I could see her smile. I wished I hadn’t, because it was the kind of smile she never gave to me. It was a smile for a boy who wanted to know her and never would. A smile for a girl who wanted to be like her and never could be. A smile for a perfect stranger.
I climbed off the rock and went to her. I felt everyone watch me go. Then I felt everyone look away before I reached her, as if they weren’t allowed to keep looking anymore. I patted her pocket, right side first. She wore jeans with the cuffs folded up to her knees; it was strange to see her in jeans. And only the bottom half of her legs were wet. She’d been in the water, but she hadn’t been swimming.
In her right pocket was a rusty nail, a quarter, a nickel, a penny, her naked hula-lady lighter, a loose strawberry candy, and a smashed pack of cigarettes with one left inside. I confiscated that; she knew I wanted her to quit.
She shrugged, kept smiling.
I tried her left pocket, and in it I found a bottle of violet nail polish, a tube of wine lipstick, and her car key. Really, I don’t know how she kept so much in her pockets. Her jeans were pretty snug already. Still, I didn’t find any bathing suit.
“Where were you?” I whispered. “Where’d you go?”
“Keep checking,” she answered without whispering.
She turned, and poking out the back pocket of her jeans was a bathing suit. It wasn’t one of mine though; it was hers. It was her favorite white bikini, the one she’d never before let me wear.
“I said I’d be back,” she said, her voice low. “You should have stayed at the house.” Then, once I’d pulled the bathing suit from her pocket, she spun around to face me. “But, since you’re here, that’ll look cute on you. Sorry it took me forever to get here, I got pulled over.”
“But how’d you know we were here?”
“You can’t do anything in this town without me hearing about it. You should know better than that, Chlo.” She shook her head, disappointed. “But it’s adorable. I mean, look at all the kids who showed up.”
“I didn’t . . .” I hadn’t meant for all these people to show. But I realized what she’d said before. “Ruby, did you say you got pulled over? Like by cops?”
She sighed. “No, polar bears. Yes, cops. One cop. A mustachioed state trooper who told me I was driving too fast. He untucked his uniform and pulled up his shirt to show me his tattoo—I don’t like that I was naked in it, but I did like the colors and I liked my hair—so I thought he’d let me go. But then he was all business and took his time writing up this little piece of paper for me and it wasn’t a love note or anything.”
“So it was a ticket.”
She shrugged.
“A cop with a tattoo of you gave you a ticket and you . . . let him?”
She saw where I was going with this, how in the world where Ruby lived, where I thought we still lived, she didn’t get speeding tickets, or, for that matter, white hairs. She didn’t have problems the way normal people did. She lived the way a dream might, if it grew legs.
“It wasn’t a very nice tattoo,” she said, and sighed. “Just go put that bathing suit on, Chlo. I almost got arrested driving it over here.”
She pointed into a thatch of trees, where I’d have some privacy. Then she smiled, the wide and dazzling kind that was all teeth. Something was very wrong and she wasn’t telling me what. Instead she was showing teeth. When I looked up beyond the dazzle of the smile, she moved the beam of flashlight away so I couldn’t see her eyes.
All everyone else had noticed was that smile. I sensed how they responded to it, visibly relaxing and going back to the party. As if they now had her permission.