Page 67 of She’s a Doll

An idea formed. It was a shitty idea, a desperate idea, but it was the only one I had. I needed to talk to Krissy. I needed to explain everything. Plan B wasn’t working, but with her on our side we could change that. We could bring Kyle down, once and for all.

Nicola might not see it now, but she’d understand. She would.

I turned my head bit by bit until I could see Nicola in profile. She was staring upward, her gaze distant, breathing steady. Before I could think about what I was doing, before I could work out any doubts, I leaned back into the time stream.

It buffeted against me, ripped through me, then broke, rapids becoming eddies that swirled outward.

Nicola’s breathing slowed. The sound of the barking dogs grew deeper and longer until it became an eerie unnatural drone. I waited until Nicola looked frozen, until the light bulb overhead began to flicker . . . then I made my move.

I crawled shakily across the mattress and onto the bedside table. It took a few attempts to wedge my stick up into the top drawer and several more attempts to push it open.

Nicola’s spare hearing aid was exactly where she’d said it would be, in the drawer, lying beside a packet of Panadol and an old phone charger. I climbed into the drawer and scooped it clumsily into my arms.

I didn’t know anything about hearing aids, but I could tell it was identical to her other one: a block of peach-colored plastic, a tube designed to hook around the ear, and a speaker encased in a silicone earmold. Carefully, I brought it to my face, until it was all I could see, and pushed it into the hole where my eye used to be.

It rattled as it slid down the inside of my face, settling into the hollow of my neck. For a split second I felt a surge of panic as something inside me revolted against the idea of anything touching me there, but I fought it back.

I needed to do this.

Carefully, I poked my head up out of the drawer.

Nicola lay where I’d left her, still and staring.

She looked dead.

The elongated bark of the dogs sounded like an earthquake, low, violent, and hungry, reverberating through the air, making my insides squirm and my limbs shake. The time stream was pulsing against me, trying to push forward faster. I fought it back as I climbed out of the drawer, kicking it closed behind me.

The urge to cry hadn’t left. It burned my eyes like acid, squeezed my middle like a fist. Half walking, half crawling, I made my way back across the mattress and collapsed in a heap on Nicola’s patchwork quilt. The moment I did, the time stream tore away from me, too fast to control. I tried to slow it down, but I couldn’t hold it anymore.

The barking pitched up, morphing from a drone into an alarm, painfully loud, like ripping metal. Nicola’s chest juddered, her breaths coming staccato quick, her head snapping to the side to look at me. Her pupils and lips blurred, the sound of her voice too high, too fast to understand.

But it didn’t matter.

I was done talking to her.

She said something else, another distorted glitch of noise, then jerked upright. She stood by the bed for a long time, breathing inhumanly fast, eyes aimed toward me, blinking and blinking and blinking. I started to think she could see the hearing aid hidden inside my head, that she was going to pick me up off the bed, yank it out of my face, and throw me back into her backpack.

Fear lumped up inside me, tangling with my exhaustion.

Nic⁠—

She zoomed into the bathroom. The slam of the door whip sharp.

Time began to slow down as she showered, the sound of the pipes in the wall, at first the frantic rap of a snare drum, easing into a familiar rattle. I noticed she’d left her phone lying on the quilt. I army crawled over to it and pawed at the screen with my porcelain hand. Nothing.

I tried my sharpened stick arm. Still nothing.

I hadn’t thought of this.

I didn’t know how touch screens worked, but if I had to guess, it probably had something to do with heat, or maybe electricity, or maybe human skin texture. Three things I didn’t have. I rubbed my stick arm against my duct tape, hoping to generate a little bit of warmth, and touched the screen. It stayed dark. Desperate, I rubbed harder, hard enough that bits of bark came off, and pushed more firmly, willing the screen to light up . . . and it did, with a blaze of glitchy, broken pixels. The image jerked and wobbled with electrical interference for a second before resolving into a home screen covered in app icons.

Nicola didn’t have a pin.

Of course.

She was too trusting.

The pipes were still rattling, Nicola was still in the shower, but she wouldn’t stay there forever, and I needed time to figure this out. I hugged her phone to my chest and scrambled clumsily to the side of the bed. I didn’t mean to fall, but I did, sliding gracelessly down the long drape of the quilt to land on the floorboards, hard enough to thump, but not hard enough to rebreak my legs.