28
Nicola put me in the passenger seat, clipped the seat belt over my lap, then drove to the nearest Macca’s, where she bought a strawberry milkshake that smelled so sugary I wished I had a stomach so I could hurl. Have you considered eating real food?
“Have you considered that you’re still on thin ice, you porcelain piece of shit?” she said, exhausted and without venom.
Please.
Nicola rolled her eyes but cycled back through the drive-through a second time to pick up a burger and some chips.
There was a single leaf of lettuce in the burger, which (if the dim achiness of her skin was any indication) might have been the healthiest thing she’d eaten since I’d left.
And she did eat it. Sitting in the parking lot overlooking the highway, she ate quickly, desperately, as if she’d been starving but had only realized when the food touched her tongue.
Are you OK?
“No,” she said around a mouthful of chips. “No. I . . .” She swallowed. “It’s been a shit few weeks, Lu. A real shit few weeks. The worst I’ve ever had.”
Those words sank into me, cold, ugly, and sharp all over.
I’m sorry.
“You keep saying that.”
I am sorry.
“I don’t need you to be sorry, I need you to be on my side.”
I am on your side.
“Right.” She took a massive bite of her burger, did a distressingly cursory chew, and swallowed loudly. “Sometimes you are. When it suits you.”
That’s not—
“And you know what the worst thing is? I get it. I do. I know you’re the star of this unholy shit show, Lu. I know that. This is your revenge, and I’m trying to help, I’m trying to do the right thing, be a good Robin to your Batman, but—”
Wait. You think you’re the sidekick?
“You’re not going to sit there and pretend that if we were characters in a comic book, it’d be my name on the cover.”
No, I said. But that’s because superheroes never use their true names. It was a corny line, so corny it ran the risk of disrupting the whole corn industry, but it seemed to work. The furrow between Nicola’s brows eased; the hard line of her shoulders softened.
“You’re such a fucking nerd.”
I know, I said. And I know I fucked up. But I’m on your side, Nic. I am. I never didn’t want to be on your side.
“Huh,” she said, and took another bite of her burger, chewing a little more thoroughly. “So,” she said as she swallowed. “I’ve got to ask, now that we’re on each other’s side again . . . did you send anyone else a message?”
No.
“Are you sure? It was only Krissy you messaged? Not anyone else?”
I didn’t have your phone for long.
“Is that how you did it? With my phone?”
And your spare hearing aid. I put it back in the drawer.
“I thought so.” She frowned down at the scrappy remains of her burger. “Honestly, the only thing I couldn’t figure out was how you’d got a battery into it.”
I stared at her. Say again?
“How’d you get the battery into the hearing aid?” she asked. “I think it’s fiddly as fuck, and I have fingers. How’d you do it?”
I . . . I didn’t. It already had a battery in it.
She was shaking her head before I’d finished talking. “The battery goes dead if I leave it in when I’m not using it. The one in my drawer never has a battery in it.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say except . . . Are you sure?
She coughed out a laugh. “You know how expensive batteries are? Even if I buy them in bulk, they still set me back a couple of hundred every year, which may not seem like much to some, but I don’t have much, being a minimum wager and all. So yeah, I’m sure.”
The hearing aid from the drawer didn’t have a battery in it. It had been dead when I’d held it against the phone to send a message to Krissy. Which meant . . .
Ghost Lore Fact #2: Ghosts can’t make sound, but they can manipulate the real world. Amended addendum: Ghosts can make sound after all, via this one random woman’s hearing aid technology. Further investigation required.
“Huh,” Nicola said, perhaps hearing my thoughts, perhaps realizing the same thing at the same time.
It should’ve been good news. It was good news.
I wasn’t tethered to Nicola. I could, if I could figure out how, use a phone, and maybe other things too.
I was free. But for some reason, sitting in the oversize passenger seat, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sitting like a blanket on my lap, I didn’t feel free.
As absurd as it was, I felt like I’d lost something.
It wasn’t a big loss, especially not compared to everything else.
But I still felt it, small and slicing. I’d so readily accepted that her hearing aids were somehow magical.
I thought maybe she had too. More than just a glitch, they were a thread of fate, tying us together—her to me, me to her.
I . . . I didn’t . . . I just sent the one message to Krissy, I said, trying to recenter myself in the conversation. That was . . . um . . . that was all.
“Right,” she muttered. “OK.”
Why? I asked. What’s happened?
She frowned down at the remains of her burger. “I got a message from Ginger last night.”
From Ginger, I repeated dumbly.
“Yeah,” she said, and took another bite. “From Ginger.”
The name triggered a bombardment of memories.
Ginger in high school, chewing the inside of her cheek as she stared down at her maths book.
Ginger the day I died, eyelids glittering pink and brows creased with worry as I walked out of her party.
Ginger standing beside Kyle, smiling at the camera, white all over, and covered in lace like cobwebs.
What does she want?
“To talk.”
About?
“If I had one guess?” Nicola looked at me meaningfully. “She probably wants to know why I went crazy and tried to frame her husband for murder.”
Oh.
“Yeah,” she said, and took another messy bite. “Oh.”
Nicola had said something spooky had happened.
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. A ghost, maybe.
One older and wiser than I was. The Yoda to my Luke Skywalker.
Or maybe a demon, all fiery, horned, and ready to drag me down to hell.
That wouldn’t have been as scary as this.
Another person. Another person who could help us.
Another person who could hurt us. After Krissy, I wasn’t sure I was ready for another person.
After Krissy, I didn’t think I’d ever be ready for another person.
“I want you to be there,” Nicola said. “When I meet her, I want you to be there. But you can’t say a single word.
Not one. I don’t care how badly you think I’m fucking up.
You can’t say anything. That’s what I need from you, Lu.
I need you to trust me. I need you to believe that I know what’s going on here better than you do. Can you do that?”
Time was still moving too slow, slurring her words, dragging her voice down, making the V of birds I could see flying overhead seem just slightly, eerily off. Their wingbeats too slow, their progress too creeping.
The rain had stopped . . .
“Can you do that?” she asked again, frustration leaking into her voice.
Yeah, I said. Yeah, I . . . I’ll try.
“No. No trying. You’re going to listen. I need you to hear this. Whatever she says, I need you to hear it, and then together we decide what we’re going to do next. Got it?”
Got it, I repeated.
She finished off her hamburger, washing it down with a long, deep gulp from her milkshake. It left a mustache of bubbly pink foam on her upper lip that she sucked off. Strangely, stupidly, I caught myself thinking how imperfect she looked, how messy, how alive . . . and how beautiful.
When are you meeting her?
“She has a part-time shift at the library,” Nicola said. “Told me she gets off at six.”
What time is it?
“Twenty past five,” she said with the surety of someone who’d been watching the clock for a while now.
Forty minutes?
“Forty minutes,” she confirmed, and took another deep, long gulp of milkshake. “Thirty-nine minutes now.”
It seemed too soon. Only an hour ago, I was lying on Cookie’s grave in the grass and dirt, watching the rain and assigning imaginary voices to a spider.
I wasn’t sure I was ready for the real world again.
It still felt like a dream being in Nicola’s car, clipped into the seat belt as if I had a life to lose, listening to her voice and watching her eat.
I don’t . . . I don’t think . . .
“If you don’t want to see her, I’m not going to either. I’ll tell her I can’t make it. We’ll go home and watch TV.”
You could go without me, I suggested weakly.
“No.” She shook her head. “No way. You’ll disappear again.”
I won’t.
“No way,” she said, head still shaking. “No way.”
I twitched unhappily, my mind a mess of Ginger, Krissy, and Kyle.
They felt like monsters to me then. All of them.
Krissy, who should’ve been the one who helped me.
Ginger, who should’ve been the one who helped Nicola.
And Kyle, face red and contorted, teeth white and bared, forearms scratched bloody but still pressing down, heavy and crushing.
The numbness that had blanketed me for weeks suddenly felt dangerously thin. The storm of grief beyond it closer and more violent than ever before.
I wanted to run away, back to Nicola’s house, back to Cookie’s grave, back to an impossible place, where I still had a body, a life, and a grandma who could hug me tight enough that my bones clicked.
But I couldn’t. There was no rewind button, not even for the dead.
Running to Cookie’s grave hadn’t changed that.
The only thing it’d done was hurt Nicola . . . and she didn’t deserve that.
Kyle did this. He did all of it. If there was even a tiny chance that we could make him feel a fraction of the pain he’d caused . . .
“Thirty-eight minutes,” Nicola said. “If you want to veto this, you’re going to have to do it soon.”
I have one question, I said.
“Only one?”
How are you going to explain the broken doll in your car?