Page 74 of She’s a Doll

Except that was a lie. I knew exactly why I was there, alone in the pet cemetery, trapped in a small and probably already moldy body held together with duct tape. It was because I hadn’t told anyone it was my graduation day. If I’d done that, if I’d said something at Ginger’s party, if I hadn’t been up in my own head about it, I could’ve had a nice time. I could’ve gotten to know Nicola, and perhaps some of Ginger’s other friends too. I could’ve stayed there and dinged my teaspoon with them all night long. But I didn’t.

Why did I let that party get to me? Why did I look at those stupid Instagram comments? Why was that why I called Krissy? Why didn’t I hang up the second I heard Kyle’s voice? Why had I let him in the house despite Cookie’s warnings? Why had any of this happened?

Why did Kyle do that to me?

Why couldn’t I stop him?

What’s going to happen now?

I thought of Ginger in her wedding dress, looking like a porcelain doll, a toy, dressed up as a bride. I thought of Nicola as she’d been at Ginger’s tea party, long brown hair, shy, uncertain smile. I thought of Krissy.

The last time we’d hung out, back when both of our hearts beat, we’d played Monopoly. I remembered the organized way she’d laid out the Play-Doh-colored notes and how she’d wrinkled her nose when the dice tumbled into two ones.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she’d asked as she nudged the silver Scottie dog forward a couple of spaces and drew from the community chest.

“Don’t look now, Krissy. But we’re grown.”

“No we aren’t. Grown people have shit figured out. I’ve got nothing figured out.”

“What do you want to be?”

“I don’t know. I’m meant to know by now, right? But I don’t. I thought I was going to become a teacher, but⁠—”

“But you hate school.”

“But I hate school,” she replied with a dramatic sigh. The dice rolled again. Two threes. I watched as she moved the dog up onto the vacant lot. It was one of the good ones, big and expensive, the last of a set.

I looked down at my own properties, lined up in front of me, few in number and grossly mismatched. I’d known I wasn’t going to win this game. Weirdly, it was a relief. I didn’t have to keep caring if the conclusion was set in stone.

“How’s your course going?” she asked.

“Almost finished.”

“Business, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do when it’s done?”

“Business, I guess.”

“Hate to break it to you, Lucy. But you don’t seem particularly good at taking care of business.” Another roll. Two sixes. I thought there was a rule about getting three doubles in a row. Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. But Krissy didn’t say anything, and so I didn’t either. She just moved the dog to its new spot, drew another card, and passed it to the empty seat beside her.

There was something wrong with that seat in my memory. It was set out from the table, cards and properties laid in front of it, but empty, shadowy, wrong.

“It’s my turn now,” Krissy said, which didn’t make sense, but somehow, in this memory, I nodded and watched as she rolled and moved her piece, the thimble, to a new spot.

It didn’t matter anyway.

I’d already lost.

27

It was a slow but soaking sort of wet, not heavy, not accompanied by booms of thunder or the weaving white tails of lightning, but still somehow able to flood gutters, to make tree branches hang heavy, to turn all the colors crisp and cold. Claudia was hiding in a crack in Cookie’s gravestone, angrily swiping the water from her fur, eight eyes glaring balefully up at the fuzzy gray sky. I imagined her with a voice like Gollum, all raspy and raw. We hatesss the wetsss. Then I reconsidered and assigned her an old English lady’s voice, the kind that you’d hear in a BBC drama. This weather is just frightful. How can I be expected to endure under such conditions?

It’s not that bad, I told her. And it wasn’t. Rain was like one big shower, really. I missed showering. I missed feeling clean. I missed the routine of it, the privacy, the prickly pruned feeling of freshly scrubbed skin. This wasn’t that, but it felt close, water running over my brow, clearing the dust from my eye, and soaking into my fabric shoulders until I felt too heavy to move.

I heard the slosh of a car bouncing through a puddle, the snarl of an ancient handbrake, and the gutting of an engine, but didn’t bother turning my head. People came sometimes. Not often, but occasionally. Last week a family had buried a goldfish here in a cardboard takeout container. It had been a brief but beautiful ceremony. A boy in too-big boots gave a shaky rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings,” reprised as “Water Beneath My Fins,” sniffing loudly and wiping his eyes every few words. I wondered what was being buried today. A dog? A cat? A rabbit? A toad? I wondered what musical accompaniment I could expect.