecake and two-and-a-half hours back so he could make it to work on time, especially if she wasn’t going to ride with him.

She gave him the eyes first: green in the way nothing else in the world is green, green to stun you, venom green.

She moved closer to him on the couch, lowered the volume on the TV. Then she took a single finger, just the one, and traced the line of his chin—accomplishing two things at once: a reminder that he really should do something about that stubble, but also of who he was dealing with, who she was.

“Don’t you like cheesecake?” she asked him innocently, and I’m trying to remember if his name was Raf or Ralph or Ray, because then Raf or Ralph or Ray said, “You know I do,” and she said, “Do I really?”

She leaned on his shoulder and mumbled something into his ear that I couldn’t make out from across the room.

She’d had him at the chin, I could tell, but she’d also made him late to work a few times already and I knew he had that on his mind, too. Being fired was apparently something that normal people concerned themselves with. Ruby herself was always late for work at Cumby’s. She ate M&M’s free off the vine in the candy aisle and popped the cap on her gas tank to keep her car full up on unleaded, but she wasn’t fired, not even close. Then again, no one else in town lived a life like Ruby’s.

Raf or Ralph or Ray was trying to make a decision. Then he saw me looking.

I was thirteen then, maybe twelve. He saw me across the room and smiled. That’s how I knew he’d risk getting fired for Ruby; lots of boys in town would.

“You up for some cheesecake, Chloe?” he asked me then, because if a guy wanted a solid shot at Ruby, he had to make an effort with her little sister. And I said yeah sure I wanted some cheesecake, and with cherries, and before you knew it he was heading south for the Mid-Hudson Bridge, trying to beat the 1:00 a.m. weekend closing at Veniero’s, some bakery in Manhattan that he assured us made the best cheesecake in the whole state. We didn’t even give him gas money, though Ruby donated a nickel for the tolls.

And I honestly don’t know—didn’t care—if he got fired the next day or not.

How easy it had been to convince him. He could have said no; he’d made a valiant effort. But in the end he didn’t. He physically couldn’t. And I don’t think he even liked cheesecake.

My dad, though, he seemed to have a strength that boy couldn’t muster. Or else Ruby had lost a touch of her magic in the years we’d been apart. My dad came out of his office all beard and big head, like he held all the power, like no one could tell him what to do, and I hated him a little bit then, hated him a lot, for thinking he could deny Ruby what she wanted.

“So it’s all settled,” my dad said. “I assume Ruby’s staying for dinner?”

“Oh no,” Ruby said. “I’m staying, but not for dinner. I’m on a liquid diet, you know, a cleanse. Shakes only, the fruit kind or the milk, and I don’t want you to go to any trouble with the blender.”

She nodded politely at the man who was my father, though he’d skipped out on me before I could walk, and then she nodded politely at the woman who was married to the man who was my father, and pulled me by the sleeve up out of the basement to get the hell away from them both.

I should have known she’d come for me at some point. I should have been waiting. Ruby was impetuous. She did things like head down the driveway to check the mailbox, wearing only rain boots, a hoodie, and a summer slip with a jam stain on the lace hem, and end up across state lines, hours from home, telling my dad she’d come for custody.

I don’t know what happened during her walk down the driveway that made her decide she had to have me back immediately—she didn’t say. It must have been really important to leave right then, though, because otherwise she totally would have put a dress on over that slip.

Once Ruby decided on a thing, it was like, in her mind, it grew legs and turned real. She could write on a piece of paper the color underwear I’d have on tomorrow and fold it up a dozen times and hide it down deep in the toe of her boot, and even if I searched through my dresser drawers blindfolded, picking out a pair I hadn’t worn in weeks, she’d have known, somehow, that I’d pick red. Almost as if she’d willed the color on my body by writing down its name.

“What did my dad say?” I asked. We’d convened in my camper, climbed up to the bed compartment wedged over the wheel, even though it was pretty humid up there, to discuss in private.