Page 10 of She’s a Doll

Cookie lay his giant, wrinkly head on my thigh and thumped his tail hopefully against the sofa. I picked up the remote, turned off the screen, and scratched Cookie behind the ears, but my attention was focused on the voice humming along on the other end of the line.

I didn’t really know Kyle. He’d always been the year above us in school. Whether that was because he got bumped up or Krissy got bumped back, I never knew. Krissy had told me he’d been working at their dad’s gravel quarry, driving trucks and saving money so he could go to university with something in his bank account. Kyle’s story was a little different. He said he was managing the family business and designing an app in his spare time.

I asked him what he wanted to study.

He said nothing really, but if he had to choose, then software engineering.

He asked me what I wanted to do.

And, on impulse, I told him the truth, which was that I’d just finished a course in business administration.

Kyle Lawson was the first person to tell me congratulations. He didn’t sound fake when he said it. He sounded genuine. He sounded impressed. “I couldn’t have done that. Those remote-learning courses are harder than they look.”

“Yeah,” I said, then louder, and with more conviction, “Yeah.”

It felt different talking to him.

He felt different.

Not a safe person. Not entirely. But a safer person. A person who wasn’t stopping mid-sentence to smile for photos.

“. . . and Grandma left to take care of Auntie Dawn. She’s divorcing her husband⁠—Auntie Dawn is, not my grandma⁠—and it’s fine, but, like, would’ve been nice to have someone at home, you know? Maybe I’m just being an arsehole. Am I being an arsehole?”

He made a vaguely negative sound.

I kept talking.

When Cookie dropped off the sofa and started staring meaningfully at his empty food bowl, I said goodbye, asked Kyle again to tell Krissy I’d called, and hung up.

I felt better.

Not all the way better.

But better.

Still, some of that lingering unhappiness seeped back into my brain as I filled up Cookie’s bowl. I decided to skip dinner and go straight to the shower. I liked the shower. A single uncluttered square of space with an extractor fan that made a lot of noise but never seemed to do anything. I stayed in until my fingers pruned and the water went cold. Then I stayed in a little longer.

There was something so comforting about getting clean.

The routine of it.

The privacy.

Ablutomania (noun): An obsessional preoccupation with cleanliness, washing, or bathing.

I’d learned the word from Call of Cthulhu, a tabletop game about slowly going mad and dying, not always in that order. Krissy owned a copy. I’d been reluctant to play at first. I didn’t really vibe with Lovecraft’s books. But Krissy kept asking me to play, and eventually I caved. It didn’t take us long to figure out I was actually way more into it than she was.

I’d shoehorned “ablutomania” into my final essay (kinda like I’m shoehorning it in now). I’d hoped it’d bump my final score up enough to wriggle into a bachelor’s degree. No luck.

I was out of the shower and in my pajamas, toweling off my hair, when Cookie started barking. I’d never heard Cookie bark like that before. Big, heavy, angry barks that shook the whole house. I felt the weight of that barking in my bones, in the very back of my teeth. A primal, ugly warning, as instinctively unnerving as a bomb siren.

“Cookie! What the h⁠—”

A knock at the door.

I straightened, wet hair flopping into my face.

I didn’t call out.