27 #2
“Yeah,” she said, and bowed her head. “I know. I know you are. I am too.”
We sat there for a long time, Nicola with her elbows resting on her bent knees, head down.
Me curled around the book, trying, uselessly, to keep it dry as the rain came thicker and heavier.
This wasn’t my favorite of Grandma’s books, but it was hers, creased and dog-eared.
I knew it would naturally fall open to that full-page illustration of the Hatter.
The page that Grandma and I had used to make my cosplay.
I hadn’t thought about this book since I’d died, but now it suddenly felt precious.
More precious than anything else she could’ve given me.
I didn’t want it to get wet. Perhaps I thought part of that thought out loud, or perhaps Nicola noticed the way I was trying to shield the book with my body, because she picked up the book with me on top of it and bundled both of us into her coat.
She smelled of sweat and smoke and something I couldn’t name, something uniquely her.
I kicked and wriggled until my face poked through the zipper. She was looking down at me, water dripping off her hood, shimmery and slow. Time wasn’t moving right, like a YouTube video on 0.75 playback speed. But that was OK. I didn’t mind sitting a little longer with Nicola.
“This wasn’t your aunt’s dog, was it?” she asked after a while, low and tired.
He was my grandma’s dog. My dog. We got him when I was little.
He was little too, a puppy from a friend of a friend.
His paws were too big and his head too heavy.
He was the color of mixed cookie dough, so that’s what we called him.
He wasn’t a very good guard dog, but he tried, he tried really hard.
He was the only one who knew Kyle killed me.
She exhaled and rubbed her eyes. “So there was a witness.”
One.
For a moment I heard Cookie’s barking again, echoing through the walls at my grandma’s house. Kyle’s voice was mixed into the soup of the memory, a hissed “Shut up, shut up, shut up” slipping beneath Cookie’s panicked baying.
“Shit,” Nicola rasped. “Shit. This situation is so fucking shit.”
You can leave me here if you like, I said.
“To do what? Slowly decompose?”
That was the plan.
“No,” she said, angry again, though I wasn’t sure why. “No. That’s not how this is ending, Lu. I’m not letting you give up. Not now. Kyle has taken so fucking much. So fucking much. He doesn’t get to just walk away from this. I need you.”
You need me? I echoed dumbly.
“Yes,” she said. “I do. I need you to stay angry, to stay fighting, because I’m angry, I’m fighting, I’m finally fighting and I . . . I can’t do this alone. I need you with me. I want you with me. I want to finish this. And maybe we can now that . . .”
What?
“Something’s happened,” she said. “Something I didn’t . . . I didn’t think would ever happen.”
What sort of something?
“The spooky sort of something.”
My speciality, I said, trying to joke, but it came out wrong.
Nicola laughed anyway, her voice also wrong.
I thought then about how we would’ve looked if anyone else were there, a couple of fuckups, of losers, of victims, sitting in the rain and mud.
The world’s shittiest vengeful spirit and the world’s best friend.
Strangely, that made me want to laugh too.
To laugh so hard my fabric burst and my stuffing spilled out.
To laugh so hard I cried. I wanted, more than anything else, to cry.
Nicola stood, the backs of her thighs coated in mud. Her clothes, hair, and eyes shimmering wet. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
You mean it?
“Yeah. I do.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to say it.
My thoughts were churning and choked as she picked me up, rain jacket, book, and all.
I felt loose, I felt undone, I felt . . .
remade. I didn’t think I deserved to feel that.
But I felt it all the same. Unfurling inside me, warm, desperate, and hopeful.
It was only when I was tucked tight beneath her arm that I managed to untangle the scramble of emotions in my head into coherent words. Bye, Cookie. I love you. After a beat I added, You too, Claudia. Thanks for hanging out with me.
Goodbye, precious, I imagined her responding in her BBC voice. Bring an offering if you ever deign to return. Crickets, beetles, it does not matter, so long as it’s raw and wri—
“Claudia?” Nicola asked.
Just a friend.
“Oh . . . um . . . Is it a cat ghost or a dog ghost?”
She’s a huntsman.
“Like . . . Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or . . . ?”
A huntsman spider. I looked up. You know, the big brown ones the size of your hand?
Nicola’s face was white beneath her freckles. “The size of your hand or my hand?”
Your hand. She’s the size of my whole upper body. It’s great.
“I didn’t think spiders would have ghosts.”
She’s not a ghost. She’s alive and hiding right over . . . oh. She’s gone. Huh. Weird. Well, she must have moved. She’s sneaky like that. You never know where she’s going to pop out from.
“You’re the worst,” Nicola muttered as she stumbled back toward her car, moving as fast as her too-big boots allowed. “The absolute worst.”