Page 29 of She’s a Doll

Ran away, faked my own death, because . . . why? Why would I do that, Nic? You tell me. Oh, what’s that? You’ve got nothing.

“Please shut up. Please.”

Well, now I know you didn’t pay attention in school, Nic, because, let me tell you, the maths ain’t mathin’.

“Nicola,” Paul said, and touched her arm.

She whirled around with a ragged scream, her fists coming up.

He jumped back a step, shocked. I was too. Nicola had never reacted like that before.

She cursed, threw down the ruffled dress shirts, and rubbed her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just . . .”

“I called.”

“I . . . I’m sorry. I’m . . .”

“Are you OK?” Paul asked. The first display of managerial competence I’d seen from him.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Totally. I just . . . Can we get rid of the doll?”

“The doll?” he repeated slowly.

“The freaky broken bride doll.”

“A customer will buy it soon. It’s only fifty c⁠—”

“Fuck it,” Nicola said, digging in her pockets. “Fuck it.”

She bought me with a 15 percent staff discount, which took the total down to forty-three cents. She adjusted the price down to a nice, round forty cents and paid in shrapnel, eight five-cent pieces, an echidna on one side, the queen’s aging profile on the other.

Paul stood nearby, watching her uncertainly the whole time.

I knew you’d see things my way, I whispered as she scooped me and all my bits into a plastic bag.

“Shut up,” she whispered one more time.

This time, I obeyed.

11

I was carried out of Trash N’ Treasure in a plastic bag, flopping, clanking, and unraveling with every jerk and jostle. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was laugh. I’d gotten off another shelf, I’d found someone who could hear me, I’d won something. For the first time in I didn’t even know how long, I felt hope, the same wild, vicious, angry sort of hope I’d had when I crushed the moth against my face.

I could do this. I could figure this out. I could kill Kyle.

I let myself imagine it in all its gory detail. The blood, the screaming, the begging. It was beautiful. It was righteous. More than just vengeance, it was justice, for what he’d done to me, for what he’d done to Grandma, for what he’d done to Cookie, and Auntie Dawn, and anyone else he’d ever hurt.

Imagining Kyle’s death wasn’t cathartic. It fed the grief inside me, making it stronger, turning it putrid. It probably would’ve been healthier to brick off the darkness and try to move on⁠—or better yet, face it, deal with it, defang it. That was probably what a therapist would say, all soothing voice and lavender-scented tissues. But instead, I held it close; I let it hurt me. Clinging tight to rage and pain and grief and all those other ugly things tangled together was a unique sort of agony, but it made me feel powerful.

It made me feel alive.

Vengeful spirit. It’s a shit job, but someone’s got to do it. And hell, at this rate, I might even become adequately competent at it.

That thought made me want to laugh all over again, a mad, cackling glee that buzzed ugly and wretched through my small, messed-up body.

The plastic bag lurched, a car door slammed, and a moment later, another door slammed too, a house door. It was slightly too fast, the sounds short, sharp, and distorted, but I was getting used to that sort of thing. I listened to Nicola’s footsteps and watched the shifting shapes through the thin white plastic of my bag.

I couldn’t really make out much. Old wallpaper. The edge of a pulpy old movie poster. A plant that badly needed to be watered.