Ruby by Ann Hood

an appointment with the principal: “… unexcused absences, cutting classes, and persistent tardiness. ” Olivia smiled in spite of herself. She thought of the term wayward teen, of movies of the week. With some makeup and better clothes, Ruby could star in one of those, and then she’d turn out all right in the end.
    The last thing in the wallet was a library card. Olivia started to slide it back into its spot, but then she looked at it again “Ruby Grady,” it read, “15 Strawberry Field Lane.” The town, Olivia noticed from the stamp on the card, was the same one where her old high school friend Janice lived. Perhaps this was significant. Perhaps the fact that Ruby lived near Janice was a sign of some sort. A woman from the occult store next to her hat shop had once told Olivia that nothing was an accident. Take everything as a sign, she’d said, almost like a warning. Olivia replaced everything, then slipped the bag back over the chair. As she walked out the door toward her car, she sang softly to herself, the song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
    Finally, Olivia thought as she studied the street map and formulated a route. Finally, she was taking charge of her own life again. Almost smugly, she navigated the secondary roads that would take her to 15 Strawberry Field Lane. Ever since David died, people had had advice for Olivia. At first, she took it. All of it. She had to; she was incapable of thinking on her own. Her brain had turned to oatmeal, thick and sluggish. There were decisions to be made about funeral arrangements and personal effects, about notifying work and filling out insurance papers. Slowly, those had turned into larger decisions, which all led to the same question: What was Olivia going to do now? She couldn’t begin to imagine an answer.
    So much advice, Olivia thought as she drove down a long stretch of empty road, from so many people who had never lost anything more than an elderly distant relative. She used to write it all down on the inside of her thigh in laundry marker: “You can’t be alone.” She’d written that on her thigh just before she got into the backseat of her parents Oldsmobile and let them take her home with them. After three weeks of Olivia mostly staying right there in bed and sometimes stumbling about the house at night like an intruder, her mother sat her down and told her that she had to get a grip. “Get a grip”—Olivia wrote that, too. “It’s time to resume your life,” her mother had said, so matter-of-factly that it seemed a simple task: returning to New York, to work, to nights out for all-you-can-eat sushi, to facials by the Polish woman on the corner. “Resume life,” Olivia had written on her thigh.
    While she tried desperately to make hats, alone in the back of her shop late at night, the woman from the occult store next door brought her tea made from roots. “It only tastes bad because you feel so bad,” the woman told her. “It will start to taste good when you don’t need it any longer.” The tea left grainy sludge at the bottom of the cup, like the sand inside a wet bathing suit. The woman told her to look for signs.
    Olivia tried. She looked for omens and guideposts everywhere she went. She copied the advice that screamed from the covers of copies of You! that Winnie brought her: YOU CAN SAY NO! and CONTROL YOUR BUTT NOW ! She wrote the phone numbers from posters on the subway for laser surgery, lawyers, lab-technician schools, and even poems from the Poetry in Motion series on the insides of her arms, like a junkie. “Stop writing on yourself,” Winnie told her, and Olivia wrote that down, too.
    In the car now, she tried to find meaning in the random songs that played. But what was she to make of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve Got Love in My Tummy” or “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am”? Instead, she switched from the oldies station to Lite Rock and started to count the roadkill she passed. So many dead animals! As a young girl,