Read Ruby for Free Online Page B

fascist. Like they blackball people they don’t like, and they’re prejudiced and everything, and they drink until they puke, honest to God. But Ben said I could live in the basement during the summer and no one would even know because only like five people are even there at all in the summer and there’s a bathroom there and everything.”
    Olivia wondered if the girl would even stop for air. She didn’t. She kept talking.
    “Except Ben, that asshole, was supposed to be one of those five people and sort of take care of me. You know. And then yesterday he tells me that A, he got a job at a camp in upstate New York and so he’s leaving, and B, they’re coming in to exterminate the place because it’s infested with fleas or something and they have to bomb it and no one can go in for like three days because this bomb is really bad shit, chemicals and everything, and you can’t breathe the air, especially me. Because if I breathe the air and the baby gets retarded or something, no one’s going to want it.”
    Finally, she paused to twist a ring that she wore on her index finger, a silver star and moon, like a ring that Olivia herself might have worn when she was a teenager twenty years earlier.
    “That’s a fact,” the girl said, her voice soft now, and distant. “No one will adopt deformed babies or stupid babies or HIV babies unless they’re from someplace like Romania where they’ve been tortured really bad.”
    The girl looked up, away from her hands and right at Olivia. All those freckles and the tip of her nose sunburned made her seem even younger, like a little girl herself.
    “Anyway,” she said, taking a big loud breath, “thanks for the water.” She picked up a tattered backpack, made from patches of velvet and sewn with thick gold thread. Again, Olivia thought of herself as a teenager, the vest she had that was made in the same ragtag fashion. She used to wear that vest for special occasions only—rock concerts, dates with older boys.
    The girl moved past Olivia, who stood this entire time in the center of her empty kitchen, and toward the door, trailing patchouli.
    “Wait!” Olivia said, and hurried to the girl, grabbing her by the shoulder to stop her from leaving. Was it that familiar scent that made her keep the girl there? Olivia remembered the jar of patchouli oil she’d kept on her dresser, how she’d carefully put droplets on her pulse points, the way it clung to everything. Or was it her own loneliness, her own desperation?
    “Where will you go?” she asked. The girl’s freckled arm under Olivia’s hand was warm from the sun.
    The girl shrugged.
    “Where will you stay for the three days?”
    She looked at Olivia, puzzled. Someone should tell this girl to use sunscreen on her face, to get her hair trimmed—the edges were all split ends. Someone should help her.
    “While the fraternity house is getting bombed,” Olivia said.
    “Oh, that.”
    The girl twisted her ring again. Her fingers were swollen, Olivia noticed.
    “I haven’t exactly thought it through,” she told Olivia. “But at the college, there’s this whole street of fraternity houses. So I figure they must all have basements, right? And they can’t all have fleas, right?”
    “This boy,” Olivia said. “Ben?”
    The girl nodded.
    “Has he given you any money? Have you seen a doctor?”
    Questions bubbled up in Olivia’s throat. Where was this girl’s mother? Why didn’t she get an abortion, get married, get help?
    The girl was giggling again. “Of course I didn’t go to a doctor. What’s he going to say that I don’t already know? And about Ben …”
    Her eyes got dreamy, the way Olivia’s own used to when she looked at pictures of rock stars in teen magazines, or when the older boy up the street would stop his white VW bug and talk to her on a summer evening.
    The girl sighed. “If you’ve got a million years, I’ll tell you all about him and me. But I have to warn you—it’s a sad sad story.