17
Plan B sucked.
It really, really sucked.
I’d had my mind pretty firmly set on killing Kyle.
Actually, I’d had my metaphorical heart and not-so-metaphorical soul set on it.
But I couldn’t think of a way to do that without Nicola’s help.
And I needed Nicola’s help. She was right: Before she found me, I was broken, destroyed.
I couldn’t do this without her. I didn’t want to do this without her.
I didn’t want to go back to being alone.
And so, even though killing Kyle was the only outcome that felt like anything close to justice, I agreed to Nicola’s new plan.
Instead of killing Kyle, we’d haunt him.
Nicola had a lot of suggestions for how to do this. After she glued my foot back on, she wiped her whiteboard clean with her sleeve and began writing them down.
Plan B
Send him creepy messages from Lu’s Instagram account.
Print off some of Lu’s old missing-person posters and put them in his letter box.
Spray-paint “I killed Lucy” on his car.
It was a carpet-bombing strategy. A psychological war designed to hit him a dozen times in a dozen different ways, wear him down, and force a surrender.
It was also indirect. Not safe, but safer.
Nicola wasn’t going to end up with a murder charge, and, as long as we kept it up, eventually Kyle—driven mad by his own guilt—would confess and spend the rest of his life rotting away behind bars.
That was what Nicola reckoned, anyway.
I thought it all sounded rather Victorian.
Even if we could drive him mad by rapping, tapping at his chamber door, convincing him to turn himself in wouldn’t be easy.
Convincing him to jump off a cliff would be even harder .
. . but I’d figure out how to twist that knife once we had it buried in his chest.
Just because Nicola didn’t want to kill him didn’t mean I wouldn’t take an opportunity if it came my way.
As the night wore on, and as the pot smoke thickened into a sleepy gray haze, the ideas became more elaborate and more unhinged.
Send him one of those letters with words made up of cut-up magazine pieces.
Email him and make up a story about being a retired detective who found out his secret and is giving him a chance to do the right thing before things get ugly.
Write “Kyle Lawson Killed Lucy McQuinn” in every toilet stall in town. Every. Single. One.
Run ads in the local paper for a “free confessional, a private and not-at-all recorded phone line where you can take the weight off your chest, Kyle.”
Buy Hello Kitty pajamas, cover them in chicken blood, and send them through Australia Post to his work address.
That last one was my idea, obviously. Nicola didn’t ask what the significance of Hello Kitty pajamas was. I figured she didn’t need to. It wasn’t exactly hard to puzzle out.
I also suggested we call Krissy and Ginger.
Actually, I suggested it several times. Krissy was my friend, and Ginger was both of ours.
Surely, even if they thought the whole ghost thing was some sort of bizarre breakdown, they’d help.
But every time I said We could call them, Nicola responded with “We could . . .” and never wrote it on the whiteboard.
A part of me wanted to press the issue, to demand they be included in this mad plan.
But another part of me held back, uncertain.
I knew I was poking at something, something I didn’t fully understand, something that made Nicola’s lips thin and her fingers twitch around the whiteboard marker.
But even so, despite the sick feeling that crept through my cracked porcelain skin whenever I thought of Ginger and Kyle’s wedding photo, I couldn’t forget who she was.
No matter what happened between Nicola and Ginger, she was still my friend. I still cared about her. I was pretty sure Nicola still cared about her too. I was pretty sure Nicola cared more than she had any right to.
Which somehow made everything even harder to understand.
Nicola was a good person. Why would Ginger marry Kyle if she could make people like Nicola love her?
Why would Kyle, if he was capable of getting a girl like Ginger, ever get in his car and drive to my grandma’s house?
Why did he get so angry? Why did any of that ever happen?
Why did he do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
Those questions kept bouncing back and forth inside my head, an old song now, still stuck on repeat. If Nicola heard them, she didn’t say anything. She passed out on the sofa sometime after midnight, a face-down tangle of limbs, her hearing aid squealing softly.
I studied her.
The sweat on her skin, the ink stains on her fingers, the jumble of mismatched tattoos on her arms. She was beautiful.
Not pretty, not put together, not perfect .
. . but beautiful. Not an awkward, gangly girl anymore, but a living, breathing woman.
I couldn’t help but hate her a little bit for that.
She’d moved out of home, cut off her long mane of brown hair, and stepped out into the world.
And then Kyle had hurt her. I didn’t know the details.
I didn’t need to. The details didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that he’d done it.
That meant Kyle didn’t just fuck up with me.
He didn’t make a mistake that he would regret for the rest of his life.
He was serial. A repeat offender. A bona fide monster.
Time buffered as I watched her sleep, freezing, then juddering forward in quick, jerky frames. For a while, I let it happen and listened to Nicola’s snoring slur, then speed into a sharp, high-pitched staccato.
Eventually, the sun snapped up over the horizon and Nicola woke with a static screech of sound, too fast to understand.
I dipped myself into the time stream and wished I had teeth to grit as it pounded through me.
Manipulating time was more than just draining.
It was debilitating. But as long as I kept it to little nudges, gentle pulls and pushes, I hoped it wouldn’t be too bad.
As the world slowed, I caught the end of a call Nicola was having, her phone held loosely in her hand, not anywhere near her ear.
Her hearing aid must have Bluetooth. A function that was probably a hell of a lot more useful than whatever frequency or setting allowed her to (somewhat involuntarily) tune in to Lucy McQuinn FM.
“. . . yeah. I know, Paul. I’m sorry, but I was up all night vomiting. It was gnarly. I can’t come in.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire, I sang out softly.
Nicola glanced at me, apologized to Paul one more time, and hung up. “I thought you were asleep.”
I don’t sleep.
“Except sometimes when you”—she vanished and reappeared at my side, sitting on the coffee table, frowning—“you hear me?”
Sorry, I muttered.
“You went to sleep again?”
Went fast. Yeah. It comes on quick sometimes.
“That’s you going fast?”
Yeah. Just . . . think of me as AFK.
Nicola nodded and followed my eyeline, turning to look at the whiteboard, our plans still scrawled across it. “Hey,” she said after a while. “Can I be honest with you for a sec?”
I knew what that tone meant. I braced myself for sober-Nicola to kindly but carefully walk back all the promises high-Nicola made. She’d tell me Plan B wasn’t going to work, that it was too risky, that slowly driving someone insane with guilt was a fantasy, and not a very good one at that.
Yeah? I said. What is it?
Her smile was wide and toothy. “I’ve wanted to spray-paint that arsehole’s car for a long time.”