Page 6 of She’s a Doll

I’d been at it for just over an hour when I gave up.

I’d never been great when it came to other people. Talking to strangers felt a little like being an underqualified worker at a nuclear power plant⁠—following checklists, monitoring reactions, hoping nothing was about to explode.

For some reason, the longer I was there, the more radioactive everything felt.

“Are you going?” Ginger asked when I started inching toward the door.

“Yeah. I . . . um . . . have to see my grandma. I promised I’d be back before sundown.”

She knew I was lying. I could tell by the unhappy way she sucked at her cheek. But, mercifully, she didn’t try to change my mind. “Do you want your drinks?” she whispered, eyes darting toward her mum. “I put them in the fridge, so they’ll still be cold.”

“No. Um. It’s OK.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said, already retreating away from her. “I’ll swing by tomorrow and pick them up.”

“OK. Um. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

It was a fine party, I told myself as I drove across town, sweating into my padded jacket, my car’s fan belt squealing the whole way. A totally normal party. Not at all weird. And, more importantly, I was not at all weird. It was fine. Really, truly, completely fine.

Even in my head, the words sounded like a lie. Despite that, I kept repeating them as I drove out of Ginger’s suburb, past the hospital and the grocery store, and through the underpass beneath the highway.

The sky was bruise purple when I got home, pulling into my usual spot.

My grandma’s house didn’t look like a five-year-old’s drawing. It looked like a carbon copy of every other house on the street. Prefab walls, corrugated tin roof, and the cheapest letter box money could buy.

It’s fine, I reminded myself as I yanked on the hand brake. Totally fine. No one thought you looked cheap, especially not Ginger. I’ll message her tomorrow and we’ll laugh-emoji about it. A great party. The best ever. I climbed out of the car.

The air was thick enough to drink. Hot, muggy, and filled with fat, whirring beetles that zigzagged drunkenly, the buzz of their wings overlapping with the rumble of trucks on the highway and the raw-throated screams of nearby cockatoos.

The neighbors were fighting again. The same fight they’d had last week.

“. . . think they’d have done a better job than me? They couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery!”

“It wasn’t a piss-up, it was Uncle Al’s funeral, and you forgot to buy a coffin!”

I could see, in the fading light, that there was an envelope sticky-taped to the front door.

I checked my phone. No messages, not that I’d expected there to be any. Grandma had a phone, but it lived uncharged in her bedroom drawer. “It’s too complicated,” she’d always say. “I’ll stick to the landline.” Except the landline had been disconnected two years ago.

I guessed when all else failed, there were always random, ominous notes. If it was good enough for Slenderman, it was good enough for me.

I shrugged off my jacket, locked the car, and walked the familiar route through the flowerpots up to the front door. The envelope had been stuck onto the door with a single bit of masking tape. The letter inside was written on the back of an old pizza receipt.

Hey Lulu Lemon!

Hope you had fun at your party. I’m going to be at Auntie Dawn’s for a couple of days. She’s going through a lot right now (I always knew Patrick was a pig, but to run off and leave her like that a week before her 70th? Don’t ever get married, Lulu. Men aren’t worth it).

Dinner’s in the fridge. Love you!

Grandma

A lump of emotion I couldn’t name clumped heavy and jagged in my throat. I swallowed it down. It was fine. I was fine. I was twenty. I didn’t need my grandma around all the time, especially not when everything was totally normal, totally fine. Actually, it’d be good to have the house to myself for a bit. A weekend without her music playing, her glasses misty from leaning over the stove, her hair tangled around her favorite leopard-print claw clip . . .

The lump rose up again.