Page 6

6

Not Like Other Girls

Dolores

My life is like this:

Being a card-carrying adult, I wake at an hour that leaves me with such a number of minutes to be at work that every single one is accounted for and there is no room for error. Morning is a blur of ablutions and makeup and hair and dressing and packing and a last-minute search for shoes. If I could mainline caffeine into my veins, I would. If I could get my hands on something stronger, I would.

Some people live to work; others work to live. I don’t do either. I exist. I keep my lower lip just above the water as I tread, a slave-driving sense of duty keeping me going. I’m spurred forward by mundane procedures that would not be completed if I didn’t take care of them: Car maintenance. Home maintenance. Cat maintenance—just the bare minimum is what it feels like. I’ll get no awards there. She’d been a selfish impulse in a difficult moment of my life, a drastic decision to stave off loneliness. A warm, breathing thing to love and cuddle and play with—something to bring purpose into my life. But instead, she makes me feel like a stranger in my own home. I walk in the door, and she watches me with skeptical eyes and scampers off to be by herself.

Every day there must be a breakfast, lunch, and dinner—three problems I get to solve all over again every single day, my personal Groundhog Day, my private ring of hell. Every day I must scrape messes off surfaces anew—or not. If I don’t, they sprout and grow legs and become their own ecosystem. Every day, there is a pile of laundry, self-generating, bottomless, gradually gaining sentience, studying me, plotting to destroy me. And the bills. Oh, the bills.

There’s no satisfaction in any of it. No sense of a job well done. Only the persistent feeling that I’m doing it wrong, doing not enough, that I’m bailing out a sinking ship.

Late at night, when it’s dark out, and the rush has abruptly ended, and my bones sag like a Halloween skeleton that’s been taken down and tossed back into its box, I crane my ears and reach past the silence of my apartment for the healthy, normal humming of the families above and below and on either side. They exist in a false sense of permanence and stability, and it agitates me. They have no idea how quickly life can change. I pace my apartment. I pluck at my clutter, picking up a book and setting it down, moving an envelope from here to there, wiping down a counter and then giving up on the others. A baby cries next door, and a woman soothes him, and a man laughs, and I throw my rag into the sink and pour myself another glass of wine and turn on the TV to drown it all out. The sounds, the humming, the silence in my own apartment. I watch an episode of something funny and I don’t laugh. I found this shit funny once—I’m sure I did. But laughter is a social behavior, and it’s not something you do on your own. Even though I do everything else on my own.

That’s what I like about true crime—it doesn’t ask me to laugh. That, and the victim blaming. The victim blaming is so… reassuring . So long as I carry pepper spray in my bra and don’t talk to men with their arm in a sling, I’ll be fine. Not like those other, stupider girls. Ho, no. How different from lung cancer or brain tumors. Can’t do a fucking thing about oncogenes.

I find a rerun on the Bottle Factory Killer. Six women over three years. Idiots. When you’re a single woman, you have to be smarter than that. I’m smarter than that. A serial killer would never get the chance to hunt me because I’d be hunting him . I have room for hobbies now, after all. So much room.

The thing about my existence is there’s a man-shaped chalk outline sketched all over it, marking out where a body used to be. I roll over it when I get out of bed in the morning. I step over it when I walk out the front door. When I’m walking to my car in a basement parking lot by myself and I notice the sound of a stranger’s footsteps behind me—a single woman on her own—the outline is there, the man inside conspicuously absent.

I’m not special. I think we all have hearts like a baby’s shape-sorting cube, holes left behind by the people who passed through. If we’re lucky, another one that’s just the right shape comes along, and we’re whole again for a moment. But triangles and squares and circles are common and easy to come by. This very distinct, four-limbed, man-shaped gap is difficult to fill. I’d resigned myself to that.

But when I sit at my desk and hold that unwrapped doll leg in my hand, I reflexively think of that chalk outline, of the unique shape left open in my heart, and although it’s a terrible idea—although there is so much more to lose than to gain—I can’t help the guiltiest, most shameful fantasy of filling it up again.

—

The days pass and I collect my doll piece by piece. A leg, a hand, a foot, a chest…I lay the pieces out in my drawer. I carry them in my purse. I rub my thumb over the nubby little toes of a foot in my pocket as I take the elevator down at the end of the day. No one’s ever given me a gift like this, and I puzzle over what it means. I want to pry apart the sutures of Jake’s skull and trawl my fingers through his brains for answers, but a man like Jake has his guard up. There’s no waiting till it comes down. The trick is to make him think his defenses are working and to pick away at the cracks where he’s not looking.

It takes two seconds to fish the flash drive out of his messenger bag when he’s gone to brownnose Doug. He was so careless about letting me see where he keeps it after I wiped his computer. Some of the files are password protected and some aren’t. There’s a spreadsheet that is a list of names, with mine at the top. I won’t deny the thrill I feel at that. The columns to the right are filled with values that don’t make sense to me. I copy it to my desktop, remove the flash drive, and stalk back to his desk. He’s nowhere in sight. I return the drive to his bag.

When I straighten, I bump his desk and his computer wakes. The golden retriever has been replaced with a new photo. My heart stumbles, cartwheels, and falls on its face.

There’s a beautiful nighttime view of the river behind them. In the foreground, Jake’s face is right next to hers, cheek to cheek, and he grins like a fool while she gazes distantly at the camera. She’s stunning, in a highlighted, lacquered, lip-fillered, paralyzed sort of way that speaks of careless wealth. It’s the Botox. Or maybe the horse tranquilizers kicking in, before he takes her back to his place and decapitates her. I look closely. Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses perched on her head. A Tiffany pendant. I’m a materialistic brand-name hound.

I return to my desk. I feel old and dowdy and cheap. I have heartburn and a headache coming on. I delete my Jake the Ripper notes from my phone. That’s that.

He comes back from lunch, and I watch him tinker away at his computer in the reflective surface of the black stone vase on my desk. I watch him push his glasses back up his straight nose and accidentally muss up his neat hair when he scratches his head. He glances over at me, laconic, bored, and I wonder if she’s his girlfriend. He’s clever and good-looking—even if he is just a temp and his freezer’s full of severed heads. I wonder if they have frequent, vigorous sex. I bet she lets him keep his glasses on.

I hate him so much.

At the end of the day, I go home and line up bits of beige plastic on my coffee table. Arms here, legs there. In my head, I line up bits and pieces of Jake.

He placed that flash drive in his messenger bag pocket in front of me while I watched. He wanted me to find that list for some reason.

The golden retriever photo—he was checking to see what I noticed.

And that selfie he replaced it with…

He’s teasing me. He’s still checking to see what I notice. He’s…bored.

Are you as bored of real life as I am?

A man with a wealthy, beautiful girlfriend doesn’t get bored.

She could be anyone. She could be no one. I’m the one he’s playing serial killer games with.

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.

I consider my deconstructed doll laid out before me, and I realize there’s a message here—an offering, if I’m interested in accepting. I’m missing a head, and I need to know: Will this Ken doll have dark hair and glasses?