“I’ll cut them again for you if you want,” she said.
She folded up my hair and held it above my forehead to create the illusion of bangs, that curtain over the eyes to hide things you don’t want to have to see. The world closer in, less inhibiting, easier to deal—and that was all she had to do to make me miss them.
“When we get you home, that’s the first thing we’ll do,” she said, “cut your bangs, then get veggie lo mein at the Wok ’n’ Roll, and I’ll give you all the baby corns like always. There’s been no one to eat my baby corns. I’ve had to throw them away.”
“I thought you were on a liquid diet. A cleanse.”
“I wouldn’t need to cleanse anything anymore if I got you back.”
She let her hand fall, and my hair was the same length again. My eyes could see all. I made a face. I was thinking of driving into town, where the Wok ’n’ Roll was, of who we might see—or not see. “We don’t have to get lo mein . . .”
“What, you don’t want Chinese? Do you want pancakes at Sweet Sue’s?”
“That’s a drive,” I said. “You mean the place way out past the high school, right?”
She looked at me funny. “You don’t remember Sweet Sue’s? The pancakes at Sweet Sue’s? The strawberry-banana pancakes?”
I did—I remembered everything about the town and about Ruby. Or I used to. Maybe it was being so close to her now, but I felt like I’d been spun around and around with my head bagged in a mosquito net and then asked to give street directions.
“I remember . . .”
I was going to bring her up. London. That’s who we were talking around, not haircuts and what to eat for dinner.
The girl who died.
The reason I was here in the first place.
London.
The girl whose name I couldn’t make my mouth say.
So to Ruby, what I said was, “Yeah. Of course I remember Sweet Sue’s.”
We were talking like I was already coming back, like my dad hadn’t said no. Like I had no dad and there was no such thing as no. Like I would be stuffing myself full of pancakes tomorrow.
“Also . . .” she said, eyes on me now, eyes in all my wrinkles and corners, eyes up inside my clothes, “something’s different about you, and it’s not just the hair.”
I let her look, though I wondered what she was seeing.
“What size do you wear now, a B?” she asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said, blushing. She was looking at my chest.
She smiled softly. “Well, you are only sixteen. Don’t worry, that’ll change.”
I flipped over onto my stomach so she couldn’t keep looking. But she was sitting up now, staring deep into me, her body between me and the ladder, the only way down.
“Don’t tell me his name,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
“Whose name?”
“Don’t say it. Just thinking about it makes me want to murder him. You cannot let me in the same room with him, Chlo. I can’t be responsible for what I’d do.”
“Ruby, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the boy you lost your virginity to—don’t say his name—who else did you think I meant? Is there someone else I have to kill on your behalf?”
I looked away. She looked away. We looked away together out the porthole and stayed like that for a long while.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said at last.
“What, like in a text? ‘Hi, I just slept with this semihot guy Jared from sixth-period study hall. TTYL’?”
“I told you not to say his name,” she said. “I should absolutely not know his name.”
“Oops,” I said, though she sure knew I’d done it on purpose.
“Semihot?” she said, with some small concern. “How semi?”
“Oh, you know. Cuter in the dark.”
“Aren’t they all?”