Page 48 of She’s a Doll

Strangely, it was Ginger I recognized first. Her curly blonde hair, her dimpled smile, her bluer-than-blue eyes. Her dress was jellyfish round, her usually pink cheeks made matte with foundation, and her hair threaded with ribbon. Her veil hung over her shoulder like a ghost, one of those wear-a-sheet-and-say-boo kinds, pressing uncomfortably close. Beside her, in a blue suit, coppery-brown hair brushed back, was Kyle.

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757 likes.

120 comments.

She looks like me. That was the thought that kept popping up in my head, over and over again, like a broken notification. She looks like me. She looks like me. She looks like me. No matter how many times I tried to shake it, the idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

Ginger looked like me. Not the living me, and not the me I was in that moment, sitting in front of Nicola’s phone, staring one-eyed at the photo⁠—a torso of duct tape, a head of bristly yellow sprouts, a set of lumpy, twisty, mismatched legs.

Ginger looked like the version of me that had sat on the bookshelf in my grandma’s workroom, pretty and porcelain.

A mass of stark white ruffles and floral lace from which emerged a small, delicate smile, rosy cheeks, and blonde ringlets, busy with ribbon.

A bride. She looked like a bride. She was a bride. His bride.

Kyle, who looked not like the raging red-faced monster I remembered but like a guy. Just a normal guy, smiling wide, but not too wide, suit a little too short in the leg, a yellow flower pinned onto his breast.

I couldn’t make it make sense. Kyle didn’t look human in my mind anymore. He was a monster, grotesque and raging, with veins and blood and breath that stank of vodka. But here he was, looking like everyone else, blending in, a perfect chameleon. And Ginger Béliveau, the girl everyone knew was meant to be a supermodel, or an actress, or something else sparkly and spectacular . . .

The image caption swam out of the haze in front of me: Presenting Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Lawson.

She’d married him.

Ginger had married him.

She’d married him and 757 people had liked it.

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No, I said. This is fake. This is Photoshop. This is a sick fucking joke. This is⁠—

“It’s real,” she said. “I was there.”

My anger churned. You . . . you let her marry him.

Nicola’s brow crumpled. “Lu. I⁠—”

You let him near⁠—

I lost grip of time. It wrenched through me so suddenly and so violently that it felt like my stitches were tearing out. With it came the storm, a tirade of grief and rage that bombarded me, choked me, tore me apart, even as I flailed, desperately trying to grab hold, to regain control. It was no use. Everything lurched and blurred; the sun flashed like a broken circuit; the ambient hum of the room ratcheted up, both pitch and volume, until all I could hear was a raging scream.

I surfaced for only a moment, just long enough to see that I was sitting on the sofa now, propped up. The image didn’t have time to focus before I slipped again, time flooding forward, so brutal and so unstoppable that I knew, no matter how hard I fought, I wasn’t going to stop it.

Ghost Lore Fact #1: Time is fucked up when you’re dead. Addendum: You can unfuck it, as long as you don’t mind getting a little fucked up in the process. Addendum #2: Sometimes you can’t unfuck it, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes, all you can do is hang on.

That was what I did.

I hung on, clutching to the flow of time, to my own limbs, caught in a blitz of panic and pain. My nonexistent ears rang. My chest heaved. Memories hit me like bullets. Grandma. Cookie. Auntie Dawn. Ginger. Kyle . . .

Him pinning me down, face red. My lungs burning, my throat collapsing, my vision folding inward.

I screamed.

Someone screamed back.

I recoiled, striking a wall of fabric, the sofa’s armrest.