Page 19 of She’s a Doll

I needed to workshop that.

The anger inside me was already unfurling, sinking back down into the darkness. But that didn’t matter. I knew what I had to do now. I just needed some practice. After all, if I was going to pull off this whole home-brand Chucky shtick, a quick jerk here or a little twitch there wasn’t going to cut it.

But I could do it. I knew now that I could.

Perhaps the five stages of grief weren’t quite as bullshit as I’d first assumed. I didn’t have any time for denial, or patience for acceptance, and bargaining and depression weren’t really my vibe. But anger . . . anger felt right.

8

It wasn’t much of a training montage. There was no “Eye of the Tiger” playing, that was for damn sure. But slowly, bit by bit, I figured out how to get the foaming mass of rage inside me to rise up, and then how to hold it.

It was all very . . . dark side of the Force.

Unleash your anger, let the hate flow through you, strike him down, et cetera, et cetera.

Except, in Star Wars, the bad guys could strangle people with their minds and shoot lightning from their fingers. All I could do was jerk, twist, and shudder my way forward, one centimeter at a time.

But I was doing it. I was moving.

Slowly, in fits and starts, I maneuvered myself forward, flopping to the side and then onto my back. I must’ve been a load-bearing doll, because the cowgirl, the ballerina, and the schoolteacher all collapsed in a heap.

Sorry, ladies. I’ve got places to be, arseholes to kill, you know how it is.

The absurdity of that thought made me want to laugh, a high, manic, angry sort of laugh that would’ve probably suited my creepy little doll body to a T.

But I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t do anything but continue to drag myself toward the edge of the shelf. It looked like the edge of a cliff. The wood mottled brown, the varnish cracked, the edge a razor-sharp line.

A part of me thought I should probably be a little more apprehensive of that drop. I was on the top shelf and my head was made of porcelain, a material not famous for its durability. But another part of me, the bigger part, was too emotionally exhausted to give a shit. I needed to get off this bookcase, and there was no way I was navigating a climb when I could still barely move. A little gravity assist wouldn’t hurt.

Sure, it might smash me to pieces, but it wouldn’t kill me.

The impulse to manically laugh bubbled back up. Probably a trauma response. Definitely a trauma response. But so what? I was a murder victim. If anyone was allowed to be a little fucked up, it was me.

The clock was still doing the whole sometimes-fast-sometimes-slow-sometimes-totally-normal routine. I ignored it. It didn’t matter if my perception of falling off the shelf happened in slow-mo action replay or Looney Tunes levels of fast-forward. Either way, I was going down.

It took me a long time, but eventually I managed to flop the front half of my body over the edge. My veil swung forward, lifting off my face, and for the first time I got a clear look at the threadbare green carpet below me.

The spot where I was murdered.

The memory wasn’t gentle. It surged up like a wave of black, polluted water, smashing into me, submerging me, pulling me down. My throat crushed, my fingers clawing, my lungs burning.

Why did Kyle do that to me?

Why couldn’t I stop him?

What’s going to happen now?

I was going to rip Kyle to fucking pieces, that was what was going to happen. I was going to ride in on Cookie like I was the goddamned Witch-king of Angmar atop a fell beast. He was never going to university. He was never getting that stupid start-up off the ground. He was never going to do what he’d done to me to anyone else. He was dead.

With a sharp, ferocious kick, I pushed myself off the shelf. For a short, terrifying second, I felt my stuffing shift inside me as I fell. My skirts billowed back, my limbs flopped and knocked together, my blonde ringlets slapped my wide, staring eyes. A wild, frantic part of me tried to scream. Another wondered, almost coldly, if it would hurt when I broke.

It didn’t.

I didn’t.

I stopped with a jerk, my limbs snapped forward, my hair dropped out of my eyes.

I wasn’t on the ground. I was hanging roughly thirty centimeters above it.