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

us crosses over and comes back—for longer than Josh did, sorry—all we can do is keep asking our questions, no matter where that leads us.’

Ruby is following along eagerly, albeit anxiously. It hasn’t helped that, since arriving at brunch, circumstantial evidence would suggest neither Sue nor Josh are particularly enthusiastic about her presence. While Lennie chatters away, Sue’s lips remain pressed together, and Lennie’s former crush barely looks up from his phone. Next to Lennie, they come off as clouds, drifting toward the sun, and it is only when a Bloody Mary is set down in front of Josh and he pounces on it, hands clasped around the tall glass as if in prayer, that Ruby realises he is in fact extremely hungover. Sue, on the other hand, is simply tired today. A lifelong insomniac, she was working online until 3 a.m. Meeting at this time, she says, feels like getting up in the middle of the night to eat dinner.

‘My apologies,’ she says to Ruby, when a series of small yawns overtake her. ‘I am not used to being out at this time. Unlike my companion here’—she nods her head at Josh—who probably hasn’t gone to bed yet.’

‘Well, not to his own bed, at least,’ Lennie adds with a wink, causing Josh to stick his tongue out at her, mutter ‘I wish’, and just like that, the table brightens, shares its first rays of genuine warmth.

How easy is it, Ruby will think later, back in her studio, to assume you are the cause of another person’s discomfort or disdain, when the reality is, we all show up with our night befores, our midnight hours and too-early mornings. She had forgotten that making new friends is one of those confounding things, like picking up a second language or learning the piano, that seems to be much easier done when you’re a kid. By the time people get to thirty-six—Ruby feels every inch her age for once—most people already have their friendships locked down. They have kids and partners and cousins and careers and mortgages that allow for kitchen renovations and a holiday in Fiji every two years. They have well-practised stories and roles to play, and any existential crisis they might experience is generally felt as a tremor, when Ruby’s experiences are more like large earthquakes, rearranging everything.

People her age don’t do the things she does.

(Same, I whisper, but she is too busy thinking about Death Club to catch the way my sigh makes the blinds in her room flutter.)

‘I’m not entirely sure why I chose New York,’ she said at brunch, when the question came up again. But she might as well have said Because I could. Because her life was so empty of the usual trappings, so accidentally unconventional, it was easier to take a gap year at thirty-six than it was to stay put and be reminded of everything she didn’t have. She wonders if anyone at the table had thought, How could she leave a whole life so easily? and they were too polite to say it. Then again, the existing members of Death Club did not seem to have many of the usual, grown-up ties to the living, either. Perhaps they understood, without needing to push.

‘Divorced,’ Sue answered when current relationship status came up.

‘Divorced,’ Josh nodded when Ruby turned to him (noticing, for the first time, the slate grey of his eyes, the glassy ocean of his stare).

‘Anxious-Avoidant,’ Lennie added, making them all laugh, so that Ruby’s pause went unnoticed before she answered ‘Terminally single’, her hand reaching for her phone, which hadn’t buzzed in twenty-four hours.

I’ll get to know them all, Ruby thinks from her bed tonight, plucking at the strings of her strange afternoon, allowing herself to feel excited at the prospect of the next Death Club meeting. Her first official one, as Lennie pointed out over brunch, before rattling off a list of fancy places they might choose to meet at. Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle, Oyster Bar at Grand Central. The recently reopened Tavern on the Green, or that hidden prohibition bar with the bathtub, which no one could remember the name of. Restaurants and bars Ruby had read about in top ten guides, and seen little point in visiting on her own.

‘Pass,’ Josh had said to most of the suggestions, rolling his eyes. ‘Will you ever stop thinking your life is an episode of Sex and the City, Lennie?’

‘No,’ she’d answered with a grin. ‘Besides, it’s better than thinking it’s an episode of Law and Order—which used to scare the shit out of me when I was a kid, by the way. Ruby just found a dead body, people. We need to lighten things up a little here.’

‘Says the woman who started a Death Club,’ Josh had snorted, and I thought, in that moment, that I might be a little bit in love with all of them. The way the Death Club members teased each other, the way they all listened intently as Ruby told them about finding my body, even Lennie, who had heard the story just days before. They never once looked away from Ruby’s earnestness, never dismissed her feelings when she admitted she would give anything to know more about me, and I liked that so much. I liked the way they didn’t judge her or tell her to get over it, not even Sue, who seemed more serious than the other two. It made me think of those friends I’d imagined for myself, the people I was supposed to meet, and I was glad for Ruby, at least. To get to tell her stories, make her plans.

Something else, too. They know things, Ruby’s new friends. Maybe not as much as Noah does, but a lot—about New York, and death, and dead girls. Josh, especially. When Ruby said she struggled to understand how no one had come forward to identify me—‘Surely somebody misses her?’—and Lennie wondered about how anyone could remain anonymous in this age of social