“No,” she said. “There’s still that second thing.”
She jammed the pedal to the floor like she wanted to bust the engine out of Pete’s car and leave us riding on fumes. Over the rush of wind she said, “Do you trust me?”
I trusted her, always, blindly, forever. She used to ask me that question before she’d lift me up and fling me into Cooper Lake by my fingertips, not ever letting go because she promised she wouldn’t. I trusted her then, and I trusted her now.
I trusted her, though I’d come all the way from Pennsylvania and she hadn’t bothered to meet my bus. I trusted her, though she’d shown me a walking dead girl tonight like it was no big deal. I trusted her; she didn’t need to ask.
“You trust me,” she said, “like with your life?”
The road ahead was perfectly dark, seeing as she’d cut off the headlights, but she didn’t let the car slow.
“Ruby, what are you doing? Put the lights back on!”
“Do you trust me, or do you trust me? Close your eyes.”
“Only if you put the lights back on.”
“Close your eyes and I will.”
I snapped them closed and it felt like we moved over the road as if through time. Centuries draining past so if only I’d looked out I could have seen my own future, my babies’ babies’ babies’ babies forgetting who they came from in their space-age sun-panel tattoo-thin clothes.
The car flew. Trees stepped aside for us. The mountain split open. There were no lanes here, no cars coming, nothing to stand in our way.
And I guess I could have come back to town only to die in a horrible car wreck, like the girl who found herself wrapped around a tree when I was in elementary school, and everyone in town left flowers in the tree roots, and stuffed turtles because I guess she had a thing for turtles, and Ruby and I would have our own tree, and what would people in town leave for us? What stuffed thing would hold our memory for eternity?
I’d never know.
The car had stopped, the engine down, the wind still. I peeled open my eyes.
Ruby wore a grin. “You do trust me,” she whispered.
Lights from a house showed me her face. She had even more freckles than I remembered—at least three more.
The house itself was pale wood, unpainted, and set back away from the road. This was the house where she lived now, where I lived now, where we’d live together.
She pushed the wind-warped hair out of my face and tucked it safely behind my ears. Victory in her eyes, speed still pinking her cheeks, she pulled away and said, “The second thing is this. Go ahead, look.”
I was looking—at the house. But she didn’t mean the house. She meant what was behind the house.
What was seeping into the distance, blotting out trees, erasing mountains, leaking up into the night with no dividing line on the horizon to show where it ended or if it ended ever at all. The shapeless, formless thing that took a breath in as I was watching it, then let out a breath when I looked away. This thing I’d been avoiding. This thing I ran away from. There before her outstretched arm, lit up from the headlights, was the reservoir.
The one I never did swim across.
CHAPTER SEVEN
OLIVE WAS HERE
Olive was here, below the hill. Across the two-lane stretch of road and through walls of trees, far enough away to keep their distance, the people of Olive had come up to watch, called to the surface by the car’s headlights.
Ruby might have told me this to send a chill up my spine, but I knew they were down there without her having to say. I felt them.