21
Three days later, spring ambushed. Hot air flooded in from the outback, flowers erupted, and insects swarmed.
The Flower Festival—the town’s annual springtime celebration—took over the park, and a convoy of trucks blocked off the main street, a parade to celebrate the best local gardener, winner decided via Facebook poll.
This year, the flower queen was a woman named Edith. She sat on a hay-bale throne in the back of a flatbed truck, tiara pinned onto her fluffy white curls, face flushed with embarrassment and delight as she waved at the people on the pavement.
We were among them, Nicola holding me up so I could see.
Nicola was wearing a flower crown and had given me a pair of fairy wings: wiry, glittery, and pink, the elastic shoulder straps knotted around my middle, the wingspan as wide as I was tall.
When I caught a couple staring, I took a leaf out of Edith’s book and waved.
Someone screamed, someone else laughed, a third person tapped Nicola on the shoulder and politely informed her of the situation. “Your doll moved.”
“It’s haunted,” Nicola explained.
“Ah. That’s a cool idea. Is it a puppet or battery powered?”
It was October, a month that was slowly but surely being consumed by Halloween, an American holiday that had been in the early stages of importation when I was a kid but was clearly gaining a foothold now.
The Flower Festival was not spared. In among the brightly colored stalls, the flowers, and the fairies, there were sheet ghosts, movie monsters, and the Scooby gang, laughing as they took a selfie together in front of the fountain.
The face painter was doing as many skulls as they were butterflies, the local busker was collecting cash donations in a plastic jack-o’-lantern, and a couple of cardboard skeletons were swinging from the branches of the nearby cherry blossom tree.
It was weird. It was messy. It was kinda fucked up.
And for the first time in a really, really long time, I fit in.
Once the parade was over, Nicola tucked me under her arm and walked around the festival, stopping to sample the honey, pet a dog, and buy a paper bag of overpriced cherries. It was the first real food I’d seen her eat, and she ate them in the most cursed way imaginable, pits, stalks, and all.
There’s something deeply wrong with you.
She ignored me, probably because there were people around, and carrying a weird creepy doll with you was bad enough, but talking to it was another thing entirely.
In the interest of keeping Nicola out of the insane asylum, I didn’t say anything else.
The last thing I needed was for the one human who could hear me to go the way of Renfield.
Eventually, after we’d looped around the festival a couple of times, she found a spot in the corner of the park, away from the crowds, and sat with her back against a tree.
I tottered around, drawing alarmed and amused looks from passersby while she pulled my car out of her backpack.
Driving on grass was harder than I’d expected.
It tangled around the front axle and turned the wheels slimy-wet.
Several times, I hit a hidden pit or stone and flipped the car over.
Nicola would only sigh and walk over to set me back on my wheels again.
The world looked like it had a filter on it.
The sky too blue, the grass too green, the chaotic mashup of the crowd—some dressed in straw hats and florals, others as monsters and memes—fading away into an artful blur.
The filter extended to Nicola, her freckles golden brown, her lips stained dark red from the cherries.
If this had been a scene in a movie, the music would’ve been something nostalgic and underproduced, a quavering voice set against the gentle strumming of a guitar.
I should’ve slowed that moment down, stretched it out, made it last.
But at the time, it didn’t feel special enough. It just felt like a day out. A break from Plan B. A fun, meaningless distraction.
And perhaps that was exactly what it would’ve been, if what happened hadn’t happened.
I was driving over a lump of grass, flopping forward to reach the knobs of the remote control, trying not to go too fast in case I flipped the car again.
I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I heard the shouting, and even then I didn’t realize how wrong it was until I pivoted the car around and saw Nicola.
She was standing, expression carefully blank, facing a woman with ombré hair in a flowery maxi dress. The woman was yelling, jabbing a finger at Nicola’s chest, voice loud enough that a small cluster of people had stopped to stare. One was even filming.
“. . . can’t believe you’d do something this sick! I knew you were fucked up, but this?!”
The filter fell away. The sky became insipid and shallow, the grass almost gray, Nicola’s face white beneath her freckles.
I accelerated toward them, too fast. The front wheel bounced on the same lump I’d just been creeping over, and everything tipped to the side.
My vision became a blur of crabgrass, dirt, and the purplish stems of yellow flowers.
The weight of the car pinned me down. A couple of kids nearby yelped in surprise.
Nic!
She didn’t respond. She couldn’t.
“You’re trying to frame my brother for murder!”
Krissy. It was Krissy. The woman was Krissy.
My best friend. The person I’d called the night I was murdered. Kyle’s twin sister.
Krissy.
I wriggled frantically, trying to twist my head, trying to see her, but I couldn’t. I was trapped beneath the car, the sound of her voice so sickeningly, heart-wrenchingly familiar.
“I know it’s you,” she snarled. “You’re the one leaving all those messages around town. You’re the only one that hates him enough to do it.”
Nic, I said. Give her your hearing aid. Let me talk to her.
“You hacked into my dead friend’s Insta account,” Krissy said at the same time. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Who does shit like that?”
I’ll explain everything. It’ll be OK. She knows me.
“Krissy,” Nicola said, voice small.
“No. Shut the hell up. You don’t get to call me Krissy. I’m Kristina to you, bitch. Kristina Maybelle Lawson. That’s the name that’s going to be printed on the court summons I send you if you don’t knock this Fatal Attraction shit off. He married Ginger. Get over it.”
“Is that what he told you?” Nicola asked. “That I was upset he married Ginger?”
“I was there,” Krissy snarled. “I saw the way you stormed off. Don’t pretend this is about anything else. I don’t care what lies you tried to tell, I know my brother. He rejected you and you couldn’t—where the hell are you going?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Nicola said, her voice small and raspy. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.
Nic, I said, softer. Nic. Please. Let me talk to her. Give her your hearing aid.
“Listen to me!”
“That’s not how this is going to happen,” Nicola said, and scooped me up. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” Krissy snapped. “You’re sorry now, are you?
Well, fuck you, Nicola Novkovi?. Yeah, that’s right, I know your full name.
I know your address too. I know where you work, I know where your parents work.
I know everything about you. My family owns this town.
If you don’t leave us alone, I swear to God, I will—”
Nic, I begged, and grabbed at her arms. Nic. Please. Nic. I can—
She shoved me, car and all, into her backpack.
Nic!
The zip closed with a sharp, plastic snarl, plunging me into darkness.
Panic shot through my stitches. I was trapped, helpless, the sounds of the festival muffled and far away.
I tried to move, but the paint cans fell on top of me, crushing me, suffocating me.
Dying, it felt like dying, only this time there was nothing to grab on to.
Nothing to save me. I clawed desperately at the darkness, kicking, flailing, screaming.
“And another thing, if you think for one second Lucy wouldn’t punch your teeth out if she were here, then—”
“Krissy,” a new voice said, low and consoling. “Stop. It’s not worth it. Let’s get out of here.”
My porcelain went cold, my insides twisted, my Bubble Wrap contracted so hard I felt some of it pop.
Kyle. That voice belonged to Kyle.