Imaginary Girls (23 page)

We’d driven a few feet over some arbitrary line outside town, and London had vanished. And not one of them was acknowledging it.

Why wasn’t anyone else shocked into a stupor over this? Wondering where she’d gone? Wondering if she was hurt and bleeding on the road? Wondering how a girl could disappear right before your eyes? Why weren’t we all screaming?

I had to ask it. “Where’d
she
go?”

“What? Who?”

“London!”

The driver threw up his hands. “Where’s the closest psych ward is a better question.”

I turned to Owen. I reached out, whispered it. “She was sitting right here.” I indicated the empty sliver of seat next to me.

He wouldn’t even meet my eyes. He was looking north and to the left of my forehead when he said, “This is a joke, right?” He hesitated. “Right?”

I looked them all in the face. No one had seen her vanish; no one had a clue.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. It wasn’t funny.”

One of the guys in the backseat laughed awkwardly, and the other guys went along with it. Except for Owen.

“No,” he said, his eyes dull. “Not so funny.”

So much of it made sense to me, right there in the back of the red car, perfect sense. If she wasn’t lying in the two-lane road, then I’d know for sure. If she hadn’t jumped out the open window, she’d disappeared instead. Almost as if she’d ceased to exist once we left the confines of our town.

Exactly if.

I opened my door and stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked for a body, but there was no body. Of course there wouldn’t be a body—because here, outside town, London wasn’t alive. Here, where the car was splayed crooked across the road, where my door was gaping open and I was looking for any trace of her, she lived only in my imagination. She died two years ago, out here.

I couldn’t get back in the car. Who knew what would happen if we kept driving and made it to High Falls. How far was too far? The farther we got, I couldn’t be sure what else would start to crumble. Flashing through my mind were images from a zombie flick, fingers and ears and noses and other bits of protruding flesh rotting off when we moved, hair shedding in clumps, arms and eyes coming loose from sockets, tongues fish-flopping on the ground. Would that happen to me, to my tongue? I couldn’t risk it.

“I don’t want to go anymore,” I called back at the car.

The driver leaned out his window, all fed up, like now I’d gone and done it. “You can’t be serious,” he called to me.

“I’m going to walk home,” I yelled back. “Or call my sister to come get me.”

The car went in reverse and pulled up beside me. “Get in the car, Chloe,” the guy driving said. I looked past him at Owen, but Owen wasn’t the one saying it.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

I waited. Owen was about to open his door. He was about to step out onto the road with me, help me figure out how to get home. To at least make sure I was okay.

The driver turned to Owen, as if expecting the same thing. But Owen was staring out the windshield at the road ahead. “Fuck her,” he said. “Just go.”

I watched the car speed away, watched it as long as I could, until it went around the bend of trees and I didn’t see it anymore.

It would be a long walk back, but I was thinking I might have to do it. Ruby didn’t know where I was. She’d dropped me off on the Green; I hadn’t told her I was leaving town. And worse—how would I explain what happened to London?

I paused in the road, there for the flattening if any cars sped my way.

Darkness was falling. It had been evening when we’d left, but now it was undeniably becoming night. At some point a car would drive past, heading north. Maybe in it would be someone I knew, someone who knew Ruby. At some point or another, hopefully before Ruby texted to check in, someone would have to drive this road and give me a ride back to town.

For now, I was outside town limits, by myself, in the growing dark.

But then a light flashed. My phone was blinking—and the small screen on it was bursting with a series of missed calls. The notices kept coming: calls and texts and voice mails, scrolling fast across the screen. My cell phone was acting like it had been jammed for days and was now spitting out every piece of communication in a breathless rush before final detonation.

Clearly the thing was broken.

I was about to pull out the battery, to see if that would help, when my phone lit up once more—this time with an incoming call. I answered immediately—expecting Ruby. But I hadn’t checked the caller ID. If I had, I would have seen it was a call from Pennsylvania.

“Chloe! I can’t believe it, Chloe, is that you?”

It was a woman’s voice. She seemed distantly familiar, like a television character from some long-canceled show, someone I swore I knew but couldn’t come up with a name and place to fit to her. My mind searched for recognition.

Then the woman said, “Your father’s been worried sick! You’ve given him an ulcer. What were you thinking, Chloe!”

Then it came to me: my stepmother. That’s who was on the phone.

“Sorry,” I said. “I—”

“Your father’s been trying to reach you. We thought something happened! You never answer your phone!”

“I didn’t get any messages . . .” As far as I knew, I never even heard the phone ringing. But had all those missed calls eating up the memory of my phone just now been for real?

“We’ve been calling this number, Chloe.
This
number. Your father called. And I’ve called. Your voice-mail box ran out of space. We would have contacted the police if your mother hadn’t been in touch with us to tell us where you were.”

“You talked to Sparrow?”

“Yes.
She
called us. You know I don’t enjoy talking to that woman, but at least she could pick up a phone.”

Ruby must have forced our mother to call and be my alibi, that was all I could figure.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“There must be something very wrong with your phone, Chloe,” my stepmother said. “Your father was terribly worried.”

“Really,” I said. For sure I didn’t believe it. Even though my phone was being difficult now, it had worked fine in town—there were no problems with the service, at least before tonight. Clearly he was only pretending to call me. He must have been relieved to have me off his hands all summer, not cluttering up his lawn with my life.

“Yes,
really
,” my stepmother said. “Don’t be so sarcastic. Stay right where you are; I’m running to go get your father. Do not hang up, Chloe. He wants to talk to you.”

As I waited, I sucked it up and decided to start walking. Eventually this road would hit a more trafficked road, like a highway, and I’d come upon a car willing to take me the rest of the way into town.

Town. Where girls didn’t disappear, at least for forever, and where no one could die, maybe ever, unless my sister wanted them to. Even if it was all in my head and I’d erased London permanently by letting her leave our borders, I wanted to be back inside. Where my sister had control over what was happening. Where things made sense.

My dad came on the phone and jumped straight into it: “You are
not
staying in New York. Your sister does
not
have the authority to enroll you in school, and I don’t know what imbeciles are running that high school, but they can’t . . . when you come home . . . don’t even know this Jonah . . . called that house . . . don’t even have an answering machine . . . tell your sister I said . . . not allowed to . . . sorry excuse for a mother . . . listening to me, young lady?”

“I can’t hear you,” I said, which was true, partly. I just liked knowing that Ruby wanted to keep me here. She wasn’t ever going to let me go again, and I was glad of it.

Also, the signal was cutting in and out. I checked my phone and I had all the bars; it must have been his phone that was losing service. His signal faltering, not mine.

“You’re breaking up,” I said loudly.

“. . . sister put you up to this . . . don’t . . . can’t . . . how dare she . . .” is what I heard and then I heard only quiet with the occasional chirping, which wasn’t my phone but the bugs and the birds in the night.

I ended the call; it didn’t ring back. And I felt relieved, as if my phone sensed that I didn’t want to talk to my dad and made it so. It wasn’t even my choice, let alone my fault.

My phone must have sensed even more than that—like how I wouldn’t want to hear his messages or read any of his texts—because right before my eyes I watched the count of missed messages spool down from 43 to 30 to 11 to 8 to 0.

The last thing I saw before the message light stopped blinking was a view of what was right in front of me in the street: the traffic sign for the old turnpike. The weird squiggle on the sign’s face showed me how the road was about to curve, but I didn’t see the curve itself, because all light cut out.

A voice sounded out in the darkness. “Hello?”

“Hello?” I took a few steps toward it. “Is someone out there?”

No cars had come down the road in either direction since I’d started walking. I’d walked as far as the edge of town, that sign we’d sped past, without realizing.

“Hello?”

I was hearing things, had to be. Though it sure did sound like someone was out there. It didn’t sound like a hooting owl; it was human.

It seemed like the voice had been thrown from the patch of darkness I’d been walking into, darker now the more I got into it. The only light I had on me was my phone, and it still worked enough to allow its light to show my way. The road a foot or so ahead of me became visible, given a pale blue halo from the cell phone’s weak glow. I followed the double yellow line, gone sallow green in the light, and took a few more steps forward.

Then something lunged right for me.

My first thought was a car, but there were no headlights. Then I assumed it had to be an animal, something big that would maul me and leave me flayed on the road. A bear, as it was upright and moving fast. But then I heard it say hello again, in English, and I realized the thing was as human as I was, that it was a person, probably a murderer or a rapist, or both. I was about to regret every decision that had brought me to this moment. Only too late did I think how maybe I should turn tail and run.

But the murderer knew me by name. It also had a cell phone and was aiming an orange-tinted light straight at my face.

“Chloe!”

“L-London?” She was blue in my light, and I was golden in hers.

If I didn’t physically feel her arms around me as she hugged me, I would have been sure she was an apparition, come back to haunt me on this vacant road. Then again, in the car she’d been about to bite my hand off—and now she was embracing me as if it hadn’t happened. Had time wound back on itself and brought us both together to start over? Did she forget what she’d said about my sister? Were we friends again? Was she back, alive?

“I thought you were a ghost!” she was saying. “I thought,
That’s it, I’ve gone certifiable, I’m like totally seeing ghosts now.
You scared the pants off me, Chloe! I almost peed right here in the road!”

I had to ask: “What are you doing in the middle of the road anyway?”

She was shaking her head in the blue halo, her tired eyes enormous, the circles under them deeper and darker than ever. Her bleached hair caught my light and had gone the color of the ocean. “I really don’t know what happened or how I got here or what. I totally blacked out again.”

“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.