I went to go get changed. It didn’t matter to me, swimming in my underwear, but for some reason she wanted me to wear this bikini. It took a long time to get the suit untied from the knots that held it together and longer to get it on my body. It wasn’t until I had the white bottoms on and was tying the strings that held together the white top that I thought about it. I’d expected her to tell me to go up to the house, and instead she was dressing me in her clothes and letting me stay.
When I got back, she wasn’t where I could see. Then I spotted London. She came out from behind the same trees that had hidden my sister, her legs and feet muddied, her clothes as soaked through as when we’d stood together under the falling rain.
Had she gone off again with my sister when I was conveniently out of the way?
She had. I could tell by how she was looking at me. All her friends were there asking where she’d come from and how long she’d been out there and yet she looked only at me. She said to me, “Thank you,” like I was doing something for her now. It sunk into me only as she thanked me for it.
She’d taken my place once, and it was my turn now to take hers. My turn originally and my turn once again.
She’d gone off with my sister when I wasn’t looking and something had changed.
Then she pattered across the rocks toward her friends, and they enveloped her and left me there to gaze out at the water alone.
Soon, Ruby walked out of the water, from the same shadowed spot that London had come from. She was motioning me backward with her hand, like I should stay where I was on the rocks and she’d come to me. There was ten feet of water between us—dark and dank and seeming deeper than it was, if it only came up to her knees—and then there were a few inches between us and then she was on dry land.
“I don’t know how to say it,” she started.
She pointed at London, who’d plunged in already with her friends, unafraid of the water. London, who splashed and screamed in delight, naked and drenched to the bone and dipping her whole head in, and she didn’t even care.
Ruby’s eyes were brackish black without a hint of color in them. The night had swallowed all color up.
“They don’t want her anymore, Chlo,” she said. “They want what they had before, Chlo. They want what I wouldn’t give them.” I could tell she was helpless now, more helpless than I’d ever seen her. “Chlo, don’t you understand? I tried to give her back, but it didn’t work. They knew I’d been tricking them all this time. What they want is you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
RUBY KNEW
Ruby knew what to do. She told me to go, now. Go to the house, pack whatever stuff I wanted from our rooms. Or, better yet, head straight to her car, since it was parked in the brush over the fence, sit on the hood and wait for her there. Never mind my clothes scattered on the ground and wherever I left my shoes, just go.
But we couldn’t leave, I protested. We couldn’t leave town.
She ignored me and pulled off her shirt, and I saw the bathing suit she had on underneath, a plain navy one-piece I recognized as mine.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.
“I can’t,” she said. She said no more, but I felt sure she was staying because Olive wouldn’t let her leave—as if they’d reached up and tied a rope around her ankle to keep her at bay. It was a thick rope, heavy and wet from lying for ages in coils at the bottom of the reservoir, and not even my sister could free herself from its knots tonight. She was barely even trying.
She was letting go of my hand and I was stepping away from her toward the trees—away from the body of water at our backs, the one that plunged deeper than usual due to the rain, leaking far from its normal shoreline, covering rocks and rock walls the way it never had in other summers, even bigger than I remembered, too big—when I grabbed back and got hold of her arm and said, “I think I should stay.”