Page 102 of She’s a Doll

“I hope he cries when they find him,” another person said loudly as we rode home on the bus, me in the mesh back pocket of Nicola’s backpack. “Coward piece of shit.”

“Creepy vibes,” someone else told a news crew, their voice coming through the TV late at night. “Bad aura. A narcissist, probably. Maybe a sociopath. Or a psychopath! Yeah, that’s it. He totally killed Lucy. I always thought so, even before those messages started appearing all around town. Everyone knew, I reckon. There was that lady, the one with hair like a boy, Nicky, she said it, but we all knew.”

Everyone knew.

A bad apple.

Rotten to the core.

To hear the town talk, no one ever liked the guy. Even Lawson Quarry got a rebrand, Kyle’s name, face, and mission statement snipped from the website overnight. Brenda’s work, I assumed. From one business administrator to another, I admired the hustle.

So it turned out the winning combo was Plan A and B together. Kill him and his reputation. A one-two punch. My vengeance and Nicola’s. Retribution squared.

Still, it wasn’t as sweet as I’d imagined. The satisfaction I felt at Kyle’s death was muddied by the guilt that sucked at me every time I thought about Krissy. The girl I knew, the woman she became. Even as the weeks turned into months, she kept posting.

Kyle. Isn’t. A. Killer.

The truth will win out. I know my brother will be proven innocent.

Fuck you all. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Kyle never hurt anyone.

“She doesn’t want to know.” That was what Nicola had told me in the pet cemetery. The evidence was everywhere, stacking up higher every day, more people coming forward, more stories coming to light. Sandy Brown⁠—real name Evie Harper⁠—among them. Someone found and reposted an old video of Krissy talking about another true-crime case, rolling her eyes at the camera as she said, “Innocent people don’t run, duh.” But it didn’t matter. None of it did. Kyle was her brother, her twin. Nicola was right. She didn’t want to know.

I should’ve hated her for that, but I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

I wished there’d been a happy ending for her. I wished she could’ve walked away from all of this unharmed. But, deep down, I’d always known that had never been an option. She’d always been too closely tied to Kyle. No matter how, if he went down, she was going to be collateral. But it was one thing to know that and another to witness it playing out in real time on social media.

If Lucy were alive, she’d tell you what a great guy Kyle is. She loved him. I know she did. She was MY friend, not yours, I know what she’d say. And Kyle is MY brother. I know him better than ANY of you.

Three months after my body was recovered, the police released it from evidence. Grandma and Auntie Dawn flew in for the funeral. Apparently, my dad did too, though I wasn’t sure where from. Over two hundred people attended. I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear the bullshit speeches, to see the news crews stationed outside, to see my coffin, closed casket, being lowered slowly into the ground. More than anything else, I didn’t want to listen to Grandma crying over me again.

“Are you sure?” Nicola asked for the thousandth time. “You could talk to her.”

I’m sure, I said, even though I wasn’t. Just . . . make sure they don’t bury me the wrong way around or anything.

Nicola’s suit was too big, the hems rolled up and the shoulders sagging. Paired with her spiky mullet of hair, it gave her a rakish sort of androgyny. Julia Roberts at the 1990 Golden Globes. Ginger wore a simple black dress that hung loose around the visible swell of her pregnancy.

They left for the funeral in the same car, Ginger’s, though Nicola was the one driving. I sat in the window, watching them back out of the driveway, feeling more like a ghost than I ever had. I could see their lips moving through the windscreen, talking, but about what I couldn’t tell. Vaguely, I wondered if the sick spiraling in my gut was jealousy, or regret.

I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to think about anything.

I climbed off the windowsill, grabbed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland off the bottom of the bookshelf, and crawled into the vent in the kitchen, curling up around the crinkly, water-damaged pages, rereading the familiar words, studying the faded pictures. Alice chasing a rabbit in a waistcoat, her terror illustrated in porcelain-chilling detail as she tumbled down the hole, then, a few pages later, staring out into a world several sizes too big.

I shouldn’t be jealous of Nicola and Ginger. And, the truth was, I wasn’t. It was a strange sort of relief knowing they were reconnecting. Everything was wrapping up neatly, the bad guy had been punished, the world had been set to rights. It felt like a storybook ending, the right ending.

I knew what was supposed to happen at the end of my story. When a ghost finishes their unfinished business, they fade away, and what was this if not the end? Kyle was dead. Grandma was burying me in the graveyard less than a kilometer away from Cookie. Nicola and Ginger were clearly growing closer together, and I’d seen the new bisexual-flag pin on Ginger’s bag. I reckoned Nicola had probably seen it too. I reckoned it was probably put there for Nicola to see.

A happy ending for them.

A shitty ending for Krissy.

A painful but cathartic ending for Grandma and Auntie Dawn, one not complicated by the reveal that I was stuck inside a toy that they’d abandoned in the trash.

I opened the book to the centerfold. The Hatter, the March Hare, and Alice, celebrating their unbirthdays. The image was faded, the page stained with mud; the Hatter’s coy smile seemed somehow very sad.

It was time for me to leave. It was time for me to untangle myself from the doll and go back to where I belonged, like Alice returning from Wonderland. I knew that. I knew it as sure as if I were an actor on a stage reading it off a script. Act 5. Scene 12. Lucy McQuinn says something deep and meaningful, then fades away forever. But I didn’t want to. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t finished. I didn’t have the answers to any of my questions.