“Again?”
“It happens sometimes. Sometimes I’m like doing something and then I look around and I’m in a whole other place doing something else. Or I think I’m heading somewhere and I forget ever getting there and I’m back home, like maybe I didn’t go at all, I just thought I did. Lots of times I wake up at night in the dirt, like I forgot to go to bed, so weird.” She shook her head again, her tinted hair poking out behind her ears. “It’s seriously screwed up.”
“So you don’t remember . . . driving to a party?”
“Did I say I was going to a party?”
I nodded.
“See? I must’ve blacked out. Do you think I have narcolepsy or something?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, “maybe.”
She stepped out of the road and onto a section of grass on the shoulder. She leaned on a mailbox, and in the light of my phone I could see that it said the name of our town’s local newspaper, which meant we were back inside, back where London was still walking around and talking, where I wouldn’t have to explain how she died all over again, where my sister’s illusion was in place. Where I was home.
But this was London’s home, too. And in her home, she was walked on a leash by my sister. And even if she wanted to get away, she never could.
I wondered what would happen if I pushed her over the line. If she’d disappear, like last time. And when she did, if she’d pop up on our side. I wondered what it would look like—a shock of light and smoke? Would the air ripple as if we were underwater? Would I blink and there she’d be, as if she’d been standing here all along?
If she yelled, could they hear in the next town? If she threw her shoe over, would it ever land? The questions were endless.
“But what are you doing in the road?” London said. “Did you black out, too?”
“I was in a car I didn’t want to be in anymore, so I got out. And they drove away.”
“Where’s Ruby?”
“Home.”
She didn’t ask me who was in the car, and I was glad she didn’t. It would have hurt to say it out loud. His name.
“This is so freakishly bizarre that you’re out here, too,” she said. “This is like the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, except for that time I tried to go to the Galleria mall in Poughkeepsie and I blacked out and all of a sudden I’m like standing on the bridge, you know that big giant bridge over the river . . . Man, that sucked! But . . . oh shit, Chloe, did you just feel that? We’re gonna get soaked.”
As she said it, I felt the first drops. A scattering of rain at first, touching down one small splash at a time in my hair and on my bare shoulders. Then the rain thickened and fell in drips down to my toes. We made a run for it, huddling under the closest tree. Our clothes stuck fast to our bodies, raindrops pooled in our eyelashes and suspended from the tips of our noses. The sound around us was a rushing flood, but one come from above.
“I should try Ruby,” I said, thinking of how to explain this. I lifted my phone and already the water was pooling into it; I was waiting for it to short out and go dark in my hand. I pressed a key and nothing happened. I pressed the same key again, and again.
“It’s okay,” London said. “I called before I saw you.”
“You called my sister? You told her where you . . . we are?”
She shook her head. “I called someone else.”
She perked up then when a pair of headlights appeared, coming our way through the rain. She leaped out from under the tree and lifted her skinny arms in the air, attempting to flag down the car but more like almost running herself into the fender before it skidded on the slick road to get out of her way.