29 #2
“I’d want you there.”
I don’t want to be dead, I said, the thought ringing in my own head, a slice of truth that cut straight to my moldy, rotten core. I don’t want to be quiet and still, hidden away in a dark place, only listening. Please don’t ask me to do that again. Please. I can’t do that. I can’t.
“Lu.” Nicola rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I just . . . I’m still fucked up over the way you just vanished after everything went to hell. And yeah, I get that I said some shit to you, some shit I really shouldn’t have said, but—”
I’m not going to vanish.
“Then why not just come with me? Why can’t we stay together? Why bother with a plan that failed?”
I need to do something, I said. Something real. I don’t want to be carried around, I don’t want to be just a witness. I want . . . I want Plan C to work. I really do. But . . .
“But Plan C isn’t a ghost plan,” she muttered. “And Plan B is.”
Plan B was your plan, I reminded her. And I think I can do it. I think I can scare him, I can haunt him. At least let me try. I can keep the pressure on. It might not help, but if I only do it when you have an alibi, it can’t hurt.
“Can’t hurt,” she repeated, voice thick with sarcasm.
Despite it, I could tell I’d gotten through to her.
Perhaps not all the way through, but she was listening to me, hearing me.
That was good, because already I was thinking through the different steps of my plan, coloring in the blanks, looking for ways to give it teeth.
The more I thought about it, the more desperate I was to try it.
I didn’t think I’d be able to make a difference.
Probably I was wasting my time. Almost certainly I was.
But at least I’d be doing something. At least I wouldn’t be lying, dead and still, listening to the world rushing on without me.
At least I wouldn’t be just a doll, a prop, a toy to be pulled out as some party trick.
“Hey,” Nicola said, fishing that thought out of my mind with terrifying ease. “Don’t put yourself down like that. You’re not a toy. You’re a vengeful spirit who can control time, remember?”
Does that mean yes? I was terrified even to ask, but I needed to know. You’ll get me a phone?
“You’re going to do something else,” she said with a surety that unbalanced me. “You’re planning something. I know you are. I don’t know what, but I know this won’t end at a phone call.”
I don’t know what I’m planning either, I admitted.
Maybe I’ll come up with something. Or maybe not.
Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe nothing I do will make a single shred of difference .
. . For a single, sickening moment the memory of my death clawed its way to the front of my mind.
Kyle pinning me down, his face contorted and red, his hand crushing me down into blackness, into nothingness, into death.
But maybe . . . maybe I can do something. Maybe I can.
Nicola studied me.
But I need you to trust me.
“Trust you?”
Yes.
The silence that followed was longer and heavier than the last. I wished I could read her mind the way she could sometimes read mine. I wished I could hear an echo of her thoughts, her feelings, her hopes, her fears. I wished I knew what that look in her eyes meant.
But I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
I’d betrayed her trust before. I hadn’t even been able to stay quiet when she spoke to Ginger. She had no reason to trust me. No reason to believe I wouldn’t put her in danger again. No reason to give me anything. And yet I was asking. I was begging.
Despite everything she’d already done for me, I was begging for more.
I knew it was obscene. I knew it wasn’t fair.
But I wanted this, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time.
I wanted a weapon to use against Kyle. I wanted to be more than just a dead girl with a sad story.
I wanted a chance to take my vengeance . . . and I wanted her trust.
I needed it.
“OK,” she finally said. “OK. I’ll get you a phone. The cheapest, shittiest phone I can. Which, by the way, will still probably be at least a hundred dollars. That’s another thing you owe me.”
Thank you, I said, somehow both relieved and terrified. Thank you thank you thank—
“Don’t thank me. Just . . . be careful, OK?”
I’m dead. What’s the worst that can happen?
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. If my phone call to Krissy had taught me anything, it was that, even though I was dead, things could get worse, a lot worse. I needed to be careful, a lot more careful than I had been. I needed to make sure I wasn’t putting the people that mattered in danger.
Kyle was the one I wanted to hurt. Kyle was who needed to pay for what he’d done. Kyle, and no one else.
Already my mind was churning, trying to configure ways I could unstitch him, unmake him, things I could say that might reveal who and what he really was . . . and how to keep Nicola and Ginger and Krissy as far away from the resulting fallout as possible.
Nicola picked something off the ground. A large cardboard box with a faded red-and-white logo on the side.
What’s that? I asked, grateful for the distraction.
“Your new body,” she said with forced-sounding cheer.
That doesn’t look like doll parts.
“That’s because it isn’t.” She dumped it out on the workbench. Colorful strips of metal clanged and clanked onto the plywood, a child-size tool kit and a couple of little plastic bags of nuts and bolts plopping down on top.
What am I looking at?
“Meccano,” she said. “You ever see Toy Story?”
What’s Toy Story got to do with anything?
“It was playing on the TV the other day,” she said, tossing aside the empty box.
“Just randomly. Honestly, I was barely paying attention. I just needed some background noise, I guess. There’s a character in it.
I Googled them. Babyface. They’re a baby-doll head on a metal spider body. Freaky as hell.”
Oh, I said, and looked at the piles of brightly colored metal. Among them I spotted a couple of crab-like claws. Oh fuck yeah.
Nicola grinned. “I thought you’d like it, what with being a cosplay show winner and all.”
Second place, novice division.
“With this,” she said, picking up a piece of metal and brandishing it triumphantly, “first place. Guaranteed.”
It took her hours. After two, she eventually stopped trying to wing it and read the instructions.
My new body was a metal plate with eight spiderlike legs bolted onto the sides, the nuts screwed in loose enough to give the joints movement, but not so loose as to risk coming undone.
The metal crab claws she bolted onto the front, snapping them a few times with her fingers to make sure they worked.
Then came the scary part.
She pulled out the glue gun, plugged it in, and fed a stick of glue into the back. “You sure you want to do this?”
No, I thought before I could stop myself. But do it anyway.
She ripped my head off my moldy, broken fabric body, ran glue around my neck, and stuck me down onto the metal plate.
For a few sickening moments I felt myself fade out of my old porcelain limbs and wondered if we’d fucked up, if I wouldn’t be able to possess the metal the way I had the porcelain, fabric, and wood.
But once the glue started to dry, I felt myself spill out into the long, spindly metal legs, the nut-and-bolt joints, and the sturdy, square claws.
She watched as I shivered and jerked to life, stumbling and staggering, clanking and squeaking. I didn’t need a mirror to know what I looked like. A cracked porcelain head glued onto a mechanical spider.
Fit check? I asked anyway.
“Honestly? I know this is probably the IKEA effect talking, but . . .” Nicola’s smile was slow and toothy. “You look killer, Lu.”