I had to imagine one, there in the car. Imagine something worth telling.
First, we’d have to get Pete out of the picture—a given. Ruby wouldn’t want Pete in the story, so maybe we could stop for gas and he’d take forever to pump it. Or we’d be driving along like normal, but then we’d hit this patch of road where the sky opens up and this shadowy, flapping thing we wouldn’t know what to call would swoop down and pull him out by the throat, and Owen would have no choice but to take the wheel. Something impossible like that, pure fiction. Something to hold Ruby’s attention.
Pete would be long gone, who cares how, and I’d slip up into the passenger seat next to Owen, the only things between us the Big Gulp in the cup holder and the stick shift.
It would be when we were speeding down Route 212 that Owen would look at me, like really look at me, for the first time since forever. Maybe he’d remember how he ignored me in school, and he’d feel bad about that.
I knew I shouldn’t care. I was like my sister, wasn’t I? I was made of her snide comments about what all the boys were after and her brick walls built up and up to keep the boys out. I should act the way Ruby did with a boy she no longer wanted, like her heart had crawled up inside her rib cage to die, and you’d never know it was up there, as it had climbed so far in, you couldn’t even smell it rotting.
But I didn’t want that.
If this were a story I was telling, if it were my story and Ruby let me tell it, Owen would turn in his seat and he’d say—
A buzz sounded. I looked down to find my phone blinking.
didnt forget you chlo. just wanted u 2 come see
See what? I was in the backseat and Pete was still driving and all I saw of Owen was the back of his head.
When we reached the quarry, Owen leaped out as soon as we stopped. A jumble of cars crowded the gravel lot out of sight of the main road, but Ruby’s big white Buick wasn’t among them. Knowing her, she’d volunteered some poor sap for the position of designated driver and secured us a ride.
There was smoke in the air—faint, I could feel it in my throat—and a flicker of warm light filtering out through the woods. A bonfire.
I left my bags in Pete’s car. I had to: The party was deep in the quarry and the only way to reach it was down a freshly trampled path through the trees. Pete led the way, with me close behind, and then Owen. I stopped short once, and Owen, who was nearer than I expected, stepped on the back of my shoe.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Sorry,” I mumbled back.
And in the night beneath oaks and pines and other trees I’d never bothered learning names for, he and I were closer than we’d ever gotten, close for three, four, five countable seconds, until he stepped away and went slipping past and his arm brushed my arm and he smelled like cigarettes and I wished he smelled different and he was gone.
I’d lost Pete, so I walked the rest of the path with my arms out, feeling my way until the trees broke open. My feet found gravel and the noise hit and I started sliding down the declining slope toward the bottom. It was a pit, a cavernous hole filled with people I used to know. Or people who knew Ruby, so they had to at least pretend they knew me because I was her sister. Here, back home, that’s the first thing I was.
Ruby was near—somewhere. I could sense her in the dark.
I reached the bottom of the pit and looked up at the other slope, a gleaming red crest in the night to show where the bonfire was burning, and where I’d find her.
Waiting for me.
Waiting to hear about the cold shoulder I gave the state of Pennsylvania. She’d ask, I’d tell, we’d be in sync again, and then the summer would get started, picking up where we left off two years ago, on a warm night like this one, before it all went so wrong.