“Ruby?” I said into the phone.
“Don’t worry, Chlo. I know what you’re thinking, and stop it. I don’t want you scared. Because there’s nothing here that could hurt you. I made sure.”
Just hearing her say that made me think she’d once thought something here could. Hurt me. That this had been a real and viable worry in her mind and, without warning me first, she went ahead and found a way to be certain it couldn’t.
“Is Lon still there with you?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re keeping an eye on her like I asked?”
“Yeah,” I said, immediately annoyed. “I’m looking at her right now. She’s fine.”
“At least there’s that,” Ruby said. “As for you, Chlo, we’ll talk later, after London drives you home. Your curfew is midnight. I’ve never believed in curfews for myself—like I would’ve listened if our mother gave me one.” She laughed, sharply, and I held the phone away from my ear as she did. “But,” she went on, and I pulled the phone back, “I’ve decided I now believe in curfews for you. Midnight.” And at that she cut the line.
I turned around to face everyone. “I have to be home by midnight, London.”
“No problem,” she said. “Ruby knows I’ll drive you.”
London took a step forward now, like she’d been voted the one to speak.
“So,” London said, as I walked closer, “does that mean Ruby’s not coming?” She suddenly looked so fragile, as if I could knock her over into the dark, damp grass with the tap of a finger and she wouldn’t have the strength to pull herself back up.
“She’s not coming,” I said.
“Sweet,” Laurence said.
“Good,” Owen said.
But Asha said, “Know what was weird? Your sister like totally freaked when she thought we were all at the reservoir, didn’t she?”
I tried to be nonchalant about that. “She’s protective. She worries.”
“Was she worried about Lon? ’Cause of what we were talking about before?”
“No, she just doesn’t want me swimming there, that’s all.”
Asha wouldn’t let it go. “But why would she worry about you swimming in the reservoir? That makes, like, no sense.”
I didn’t get it.
“Yeah,” Damien called from a dark spot in the grass, “didn’t you swim all the way across back in the day?”
“In the middle of the night,” Asha said with awe in her voice, “from one shore to the other and then back again—everyone talks about that night.”
“The night I tried to swim across,” I corrected her.
“Yeah, right,” she said, as if I were being modest. “I heard it was amazing. Everyone says so. Ruby said you could swim it, and no one believed her. But Ruby was like, ‘Just watch.’ And so you dove in. And you went deep under. And you made it to the other shore and everyone saw and you waved and then you came all the way back across with, like, proof or something, and it was amazing, everyone says.”
“What proof?” I asked.
Her face went blank. “I dunno. You were there. Don’t you remember?”
People in town remembered what they did because that’s the story Ruby told them. It’s the story she wanted everyone to remember, so she must have recited it again and again, jamming their ears with it till they knew it by heart. Until they thought it true.
“How old were you?” Asha said.
“Fourteen,” I said quietly.
“Wow,” she said. “You know no one’s ever done that, before or since?”