Page 86 of She’s a Doll

She stopped pacing and fixed me with a long, tortured look. “Don’t you?”

It struck me then how much better she knew Ginger. Ginger had always been in my life, that kid in class who seemed to shine just a little bit brighter than everyone else. But Nicola had been Ginger’s friend. Their orbit closer, more intimate, more real.

“I don’t want her to get hurt,” Nicola said. “Even after everything, I don’t want her to get hurt. I know it’s pathetic⁠—”

That’s not pathetic.

“Then why do you sound like that? Like you don’t want this plan to work?”

I wasn’t sure. If Sandy Brown was another victim, if she had some evidence that would put Kyle in handcuffs, I should be reaching for that with everything my cold, dead soul could muster. But I wasn’t. A part of me just didn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine it would be so easy. I also couldn’t imagine it would be enough.

Even if everything went as perfectly as it could, even if Kyle did end up behind bars, would he get a life sentence? Would the world know everything that he’d done? Would I be able to read about it in the paper and feel OK again?

The storm inside me said no. It said no with a fierceness, a desperateness that I couldn’t contain. I felt hollow, I felt angry, I felt like a pile of unskinned nerves, exposed and electric with pain. Kyle had ended my life, destroyed my grandma’s. He’d hurt Nicola, and Ginger, and probably Sandy Brown too, and for what? For what? How could any of this make up for that? How could anything Sandy Brown gave us make any of that OK?

I’m a ghost, I said. Plan C isn’t a ghost’s plan.

“What does that mean?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“Lu,” Nicola said softly, and came back to the table, leaning her elbows against it so we were at eye level. “Talk to me. I thought this would be good news. We might have something here. Another person. A witness, maybe. Not to what happened to you, but to who and what he is.”

I can do Plan B, I said. I still can do it. I can haunt him. I can make him confess.

Nicola was already shaking her head. “Plan B is done. He knows it’s me. Krissy said he’d take me to court if I didn’t cease and desist. Literally, those are the words she used. Cease and desist.”

That’s why you can’t do it. But I can.

“Lu,” she said, low and tired. “That’s not⁠—”

Listen. Go to Sydney. Find Sandy Brown. Take your phone, location on, meet her somewhere with CCTV. Leave me here and⁠—

“No,” Nicola was already saying. “I’m not leaving you.”

Please, trust me. I trusted you. I did what you wanted. I stayed quiet when you talked to Ginger.

“Actually, you spoke twice when I was with Ginger.”

I . . . I’m sorry. I . . .

“It’s OK,” Nicola said. “I can tell the difference between stuff you say on purpose and stuff you say by mistake.”

You can?

“Yeah. The stuff you say by mistake is fainter, further away, sometimes jumbled, like you’re thinking all the words at once, or out of order. Sometimes you don’t even sound like you. Sometimes you sound like . . . other people.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing, and for a minute that silence stuck. We stayed there, her leaning against the table, me sitting on it. Her skin was pale beneath her freckles, her eyes shadowed, her mullet even shaggier than normal. For the first time I noticed that some of the tattoos on her arm were unfinished. Cartoonish flowers fading into nothing.

“You’re about to tell me how gross I look,” she whispered. “I can tell.”

You don’t look gross.

“I feel gross.”

I’m growing mold, I reminded her. You’re fine.

The smile that twisted her lips was a small, tight, unhappy thing. She bowed her head, hiding it from me, and sucked in a deep, shaky breath. “OK,” she said, voice tight and quick. “Fine. What’s your plan?”