He recognizes her instantly. Same dark hair, same handsome face.
Last time he saw it it was wrecked with anger, watery and distorted. No. Last time he saw it, it was slack and empty. Dead.
Her face has that same look, that's the problem. Slack and empty, like someone drained all the life out of it. But then her eyes turn toward him, and something sparks up behind them. The engine turns over. She's awake.
Ponyboy walks out of Latin club shaking. He didn't know. He didn't know.
"Get up, dummy."
"You get up. I'm hurt."
"You're not hurt. Get up."
Bob closes his eyes and clutches a hand to his chest dramatically. "It's me heart. It's gave out on me. I'm dead, Delilah. Dead as a doornail."
Ruby surveys him impatiently from the branch of an oak tree. They are nine years old and have taken up pirating in the backyard, but Bob is, as usual, doing it all wrong.
"What's a doornail?"
"No one knows."
"If you don't get up, the sea monster will get you," she says threateningly, indicating the Great Dane lounging in the corner of the yard with a papery green wreath around its neck. "Houdini! Attack!"
The dog wags its long tail once and rolls over.
"Pirates aren't afraid of sea monsters," says Bob, and finally jumps to his feet. "I'm Robert O'Sea-Shanty, Menace of the Waves, and I'm hungry. Let's get lunch."
Ruby clambers up onto the next branch. "You go down to the galley, then. I be up in the crow's nest, matey, on the lookout."
"I want to be on lookout," says Bob, just to be annoying. She tosses an acorn at him. It misses.
"We can't both do it. Who's going to steer the ship?"
"I'm in the galley. I'm not steering the ship." Bob throws his hands up in the air. "Damnation! We be forgotten to steer the ship, matey! Oh, no, we're capsizin'!"
He throws himself violently overboard and Ruby can't help but start to laugh as he pretends to paddle frantically in a leaky boat, chucks the invisible oar aside, and leaps into the sea. She laughs until she can hardly breathe, egging her brother on to greater heights of pantomime, until Miss Jenny comes out of the house and yells that lunch is ready. Bob is up and off in the blink of an eye, leaving Ruby high up in the crow's nest, still trying to catch her breath.
He quits Latin without any excuses. Just stops going. And that helps some, but soon he's catching glimpses of her everywhere, the edge of her ponytail in the parking lot, the hem of her skirt as the cheerleaders sprint by. She must have always been there, and he just never noticed before he saw her face lying blank in the moonlight and Johnny screaming behind it.
Suddenly he can't stop seeing her, but she never quite seems to see him. She is always turning her head but never quite looking. It's like being haunted by the world's most unobtrusive ghost.
Maybe she wants to be left alone just as badly as he wants to leave her.
But he can't help but wonder, sometimes, what it's like to lose a twin. It it's different than just a brother or sister. If somehow it's worse.
He thinks too much about things like that.
Robert and Ruby. Bob and Bee. Their father calls them the Twin Cities; each containing multitudes. Their mother laughs and says that's silly. They're only children, Bill. Bobby and Bebe. Her whole heart in two sets of grimy hands.
They call themselves the Pack, because they read The Jungle Book together, hunched over with a flashlight in the hallway between their rooms. When they pretend to be in the Seeonee, they are twin wolves, the sons of Mowgli's mother. Always loyal, always brave.
When they play spaceship, she is the pilot. When they play pioneers, he drives the wagon. She shoots down aliens with the ray gun he never wanted; he lassoes wild horses (and sleeping dogs) with her jump rope.
They are inseparable. The best of friends. Until the cat.
When she looks back on it years later, she can see the signs there, building up behind her like a row of jagged stones. Making a hunched little house in the distance. But on the day that it happened it was like an earthquake, it was like everything shifted at once and never quite went back to the way it was before.
In her memory, it goes like this:
When they were ten, Bob found a kitten. He did not know she was watching from the oak tree- she was planning on ambushing him with the ray gun as he came around the side of the house, but the mewling distracted her. When he came into view there was a little black and white kitten in his hands, and she was just about to drop out of the tree and run to pet it, but her dress caught on a branch. And Mama had said if she tore one more dress she would never be allowed in a tree again, so she sat back carefully to unthread the snag, and when she looked up again the kitten was gone. Bob's hands were empty, and he was staring down into the water bucket that Miss Jenny kept for the marigolds on the porch.
He did not laugh while it struggled, but only stared down at its terrified little claws extending desperately, extending and retracting and extending again as it sank beneath the surface and rose up, again again again.
He didn't hear her coming. It was like hypnosis, like the man they had seen on tv who quacked like a duck when a bell rang. He could not look away from the screaming kitten, and so he did not see Ruby coming up behind him as hard and as fast as she could. She hit him at full speed, and Bob went flying into the side of the house, and she had the little kitten up and pressed against her chest before he hit the ground.
It was still mewling, it was still terrified, but something in Bob's face had changed. He looked like something had been taken away from him. He looked like he was going to cry.
She backed away with the kitten pressed to her chest, and she could not for the life of her tell what he was seeing when he looked at her. She couldn't tell what he was thinking, and she could always tell what Bob was thinking.
That was what scared her the most.
Ponyboy stops having nightmares.
The first month, he hardly notices. The second, it feels like a miracle. He has dreams where Cherry laughs at him and dreams where he's running but he doesn't know where, but those don't count as real nightmares. Real nightmares, you wake up screaming.
It makes mornings easier. His brothers notice and tease him about it in a way they haven't done for a while, and he finds that he doesn't mind.
"Hey," Darry says one morning, "one of your teachers called about Latin club. Said you just stopped showing up. You join a different one or something?"
But for some reason, the lie slips out of his hands and away. He can't come up with it, with even something so simple as yeah, I'm in French club now because all he can see is her big eyes and her pallid face slowly coming to life before him. In a way Bob's never will again.
He gets up and leaves the table without answering. And Darry and Soda look at each other over their eggs, united in fresh worry. Soldiers in a never ending war.
Before the kitten, there were snakes cut in half with his pocket knife and frogs crushed slowly beneath his foot, but Ruby thought those were things boys just did, and also partially for her protection, since she never could stop that shriek of horror that bubbled up out of her whenever they came across her path.
When she tells her parents, Bob cries piteously that it was an accident, that he never meant to drop the cat, that Ruby is making it up. He cries so long and so hard that she begins to believe him, and before long they are friends again. Almost as good and as close as before, but not quite, just not quite. There is something inside her that will not believe, no matter what her mother says, that it was entirely an accident.
There is something inside her that does not trust him anymore.
She is ten and it is her secret, the first one she cannot tell to Bob or Mary Ellen, and so the first one that she keeps alone. It gives her a strange, powerful feeling down in her chest. It gives her a fear she does not yet recognize.
The house is the same. Her parents are the same. Even the games she plays with Bob are the same. Nothing changed.
But something changed.
The day after Pony turns ten, he falls trying to cross a creek. Water soaks up his sleeves and down his shoulders, and on the bank Johnny laughs so hard that he has to laugh too. Johnny never laughs like that. Soon he's in the creek too, and they're splashing each other. Water catches the sunlight as it sprays across their backs and into their eyes, and they laugh until they crawl up onto the bank and lay down against the tree roots. Johnny picks some wild mint to chew, and Pony just lays there with his eyes shut against the sunlight, listening to the birds they haven't managed to scare away.
After a minute, a thought comes to him, and he speaks it without hesitating. "I wish we were brothers."
It hits him, after he says it, how much he really does wish it was true. Soda and Darry are always off together, throwing passes he's too short for and talking about things he doesn't understand. And Johnny is two years older, but it's like they're the same age. He wishes he had a brother the same age, and that it would be Johnny.
His birthday was yesterday, but he thinks maybe if he pictures the cake in his mind and blows at the imaginary candles anyway, maybe he has a shot. Darry says wishes don't come true, but what does he know?
"Yeah," Johnny says after a minute. Birdsong fills the silence between his words. "Me too."
"Charlene is a liar."
"Ruby Sheldon," Mary Ellen is hot with fury, hands on her hips, her whole face a wild shade of red. "I'm the oldest friend you've got. And if you're calling Charlene a liar, you might as well be calling me a liar too."
"I am not," says Ruby, frustrated. "It's not the same!"
"It is!"
Charlene Laribee is seventeen, two years older than they are, but she's been Mary Ellen's friend for years too. But Ruby cannot seem to feel that the way she feels things usually; she only feels strange and numb, and behind that furious. Furious beyond anything she's ever felt before.
"He wouldn't do that," she spits. "Bob wouldn't do that, he's not that kind of boy, but Charlene is the kind of girl who would lie about it! And everyone knows it! So don't take it out on me, just because you associate with liars and whores!"
She sees the hand coming, but it's too late to stop it. Mary Ellen slaps her across the face. It is the first time in her life that anyone has hit her, and she cannot help but be surprised by how much it hurts.
For a second she wants to hurt Mary Ellen so badly that she'll be the one with all the flaming rage inside her, feeling like she can't breathe from the force of it.
But instead she turns around and walks away.
Later that evening, in the doorway of Bob's bedroom, Ruby stands and watches her brother sitting on the floor trying to fix a pen. In the fading sunlight he looks younger than he is, much too young to do anything as awful as what Charlene Laribee is spreading around to all the girls she knows.
When he looks up and sees her, he grins. "Hey, ghost. Didn't see you there."
"Did you?" It comes out without her meaning it too.
The grin fades. "Did I- oh, come on, did you hear that dumb lie? What, you gonna believe some bullshit like that? Really?"
His tone is so derisive that she can't meet his eyes. Instead she looks at the poster above the bed, four boys with a surfboard smiling down at her.
"Come on," Bob says again, pleading this time. "You don't believe that, do you?"
Ruby looks at his big sad eyes.
"No," she says. "Of course not."
She's lying.
Even later than that, in the middle of the night, Ruby lies in her bed and thinks of that kitten drowning in a bucket. And thinks to herself: if he's a monster, what am I?
Ponyboy is sitting in a booth at Jay's when a truck bed full of cheerleaders swings in, drawing more attention than they ever have at school. They pour out in waves, fend off the catcalls, and troop into the restaurant. Two-Bit is beside himself with glee. He leaves Pony stranded alone in the booth, so that when she walks up there is no defense, no wall between them. They look at each other across the open field of the tabletop, and after a moment, she sits down.
After another moment, she says: "I know what he was like. Better than anybody, I know."
She's so quiet that he has to lean in to hear her over the din of girls laughing.
"I know what he was like," she says again, meeting his eyes. "And he would have killed you. I'm sorry, but it's true."
Her brother. Her twin. Ponyboy finds himself suddenly unable to look at anything except for the stray grains of salt scattered across the table. And he honestly does not know what to expect next, but it surprises him when she says:
"I'm glad someone was there to stop him."
Even if that meant taking his life. She doesn't say that part, but she doesn't have to.
He stares at her until she gets up and walks away.
He flies down the road like he's half-mortal, like death is a thing beyond conception, and she can't help but laugh at the speed and the wind in her hands. They are sixteen and finally free. She puts both hands out the window at once, and he's laughing too, laughing and turning the radio up so high that he has to shout to be heard over it.
"This is a new one!" He bellows at her. "You'll love it, it's amazing!"
Guitar notes ripple across her shoulders, roll down her spine. She's laughing so hard she can't breathe. The sun is going down. Everything is golden. She's so happy. She has to close her eyes against the light.