14 #3
And B? I asked eventually, the thought small in my own mind.
“And what?” Nicola replied.
You said A, implying the existence of a B.
“Oh. Right. And (B) you thought everyone made fun of you after you left, which . . . I don’t know what that is. A persecution complex, maybe?”
Some of you were definitely judging me.
“Some of me?”
Some of the others.
“Like who?”
Ginger’s mum.
Nicola sighed. “Yeah. She was shitty to me too. Honestly, I think Mrs. Béliveau is shitty to everyone. Remember in cooking class when she said Brooke didn’t look pretty enough to be a bad cook?
Yeah. She’s a piece of work. Pretty sure that’s why Ginger’s so eager to please all the time. Shitty-parent-itis.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“It wasn’t a very good party,” Nicola said. “Honestly, parties at Ginger’s house never really were. They’re more about the Insta pics, you know? I’m pretty sure all of us were on our phones before the sun had even set. We weren’t gossiping about you.”
I . . . I guess I . . .
“You projected your insecurities onto us,” she said, humiliatingly perceptive. “Which is wild because you always seemed like the biggest, bravest person in school. You argued with teachers. You entered cosplay contests and won.”
Second place, novice division.
“Still.”
Look, I . . . I just got the vibe that . . . I don’t know. You were all so pretty, and I . . .
“Let me guess, you’re not like other girls.”
Well, no, I’m not. No two humans are perfectly alike. Also, I’m a haunted doll.
“I think the point might’ve nicked you as it skated over your head there.”
I glared at the cables and cobwebs, feeling sick and angry and hopeless and helpless and small and pathetic and dead.
I wanted to hate Nicola for being a coward.
I did hate her for being a coward. But I also knew how stupid and unfair hating her for that was, which made me feel even smaller, even sadder, even more pathetic.
“OK,” Nicola said after a while. “I’m worried you’re going to mess up my TV. Can you come out now?”
I didn’t move.
“If you come out, I’ll show you a photo I found online. I think you’re gonna want to see it.”
Kyle killed me, I said. Kyle. Did no one even look at him? Was he even a suspect?
“I don’t know, Lu.”
And Grandma wasn’t a hoarder, by the way. Not really. I mean, not as bad as those on TV. There was nothing gross in our house. You could get to every room. There were only a couple of places it was piled up really high. Just . . . I think after my mum died, it became hard letting go and . . .
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said. “I’m sorry about what I said. I’m sorry about what everyone else said. I’m sorry. But I also really, really need you to come out and look at this photo.”
I didn’t want to come out. I wanted to stay tangled in the dusty zigzag of cords and scream some more.
But Nicola’s voice was even and coaxing, and the truth was, more than anything else, I didn’t want her to stop talking.
It was strange how anchoring conversation was.
The simple ping-pong of saying something and having someone else respond.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed that after my murder .
. . or how terrified I’d be of losing it.
Of losing her. Of being left alone again.
I didn’t want to hurt her anymore . . . and knowing that I had hurt her only a few moments ago made me feel broken and wrong.
“Are you coming out?”
Yeah, I responded. Yeah. I just . . . I . . . Just give me a sec.
Slowly, in jerky movements, I pulled myself free of the cables and crawled out from behind the TV.
Nicola was sitting cross-legged on the floor, phone in her lap.
As I emerged, she reached out and wiped a spiderweb from my face, knocking my eye patch askew.
“Sorry,” she said as she fixed it. And then, quieter, “And sorry about . . . about your grandma. I know this is all still really new for you.”
It’s OK, I muttered, even though it wasn’t, and pushed her hands away from me.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
I’m dead. I’m not getting better.
A wry smile tugged at her lips. “Right. Of course. How could I forget?”
What photo did you want to show me?
She nodded and turned her phone around.
My Bubble Wrap clenched and my stitches went tight.
Grandma, I whispered.
“So that is your grandma?” she asked. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to say anything, in case it wasn’t.”
That’s her, I said, still shaking. I thought of the dolls at Trash N’ Treasure, of Grandma’s furniture scattered across the store, her books piled up, her favorite chair with a discount sign on it. A fear I hadn’t yet faced, bubbling hot inside me. She’s alive?
“The photo was posted a year ago, so I don’t know. But she was alive then.”
Where’d you find it?
“I looked at your old Insta messages again. There was one from Dawn, which I figured must’ve been your aunt. I did some snooping. She doesn’t post much on Instagram, but she’s pretty active on Facebook. It says she lives in Christchurch now.”
Christchurch? As in . . . New Zealand?
“Do you know any other Christchurch?”
It didn’t make any sense. Auntie Dawn didn’t live in New Zealand. As far as I knew, she’d never even left the country.
“I scrolled back years,” Nicola said. “She posted a whole bunch of stuff around the time you disappeared. That’s when she messaged you too, asking you to come home if you could.
She was the one working with the police, organizing the search efforts, until she had to step down.
Apparently, the pressure was too much and she had some kind of mental breakdown? ”
Why’d they move to New Zealand?
Nicola didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
The answer to that question was painfully, wretchedly obvious.
We lived in a small town, the sort where each family had an aisle in the cemetery and the local paper reported on the primary school soccer game.
If everyone blamed Grandma for my death, then no one would ever treat her the same way ever again.
There’d always be sideways glances, insults whispered behind cupped hands.
Gossip never died in this town. It took root.
I didn’t need to hear it to know what shape it would take.
My grandma had already lost a daughter. Now a granddaughter .
. . She was driven mad by grief. That was what they’d say.
She had a violent history, signs of mental illness. It was only a matter of time.
“I’ve never been to New Zealand,” Nicola said softly. “It looks nice.”
It did.
In the photo, the sky was a pristine blue and streaked with long whips of white cloud, the grass was shining gold, and the sun whited out one corner of the picture.
Grandma and Auntie Dawn were standing at the edge of a lake, hiking boots muddy, cheeks flushed hot, blotchy pink.
The water behind them reflected the rugged, snow-covered peaks on the horizon.
I looked at those mountains and thought of Grandma’s favorite shirt. My other pair of shoes are skis. I wondered if she’d tried skiing yet. I wondered if she loved it as much as she’d imagined she would. I hoped so. I hoped Cookie was with her, prancing in the snow, big, happy, and dumb.
I stared at the photo until Nicola’s phone went dark. The black screen reflected my face back at me, dusty and one-eyed, broken and patched back together, coy smile still locked in place.
I thought she’d died, I muttered. When I saw her stuff at Trash N’ Treasure . . .
“Her stuff’s there?”
Yeah. It was. Some of it. Her books. Her chair. What does it matter?
“There could be some evide—”
Stop. Please. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to retrace my steps. I don’t want to dig through the pieces of my life looking for clues. I don’t want to make a game of my own murder.
“I’m not trying to make a game,” Nicola said. “I’m just . . . shit. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
I know. And that was what made it worse.
I knew Nicola thought what she was doing was right.
I knew that perhaps, in some other, less fucked-up world, it would be.
Handcuffs and a prison cell for him. A bright, heavenly light for me.
But that wasn’t right, that wasn’t real.
That was the sort of thing that only made sense in TV shows, where endings were scripted and not . . . senseless, random, crushing.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
Nicola was swiping and tapping at her phone, frowning and chewing uncertainly at her cheek.
What are you looking for?
“There’s another photo you need to see, and this one isn’t going to be fun. But I think you need to understand that . . . well . . . you’ve been gone for a long time.”
I know that.
“Yeah. You do. But also, you don’t. Because . . .” She sighed. “Because this shit isn’t black-and-white. It should be. Believe me, I know it should be. But it isn’t. There are people in the crossfire. People I think you care about.”
What are you—
“Promise you won’t hide behind my TV again.”
Why?
“Promise.”
No, I snapped. No, I don’t promise. What’s—
She turned her phone around again, showing me a new photo.
A wedding photo.
A young couple standing beneath a flowery arch.
Strangely, it was Ginger I recognized first. Her curly blonde hair, her dimpled smile, her bluer-than-blue eyes.
Her dress was jellyfish round, her usually pink cheeks made matte with foundation, and her hair threaded with ribbon.
Her veil hung over her shoulder like a ghost, one of those wear-a-sheet-and-say-boo kinds, pressing uncomfortably close.
Beside her, in a blue suit, coppery-brown hair brushed back, was Kyle.