15
She looks like me. That was the thought that kept popping up in my head, over and over again, like a broken notification. She looks like me. She looks like me. She looks like me. No matter how many times I tried to shake it, the idea wouldn’t leave me alone.
Ginger looked like me. Not the living me, and not the me I was in that moment, sitting in front of Nicola’s phone, staring one-eyed at the photo—a torso of duct tape, a head of bristly yellow sprouts, a set of lumpy, twisty, mismatched legs.
Ginger looked like the version of me that had sat on the bookshelf in my grandma’s workroom, pretty and porcelain.
A mass of stark white ruffles and floral lace from which emerged a small, delicate smile, rosy cheeks, and blonde ringlets, busy with ribbon.
A bride. She looked like a bride. She was a bride. His bride.
Kyle, who looked not like the raging red-faced monster I remembered but like a guy. Just a normal guy, smiling wide, but not too wide, suit a little too short in the leg, a yellow flower pinned onto his breast.
I couldn’t make it make sense. Kyle didn’t look human in my mind anymore.
He was a monster, grotesque and raging, with veins and blood and breath that stank of vodka.
But here he was, looking like everyone else, blending in, a perfect chameleon.
And Ginger Béliveau, the girl everyone knew was meant to be a supermodel, or an actress, or something else sparkly and spectacular . . .
The image caption swam out of the haze in front of me: Presenting Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Lawson.
She’d married him.
Ginger had married him.
She’d married him and 757 people had liked it.