Page 25 of She’s a Doll

The shop wouldn’t make enough money to pay rent if they didn’t sell this sofa today (I was pretty sure that whole thing was just a lie Paul made up to try and motivate the workforce, because they didn’t sell the sofa, and it was fine).

I watched, somehow both exhausted and bored, every part of me wrung out and thin, my rage frothy, weak, and wasting.

I felt broken. I felt small. I felt . . . to blame. All of this was my fault. I should’ve known Auntie Dawn would’ve been there. I should’ve known she would freak out if she saw me move. I should’ve stopped Kyle Lawson from killing me.

Kyle wasn’t a big guy. He was closer to Andrew Garfield than to Arnold Schwarzenegger. A little bit of muscle, but not enough to so quickly and easily end my life. I should’ve been able to stop him. I should’ve fought back harder. I should’ve at least blackened an eye, bloodied a lip, broken a nose, something.

But I hadn’t.

And now I was in pieces, locked in a glass case, still smiling my pleasant smile.

But what else could you really expect from an adequately competent business administrator?

“Why won’t Paul let us dump that creepy old thing?” I overheard an employee say one day.

“He reckons a collector will want it.”

“What sort of collector?”

A puzzle, waiting to be put together A spooky haunted doll A broken toy $19.95 $12.50 $9.00

I’d barely done anything to Kyle, which was why I was here.

Trapped in this useless doll body, time roller-coastering around me, my grandma’s grief-stricken face seared into my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d looked when she picked me up. Cheeks hollow, eyes shadowed, skin papery and pale. She hadn’t been eating. She didn’t look like she’d done much sleeping either, all because I couldn’t stop him.

Why did Kyle do that to me?

Why couldn’t I stop him?

What’s going to happen now?

“Stop it,” a tiny voice whispered.

There was a woman kneeling near my cabinet, pulling ceramic cats out of a box and arranging them around a sign. Take home a feline friend (that won’t puke up a hairball on the rug). $3.50 each. 2 for $6! Get the whole family for $14.95!

She had a lopsided mullet, brown and shaved at the sides, a sleeve of mismatched tattoos, and a blocky old hearing aid hooked up to her left ear. The aesthetic ugly enough that it looped all the way back around into being hot. The rest of her outfit stayed stuck in ugly. An oversize staff T-shirt, blue jeans, and shoes that had been taped back together.

Her hands were shaking as she set the cats on the shelf.

“Stop it,” the woman said again, a low hiss. “Stop thinking about him.”

She was talking to herself . . . about a guy. This had the potential to be the most interesting storyline on this weird reality program yet. I wondered if it was a friend she liked but couldn’t have, or a boyfriend she didn’t like but couldn’t get rid of.

“Fuck you,” she spat. “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s not a friend. He’s not anything to me.”

Wait.

Wait a second.

Wait a whole goddamned minute.

Can you hear me? I thought as loudly and clearly as I could.

She winced and touched her hearing aid.

Holy shit. You can. You can hear me.

She didn’t respond.