Page 100 of She’s a Doll

Ginger glanced uncertainly across at me and then down to Nicola. “We can’t stay much longer. You’ll get struck by lightning.”

She’s right, I added. Either that or you’ll get washed away when the rain raises the water level.

“Also,” Ginger said, “I think the water is rising.” I didn’t have my phone, and she couldn’t hear me. Perhaps that was a little fucked up. Perhaps I should’ve tried harder to include Ginger. But I was tired, it was early, and a small unexamined part of me wasn’t quite as ready as I’d thought I’d been to give up the special connection I had with Nicola. Which, if I was being honest, wasn’t just a little fucked up; it was properly fucked up, far up enough in the fucked-up subscription tiers to come with a free armchair diagnosis. But, in that moment, I didn’t care.

“Just a few more minutes,” Nicola said, and kept digging.

I curled my spider legs around myself and watched her work.

Kyle had said we’d played here as kids. I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was climbing to the top of the trunk with Krissy while he and his friends ran around the creek bed below, splashing in the shallow water and whipping each other with leafy branches.

Krissy and I would’ve been six, maybe seven. Old enough not to call the dragonflies zigzagging through the air baby helicopters anymore, but not so old not to think it. The adults had been gathered around the nearby barbecue, the smell of burning meat and the sound of their curses carried by the wind.

It used to be a happy memory, a simple one. Now I couldn’t conjure it in my head without also hearing Kyle’s panicked voice, echoing out of the hole in the ground, hands clutching at his bloody thigh, pale face peering up at me through the tangle of steel rebar.

“. . . I left you beneath the willow . . .”

Below, Nicola snarled, almost as if she could hear him too, and drove the head of the shovel furiously at the willow’s spidery roots.

“. . . I didn’t want you to be somewhere ugly . . .”

Mud, rock, and clay sloshed down into the water at Nicola’s feet, gross and lumpy.

“. . . it was a wombat hole . . .”

Just the idea of being shoved in somewhere so small, so dark, so dirty, made my claws shake, my glue feel cold and choking. I wanted to go home, sit on the sofa, or, better yet, in the sink. I was waterproof now, right? I could do that. I could shower again.

I let myself imagine it. The bright white light, the blast of warm water, the weighty, steamy taste of the air. I missed showering so much. There was so much I missed. So many little things, things I never even thought about when I was alive.

The too-spicy taste of Grandma’s chicken noodle soup, my lips numb, my cheeks hot. The feel of laughter, the sort of laughter that made my eyes wet and my lungs feel high and tight. The feel of running a comb through my hair a few extra times, pulling it back behind my ears.

“Ginger,” Nicola called. “Do you have your phone?” She’d stopped digging.

“It’s in my pocket,” Ginger replied.

“I need a light.”

I watched as Ginger uncertainly slid down the muddy bank, stumbling over roots and loose rock. She was in skinny jeans, which didn’t help, and sandals, which only hindered. By the time she made it to the bottom, she was as muddy as Nicola. She hesitated a moment before stepping into the knee-deep water and wading out to where Nicola stood.

I watched the two of them standing in the slow brown stream, half obscured by the grass and scrub.

Nicola whispered something to Ginger. Ginger whispered something back and pulled her phone from her pocket, turning the light on and shining it at something in the roots of the tree. I couldn’t see what they were looking at. I didn’t want to see it.

“It’s her,” Nicola’s lips said, too soft for me to hear, but it was easy to read. They were the words I’d been waiting for, the words I’d been dreading.

“It just looks like fabric,” Ginger replied.

“It’s Hello Kitty.”

“What’s Hello Kitty got to do with anything?”

Nicola tossed the shovel up onto the embankment and clawed at the earth with her hands. I couldn’t see what she was uncovering, but I could see Ginger’s face. The color drained out of her cheeks, not slowly but instantly, pink vanishing, replaced with a grayish white. “Oh . . .”

“It’s her,” Nicola said again, louder, surer. “Call the police.”

Ginger turned aside and began fumbling with her phone. “What should I say?”

“Tell them we were walking and saw something.”