“Outside Rosendale, I think,” the driver said, eyeing me warily. “Stone Ridge maybe.”
We’d driven a few feet over some arbitrary line outside town, and London had vanished. And not one of them was acknowledging it.
Why wasn’t anyone else shocked into a stupor over this? Wondering where she’d gone? Wondering if she was hurt and bleeding on the road? Wondering how a girl could disappear right before your eyes? Why weren’t we all screaming?
I had to ask it. “Where’d she go?”
“What? Who?”
“London!”
The driver threw up his hands. “Where’s the closest psych ward is a better question.”
I turned to Owen. I reached out, whispered it. “She was sitting right here.” I indicated the empty sliver of seat next to me.
He wouldn’t even meet my eyes. He was looking north and to the left of my forehead when he said, “This is a joke, right?” He hesitated. “Right?”
I looked them all in the face. No one had seen her vanish; no one had a clue.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. It wasn’t funny.”
One of the guys in the backseat laughed awkwardly, and the other guys went along with it. Except for Owen.
“No,” he said, his eyes dull. “Not so funny.”
So much of it made sense to me, right there in the back of the red car, perfect sense. If she wasn’t lying in the two-lane road, then I’d know for sure. If she hadn’t jumped out the open window, she’d disappeared instead. Almost as if she’d ceased to exist once we left the confines of our town.
Exactly if.
I opened my door and stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked for a body, but there was no body. Of course there wouldn’t be a body—because here, outside town, London wasn’t alive. Here, where the car was splayed crooked across the road, where my door was gaping open and I was looking for any trace of her, she lived only in my imagination. She died two years ago, out here.
I couldn’t get back in the car. Who knew what would happen if we kept driving and made it to High Falls. How far was too far? The farther we got, I couldn’t be sure what else would start to crumble. Flashing through my mind were images from a zombie flick, fingers and ears and noses and other bits of protruding flesh rotting off when we moved, hair shedding in clumps, arms and eyes coming loose from sockets, tongues fish-flopping on the ground. Would that happen to me, to my tongue? I couldn’t risk it.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” I called back at the car.
The driver leaned out his window, all fed up, like now I’d gone and done it. “You can’t be serious,” he called to me.
“I’m going to walk home,” I yelled back. “Or call my sister to come get me.”
The car went in reverse and pulled up beside me. “Get in the car, Chloe,” the guy driving said. I looked past him at Owen, but Owen wasn’t the one saying it.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I waited. Owen was about to open his door. He was about to step out onto the road with me, help me figure out how to get home. To at least make sure I was okay.
The driver turned to Owen, as if expecting the same thing. But Owen was staring out the windshield at the road ahead. “Fuck her,” he said. “Just go.”
I watched the car speed away, watched it as long as I could, until it went around the bend of trees and I didn’t see it anymore.
It would be a long walk back, but I was thinking I might have to do it. Ruby didn’t know where I was. She’d dropped me off on the Green; I hadn’t told her I was leaving town. And worse—how would I explain what happened to London?
I paused in the road, there for the flattening if any cars sped my way.
Darkness was falling. It had been evening when we’d left, but now it was undeniably becoming night. At some point a car would drive past, heading north. Maybe in it would be someone I knew, someone who knew Ruby. At some point or another, hopefully before Ruby texted to check in, someone would have to drive this road and give me a ride back to town.