Page 99 of She’s a Doll

“Lucy brought Cruisers?” Nicola said, looking down at me. “Holy shit. I didn’t know it was that kind of party.”

“It wasn’t,” I said.

“It wasn’t,” Ginger echoed a beat later. “My mum would’ve freaked if she knew. She was convinced I needed to lose weight. Sugary, alcoholic drinks like that? No way. I hid them. After Lucy vanished, I told myself I’d give them back to her when she came back and⁠—”

“Do you still have them?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ginger said. “I still have them. I couldn’t throw them away. Not when Lucy said she’d come back and get them.”

“Did I say that?”

“Are you . . . are you serious? That was the last thing you ever said to me, Lucy. I’ve thought about those words every day for years. There were nights I couldn’t stop thinking about them and you forgot?”

“I had a lot going on! Have you ever had to control-alt-delete your way out of death? It’s not as easy as it looks, you know.”

Nicola was laughing, hoarse, barking, and beautiful.

Ginger looked like she’d rather be crying.

I wished I could do both. I wanted to laugh, to cry, to howl and dance and show the concrete puddle I’d left in the construction site middle fingers I didn’t have. Kyle was dead. He wouldn’t hurt anyone else ever again, and it didn’t save me, killing him didn’t save me, but that didn’t matter, I couldn’t let it matter, I wouldn’t let it matter. Because I’d won. I’d won. And that was a good thing. A good thing.

I didn’t realize I’d started shaking until Nicola squeezed me tighter with her arm, locking my limbs against her side.

“It’s OK, Lu. It’s OK.”

No, I said, no longer projecting my voice into my phone, no longer wanting to talk to anyone but her. It’s not. I fucked up. I died. I was⁠—

“That’s OK, that’s OK.”

I stole your GoPro. I stole it and lost it. I’m sorry.

She coughed out a tight laugh. “That thing hasn’t worked for years. But, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll add it to your bill. Why did you have it?”

I was trying to make him confess. But then I . . . I couldn’t . . . I . . .

“It’s OK. It’s O⁠—”

He told me where he left me, I said, softer, sadder. He didn’t bury me. He just put me in an old wombat hole on the creek and covered up the entrance. It was beneath a big, old willow. Krissy and I used to play there when we were kids.

Nicola’s face was a schooled mask.

He might’ve been lying. I don’t know. I’m sorry.

“It’s OK,” she said again, quieter but more confidently this time, and turned back to Ginger, who was crying silently as she stared at me. “Take Kyle’s car home,” Nicola told her. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’re going to the creek.”

“The creek?” Ginger repeated.

Nicola nodded. “Bring a shovel.”

34

I sat on the grassy embankment beside the creek and watched as a storm crept down the distant hills, a solid lump of dark cloud and flickering light. Ginger stood beside me, wrapped in Nicola’s yellow rain jacket, blonde hair whipping around her head as the wind plucked and pulled at her, fickle and mean.

Half in the creek, half on the jagged dirt edge stood an old, dead willow tree, branches spindly and black, bark cracking and peeling away. When I was a kid, it’d been green, alive, the names of lovers carved into the trunk new enough that they were still tacky with sap. Now it looked like something from a Tim Burton movie.

What if we can’t find it? I asked. I didn’t want to say “me.” I didn’t want to think about this place being my grave . . . even though it was.

“Then we come back tomorrow,” Nicola called up at me. She was in the creek, knee-deep in water, hacking at the muddy roots of the willow tree with a shovel. “I’m not leaving your body out here, Lu. Your family deserves to know what happened. We’ll find you. I don’t care if I have to dig up the whole goddamned tree.”