Page 88 of She’s a Doll

Yes.

The silence that followed was longer and heavier than the last. I wished I could read her mind the way she could sometimes read mine. I wished I could hear an echo of her thoughts, her feelings, her hopes, her fears. I wished I knew what that look in her eyes meant.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

I’d betrayed her trust before. I hadn’t even been able to stay quiet when she spoke to Ginger. She had no reason to trust me. No reason to believe I wouldn’t put her in danger again. No reason to give me anything. And yet I was asking. I was begging.

Despite everything she’d already done for me, I was begging for more. I knew it was obscene. I knew it wasn’t fair. But I wanted this, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time. I wanted a weapon to use against Kyle. I wanted to be more than just a dead girl with a sad story. I wanted a chance to take my vengeance . . . and I wanted her trust.

I needed it.

“OK,” she finally said. “OK. I’ll get you a phone. The cheapest, shittiest phone I can. Which, by the way, will still probably be at least a hundred dollars. That’s another thing you owe me.”

Thank you, I said, somehow both relieved and terrified. Thank you thank you thank⁠—

“Don’t thank me. Just . . . be careful, OK?”

I’m dead. What’s the worst that can happen?

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. If my phone call to Krissy had taught me anything, it was that, even though I was dead, things could get worse, a lot worse. I needed to be careful, a lot more careful than I had been. I needed to make sure I wasn’t putting the people that mattered in danger.

Kyle was the one I wanted to hurt. Kyle was who needed to pay for what he’d done. Kyle, and no one else.

Already my mind was churning, trying to configure ways I could unstitch him, unmake him, things I could say that might reveal who and what he really was . . . and how to keep Nicola and Ginger and Krissy as far away from the resulting fallout as possible.

Nicola picked something off the ground. A large cardboard box with a faded red-and-white logo on the side.

What’s that? I asked, grateful for the distraction.

“Your new body,” she said with forced-sounding cheer.

That doesn’t look like doll parts.

“That’s because it isn’t.” She dumped it out on the workbench. Colorful strips of metal clanged and clanked onto the plywood, a child-size tool kit and a couple of little plastic bags of nuts and bolts plopping down on top.

What am I looking at?

“Meccano,” she said. “You ever see Toy Story?”

What’s Toy Story got to do with anything?

“It was playing on the TV the other day,” she said, tossing aside the empty box. “Just randomly. Honestly, I was barely paying attention. I just needed some background noise, I guess. There’s a character in it. I Googled them. Babyface. They’re a baby-doll head on a metal spider body. Freaky as hell.”

Oh, I said, and looked at the piles of brightly colored metal. Among them I spotted a couple of crab-like claws. Oh fuck yeah.

Nicola grinned. “I thought you’d like it, what with being a cosplay show winner and all.”

Second place, novice division.

“With this,” she said, picking up a piece of metal and brandishing it triumphantly, “first place. Guaranteed.”

It took her hours. After two, she eventually stopped trying to wing it and read the instructions. My new body was a metal plate with eight spiderlike legs bolted onto the sides, the nuts screwed in loose enough to give the joints movement, but not so loose as to risk coming undone. The metal crab claws she bolted onto the front, snapping them a few times with her fingers to make sure they worked.

Then came the scary part.

She pulled out the glue gun, plugged it in, and fed a stick of glue into the back. “You sure you want to do this?”