Page 84 of If Looks Could Kill

The figure bends over Pearl. Her face and hair are pale, but her clothing is dark, so she seems to be a floating head. She vanishes so suddenly that Pearl thinks she dreamed her.

Then she hears her at the foot of the stairs, stamping out the fire.

She returns and snarls at Jack, then bends down and slides her arms under Pearl’s shoulders, lifting her carefully to her feet. She murmurs strange words into Pearl’s ear that she can’t understand. She smells singed, like burning firewood.

She all but carries Pearl up the basement stairs and out the back door, into the alleyway. She bears most of Pearl’s weight as they round the corner onto the side street and, from there, onto Tenth Street itself.

The crowd of onlookers has vanished, and the street is desolate. The mysterious girl turns this way and that, unsure of where to go or what to do.

“Oy!”

Pearl turns slowly toward the sound of the voice and of running footsteps. A short, stocky figure emerges from the darkness into the glow of a streetlight, with two taller lads at his heels.

“It is you!” he gasps.

“Oscar?”

He turns to his mates. “Fellas, I knows this bundle,” he crows. “She’s a Hallelujah Lass from the neighborhood. The pretty one I toldja about, who’s good at selling papers.”

She looks at the grubby paperboys and wonders if she’s delirious.

“I’m Pearl,” she tells them.

“?’Sright, Pearl,” Oscar says.

The other girl perks up at this. “Pearl,” she repeats in a foreign accent. The girl taps her own breastbone. “Nicolette.” French, perhaps?

Oscar’s companions’ eyes grow wide at the sight of Pearl’s blood-soaked dress. “Geez, lady, you’re bleeding awful,” one of them tells her. “Did Jack the Ripper do that to you?”

In some corner of her fading consciousness, it amuses Pearl to think she’ll be giving these lads the tale of a lifetime. They’d tell their grandchildren someday.

“He did,” she tells them. “He got me. I’m dying.”

Nicolette, her mysterious rescuer, jabbers something at the paperboys that Pearl can’t understand, though she recognizes the phrase that sounds like “toot sweet.”

“She’s gotta get to a hospital,” one of the taller paperboys says. “St. Vincent’s is the closest. Just a few blocks across town from here. Just up to… lessee… Twelfth. I think.”

“Can we get a cab this late?” asks the other boy.

“Dick, Freddie,” Oscar says. “Get yer bikes. We’re taking her to the hospital. Now .”

Over Nicolette’s protests, the boys bring forward two safety bicycles and position Pearl upon a seat.

Indifferent to propriety, the one named Freddie tucks her excess skirts under her thighs while Oscar and Dick balance the bicycle.

Freddie straddles the bar in front of Pearl and instructs her to hold tight to his waist. He pushes off, bobbing up and down as he pedals.

The bicycle wobbles until it settles into a glide.

The scolding voice of Nicolette fades into the distance, then, curiously, keeps pace with them. Pearl manages to turn to see Nicolette riding along behind Dick, with Oscar running after.

She is lightheaded from loss of blood, and the wind whipping across her skin is biting cold.

She feels disconnected, as though she’s floating above herself, watching the scene.

An unwashed teenage boy she’s never met is doing his darnedest to propel her toward a hospital several long blocks away.

The only clothes she owns in the world are drenched with her own blood.

It’s the strangest procession of her life. And the last one.

She might as well enjoy it while she can.