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

but wait, terrified, beside this shivering stranger. Knowing she won’t be able to feel my presence, find me for a second time, until she is ready to see what everyone else has missed.

Ruby is wrapped in something silver. Two kindly police officers keep calling her Ma’am as they take turns with their questions, pressing gently against her confusion. She is trying to cooperate, trying to swim up through her cold, saturated brain, but her eyes keep going to their belts, to the thick, black weapons heavy like rocks. Thinking how easy it might be for someone to reach over and pull one free, grasp a gun or baton and—

She closes her eyes and metal comes down against her skull, smashes through skin and bone, breaks her into a thousand little pieces. She sees blood. Exploding. But it’s just the sirens flashing, and the yellow of a girl’s hair, and the slow, steady stream of uniforms making their way down to the river. She was moved away from the water once the forensics team arrived, but Ruby can still see the rush of activity down there. All the ways they make a crime scene of the body.

She feels like she’s going to be sick.

The officers are staring at her; Ruby’s hand has gone to her mouth. There is metal on her tongue, and it tastes like a gun, the cool, hard sensation of a barrel pushed against her face. Like a fist.

She doubles over and throws up on the gravel.

‘Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am? Can we get you some water, ma’am?’

And the questions stop as someone pats Ruby’s shoulder, the female police officer perhaps, though Ruby cannot be sure, because rain and tears have blurred everything now.

‘Did you notice anything just before you saw her? Did you see anyone strange in the area? Did anything seem out of place?’

That’s what they kept asking her when they first came down to the river. And she’s said no, yes, um to all variations of these questions, leaving a useless trail of words between her and these people trying to help, because she saw nothing. There was nothing. There was just the rain closing in, and the river churning, and the place she stopped to breathe, before turning for home.

‘What’s going to happen to her?’

Her one question for them. Left unanswered as she shivers in her silver wrap and another siren keens its way toward the river.

Later, Ruby sits on the tiled floor of her shower, water hitting her shoulders, spraying over her skin. She watches as this water pools at her knees. Tries to think of anything but this morning. If she closes her eyes, she’s immediately back there, and the water trickling over her body turns red, covers her in thick, congealed blood. They think she didn’t see; they think she had been moved far enough away from the water, but when my body was turned over, there was bright red at my right temple, or where my temple should have been. Ruby wasn’t supposed to see my face, but those nice police officers were still asking her questions as the others got to work, the ones who lifted the caution tape with their gloved hands, darting under and around it, as if they did this all the time.

She knows she wasn’t supposed to see that my face had been smashed in.

(What she doesn’t know. In that moment, I looked just like my mother. That pretty, destroyed face of hers when I found her on the kitchen floor. I’m sorry, I want to say, the first of many times, for all the things Ruby will have to deal with now. I know what it’s like for the horror to follow you home.)

Ruby was taken back to her apartment in a squad car; she sat in the back and apologised for dripping rainwater onto the seat, and tried not to cry when Smith, the female officer, assured her she’d done a great job today. ‘Truly, you did everything right, Ruby,’ Officer Jennings agreed over his shoulder. Ruby had been so relieved to see their flashing lights approach, to hear the sirens as they got closer. She doesn’t know how long she was alone by the river before they arrived. Five minutes, maybe a little more. She spent that time sitting, standing, crouching, her phone pressed to her ear, a stranger’s voice on the end of the line telling her to stay calm, reminding her that help was on its way. Ruby paced in the smallest circles throughout the call, trying not to look across the water. Careful not to touch or move anything around her.

‘Keep as still as you can,’ they said on the phone. And she knew what they meant by that.

Someone was there before you, Ruby. Please don’t disturb anything they left behind.

They left behind a girl in a purple T-shirt. Face down on the rocks. And it was clear someone hurt the girl, someone did this to her. And maybe, it occurs to Ruby, that someone was still there in the park, watching as she waited for the police to arrive. Maybe that someone heard her stumble as she tried to explain where she was, where the body was in relation to her. When she couldn’t give street names or directions, could only look around and describe her surroundings, trying, desperately, to give the police the help they needed to find her.

‘There’s an overpass. I passed the boats. There are wooden posts sticking out of the water. There’s a road above us. I can’t see any signs. I was trying to find a way out!’

Maybe this someone was watching Ruby the whole time, or maybe they were already long gone, and the girl had been dead for hours. Nobody said. How did the girl get down to the water’s edge, anyway? Ruby had hurt herself trying to climb over the railing, she saw the investigators scrambling, too, slipping on the wet rocks, struggling to find their