Page 72 of She’s a Doll

I imagined her finding me, taking me back out to the shed, and putting me back on the plywood table, palm flat against my torso, pinning me down. I imagined the rusty hammer, raised aloft. I imagined myself splintering, pieces of me tumbling away, shrinking down into a shard, a fragment. I imagined slipping off that tiny piece, falling away into the darkness, into the nothingness.

“I wish I’d never found you,” Nicola rasped. “I wish I’d never bought you. I wish⁠—”

I’m sorry, I whispered.

Her boots thumped back toward me, shaking the floorboards, like an earthquake. She stopped in the middle of the room, waiting to see if I said anything else. I didn’t. I stayed curled and crumpled beneath the sofa, staring at those boots.

A minute passed.

Then two.

Then ten.

“Fuck you, Lucy McQuinn.” She said the words quiet and slow, so slow I would’ve thought time was lagging if I couldn’t also hear the broken wobble caught in the back of her throat. “Fuck you and fuck your vengeance. You don’t deserve it.”

25

Hours passed before I was brave enough to crawl out from beneath the sofa, weak and exhausted, my anger suffocated, my thoughts spiraling.

I’d fucked up.

I’d fucked everything up.

I’d thought, by sending that recording to Krissy, I’d fix something. Something inside me, something between us, something I couldn’t even name. Instead, I’d brought everything crashing down. I’d been stupid, I’d been selfish. And what was worse, I’d known it. I’d known that by sending that message to Krissy, I was putting Nicola in danger. I’d done it anyway. I’d done it because I wanted to be right. I’d done it because I wanted Krissy to help us. I’d done it because Nicola had dropped me in her backpack and zipped it closed.

I’d done it because I wanted to hurt her.

Nicola’s last words echoed inside my head, over and over again, a CD stuttering on a scratch. “You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it.”

She was right. I didn’t deserve my vengeance. I didn’t deserve her. I was a monster, and a clichéd one at that. The sort that pretended to be your friend, then stabbed you in the back. She’d been the one hanging up the missing-person posters, spray-painting the messages, coming up with the plans and executing them. I was nothing without her. A broken doll on a glass shelf, not even worth the discounted price tag.

I emerged from beneath the sofa and kept crawling, dust clumping around the edges of my duct tape, making it peel and fray. I didn’t try to stand. I couldn’t muster the anger for it. And even if I could, I was broken. Old cracks had reopened, and new ones had formed around the clumps of glue. I felt my consciousness shrink as pieces fell away, a breadcrumb trail of broken porcelain stretched out behind me.

I made it to the hallway and paused, taking in the wreckage.

Nicola’s bedroom door was closed, but everything else hung open. The drawers, the cupboards, the cabinets, even the curtains. The light from the nearby streetlamp painted the contours of the wreckage in flickering, fluorescent blue. Fallen bookshelves, scattered belongings, broken things. The boot prints of the politely knocking police officers covered the carpet.

Time sloshed sticky slow around me, transforming the tick of the clock into a slow throb and the hum of the fridge into a death rattle. I found what I was looking for in the corner of the hallway, lying on its side, clumps of grass still stuck in its wheel treads. The toy car.

I didn’t know what the time was when I dragged myself through the cat flap. The microwave said it was 03:12, the oven said it was 02:54, and the old clock in the hallway said it was 01:10. All that mattered was that it was late enough to be early, Nicola wasn’t coming out of her room, and the street outside was deserted.

I heaved my car through the cat flap, plastic scraping on wood, and fell backward as it slid through. It took a couple of attempts to climb into the toy car’s chassis and several more to press the on button on the remote control duct-taped to the bonnet.

A small green light came on. I leaned against the knobs and the car moved, creeping toward the letter box, the engine grumbling low and slow as time stretched that short pathway out until it felt longer than an airport runway. The streetlight flickered as I finally made it onto the sidewalk and accelerated toward the main street.

The roads were empty.

I zigzagged along the cavernous lanes, weaving around speed bumps and running red lights. I didn’t know where I was going until I reached the first sign. It pointed toward the highway with a giant green arrow.

“She buried him at the pet cemetery,” Nicola had said. “You know the place? It’s a couple of kilometers down the highway in a sheep paddock.”

Cookie.

I didn’t know if the toy car had enough battery to get there. I didn’t care. I steered in the direction of the arrow and accelerated. Dawn was just starting to pinken the horizon when I peeled off the entry ramp and started driving along the highway’s concrete shoulder, tires crunching and bouncing over broken glass and cracked tarmac. In the early-morning fog, the cars appeared suddenly, headlights blazing, engines roaring, then disappeared just as quick, taillights staining the fog red in front of me.

I was too tired, my anger too decomposed, to do anything but lean against the knobs. The toy car’s whirring grew lower and slower as the battery drained, the speed dropping away bit by bit until I was barely moving. Or maybe time was barely moving. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. I just kept rolling forward, adjusting my course only to navigate around discarded hubcaps, chunks of torn rubber, and roadkill⁠—ruined, flattened corpses of rabbits, foxes, birds, a couple of bloated, beaten wombats, and one gargantuan kangaroo.

Its fur was matted flat with dried blood and dew, its body torn open, exposing the broken cage of its ribs and the purplish brown of rotting viscera. Its claws were long and hooked, its legs and tail flung back for its last jump. Scavengers had already eaten the flesh off its face, leaving the skull exposed and yawning wider than it ever could’ve in life.