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

O’Byrne would get to the river and the rocks eventually, that he was slowly guiding her there through the tangle of what came before, but she also knew she had nothing of value to offer him, no startling insight, no recovered memory pushing through to validate the way he looked at her so intently. Twenty-four hours after finding the body, Ruby had to admit she knew even less than she did when it happened.

When the interview was over, the detective thanked her for coming to the station, crinkled his dark eyes a little, kept his large fingers soft when he reached out to shake her hand. But Ruby was sure she had disappointed him yet again and had to look away. Walking home, she had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t quite there on the street anymore, was not entirely inhabiting her own body. It was like being drunk, but something more, too. A feeling that everyone around her was also drunk, and not in a pleasant end of the night way. Someone behind her coughed and it sounded like a slap. A man smiled at her and it quickly morphed into a leer. Buying fruit at Whole Foods, another man asked if she was having a nice day, and Ruby was certain he was goading her. Turning onto her street, for a brief, disorientating moment, she thought she saw the Financial Manager, the one who sent those explicit, unsolicited pictures of himself. Even the front desk guy at her apartment building seemed altered; she could feel his narrowed eyes stay on her as she waited for the lobby’s elevator doors to open. For a second, she found herself panicking that he knew which floor she lived on, maybe even had a key to her door. How had she not considered this before?

Ruby’s heart was still hammering when she walked into her studio. She double-checked the door and windows were securely locked, and then she lay down on her bed, hand to her chest, trying to calm herself. The guy at the front desk was clearly harmless. The Whole Foods man was just making conversation, and there was no way that creep from the dating app would know where she lived. They never even exchanged full names. She knows that, reasonably, but the strange feeling of being both in and outside of her body persists, even here in the safety of her room, so that she feels acutely aware of her heart in her chest and separated from her own limbs at the same time. It does not help that whenever she closes her eyes, she can see flashes of red at a young girl’s temple, the twist of bare legs, yellow hair floating. She had tried her best with Detective O’Byrne—‘I turned left here, no wait, I came down the stairs from the right, there’—but all she could really remember about yesterday morning was what he already knew: there was a dead girl in Riverside Park, and she found her, and it was obvious that something very, very bad had happened to the girl before Ruby came along.

She now knows that I was strangled to death; the latest headlines scream it. When she first encountered this awful detail, she immediately put her hand to her own throat, applied pressure to the cartilage she could feel straining under her skin. How depraved would a person have to be to take a life in this way, she wondered, her eyes filling with tears. To use their bare hands, to look up close at the pain they were causing. To imagine it, even a little, was horrific.

He’s out there somewhere, she thinks. The man who did this. Right now, he could be down the street, or at Whole Foods, or there in her building. He could be any man she’s met in New York City. The thought is terrifying, and she resists it as hard as she can, wriggles her fingers and toes, cycles her legs in the air, trying to focus on her body, her breathing, anything that feels like it’s hers alone. She has an instinct that something got rearranged when she was down by the river, that there was a before Ruby, and now there is an after Ruby, a woman who no longer feels at home in her own body, as if the violation of someone else has somehow seeped into her own skin.

But nothing actually happened to me, Ruby reminds herself. All I did was find the girl. I was never in any danger.

And yet. What if that young girl thought she was safe, too? Right before that very, very bad thing happened to her—did she have any idea of what was coming?

It is impossible for Ruby not to imagine this.

And now, finally, slowly, I begin to take shape in Ruby’s mind. A person begins to form beyond the blood and bruises, the broken things. A real person, a young girl who had a whole life, and she must have been so scared in those last, awful moments. This thought makes Ruby sit bolt upright. She has been wondering about the kind of man who could do such awful things, but this suddenly feels like the wrong question. Who on earth was the girl he did those awful things to?

Who is she?

From her new home base of fear and confusion, twenty-some hours after she discovered my body down on the rocks, Ruby Jones sets out to find me again.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she reaches for her laptop, begins to search online for anything and everything she can find out about the case. Because, even if she doesn’t fully understand this yet, Ruby has deliberately chosen not to forget me. When forgetting would no doubt be the easier path for her to take.

She has so much to learn. About herself. About dead girls. It is most definitely not going to be easy. But in this moment, what matters most is this: Ruby has decided to hold on