Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

river, the lights of New Jersey are filtered through thick, dark clouds. It would be beautiful, she thinks, if she weren’t soaked through to the skin. A rare opportunity to have this view to herself.

She is approaching the marina when her foot cracks down on something round and black. She must have come down on whatever it was with her full weight, because bits of plastic scatter across the path. Some random object, meeting its end under her foot, discarded—or lost—and now shattered. She hopes it wasn’t important, whatever it was, and says a silent sorry to the god of lost things. Running thoughts, she calls this kind of musing. Nonsense passing through her mind, cleaning it out. Already, she is less angry. More herself. Or perhaps, mercifully, less.

It’s after passing another cluster of boats and a flooded ramp—rain falling, river rising—that Ruby notices her access to the upper level of the park is now completely blocked off by a tall chain link fence to her left, running parallel to the water. She’s obviously come further south this morning than she realised, to a part of the park under construction, and now her planned exit is somewhere behind that fence. She is going to have to turn back, after all.

Fuck.

Another clap of thunder, a flash of lightning even closer this time. Lights pulse across the river and the yellowed windows of the buildings on the opposite bank go dark, like candles blown out. The rain is now coming down in one solid sheet, and it’s so cold Ruby can see her breath, ghosts floating before her with every exhale. She has little visibility beyond these apparitions, and she stops to get her bearings, wipes the rain from her face. She can just about see a burnt, black structure out there in the water, behind an uneven row of thick wood posts, partially submerged. This part of the running trail is suspended over the river; just ahead, the track winds back from the shoreline before pushing outward again, creating a small u-shaped beach of moss-slimed rocks and rubbish below her. High above, cars swoosh by on the sodden, concrete freeway, but down here: no one.

Reaching for the railing directly in front of her, Ruby bends, takes a few deep breaths. It is when she straightens up and prepares to kick off that she sees it. Across the tumble of wet stone and weeds, no more than six or seven metres from where she is standing, there is something purple laid out on the rocks, right where the water slaps up against them. As Ruby squints through the rain she sees something else flow out from the purple, yellow reeds, rising and falling with the river.

There is bright orange too, glints of it, and as Ruby blinks through the rain and tries to focus, she understands she is looking across the rocks at fingernails, and a hand, and the yellow is hair, and she knows she is looking at a young girl’s body before she feels it, before her heart punches hard in her chest, and her legs threaten to give way underneath her.

‘Hey.’

Ruby doesn’t know if it’s a whisper or a shout.

‘Hey!’

It’s more like a cry this time, something hoarse and desperate. Face down at the water’s edge, the girl does not turn over.

Ruby is not close enough to see whether the girl is breathing. As her heart starts to sound in her ears, she makes to climb over the railing, but her foot slips on the wet, her shin cracking down on hard metal. Electric blues and greens flash behind her eyes as she stumbles back, almost falls over. Still, the girl doesn’t move. Trying to ignore the pulsing pain in her leg, panic rising until she can taste it, Ruby pulls her phone from her vest pocket. Her hands are shaking so much, she hits the wrong numbers on her pass code three times over before the screen unlocks.

911. That’s the number you call, right? She needs someone to tell her what to do.

‘Hello? Yes. I think. Help. I can see someone by the water … there’s a girl, and she’s not moving. I think … I think she’s not okay. I don’t know what to do. Hello? Yes. Please—I think she’s hurt. I don’t know if I should go to her. Should I go to her? Please. Tell me what to do.

‘She’s not moving. She’s not responding. She’s not turning over. Please! I’m not close enough to see if she’s breathing. Tell me what I need to do.’

Please.

She’s not close enough. To see that I’m not breathing.

Standing across from my body. All that murky water in my mouth, in my lungs. Stripped below the waist, blood matting my hair. Left on the rocks to flail like a fish, until I stopped moving, eventually. Pulled away, mercifully, as he plunged in. And now a stranger is looking at my dead body. Now we’re both scrambling to understand what it is we’re seeing. What it is that’s been done to me.

I now know that you can cry, scream, howl like the wounded animal you are. And they do not stop. It does not move them. They keep going until there is nothing left, until you are broken apart, obliterated.

Almost like you were never really there at all.

Ruby Jones is my only witness. I understand this suddenly, explicitly, and I grasp at this singular certainty, feel my way along it, until I find myself standing next to her, there on the waterfront path. She couldn’t get to me, but somehow, some way, I make my way to her. I am in awe as I reach out to Ruby, but my fingertips turn to rain, drip down her cheek, and a second truth claps itself out above us:

She can only see the husk of me, left down on the rocks.

Turns out you have to learn how to see a dead girl. To recognise her. For now, I can do nothing