Page 34 of She’s a Doll

“Yeah. I guess that happens when you go missing for years.”

Years. That word bounced around my head. I knew it had to have been years. Nothing else made sense. But still, to have it confirmed . . .

Anything good? I asked.

“It was pretty much just everyone telling you to come home and that they hope you’re OK. Some were recent. Krissy sent an ‘I miss you’ only the other week.”

Krissy. It shamed me how little I’d thought about her since this whole thing began. She was my best friend . . . and Kyle’s twin sister. Those thoughts collided inside me, smashing together and twisting, a cacophony of confusion and devastation, like cars in a head-on collision.

Did you reply?

“No. I’m not that fucked up.”

What about Auntie Dawn? Were there any messages from her?

“I don’t know. I didn’t read everything. I don’t think I saw any messages from a Dawn.”

The light on the glue gun turned from red to green. Nicola didn’t seem to notice. She was looking at me. Actually, no. She was looking at the table just beside me, like she didn’t want to meet my one-eyed glass stare.

What is it? I asked, because I knew it was something.

“I . . . I was just . . .”

What?

She took a breath. “Can you . . . um . . . can you tell me what Kyle did?”

For some reason, that was the last thing I expected her to say. I floundered, trying to think of an answer. I didn’t have the words. Not for what he did to me. Not for what happened afterward. Not for any of it. It was all still a mess in my head. Pain. Rage. Confusion.

Why did Kyle do that to me?

Why couldn’t I stop him?

What’s going to happen now?

He killed me, I said.

She waited for a moment. When I didn’t elaborate, she looked down and nodded. “OK. Um. Right. OK. That’s OK.”

No it isn’t, I spat, anger causing my limp body to twitch and shudder. He’s going to pay for what he did. I’m going to kill him. He doesn’t get to get away with what he did to me. He’s going to hell, and I’m taking him there myself, kicking and screaming, preferably.

She watched me, frowning slightly, gun held aloft. “How?” she said. “How will you do it? How will you kill him?”

I’m still figuring out the details, I admitted. And then, because the grief and pain inside me were twisting and sharpening, growing teeth, I changed the subject, desperate to avoid being swallowed whole by that darkness. Have you ever used one of those before?

Nicola looked at the gun in her hand. “No. But it says ages eight and up on the box. How hard could it be?”

A coil of uncertainty wound down my stitches. Are you sure you don’t want to practice a little bit first? Maybe smash a mug and glue it together to start off with?

“I’m not breaking one of my mugs,” she said, squeezing the trigger and watching the hot resin ooze out. “It’ll be fine. This is cheap glue. I can scrape it off if I make a mistake. Besides, it’s not like you could get much worse.”

She had a point.

Even so, I watched closely as she began to assemble my pieces on the table, matching the larger, obvious ones together first. A foot with a calf, a hand with a forearm, and various bits of head, some with sad little ringlets still clinging to them. Those were the bits she started with, slotting the shards of porcelain cranium back together and drenching them in glue.

It came out globby and gross. I was never going to be pretty again, but after a minute or two of watching I became satisfied that I would be structurally sound. That was the only thing that mattered.

Still, it was unsettling seeing all the broken bits of me start to be sealed back together. I imagined that this was what it must feel like to have an out-of-body experience during surgery, witnessing yourself being carefully, tenderly eviscerated, then reassembled.