Or maybe they just saw me at the reservoir and thought I was about to jump in.
“She’s here to talk to her dead sister,” London called out, laughing as she did. The boys didn’t laugh; they couldn’t believe she’d said it.
I had no reply. I didn’t—wouldn’t dare—deny it.
London was cracking up. She laughed and she laughed and the way she laughed told me she didn’t care about anybody, especially not herself. I knew this from how she laughed at me—Ruby didn’t have to tell me.
Even the boys told her to stop laughing. It wasn’t funny. I could tell they didn’t want to stand in the dark before the depths of the reservoir; they wanted to go, to get away from me and from it. Now.
Then we heard the splash.
It came from deep in, too far from the rocks on shore to pinpoint. It could have been anything, could have come from anywhere.
We were all looking out after it when one of the boys stepped up. He squinted into the dark distance. “Is that a . . . boat?”
The rowboat was white, or it had been, but with rust it looked reddish gold. Burnished by our eyes, roughed up from being out in the open, it drifted there, bobbing in the wind, going nowhere.
“That wasn’t there before,” the boy said.
“That’s some creepy shit right there,” another boy said.
Then all eyes on me, and with the eyes came flashlights, and beams of light up and down my body, like I could somehow explain it, had some kind of remote in my pocket that could direct the night and the wind and every free-floating object from here to the Hudson. Like I was somehow in control, someone they shouldn’t mess with.
London pulled her light away. “She’s just screwing with us,” she said.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, holding up my hands to show empty palms. The reservoir curled quiet at my side, not giving itself away.
No one would say her name out loud, though I knew they were thinking it. You couldn’t not-think it, not here with her breath on the air, her eyes glowing from the tree branches like owl eyes, her face on the crater of the low-hanging moon.
“O’s having that party,” one of the boys said. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” another boy said.
A beer bottle was tossed in, but it was empty, so it didn’t sink at first. It rolled along the surface of the water without even a message inside it.
“Yeah, the party,” London echoed.
No one asked if I wanted to come. Without Ruby, I wasn’t invited to parties anymore. I’d heard Owen had gotten his casts cut off and was throwing a party because he could walk again, but no one at school said, Hey, Chloe, O’s having a party, you should go.
The boys took off, and London started to follow, but then she paused at the tree line, and I saw her shadow waver, her short stick-up hair and her telltale stick-out ears. Did she know how close she’d come to not having this party to go to? To not having these boys to follow her around?
Is this what she did with her life, since Ruby had given it back?
“Hey”—she was stepping closer to me now, talking nice to me, now that her friends couldn’t see—“Chloe? Are you, like, okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“How could you be fine? You’re not fine. Obviously you’re like the furthest thing from fine.” She looked down at the pile of stuff at my feet. “Are you gonna burn all that up or something?”
“What? No!”
“Then what? Bury it?”
“Why would I bury her stuff?”
It was dark, and London had her flashlight held low, but enough of her face was illuminated so I could see that I was making her uncomfortable.
I picked up a magazine. I collected them during my shifts at Cumby’s.