Page 41 of She’s a Doll

I didn’t need to think about it. I knew what I wanted. I wanted Kyle to feel what I felt when my world went dark. I wanted him to scream and beg and for it to mean nothing in the end. I wanted him to die. I wanted that with a desperation that I’d never felt before, a wildness that felt as dangerous as it was powerful. Nothing less than that would matter. Not to me.

“You’re the one witness the police never spoke to,” Nicola said, oh so gently, oh so calmly. “You know more about this than anyone. Let’s at least retrace your steps.”

You’ve watched too much shitty TV. You think there’s something I’ve missed. “RACHE” written in red. But there isn’t. There isn’t. There’s nothing. Just . . . I looked down at my arms, one porcelain, the other wood. I’d never thought much about my arms when I was alive. They were arms, not so very different from anyone else’s. Long and fleshy with hair, veins, muscles, and scars. . . . me. There’s just me. I’m all there is.

“I know. But that’s just it, Lu. You’re here. You defied death to be here. I know you don’t think you know anything, but maybe you do. Maybe, by talking through it all, we’ll figure something out, something that’ll bring him down.”

I didn’t want to do it. I hated that she wanted me to do it. I hated her for wanting me to do it. But I also knew that I couldn’t kill Kyle without her help. I needed her. And if talking through my last, boring day alive was what it took . . .

Fine, I snapped. You want to play Nancy Drew? Fine. You won’t find anything.

“Thank you,” she said, already standing. “I’ll be right back.” She rushed out the door. She reemerged a moment later with a small handheld whiteboard with a magnetic marker.

Where’d you get that?

“I picked this up at Trash N’ Treasure yesterday.”

That made me even angrier. She’d been planning this, probably from the moment she’d decided I wasn’t a hallucination. She thought she was going to save the day, the right way, the heroic way. The way it’d be saved in a movie, or storybook. Bad guy behind bars, dead girl in the ground, everything tied up in a nice, neat bow.

“Can you tell me where you went the day you died?”

I woke up, I said, my thoughts flat and toothy. And went to the library.

“That’s it?”

That’s it.

She wrote LIBERARY on the whiteboard, marker squeaking. I didn’t mention the extra E, which made me feel petty, but whatever. “Did anyone see you? What were you doing there?”

Studying.

“You studied at the library?”

We didn’t have home internet, just mobile data. The library has free Wi-Fi, free air-conditioning.

“How long were you there?”

Not long. I only had some paperwork stuff left to do. I finished it, printed my certificate, then left.

“You printed your certificate?”

Yeah. So?

“Nothing. I just thought⁠—”

It wasn’t a degree, I told her, unable to hide my bitterness. It wasn’t anything fancy. Just this online vocational-training thing. The certificate auto-generated when I finished the last bit of coursework.

“You didn’t say anything at Gin⁠—”

I didn’t want to. It doesn’t matter. After the library, I went home and got changed for Ginger’s party. My grandma was there, but I didn’t talk to her. She was on the phone to Auntie Dawn.

Nicola hesitated a moment before writing HOME on the whiteboard.

Did the police do this? I asked eventually. Did they make a timeline? Did they talk to you?

“They didn’t talk to me,” Nicola said. “But I remember Ginger said she was interviewed twice, so yeah, I figure they must’ve retraced your steps.”

So what’s the point of this?