Page 3 of Cracked Doll

"Doesn't she own anything from this century?"

“I mean, she is a beauty. Her looks have no parallel. But she is so odd.

“The most beautiful girl in town, yet such a freak. All that beauty in a girl who avoids everyone in town, and dresses like she doesn't belong in this time.”

“A pretty freak.”

I keep walking. Autumn leaves drift down around me, red and gold, and one lands directly in my open palm as though it planned to. I stop and look at it — just a leaf, just a small, ordinary, dying thing — and for one strange moment it's the most beautiful object I've seen all week.

That's when the feeling starts.

I've been watched my whole life. I know what that feels like — the specific prickle of a stranger's curiosity, the weight of gossip following you down a street. This isn't that. This is different. Colder. Deliberate. The hair on the back of my neck rises like something's breathed on it, and every instinct in my body says turn around — and every instinct I've spent seven years training says don't, don't you dare, you don't know what you might see — and so I do neither. I simply walk faster, my heart slamming, until the feeling fades somewhere around the corner of Church Street.

Aldridge's is the only shop in town I can stand to linger in. No mirrors on the walls, nothing but wire spools and glass eyes and little tins of pigment for doll restoration — Mrs. Aldridge keeps it that way for the trade, not for me, but I've never been more grateful for a business owner's practicality.

Someone by the door mutters as I pass, "You know it's not Goth Weekend every day, love," with a little laugh that isn't really about the joke at all. I don't answer. I never do.

The woman behind the counter isn't Mrs. Aldridge today. She's younger, warm brown skin, a great soft cloud of dark hair falling past her shoulders, and she smiles at me like she means it — a rare enough thing that it catches me off guard.

"There you are," she says. "Was wondering when you'd be back for your usual."

I nod, still not quite lifting my eyes past her collarbone, and let her gather what I need — the wire, the pigment, a fresh set of glass eyes in three sizes. When I pay, she leans in, voice dropping, conspiratorial.

"Don't mind that lot out there," she says. "Whatever happened to your family seven years back — that's a tragedy. It's not your fault people round here don't know how to be decent about it. They'd rather call you strange than admit they never once brought your family a casserole." She shakes her head. "They're the freaks, if you ask me. Not you."

Something in my chest loosens, just slightly, just for a moment. "Thank you," I manage.

She grins and sticks out a hand. "Sorry — I'm Amara."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Ophelia."

"Oh, I know," she says, laughing. "Everyone knows Ophelia." She says it without cruelty, which is new. "That's a proper tragic name to be saddled with, isn't it. Drowned girl, madness, the whole bit. Is that why you're so gothic — parents saw the name coming and decided to commit?"

I've read the play. I know exactly how it ends for the girl who shares my name — flowers, a river, a mind that broke quietly and then all at once. "Maybe that's the reason," I say, and something in my voice must sound like a joke, because Amara laughs again, delighted.

"I like you. You're so beautiful," she declares. "I'm a goth girl myself, if you couldn't tell." She gestures vaguely at her all-black outfit. "Goth Weekend's coming up — October's only just started. You should come with me. Might be nice to be normal for two whole days."

"Sure," I say, though the word comes out uncertain even to my own ears.

I gather my things and go. Behind me, as the door swings shut, I catch the tail end of someone muttering something about that odd Sorrell girl — and Amara's voice, sharp and sudden: "What's your problem? Seriously — what is your problem?"

I smile, just a little, all the way home.

The shop is dark when I return, and the till is exactly as empty as I knew it would be.

I don't bother checking twice. I climb the narrow stair behind the counter, past the sitting room where the sober apologies and the drunk cruelties happen in the same worn chair, up to the top floor where my room sits at the end of the hall.

I pass the other door without meaning to look at it. I always look at it anyway.

It hasn't been opened in seven years. Dust on the handle, a thin skin of cobweb in the frame. Behind it: two small beds, untouched. Toys my father made with his own hands, for the daughters he still had three of, once. I used to think I'd go in on my eighteenth birthday. I used to think a lot of things I no longer believe.

My own room is small, plain, deliberately empty of anything that could catch light and throw it back at me. I sit at the window instead, knees drawn up, and watch Whitby fold itself into evening.

From up here you can see the whole shape of the town — the abbey ruins black against a sky bruising toward violet, gulls circling the harbor one last time before dark, gas-lamps blinking on along the cobbles like a string of small, deliberate stars. It really is the most beautiful place in the world, this town that loves its ghosts. I've just never quite been able to love it back, not fully, not when it insists on being so beautiful while everything inside these walls falls apart.

I let myself remember them. Just for tonight, just because it's the one night I let myself.

Cordelia's laugh, too loud for her size. Rosalind, always the gentlest of us, plaiting my hair while I plaited hers, three heads bent together, three faces so alike our own mother — before she died bringing us into the world — could hardly have told us apart if she'd lived to try. Black hair. Ice-blue eyes. We were identical enough that strangers used to gasp.