Then, quickly, before she could ask more questions, I added, “It was no big deal. What happened, I mean. I’m glad I got it over with.”
She let out a breath. Clearly she was not glad, not one bit. And here would be the time to ask the questions big sisters were supposed to ask after a secret like this had been revealed—about protection, for instance, all the slimy stuff no one wants to talk about. Force herself to say the word condoms, to make sure we used one. Ask did he treat you all right? Ask how do you feel now, you okay? Say it’ll be better next time. Next time it won’t burn so much, next time you won’t want to sock him in the eye for not going slow.
Big sisters had to do it, when the mothers weren’t sober enough to string five words together and say it themselves.
But Ruby told me a story instead.
“My first time,” she said, “was right on the edge of the water, on the rocks. I had on these little silver hoop earrings, like three in one ear, and when we were doing it they starting humming and my ear got really hot—like that time with the iron on the bed when you thought you unplugged it first and don’t make that face it didn’t hurt that bad really—and then the earrings were flying out of my ears, these shiny, silver whirling things high up over the water, they’d come totally alive and, wow, was it something.”
“So you lost your earrings?”
“Yeah, they fell out. I guess I wasn’t supposed to have them anymore. The whole thing sort of ruined the idea of earrings for me. I mean, you’ll only lose them. Why bother wearing them at all?”
I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say with this. Ruby’s stories didn’t have morals. They meant one thing in the light and one thing in the dark and another thing entirely when she was wearing sunglasses. If she was disappointed in me, for what I did in that Subaru, she wasn’t showing it.
“This was at the reservoir?” I asked.
She ignored that. “I remember looking up and seeing these silver swirls in the sky, bright like stars, brighter even than the moon, which was full that night . . . well, almost. I bet that was them flying over the mountains—and what’s on the other side, the big mall in Poughkeepsie?—and you could see them for miles and miles.” She sighed. “That was the best part of the night.”
“Who were you with?” I asked. Because she’d never told me.
“Some guy,” she said. “So, anyway, your dad’s all hung up on those final exams you have to take at school, and also, FYI, he called me irresponsible, and I said that’s our drunk mother not me, and he said our mom’s an alcoholic and it’s a disease and we should not make fun of her because she has problems, and I said he’s got no idea what kind of problems, and he said only over his dead body could you go back upstate with me, and I told him he didn’t own you, and he said actually he did, that’s what child custody is, and you’re technically still a child until you’re eighteen, and then I stuck my tongue out at him like this.” She stopped talking, to demonstrate.
“You didn’t!”
“Kidding. Well, only about the tongue.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said I’m a bad influence and got you mixed up in drugs. I said you don’t do drugs because I won’t let you, and if he knew me at all he’d know that.”
Now I rolled my eyes. She was right, though.
“Because if anyone knows how to look out for you, it’s me. He has no idea what I’d do for you. No idea.”
This was true; then again it wasn’t. It was true because I wanted it true, made it so by stowing it in a picture frame on the wall of my mind where I reminded myself of things, the things I knew about Ruby, the things I knew about myself. One and the same, all hung on the selfsame wall. But it also wasn’t true because I was here. She let me stay here in Pennsylvania, and it had taken her two years to come.