Page 87 of She’s a Doll

I don’t have a plan.

“That’s a lie. I know you, Lu. You have an idea. It’s probably a stupid idea, an insane idea, but you have one.”

She was right. I had an idea, flimsy and full of holes. It was an idea that had started to form as I lay in the back seat of Nicola’s car, listening to the quiet quake in Ginger’s voice.

“Lu?”

I messaged Krissy, I said. I didn’t know I could do that until I did it. I could call Kyle. I could haunt him that way.

She exhaled and looked back up at me. “You’d need a phone to do that.”

I jerked my head in my best approximation of a nod.

“So . . . what? You want me to put on a face mask, go into town, buy a burner with cash?”

I can’t do this without you. I don’t want to do this without you. But just think about it. They wouldn’t be able to blame you if you had an alibi.

“That’s a long-winded way of saying yes, that’s exactly what you want me to do.”

Go and see Sandy Brown, I said, trying my best to sound reasonable, to sound sane. Take Ginger. I’ll stay here and keep the pressure on him. I don’t even need your hearing aid to do it. And maybe it’ll work. Maybe it’ll scare him enough to confess. You heard Ginger, he was crying. Maybe just one more stone is all it’ll take. Maybe we can still start that avalanche.

Nicola didn’t look convinced. “You really think that? Everyone at the police station just wrote your last message off as AI. Why wouldn’t he just assume the same thing? Why wouldn’t he just block you immediately after the first call? How would you even get his number in the first place?”

What else good am I? I asked. I’m a ghost. If I came to see Sandy Brown, I’d just be hiding in your backpack, in the dark, saying nothing, doing nothing.

“I’d want you there.”

I don’t want to be dead, I said, the thought ringing in my own head, a slice of truth that cut straight to my moldy, rotten core. I don’t want to be quiet and still, hidden away in a dark place, only listening. Please don’t ask me to do that again. Please. I can’t do that. I can’t.

“Lu.” Nicola rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I just . . . I’m still fucked up over the way you just vanished after everything went to hell. And yeah, I get that I said some shit to you, some shit I really shouldn’t have said, but⁠—”

I’m not going to vanish.

“Then why not just come with me? Why can’t we stay together? Why bother with a plan that failed?”

I need to do something, I said. Something real. I don’t want to be carried around, I don’t want to be just a witness. I want . . . I want Plan C to work. I really do. But . . .

“But Plan C isn’t a ghost plan,” she muttered. “And Plan B is.”

Plan B was your plan, I reminded her. And I think I can do it. I think I can scare him, I can haunt him. At least let me try. I can keep the pressure on. It might not help, but if I only do it when you have an alibi, it can’t hurt.

“Can’t hurt,” she repeated, voice thick with sarcasm. Despite it, I could tell I’d gotten through to her. Perhaps not all the way through, but she was listening to me, hearing me. That was good, because already I was thinking through the different steps of my plan, coloring in the blanks, looking for ways to give it teeth. The more I thought about it, the more desperate I was to try it.

I didn’t think I’d be able to make a difference. Probably I was wasting my time. Almost certainly I was. But at least I’d be doing something. At least I wouldn’t be lying, dead and still, listening to the world rushing on without me. At least I wouldn’t be just a doll, a prop, a toy to be pulled out as some party trick.

“Hey,” Nicola said, fishing that thought out of my mind with terrifying ease. “Don’t put yourself down like that. You’re not a toy. You’re a vengeful spirit who can control time, remember?”

Does that mean yes? I was terrified even to ask, but I needed to know. You’ll get me a phone?

“You’re going to do something else,” she said with a surety that unbalanced me. “You’re planning something. I know you are. I don’t know what, but I know this won’t end at a phone call.”

I don’t know what I’m planning either, I admitted. Maybe I’ll come up with something. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe nothing I do will make a single shred of difference . . . For a single, sickening moment the memory of my death clawed its way to the front of my mind. Kyle pinning me down, his face contorted and red, his hand crushing me down into blackness, into nothingness, into death. But maybe . . . maybe I can do something. Maybe I can.

Nicola studied me.

But I need you to trust me.

“Trust you?”