I said I’d stay in town, even after. I’d stay, though I heard how they talked about me, in the months that passed, the things they said. I couldn’t help but hear. With Ruby around, I used to find it easy to go deaf to anything anyone else uttered—it happened with barely any effort, like I’d been listening through an empty water glass held to a wall and all I had to do was step away.
But, without her, every word seeped through.
I heard them in the school stairwells and behind my back in trig and in chem; in the upstairs girls’ room, in the downstairs girls’ room, by the coolers in Cumby’s, on the Green as I drove by in her enormous white car, on the track while running laps in gym. They said things they’d never say out loud, if Ruby were here.
They called me “disturbed.”
They called me “hopeless.”
They said I needed to get over it, move on. They said she was gone, and that was the worst, when they said she was gone. They said if I couldn’t face the fact that she was gone, someone should lock me up, like on that psych ward in Kingston where they put the cutters and the nymphos and the kids who talked to animals and thought they talked back. They probably would have said far worse, if they knew where I spent my nights.
The thing is, everyone was wrong. There was no need to pump me full of sad-girl meds or fire up the electroshock machine. There weren’t enough talks in Guidance to convince me to let go of Ruby, to stop acting like she was around, because what no one in town could seem to face was that she was still here.
Soon it was late fall, and I’d just turned seventeen, and the nights were longer than they’d been in summer, which I didn’t mind, since it meant I could make my visits with Ruby far earlier.
I parked her car where she used to park it, and I found my way to the rocky shore without needing a flashlight. I’d walked the path enough times that my feet could find footing before my eyes had time to adjust.
No one went swimming here anymore—it was too cold. But kids from the high school would come sometimes, for the thrill of jumping the new shock-fences, getting the electric buzz kicking up through their toes. They took the long way in, with the running leap and the high climb; they didn’t know how to find Ruby’s way, how it was there as it used to be, how all they needed was to seek out the flap in the fence, duck down, and crawl through. I knew, but I didn’t tell them.
They’d spill out of their cars, parked where even the laziest cop could spot them, then stomp through the woods, cracking branches off trees, making a mess of the shoreline with their discarded trash.
If I heard them coming, I’d take cover in the trees. But one night they were quieter than usual and caught me out in the open, near the rocks. And worse—London was with them.
She walked differently, with Ruby not around. She walked like she owned the place, had carved her initials in all the tree trunks, then sucked the sap out with a straw. She was reckless, taking hits of E at school. She was sloppy, with her boyfriends on benches on the Green. She was nothing like my sister.
She’d stepped out of the woods with her friends—three boys. They carried bottles of beer and flashlights, which bounced to me and then away from me. As soon as they saw who it was, the lights went far, far away.
Only London came close. The beam of her flashlight revealed the collection of items at my feet.
“What are you doing, Chloe?” she hissed.
“Nothing.”
“Hold on. You’re not going to—”
She stopped short when a boy called over to her, some boy I didn’t know. “What’s she doing?” he said; he wouldn’t come see for himself. There was something about me that scared people now, like they could see through me to what I carried around inside my heart, that lit and forever-flickering flame. You’d think they were afraid I’d try to burn them with it.