Excerpt from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I wasn't worried about Ruthy. During Christmas she had single-handedly beat up a boy-cousin thirty pounds heavier for calling her butt-ugly: "Oh, you going to cry? Look who's fucking ugly now," she'd said, while he blubbered on the basement floor and tried to hide his face.

In my fourth-grade mind, Ruthy was invincible. Thirteen-year-old Queen of the Quick Comeback, hoop earrings and Vaseline, Patron Saint of the Fist and the Late-Night Call Home from the Principal. Who in the world could touch her, my sister?

No one.

My mother, now more agitated, stepped quickly to the bathroom and shouted through the door. "Jessica, get off the fucking phone already, God."

Once Ma got her hands on the receiver, she dialed the school, but nobody was picking up. Then she called my father at work and started flipping out in Spanish. It was now approaching seven thirty, and Ruthy wasn't home. No phone call. No nothing. (Though Jess had tied up the line for God knows how long.) "And I'm telling you right now, Eddie. I'm not playing games. If I find her sitting outside, chilling with her little friends…"

But the edge in my mother's voice softened and trailed off, betraying the unmistakable fear that sometimes surfaced at the cash register after her credit card was declined and she'd send me back to return whatever brand-name box of cereal I'd begged her to put in the cart. Ruthy was never late coming home from track practice. Not once that I could remember. After she ran, Ruthy always arrived on time, six p.m. for dinner, hungry and eager to replace whatever energy she'd lost.

It was twenty-eight degrees outside that night.

Ma made me and Jess put on a coat and loaded us into the car to drive out to IS 61. Then she told us to roll down the windows and call out for Ruthy, "Loud, girls, so she can hear you." But our voices only echoed across the street against the brick walls of the empty school building.

"For how long?" I asked, the fourteenth time around the middle school.

"Until I tell you not to," Ma said.

When Ma got tired of circling Castleton, she took Forest Avenue and turned left on Victory Boulevard, drove down that long hill towards the water, where we could see the city's skyline twinkling ahead, the buses gliding past us away from the ferry. The long gray lines of electricity suspended between a stretch of wooden crosses erected along Victory Boulevard like the pictures I'd seen of the Calvary in our Sunday school textbook.

Sometimes it feels like the three of us are still stuck in that car.

Shouting out Ruthy's name into the unanswering dark.


For a straight month the cops rolled up and down the block asking everybody the same questions, whether or not Ruthy had a boyfriend? "Or maybe one of youse saw her after school walking back that night to the house? A skinny-looking girl?"

Five foot one. Long red hair. A beauty mark beneath her left eye.

Look, a picture of Ruthy cheesing on a bus on a seventh-grade trip to Six Flags, probably getting ready to argue about something she said somebody was spitting behind her back. Probably about to roll up her FUBU sweatshirt to show you the place in her belly where she'd pierced herself with a safety pin. Our Ruthy'd been a special kind of pain in the ass. She took more liberties than any of us did; once she even snuck out at night and came home at two in the morning, inspired by a dare and unafraid of the epic ass whupping she would receive from my mother, who sat there in the living room on the couch, waiting in the dark for her return. Even though she was only thirteen, she'd been practicing disappearing since she was twelve.

But people didn't talk about that. Not at the praise and worship service at Our Lady of Hope, where they lit candles afterwards and the pastor chanted, "That Ruthy Ramirez will return to us safely." And certainly not in the Ramirez house, where we'd taped her eighth-grade class photo to the wall above Mom's dresser and surrounded the picture with candles and rosary beads as if she were a small deity.

Excerpted from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez. Copyright © 2023 by Claire Jimenez. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.