“Is that okay?” she asked, teeth clicking in the January cold.
“No, of course.” She stepped back to let Ruby inside. “You know you’re always welcome in this house.”
Ruby knew she was something more like tolerated, but it was enough.
The Bakers were in the middle of their own dinner, also mac and cheese (these coincidences happened more often than you’d guess) but the fancy sort made with crumbled breadcrumbs and truffle oil. Aunt Annie grabbed an extra glass bowl out of the cabinet, and Cece waved around a full mouth.
“Hey there, Ruby,” Uncle Neil said, patting a cloth napkin across his mustache. “What’s the word?”
“Not much.” Ruby dropped her bag in the doorway. “What’s been going on around here? Anything new?”
“Same old, same old,” Uncle Neil said, the last word was cut off by Aunt Annie loudly clattering the silverware as she pulled a fork out of the drawer for Ruby.
After dinner, the girls went upstairs to Cece’s room. To look at Cece, you’d think it would be plastered with concert memorabilia or posters for quirky French movies, with her tights strewn all over like rainbow-colored streamers. Maybe a Styrofoam head on the dresser, speared with funky earrings. In reality, the framed art on her delicate peach walls was of pleasantly innocuous items like sneakers, and starfish. There was even a plaque that said: THINK HAPPY, BE HAPPY.
There was a composition book on her white wicker dresser, filled with song lyrics and poems she let Ruby read once or twice a year, peering through the fence of her fingers the whole time. Ruby had even less patience for poetry than for fiction, but anything Cece wrote was an exception, and Ruby was the only person in the world she would show them to.
Mostly, though, this bedroom resembled a page off the Pottery Barn Teen website (carefully designed by her parents, in other words).
Ruby dropped her backpack and sat down on the crisp white quilt while Cece plugged her phone into the charger on the nightstand. She brought up Spotify and a song began. With a twinge, Ruby recognized the electric guitars, the ukuleles, the lyrics:
If I were a sea cucumber
Beneath the briny waves I’d slumber
No eyes to weep, no heart to beat,
By sorrow I’d be unencumbered.
“Why are you listening to this?” she asked, her stomach rolling.
“Dov made me a playlist.”
“Who?”
Cece lowered her eyes, the same shadowy green as Ruby’s, and climbed onto the bed beside her. “You know. Dov Mahalel. He sat with us at lunch today.”
“You don’t even like Creatures Such As We,” Ruby pointed out, maybe a little too smugly.
“I’m learning to like them.”
“Because you like Dov Mahalel?”
Her ears went pink. “Why wouldn’t I? He’s cute, right?”
Opting out of that conversation, Ruby scooted forward so she could throw the quilt back, and Cece tossed her own side back. Together, they piled the pillows against the headboard, then lay flat, flinging the quilt up over their heads and across the pillows so that the blankets sloped up and away from their faces, just the way they liked it. Ruby turned her head to look at Cece, and Cece turned hers, bun mussed into a bomb mid-explosion.
“Hi, Bebe,” she said.
“Hi, Cece,” Ruby said.
They giggled in the close air.
“How was English?”
“Shrug. How was Levi?”
“Ugh. How was your weekend?”
“It was fine.”
“Cece.” Ruby watched her cousin in the filtered light. “Come on. You can tell me. We promised—”
Her cousin bolted upright, destabilizing their fort so that the ceiling collapsed onto Ruby’s face, quilt and pillows and all. “Who even told you?” she asked sharply.
Ruby clawed her way out and brushed at the short strands of hair static-clinging to her face, trying not to feel wounded. “It’s true, isn’t it?”
Cece looked away, plucking fuzz off her tights with great determination until Ruby laid her hand palm up on the quilt, and Cece took it. They both stared at their interlocked fingers—Ruby’s topped by rough purple polish, Cece’s soft and clean. “Mom and Polina are already planning my party.”
Ruby nodded, wishing fiercely that she’d smuggled the Stoli out of the house with her. They could both use the courage. She caught Cece’s eye again. “It’s your turn.” Finally, she didn’t say. I’ve been waiting, she didn’t say. I want to tell you mine, she didn’t say.
“I know, I just . . . didn’t think it would be like this,” Cece whispered, and it was in the older, wiser, stranger voice Ruby had been awaiting for three long years.
• Four •
This was how Dahlia had explained the Chernyavsky “Gift” to Ruby.
One afternoon in early April six years ago, the breeze damp and cool and the clouds bone-bright above them, her sisters sat her down at a picnic table outside of the Cone Zone. Ruby remembered the year clearly, because both she and Dahlia had birthdays in April, and Dahlia had just turned twenty-two, while Ruby was about to turn eleven. She remembered that because their mother had left the morning after Dahlia’s birthday, which was probably why Ruby received “the talk” so young. Not only to explain the curse, but to explain their mother, too.
The Cone Zone was a seasonal ice cream place in downtown Saltville. Their big attraction was something called the Danger Cone. Each week, they’d create some new unusual, ambitious, often foul flavor—spaghetti sauce, broccoli, fish-and-chips. That month it was garlic and mint, so when Ruby thought of the talk, she’d forever taste toothpaste and mashed potatoes. When she was younger, Ruby would order every strange flavor she could just to disgust Ginger, but she’d since realized that Ginger didn’t care that much what Ruby did, so she was only hurting herself.
That day, she sat shivering as rivulets of her unappealing ice cream ran off the scoop and down her fingers—it really was too cold to eat ice cream outdoors—when Dahlia asked, “Ruby, what do you know about astral projection?”
“Um,” she’d answered. “Is it about space?” On her nightstand was a library copy of The Demon-Haunted World in its battered plastic sleeve, and she was picking her slow way through it as best she could. Her first ever Sagan book, she’d borrowed it from the school media center after her fifth-grade science teacher posted a quote from it on their bulletin board: Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.
She’d already loved science books, and at the moment, getting a grip on things sounded good to Ruby. Their lives had flipped upside down in their mother’s absence. Dahlia had left college and stayed home to take care of them, but she wasn’t very good at it yet. The day before, she’d packed an entire sealed box of granola bars, no juice, and two pieces of bare white bread in Ruby’s lunch, forgetting to spread them with peanut butter. But at least she was trying. Ginger, a senior in high school, would barely look at her sisters. She’d sit at the register counter in the closed tea shop in the front room of their house for hours every evening, reading one of her bleak and sophisticated novels, or swirling a finger through a pile of shredded peppermint leaves, or just staring out the window until the setting sun flared one last time over the pine trees, then sank.
“It makes Ginger feel better to be alone,” Dahlia had said one night when she pulled Ruby away from spying at the shop door. That didn’t make sense to Ruby, but the world didn’t make much sense anymore. Maybe if she could decode the too-big words and ideas in her Carl Sagan book, it would again.
“No, space is astronomy. Right?” Dahlia looked over at Ginger, who sat on the opposite bench from them with a book propped open and a practical juice smoothie instead of a cone.
“Oh my god, Dahlia,” she muttered, but never looked up from the page she was pretending to read. Her blond hair whipped in the wind, still natural back then.
“Rig
ht, okay,” Dahlia continued, folding her hands atop the table. She hadn’t gotten anything for herself. “Astral projection is . . . it’s kind of like a superpower. And it’s a power the women in the Chernyavsky family have.”
“You’re lying,” Ruby protested.
“Why do you think so?”
“Because superpowers aren’t real,” she said. “And neither are Mom’s stories.”
They had all grown up on their mother’s stories of the Chernyavsky family, their gifts and their downfall, which were one and the same. How the Chernyavsky women had been powerful in the old country—healers, seers of fate, sources of great wisdom. How they’d helped the worthy people who sought them out in the deep woods, and punished the wicked. And how they’d been hunted for their abilities, and had all but abandoned them when they fled Russia, arriving in America with few possessions and fewer gifts left to them.
Ruby didn’t really believe the stories—not when her mother told them, or their great-aunt Polina. At least, not all of them. She knew about the human brain and space and the periodic table of elements, but had never come across anything like the powers her mother had spoken of in her own books, books about real things, provable things. . . . Except that when her second cousin Alyona had died of breast cancer last year, she had felt the chill sweep through her; that icy premonition her mother had told her Chernyavsky women felt when a light among them was snuffed out.
Back then, she hadn’t been so sure what to make of that.
“Believe me,” Dahlia assured her, “it’s something we all do, and someday you will, too. But only once.”
Across from them, Ginger slapped her book shut. “You’re doing it wrong. You’re just going to mess her up! You’ll ruin her for life if you tell her like that!”
“Well, who’s gonna explain it better? You, or Mom?” Then Dahlia blanched, looking pained, as if she’d stubbed a recently broken toe, or slapped a fresh sunburn.
Ginger reopened her book, pretending not to care. “Be my guest,” she said, eyebrows folded up beneath her blunt high school bangs.
“Thank you. Ruby, astral projection is this theory some people have, where you can leave your body. Because there’s your body, right, and then there’s whatever’s inside of it.”
“Your guts?” Ruby panicked. Pictures of intestines and blood and bones floating up from a rubbery pile of skin blossomed before her.
Ginger glanced back up, aghast.
“No, no, no, oh my god no,” Dahlia hurried to say. “I mean, like, your spirit, you know?”
Ruby sort of knew. The Chernyavskys didn’t attend churches or synagogues or mosques, but Saltville was the kind of place that put up a nativity in the town square each December, and piped not just “Rudolph” or “Frosty” but the heavy-hitter Christmas tunes over department store speakers; the slow, epic Jesus jams. So she’d gotten the gist. “That’s real?”
“In a way. It’s, like, your thoughts and your feelings and your energy. And imagine those parts of you drifting up out of your body. Okay? Now imagine that you could be out of your body, but you can still move around. You can look down on your house, or your street, or you could land on the front lawn of Great-Aunt Polina’s house, and nobody would see you or know you were there, because you’re not in your body. But you could see everything. Are you imagining that?”
“Yeah.” She stared at the table trying to picture it. By this time, her ice cream—named Cool Vampire—had been reduced to a minty, tangy puddle on the weather-bleached wood, with its cone like a ruined tower in the center.
“Good!” Dahlia bobbed her head. “So now imagine something else. You can’t just travel from place to place, you can also travel in time. But”—she held up one long finger, stacked with silver rings—“you can only go forward into the future. And you can’t go just anywhere. You can only go into your own body, wherever your body will be in the future.”
This made no sense, and she was about to say so before Ginger added wryly, “Why don’t you just call it time travel?”
“No, Ginger,” Dahlia answered, her voice overly sweet. “Because that’s you going into the future inside your body, so you’re a whole person when you get there, and you can run into your future self in the mall, or wherever.”
“Is time travel real?” Ruby asked, distracted, because in between her science books, she’d also been reading a book for history class called 11,000 Years Lost, about a girl who, while hunting for Paleo-Indian artifacts near her school, wound up going back in time to the end of the Ice Age. And to be honest, that seemed like a much better power.
“No.” Dahlia dashed her hopes. “I don’t think so, at least. But the point is this: someday, probably when you’re a teenager, you’ll be standing in our kitchen, or watching TV, or taking a shower, and then all of a sudden, you’ll blink and be in the body of your future self. And you could be fifty, or seventy, or one hundred. There’s no way to know.”
“. . . Why?” Ruby dared to ask.
Dahlia sighed and fiddled with the clasp on her chunky bracelet, the one their mother had just given her for her birthday. “Because,” she said, looking not in Ruby’s eyes, but at a nonspecific spot on her forehead, “you’re going to be whatever age you are when you die.”
Here, Dahlia had fumbled the explanation a bit. For years, from their talk until the middle of a random gym period in eighth grade, Ruby had thought that when she saw her Time, as her family called it, she’d slough her body and slip into the future just in time to see her own demise. She then believed she’d pop back, like a video game restarting after a lost life, aware that she’d someday die in a plane crash, or clipped by a car, or falling off a ladder, or poisoned by Ginger when she’d mouthed off once too often. She thought that bitter kernel of knowledge was the whole point, and one could see, from Dahlia’s fumbling speech, how she’d gotten the idea.
But no. This was what actually happened.
When a Chernyavsky girl was old enough—maybe thirteen like Ruby was, maybe fifteen, maybe more—you didn’t really see how you’d die. You could guess, a lot of the time, but you only saw who you’d be when you died. Who you’d be in the minutes or hours or some small, useless amount of time before the end.
There was one thing Dahlia did manage to get across that day at the Cone Zone, though: whatever Ruby saw during her one-time-only, nonrefundable trip into her future, it was inevitable.
“If you don’t like your . . . your Time,” Ruby had asked, “why don’t you just change it? Like, if you’re supposed to die on a roller coaster, you could just make sure you never go to Six Flags. Then you won’t die.”
Across the table, Ginger put her book down spine-up on the wood. She’d dropped the smug smile that had lingered throughout Dahlia’s explanation and was instead pressing her top teeth into her bottom lip until the pink skin paled. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said.
Dahlia nodded in agreement. “Remember when Alyona died last year? She had seen herself having cancer treatment when she was a teenager. She never smoked a cigarette after that, or drank, or dyed her hair, or lived near power lines, or went outside without sunscreen. It didn’t change anything.”
“Okay, so why didn’t she run away? Like, instead of going to that hospital for treatment, why didn’t she just go to Japan or something? Has anyone tried that?”
“Somebody has,” Ginger muttered at last.
“Mom?” Ruby guessed, a cold, fizzy feeling in her head as if she’d actually eaten her ice cream, gulped it down in one greedy bite.
“You don’t know that,” Dahlia said, glaring at Ginger.
“Polina basically told you—”
“No she didn’t. That’s your interpretation. We don’t know why she—”
“Abandoned us?” Ginger cut in. “Maybe you don’t want to believe it, but I know why. Anyways, Ruby,” she said, turning pointedly away from Dahlia, “it won’t work. Running away from fate won’t change anything. It never does. It just makes everything worse,
for everybody.”
So that was that. Your Time couldn’t be changed, and to try to alter fate wasn’t the point. Good or bad, it was impossible to fight the future. Whatever powers the Chernyavskys had, that wasn’t one of them.
At least, not anymore.
• Five •
Ruby: Strawberry or blueberry
Cece: ?
Ruby: Pop Tarts, can’t decide
Cece: Have an apple
Ruby: OK got it, strawberry Pop Tart it is
Cece: Enjoy your delicious warm cardboard
Ruby set her phone down on the counter to pluck her already-burning Pop-Tart from the toaster. It was a Saturday afternoon in the first week of February, and Ruby had been texting her cousin constantly about everything but her Time. If she didn’t pressure Cece, she hoped that it would become Not a Big Deal—though of course it was a Very Big Deal, the biggest—but to no effect. “I’m just . . . not ready,” she’d told Ruby the night of their sleepover. “This is it, you know? My whole future. I need time to, like, process.” But it had been a month, and Cece was no closer to sharing. Not that Ruby could tell.
She’d just shoved half of the hot Pop-Tart into her mouth, when a familiar seed of a feeling sprouted inside her chest. It was small at first—the uneasiness of remembering the physics homework you never finished just as you pulled into the school parking lot.
But the feeling grew throughout the afternoon.
Restless, she retreated to her bedroom, plugged in her headphones and put on the newly published episode of Solving for X-traordinary as a distraction. After a relatively brief adventure, Kerrigan Black had left the Chalbi Desert behind two weeks ago, and had just landed in a seemingly suburban backyard somewhere in time.
I examine the grassy lawn crisscrossed with clotheslines before me, and the sturdy wood saltbox house peeking through the sheets. I drag myself to my feet, hurriedly shedding my bright red kanga and untying my braids. I stand shivering in the simple white shift dress in which I always travel, my hair unspooling across my shoulders, whipped up by the wind. I pat my pockets for my small field journal, exhaling in relief when I feel the familiar shape beneath the fabric.
The Wise and the Wicked Page 3