The water was colder here, no denying it. And something was in my path, as if she’d made it appear there for me. A small rowboat bobbed in the water, unseen from shore in the deep night. I rested a hand on it, leaning my weight into its rusted side so I could catch my breath. The moon up above showed half a face; the stars could be counted till morning.
I waited there, legs loose, hair swirling around me, and listened to her friends on shore. Laughing. Splashing. Dragging a canoe out of the woods. Breaking a bottle against the rocks.
No one called my name.
I wondered if they’d forgotten, if I’d taken too long. Or maybe they knew I never meant to do it. I didn’t do everything Ruby said, not every single thing. I did what I wanted. I did things and then looked back to see what she’d say.
Maybe everyone knew this was a joke, a misdirection. Because surely she had to be joking—I did need air to breathe like everyone else; I did have only two legs and no fins. If anyone was a mythical creature here, it was Ruby, the one we all looked to and listened for, the one the boys loved and fought to be with, who couldn’t be captured or caged. The stories she told about me didn’t matter; the boys just wanted a chance to make up some stories of their own with her.
I could hear Ruby, far off in the distance. Miles away, it seemed, miles and miles. I heard her laugh—I’d know that laugh anywhere—a laugh flat and dry and cut short when others let theirs last far longer. She only really found something funny when she said it herself, or if I did. She’d laugh for me.
My stomach was sloshing with wine, my teeth chattering from the cold, my nose starting to drip and run. Why wasn’t she calling for me so I knew to give up and come back?
I couldn’t hear her laughing anymore. I couldn’t hear her at all. It was as if I’d only imagined the sound of her laughter, imagined her on shore looking after me. Maybe, once I swam back, I’d find she’d shed her clothes, left my twenty folded up inside for safekeeping, and simply . . . vanished.
I was about to let go and push back for shore when my fingers felt something strange. My arm was slung over the side of the rowboat, hanging down inside it. And whatever I felt at the bottom of that boat was far cooler than the water I was drifting in, and cooler than the mountain air. It was cold. Dead cold.
As my hand patted around, trying to get its bearings, to see by touch, the thing took shape. It had a long, mushy stem, a flat soft section. It had five thin pieces spread out in all directions. It had—oh God, it had fingernails.
Then I heard my name at long last. “Chlo!” Ruby was shouting. “Chloe! Chlo!”
Normally my heart would have leaped, hearing her call my name like that, wanting me back so loudly, so badly, so everyone could hear—but my heart wasn’t even beating. I couldn’t speak, didn’t have the sound in me to shout back.
There was an arm in that boat. An arm attached to a cold, dead hand.
That’s when the flashlights came. Close enough to reach me—I must have not swam out as far as I thought. Flashlights all over me, beams covering my face and neck and shoulders, showing I was here in the water, hanging on, still alive. But that meant they also lit up what was inside the boat so I could see it. That other pair of shoulders, the long neck, the face that wasn’t mine.
A girl, lifeless eyes staring up at the half moon. A girl who left her body here for me to find it. A girl with pale hair, pale cheeks, paler still in a bright white shirt.
Then arms around me—bigger arms than Ruby’s arms, she’d sent the boys—holding me too tight at first until they caught sight of the girl in the boat, and then letting go, letting go and shouting, grabbing for the boat and letting me go.
The face in that boat could have been mine; for a split second this thought rattled through me and then, faster than it’d come, it dropped away.
Because it was her face again, the girl’s. The last thing I remembered were her two open eyes and her two closed, cracked lips. I recognized her. She was someone I knew.
Her name was London, it came to me. London Hayes. We had seventh-period French together; she was the same age as me.