She was very specific in letting me know what her headstone should say, but she didn’t like it when I tried to figure out what I might want for mine. I couldn’t pick a color, and I couldn’t tell her what should be written on it, because she never wanted to read those words, not in this lifetime, and not in our next lifetime, if there were such a thing as multiple lifetimes, which Ruby happened to think there were.
Up at the mausoleum, London’s friends were passing around a joint. I accepted it when it came my way for politeness’ sake, and took the tiniest puff of a hit before passing it on. I didn’t know if Ruby would have let me go if she knew we’d be smoking and sharing spit up on this hill full of headstones like we were, that I’d be coughing out smoke longer than anyone, unable to get that dry tickle out of my throat. Ruby smoked weed, but that didn’t mean I could. She did a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to imitate. She did them in the room with me, but I guess she expected me to look away.
I was here now, without her, and I wasn’t looking away. My eyes were starting to come clear.
That’s why I found myself staring at London.
Her friends acted like she was nothing unusual. But, to me, she was a shrill and shrieking fire alarm in a quiet library, and not a single person seemed to hear it. Were they deaf? Was everyone?
“Right, Chloe?” someone was saying—I hadn’t been paying attention.
“What?” I said.
“Your sister drew that, right?” Cate asked.
“Yeah, guess so.” Only a single glance told me it was one of hers.
Because there it was—a masterpiece à la Ruby—covering an entire side of the mausoleum. She’d used chalk, the kind made to scribble slogans on sidewalks, the kind that washed away to nothing when it rained. She liked to scrawl her name to show she’d been somewhere. Practically our whole town was tagged. But this mural was more of a mark than she usually bothered to leave. In fact, it was enormous.
“I love it,” Vanessa breathed.
“It’s, like, really beautiful,” Asha said.
Cate nodded. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
And there I was—I mean, anyone would assume it was me—a chalk stick figure in blue, since Ruby said that was my color, and with my hair in bangs, since Ruby had always liked my hair in bangs. I didn’t look like that now, so clearly she’d drawn me as she remembered me before I went away.
In the drawing, my stick hand was holding the hand of another, far taller figure. This one was drawn to be the size of a mountain in comparison to me—with a head made of swirls and enormous green orbs meant to be her all-seeing eyes. Her hands alone dwarfed my stick body, dwarfed the yellow smudge of the sun. Her feet in tall boots walked the water, touching only the tips of her toes to the blue squiggles meant to be undulating waves. She carried me above it all, my toes touching only air. Her dark hair made a long, flowing cape behind us both.
The drawing was Ruby by Ruby. And below it, so you could make no mistake who was responsible, etched out in red chalk, it read:
RUBY WAS HERE
For some reason, she wanted her mark there, and she wanted no one to forget it.
I dragged my eyes from the chalk mural to find Owen glaring openly at it. He hated what she’d done to the mausoleum, this showed clear in his face, but maybe his hate went deeper than her drawing ability. Maybe he hated the one person in the world who I loved.
I knew that art wasn’t one of Ruby’s talents, but no one seemed quite willing to point this out. So I said, “It’s sort of”—surprising myself as the word found my mouth—“hideous, isn’t it?”
Owen had been leaning on the bench across from me, toking up, but when I said that, he stopped slouching and paid attention.
“Oh no,” said Vanessa. “It’s not. Not at all.”
“It’s not hideous,” Cate said sharply, as if she herself had drawn it.