She had this way about her, my sister, this innate talent at getting people to do what she wanted—to leave cash-register drawers gaping open, to tattoo her likeness like a Madonna across their ribs. How many times had I been witness? So I should have known how it felt to have her do it to me.
She locked my eyes up in her eyes and secured the deadbolt. She caressed my arm, her touch softer than air. “Chloe,” she said, my name music on her tongue. “You don’t want to stay, do you? No. No, you don’t. That’s right, Chlo. I know. I know, I know, I know”—her hands in my hair here, her whisper in my ear—“you want to go.”
I did as I was told. I must have. Because, before I knew it, I’d found the white Buick parked beneath the tree cover and I was sitting on the slope of its hood, waiting for her to come out and say it was time to go. Then two things happened that brought me back. The first was when Owen stumbled through the trees.
He slowed and let his friends go ahead. “What are you doing?” he called to me, not getting close. “I thought there was a party.”
“There is,” I said, and we heard it sounding out in the night, and he wanted to run to it, I knew, but still he stayed because maybe I had some magic in me, too.
I was about to get him to do something terrible to himself, like stab a stick in his eye, or bash his head with a rock, to see if I could, the way Ruby could, just to see, when he said, “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I did something to you. Like you cared. Like I’m the asshole.”
“But you’re the one who—”
“Guess what?” he said, cutting me off. “I did. Like you. I used to. But you’re not who I thought. I imagined you were . . . someone else.”
“Who am I really, then?” I said. Because I was sitting on the hood of my sister’s car in her favorite white bikini, the night stars peppering my skin, and though I had no idea where we’d be living tomorrow, I knew that the one thing I did have in the universe was Ruby, and that Ruby had me.
“You’re just like her.” He spat it out like an insult. “Guess I’ll see you out there.”
He pushed through the trees and was gone, and I had no influence over him, none whatsoever. I hadn’t even had the chance to tell him I once liked him, too. I used to. But now I never would—not him, and not anyone—not again. For the first time, I felt truly like my sister. My heart had grown and twisted into the exact same shape as hers. We were mirror matches, on the inside.
That’s when the second thing happened.
I heard the whistle blow.
The sound of it was faint at first, hard to discern from the wind. Then when I turned my ear to it, when I concentrated and sought it out, I heard it clear. The hiss of a steam whistle. A faint, faraway, years-buried scream.
It was coming from the direction of the water. Where my sister was.
When I reached the rocks, I found her where I’d left her. The air had quieted, no whistles carried here on the wind, and something in Ruby had turned calmer, colder.
I noticed Owen catch sight of me, stop, then walk straight for the rock where London was perched, as if he’d been heading for that rock the whole time and hadn’t at any point in history been heading for me.
Ruby spoke up. “So London told me something I refused to believe. A rumor. A lie. You and Owen. Do you know the one I mean?”
I nodded.
“Is it a lie?”
I was careful not to make any sudden movements. “I guess that depends on what she told you.”
Her neck snapped to where Owen was with London and this was how, with my sister’s hand now lightly circling my wrist, the hush of water at our feet, I happened to see what he looked like kissing someone who wasn’t me. How his mouth got on hers and then ran down to her neck, and how his hand pushed through her pale scratchy hair, and how he didn’t want me at all, even if he said he once did for like two seconds.
I turned around, physically, to face the water. And I guess that said to my sister all she needed to know.