But the cold surprised me each time. The fear felt new.
Because there she was, the girl in the boat, drifting at the exact point in the reservoir where I’d stopped swimming the first night and stopped swimming every night I dreamed it since. Ruby always said she’d protect me, but I couldn’t keep myself from thinking the worst thing I could, since she wasn’t around to bend my mind her way.
She didn’t protect me that night.
The girl who’d been buried could have been me.
The longer I stayed away from town the more I thought about the girl who sat in the last row of my French class, London Hayes. How she’d cut her hair right before the summer, chopped it off like a boy. How I’m pretty sure she had long hair before that, long and without bangs like so many of the girls in town because that’s how Ruby wore her hair. But now I remembered how London’s ears stuck out after she’d chopped it, like maybe she should have considered her ears before going ahead with that haircut and I guess no one thought to tell her.
London once got called to the front of the classroom because Ms. Blunt, our French teacher, had spied what she was doodling in her notebook. She made London show the entire class: through a crosshatch of shaded scribbles, a naked girl with bloodthirsty eyes and sharp, serrated ribs, nipples dangling like extra fingers, toes black with disease.
It was grotesque, offensive even. Ms. Blunt glared at the lined page, the blue ballpoint put down so hard it left gashes, and in her dramatically accented, overloud French she asked London, “Qui est-ce?” Violent pointing motions. Enunciation galore. “Qui est-ce?”
And we all racked our brains trying to remember what that meant—this was remedial, not Regents-level French—but London knew the question and knew how to answer. She shook her head sadly and said, “C’est moi.” It’s me.
Something was wrong with the girl—clearly.
Other than that, I didn’t know too much about her. There was this rumor that she once took five hits of LSD and went to school on purpose, like a walking biology experiment, which I guess failed because she didn’t make it through fourth-period gym. She started drinking in sixth grade, people said, too, but that was mostly a compliment.
I must have seen her outside school sometimes. She knew Ruby’s friends, could be spied in the backseats of their cars as they spun their way around the Green. Plus she was friends with Owen—I couldn’t help but notice—the boy I tried hard not to hold in my heart as he barely ever looked my way. Also, I’m pretty sure one time she borrowed my pen and never gave it back.
I knew she was at the reservoir that night, even though she wasn’t invited.
That’s all I knew.
Just weeks into living at my dad and stepmother’s house in Pennsylvania, my mom mailed me a package. She was sober again and must have realized she should show a stab at missing me, for, I guess, my sake. But the box was no attempt at amends. It was more a junk drawer than a care package: a spilled cache of feathers and beads from the craft store in town where she worked weekends; a rock from, I figured, the Millstream, dusted in our town’s dried mud; some menstrual tea (seriously?); a dog-eared book on power animals (hers was the sparrow, she said, which she’d also taken on as her new name; Ruby said it was actually the vampire bat); and nothing whatsoever from Ruby.