Page 75 of She’s a Doll

A shadow fell over me.

“You. Are. The. Worst.”

My porcelain went cold, my stitches tight. Slowly, I turned my head to look up at her. Nicola stood over me in an oversize yellow raincoat, hood up, shielding her face from the worst of the rain. Her lips were pressed flat, her car keys hanging from her knuckles, jangling with the shaking of her hands.

Nic . . .

“The fucking worst,” she snapped. “I’ve been looking for you for weeks. For weeks.”

You said you⁠—

“Wished I’d never met you? Yeah. I do. I really fucking do. But guess what? I did meet you. I did. And that means something to me. Everything’s tits up now because of you. My life is ruined. But that doesn’t mean you get to just vanish in the middle of the night like a gh⁠—” Her voice broke into a ragged inhale. With horror I realized she was crying, the big, gasping, gross sort of crying, the real sort of crying.

Fear and confusion smashed and tangled inside me, violent and toothy. I wanted to talk to her, to run from her, to beg her forgiveness, or maybe just let her kick and smash me to pieces.

I thought you wanted me t⁠—

“You’re so fucking stupid,” she snarled, and scrubbed at her face, rough and angry. “You think I wanted you to leave? You think I wanted all that to be for nothing? I wanted to spend weeks looking for you? Weeks thinking maybe I was crazy after all? Weeks thinking I’d imagined everything?”

I . . . didn’t think . . .

“Oh. Great. That’s just great. She didn’t think. Just like when you messaged Krissy, you didn’t think. Well, guess what, Lu, you need to start thinking. You’re smart. I know you are. You use too many snobby words to be stupid.”

I just . . . I didn’t think Krissy would⁠—

“And I can barely hear you!” she yelled. “You couldn’t have chosen somewhere dry, could you? Somewhere indoors? Somewhere not beside a literal fucking highway? Background noise makes it harder for me to hear, you know. But no, oh no. You spooky little shits never think about anyone but yourself. So here we are, in the freezing cold, knocking off Stephen King, because of course, of fucking course.”

I’m sorry, I said, forming the thought as clearly as I could. I’m sorry. I betrayed you. I⁠—

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, you sure did. But that’s not all you did. Before you betrayed me, you gave me hope, the first tiny piece of hope I’d had in a long time, and then you left and took that hope with you.”

I started to shake. I couldn’t stop.

“You know the thing that kept me going?” she said. “The one tiny piece of evidence that you left me?” She dug into the massive raincoat pocket and pulled out a tatty old book. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel.

My Bubble Wrap clumped up high in my chest. That’s⁠—

“You told me your grandma’s books were at the store.” Her voice scraped out of her throat like sandpaper. “That meant you must’ve been real, because I didn’t know that, but you told me, and when I looked I found this.” She yanked open the front cover. Six words were scrawled on the white of the page, below the title, in my never-quite-got-a-pen-license handwriting: Property of the McQuinns. Paws off!!!

I thought you never wanted to see me again, I whispered.

“I decide that,” Nicola snarled, and snapped the book closed. “I decide when I’m done, not you. After everything, you just left, without even a ‘thank you,’ without even an ‘I’m sorry,’ without even a ‘goodbye.’ You left.” Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes red, and her skin pale beneath her freckles. She looked like Grandma had looked when she’d picked me up.

I’m sorry, I said again.

“No. Fuck you. Fuck you. You don’t even . . . you don’t even know. You don’t know what you did. I looked everywhere for you, Lu. I tore up the apartment, the floorboards, I climbed back up that billboard, I walked around the street at night and called your name. I didn’t think of this place until this morning. Have you been here this whole time?”

Yeah.

She threw the book down in the mud at my feet and started pacing, her boots squashing, her hands shaking. “It’s so obvious,” she croaked. “I should’ve known this was where you were. I should’ve known. I’m so . . .”

The rain was starting to come down harder again, morphing from a drizzle into a soft but drenching shower. I reached out and clumsily pulled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into my lap, heaving closed the massive cover before the pages could get any wetter.

Nicola kept pacing, ripping through the grass and thistles, sliding in the mud, slipping, but not enough for her to fall, not enough for her to stop. There was a wildness to her that hadn’t been there before, a fury. I watched her pace, all hard edges and stamping feet, her breath steaming the air in front of her face.

Does everyone hate you? I asked weakly.

“No,” she snapped. “No. It’s worse than that. They don’t hate me. They pity me. Kyle said he didn’t want to press charges, that he understood that I didn’t mean any harm, and oh what a good guy he is, what a hero. That’s what my parents said when they gave me money for a fancy psychiatrist. That’s what Krissy said in her stupid video about this. I should be grateful Kyle is such a nice upstanding empathetic guy.”