Page 57 of She’s a Doll

Cookie. Big, dumb, beautiful Cookie, who I’d imagined flopping around the snow, happy, stupid, and carefree, instead buried up the road in that crummy old pet cemetery. He’d tried to help me, tried to protect me from Kyle, and I’d locked him in my grandma’s bedroom.

I wondered how long he’d spent in there. Days, probably. All weekend. It had been summer. He would’ve been hot, with no water. It was lucky he survived at all.

I did that. I was the one who closed the door on him, ignored his barking, and let Kyle into the house. But he didn’t care. He still picked me up when I was hanging off the bookshelf by my lacy skirts, brought me to the sofa, and curled protectively around me.

“You sure you’re good?” Nicola pushed.

I was crumbling inward, the anger melting out of my body, loosening my duct tape, deflating my Bubble Wrap. I fell to the floor with a sad little flop, my head clanking hard against the checkered lino. I’m fine.

Nicola didn’t ask again.

He was an old dog. I should’ve known this was inevitable. I should’ve at least expected . . . but I hadn’t. He’d slipped away while my back was turned, leaving behind a slow, unfurling sort of grief, unlike the storm I was used to. It was a smaller, keener sort of pain. A knife, twisting slowly, sinking deeper between ribs I didn’t even have, into a heart I’d lost long ago.

For the next few days, all I could think about was Cookie. The puppy Grandma had brought home, bony and shivering with too-big paws and mites on his ears. The way he curled up so small in my lap, his whole body taking up less space than his head would only a year later. I thought about the destructive whip of his tail, the deep bay of his bark, and the warm weight of his body pressing me into the sofa.

Perhaps Nicola heard some of my thoughts. Or perhaps she didn’t need to. The dots weren’t hard to connect, after all. Dead dog. Despondent doll. DoesTheDogDie.com’s voter consensus: yes.

A week, or maybe only a few days, later, she walked in the door carrying a box with an Ages 8 to 88 label on the side.

“You’ll never believe what I found at Trash N’ Treasure.”

Another haunted doll? I guessed.

She arched an eyebrow. “Is my company not enough for you?”

I didn’t mean . . .

“I’m joking,” she said. “I’m not supporting two of you moochers. Though, now that I think about it, haunted-toy fights could be a lucrative little side hustle. I could make an arena, take bets. It’d be like BattleBots but way sadder.”

I stood in the hallway, staring up at her.

“That’s another joke,” she said after a while.

Oh. OK . . .

“I’m going to stop making a fool of myself and show you this. Are you ready?” She didn’t wait for me to respond before turning the box around to show me the front.

Printed on it was a picture of a remote-controlled car, red with fat wheels, tread for days, and a combined driver-passenger compartment that looked just big enough to wedge myself into. It was also new. The cardboard box still shiny and plastic wrapped, the place where the price tag had been recently ripped off obvious. There was no way she’d gotten this at Trash N’ Treasure. She’d bought it at a toy store, probably for more money than I even wanted to think about.

Why? I asked.

She shrugged. “You seemed sad. You’re also really bad at walking, no offense. I thought this might be a two-birds-one-stone situation.”

That night I sat on the corner of her workbench and watched as she sawed the roof off the passenger compartment, squirted glue onto all the sharp edges, and duct-taped the remote control onto the bonnet. It took a lot of wriggling and cursing to get myself wedged into the car⁠—I still didn’t have the luxury of working knees⁠—but eventually I managed to jam one leg into the passenger footwell and the other into the driver’s. When I leaned forward, my arms reached the knobs on the remote.

It felt familiar, and it took me a moment to realize that was because the remote was similar to my PlayStation 2 controllers. Suddenly all those hours sunk into that ancient console didn’t feel like dead time; they felt like training. I stabbed the on button with my stick hand. The battery-powered engine came to life with an urgent whir.

The next day, Nicola chucked a sickie and took me to the skate park near the river to practice.

The skate park was near the creek, a zigzag of muddy water framed in dry, crackling reeds. Upstream it widened into a shallow rapid, overlooked by an old willow tree that Krissy and I used to climb in when we were kids. Downstream and the bank turned industrial, old scrapyards and the Lawson gravel yard. Here it was a piebald blend of the two extremes, nature pocked with cement, trees wrapped in caution tape.

Nicola stood to the side with a broken TV remote, pressing random buttons, just to make me zipping around look a little less weird. I jerked and swerved my way slowly around the course at first, almost crashing half a dozen times before I started to get the hang of it. An hour in and I was racing, the wind whipping through my blonde bristles and whistling in the hole where my right eye used to be.

I’d lost my eye patch. I didn’t care.

Driving in loops around the cracked cement track didn’t fix anything. Not really. Cookie was still dead. I was still dead. Grandma still might be dead, and even if she wasn’t, she was across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand.

No. The car didn’t make anything better. But it sure as fuck made it faster.