Don’t go,” I would have said, if she’d only woken me up first. But what I woke to was the sun on my face and bright, shadow-free walls and an enormous expanse of bed, rumpled sheets tossed about like a windstorm, the room empty except for me.
It was morning, and she was gone.
On the pillow beside mine was a glistening strand of hair. Ruby and I shared a hair color, no thanks to having two different fathers: the same exact shade of deep dark brown, enhanced with equal parts henna used to bring out the red. But this strand of hair didn’t match our color. It was white, like all pigment had been stripped out in one suck. And when stretched out to flatten its curl, it reached, end to end, as long as my arm.
The unread text on my phone—I could picture her there in the room, messaging me from inches away instead of shaking me awake to tell me in person—said simply:
brb xo
Wherever she’d gone was yet another secret she was keeping from me.
I checked the windows first, to see if we were still flooded in, but all that was left in the yard were scattered puddles and shallow slicks of mud. The reservoir wore an innocent face across the way, waterline still high, but not near enough to engulf the road.
Down in the kitchen, I could hear both Jonah and Pete being all perplexed about where she was, too. When I peeked in, I saw how they kept eyeing each other like they’d kick the table aside and scrap with their bare hands if she came back and said she’d pick only one of them.
“Her car’s gone,” Pete said.
“I saw,” Jonah said. “She took all her shit from the living room. And who knows what she got from upstairs.”
“The water’s down,” Pete said. “Guess she didn’t need any help getting out.”
“Guess not,” Jonah said.
They both stared as I stepped all the way in but didn’t utter a good morning.
“She left Chloe here,” Pete said, as if I wasn’t digging out some sugar cereal from the cabinet two feet away.
“All I know is she’s not taking off and sticking me with a fifteen-year-old kid,” Jonah said.
“Sixteen,” I said, eating cereal out of the box.
“Sixteen-year-old kid,” Jonah corrected himself.
“Don’t look at me, dude,” Pete said. “She can’t stay at my place. I live with my parents.”
“Well, she can’t stay here,” Jonah said.
“Stop it,” I said. “She’ll be back for me. She told me.”
And she would; it was only that I didn’t know when.
The day deepened and she didn’t answer her texts. The night swept closer and she didn’t pick up when I called. The white Buick didn’t roar back down the driveway. When Pete got his car out of the mud and said I could get a ride with him, I went into town looking for her. No one had seen her all day.
Coincidentally, no one had seen London, either.
It was on the Green, standing there with some of London’s friends, that I realized I needed to go back. I needed someone to drive me. Now.
I made an excuse. “It’s so hot out,” I said, sounding so innocent. “I feel like swimming. Let’s go to the reservoir.”
Cate, Damien, Asha, and Vanessa liked the idea and said sure.
“So, you gonna swim across this time? Like you did that one summer?” Cate said to me, oblivious or stoned or both.
“I thought you asked if she was going to swim across time,” Asha said.
“Wow,” Cate said. “That would be impossible.”
“Yeah like completely impossible.”