Dumb Girl

by C. R. Jane

  “You’ve had a long day. You will go upstairs to your room. The third one on the right at the top of the stairs. If you get confused, look for the purple flowers on the wallpaper. That one is yours. You’ll go to sleep early, have a good rest, and tomorrow I’ll explain to you, after lunch, what you should expect.”

  I could hardly think as I followed his instructions, hardly function at all. The only thought I had in my mind was one, and it kept repeating over and over like an old record of Gran’s that got stuck and had to be bumped forward. Vinyl, she used to say, gave the best sound, but it was the least reliable. Right now, that was my brain—unreliable—because all I could think over and over was that she hadn’t even said goodbye.

  She’d left me.

  But then again—everyone did.

  Holly

  Now

  My neck snapped back, and I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying out so hard that I tasted blood in my mouth. My body broke out in painful, soul sucking goosebumps. I leaned over and spit the blood out on the floor.

  The man who beat me on my uncle’s behalf was big, bulky, and missing an eye. There was obviously a story there, but not one I cared to hear.

  “You’re quiet. Most of you yell and scream.”

  Early lessons tended to stick. I’d never had a hand raised to me until I’d stepped in this house. I wasn’t stupid. They hit less if I stayed quiet. But whatever. It was better to think about other things.

  The second goon entered the room. He was drinking an iced tea, eating a brownie. My stomach grumbled. How could I be hungry in the middle of this mess? That was kind of funny.

  My first torturer hauled me from the chair and threw me onto the ground. It was time to let my mind drift. I was pretty sure he was going to take out the cane and redden my ass until I couldn’t sit for days.

  Whack.

  What were the guys doing? Had they left? Listened? How much did they hate me?

  Whack.

  I shook from staying silent. It wasn’t the pain, it was the restraint.

  Whack.

  How had the rest of Steven’s PT gone? How was Graham’s campaign going? Was Charlie going to marry Amy? Why wasn’t Jamie painting?

  Whack.

  Chapter 5

  Graham

  A Few Months Earlier

  My software was good. So good that it could pick up Holland’s face everywhere, even in less accurate forms of media. Like paintings.

  I picked up the phone after I saw the software’s latest hit and called Steve. “I found another one,” I told him.

  There was silence on the other side of the line. We weren’t friends, per se. But we at least had a common goal. A desire for a reckoning of sorts.

  “Who is he?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. He couldn’t fool me though. I knew he had the same burning curiosity inside of him as I did. It was like something had caught hold of me, and I was obsessed with finding the others.

  The others. That’s what I called them in my head. I both hated them, and wanted to meet them at the same time.

  While it was nothing short of stomach-curling to meet other men who had stuffed their dick in the girl I’d once wanted to spend forever with, it was maybe a little bit healing as well to know I hadn’t been the only fool in the world to get conned by her.

  “Jamie Rawlings is his name. He’s an artist in New York City.”

  He laughed, a hollow, broken-sounding laugh of a man on the edge of losing it. One thing I had learned about Steve Wolf, he was no longer in charge of his life. He lived every day just getting through it, and I was pretty positive that was because of Holland.

  “Guess she didn’t have a type,” he said bitterly.

  “I’m going to go find him,” I said, ignoring how much the truth of his statement hit me. We had all been just marks to her, no rhyme or reason to her selection, except whatever was lining our pockets.

  There was another long silence on the other side of the line.

  “Have fun,” Steve said before hanging up the phone without another word.

  I sighed. Moody bastard. Guess I was doing this alone.

  Jamie Rawlings. An up-and-coming artist who had gained quite the following both because of his paintings and the fact that he had money and could be considered eye candy. I stared at the picture of him I had found online. It was a write-up in the New York Times, and they had included quite a few pictures of him.

  There was a certain wildness about him in the pictures, something that told me he was just a little bit off. A little bit… wrong?

  I looked at the date of the picture. It was recent.

  Had he always been that way, or had Holland made him like that?

  I guessed I would find out.

  I found him at a gallery showing of his latest work. Before I had even found him, I knew that I was in the right place.

  Because she was everywhere.

  Her eyes, the slope of her nose, that infuriating way she would always smirk at you. Different pieces of her were featured on every canvas, taunting me.

  I wanted to simultaneously tear them apart and buy them all so that no one else could see her. It was an infuriating mix of emotions.

  The gallery was crowded. Everyone was oohing and awing over the paintings, not knowing that they were lusting after a sociopath.

  There were a lot of women in the room, but there were also a lot of men. They stared at the paintings, and I could just see how they wanted the woman they portrayed. A hot lick of jealousy passed over me, and I wondered what this guy’s relationship had been like with Holland that he was able to showcase her like this so easily.

  The bastard was talented, I would give him that. But he failed to capture the danger that Holland carried with her. He had failed to capture all the complicated moments that made her so good at what she did.

  I looked around for the man in question. But to my surprise, he wasn’t surrounded by a throng of worshipers, something I was expecting based on the number of Page Six articles I had found labeling him as a “playboy.”

  Instead, he was leaning against the wall, sipping a tumbler of dark liquor. Everyone else in the room was feasting on champagne and hors d’oeuvres, but not him. He was staring at a collection of paintings off to his right, wearing a small, angry smirk. When I shifted my focus to what he was staring at, I started coughing up the champagne that I’d been sipping.

  It was Holland again. A very nude Holland. There was a collection of five paintings on the wall, and they had captured quite a crowd. What struck me most about the paintings wasn’t that Holland was naked in all of them, although I’d admit begrudgingly that he’d done a pretty bang up job of capturing just how perfect her body was.

  No, it wasn’t her body, it was her eyes.

  Just by seeing them, I could tell she had destroyed him. In every painting, there was a wicked look on her face, as if she held your world in her hand and couldn’t wait to destroy it.

  He had captured that in every painting in the show. There was none of the pain, sadness, and confusion that I’d often seen in her features. All that he had captured was what she had become in all of our minds. The temptress who had stolen our hearts and destroyed them without a thought.

  Seeing her portrayed like that sparked something in me.

  It was hatred.

  Hate so strong that it made me want to take a knife to my own chest and carve out the piece of it that she had touched.

  I rubbed my chest, trying to get the feeling to go away. I couldn’t think when it got like this.

  And since she had left, it had been this way more often than it hadn’t. I took a deep breath and approached him.

  “They’re not for sale,” he said in a bored, dry tone without bothering to pay me any attention.

  I wasn’t expecting that. What was the point in having a gallery showing if you weren’t going to sell anything? And I could tell based on the amount of people here, all who seemed like they were chomping at the bit to get some o
f his work, this work, that he was going to have to say ‘no’ a lot tonight.

  “Why would I want the painting when I’ve had the real thing?” I asked, some of the anger he had evoked still bleeding through my voice.

  He stared at me startled, the first real hint of emotion showcased on his face.

  “What did you just say?” he asked. I noticed that his right hand was twitching, like he wanted to grab something. Or maybe he just wanted to punch me like Steve had. I took a step back just in case. I wasn’t up for making a scene here. There was a part of me that wondered if she still kept tabs on us. I was sure she would notice if a brawl erupted in the middle of a fancy gallery showing.

  Or maybe that was just wishful thinking—the idea she would care enough to keep up with us.

  I gestured to the art surrounding us. “This is a girl named Holland, right?” I asked. The fact that she had gone by Holland with me or Holly with Steve made it likely she had gone by her name with this guy as well. Was it her real name? If it was, why would she use it in all of her cons when she changed everything else about her?

  What I had been trying to avoid happened anyway. Jamie step toward me, his whole body trembling, his face turned an ashen gray. “How do you know her? Do you know where she is?” he asked, his footsteps unsteady, as if he’d suddenly become drunk.

  “What did she take from you?” I asked. He stopped, thinking about my question. It was interesting to watch his face, he was such an open book now that I’d made him crack. His emotions flickered across his face, wave after wave. I was surprised to see that anger was not the most prevalent emotion. Pain yes, longing as well, but also… guilt. So much guilt.

  What was that about?

  Didn’t he know that it wasn’t his fault? That Holland was just a remorseless bitch who had never cared? That no matter how much we had been willing to give her, how much she meant to us, that it would never have been enough for her?

  Maybe I was projecting.

  “I can’t talk about this here,” he finally answered. “As you can see, I’m kind of in the middle of something.” He shuttered his emotions as he pointed around to all the people who had started to stare at us.

  I nodded. Made sense. I’d been trying to avoid a scene, and instead, had walked right into it. Maybe I was trying to find an outlet for everything churning inside of me. It was like I had wanted Stephen to punch me. It was like I had wanted to fight with Jamie.

  It was like I wanted to feel actual emotion.

  “I’ll meet you in an hour,” he said.

  “Okay,” I replied. I began to walk away. Suddenly, I turned around, not understanding what I was about to ask for even as I asked for it. “I want that one,” I ordered him, pointing to a painting of Holland glancing over her shoulder, the perfect skin of her bare back displayed for the viewer.

  He stared at me for a moment, a look in his eyes that I didn’t recognize. He nodded once, and then I walked out.

  Rain had begun falling by the time the show finally ended at 11:00 pm. I leaned against an outside building, not caring that I was soaked. It suited how I felt, how I always felt.

  Jamie came out with an umbrella.

  “I hate this fucking weather,” he muttered as he pulled out his phone to call an Uber.

  The way he said it, it had something to do with her. “Was Holland a big fan of the rain when she was with you?” I asked sarcastically.

  He shot me a dirty glare. “Something like that,” he finally grumbled.

  “Where we going?” I asked once we were driving through the crowded Manhattan streets. It was a funny thing, how out of my comfort zone this little journey took me. I didn’t accost artists at their art shows or athletes at their homes. I didn’t randomly jump in an Uber with a stranger.

  Well, I guess if you counted Holland, I did. Regardless, months later, and I still bore no resemblance to who I had been before I met her. And I hated that.

  “I’m hungry, they never serve good food at those things,” he replied

  I snorted at that. From the article I had read about Jamie, he came from a privileged background, or at least had a rich father and a trust fund or something like that. The article also talked about how Jamie was frequently seen at the city’s hottest food spots. The show had been serving his kind of food.

  Or at least, what had been his kind of food.

  I had my suspicions for his sudden change in palate.

  My suspicion was confirmed when we pulled up to a greasy diner tucked in between some brownstones.

  “They serve good fucking burgers here,” Jamie said, not looking me in the eye.

  I didn’t eat burgers. Hadn’t since Holland left. I hadn’t eaten them before her, and I didn’t want to eat them now. Even if it had been something that I’d loved to do when I was with her.

  I guessed burgers were another thing she shared with all of us. I suspected that Steve may have had some memories tied to burgers as well.

  I fucking hated that.

  We walked into the diner. It really was a dive. Just the kind of place that Holland would’ve liked.

  Holland, Holland, Holland. I’d set myself on this journey, hoping for retribution, or at least, a little bit of peace. Instead, I was torturing myself, embedding her further inside of me until I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to get her out.

  There was nothing I wanted more than for her to stop being the face I saw whenever I closed my eyes.

  Jamie

  A Few Months Earlier

  Graham Kempner was a prick. Not much else I could say about him. Staring at him across the table from the dive that Holland used to drag me to, I tried to find some kind of similarity to tell me that she had a type. Egotistical asshole, maybe. Was that a thing?

  I had known he was trouble the second he walked in. I doubted he gave a fuck about my art. He’d come with a mission. People with game plans in life were always the ones you needed to watch out for.

  I had been trying to play a game with myself since she left. I tried to see how long I could go without thinking about her. I would be doing okay, hours passing while I wrapped myself in distractions, and then someone would walk by with almost her exact hair color, or I’d come across a restaurant I had taken her to as I drove to a meeting… or it would rain. Like tonight.

  I had been reborn in the rain that night with Holland, and there was a part of me that couldn’t go back.

  Who was I kidding… everything about me hadn’t been able to go back after that night.

  I had been dying since she left. I wasn’t stupid enough to be able to lie to myself about that. Graham offered what amounted to a glass of water to a man who had been dying of thirst in the desert. I could pretend to hate Holland all I wanted, but that would be like hating myself, since she had become so much a part of me during that short amount of time we had together.

  “Talk,” I told him after we had ordered our food. Graham had ordered a chicken sandwich, despite the fact that I had told him this was the kind of place you only ordered burgers from. Probably intentional, and it made me itch inside that she had shared her love of burgers with him.

  “I found her,” he told me calmly as he stared at me intently, searching for something. If he was trying to figure me out, it wasn’t ever going to happen. She had been the only one who could see the real me.

  He’d found her. It took me a second for the words to actually hit me.

  I hadn’t tried to search for her after she’d left. I had known the moment she was gone. There was an emptiness in the air that hadn’t been there before.

  When I was a little boy still trying desperately to listen to the mad ramblings of my distraught mother, she had told me that we left pieces of ourselves everywhere we went. And that how we were remembered forever would depend on where we went in life.

  The funny thing about that story—my mother had always wanted to travel, but had never left New York City.

  It was ironic now to think about it in that light, and I
had eventually forgotten it for a time, accepting it for what it was… a whole lot of nonsense.

  It had been nonsense until I met Holland.

  And then she was everywhere. Scattering pieces of herself all around the city I loved, until the city itself had been transformed, just like me.

  That was probably why that moment had stood out to me so much, the silent emptiness. Because somehow, she had managed to collect those pieces of herself and take them with her.

  And I thought her presence was what I had missed the most. Her everywhere around me.

  “Does she want to be found?” I asked. And he stared at me strangely. Like that question was something he had never bothered asking himself. And maybe it was a stupid question. What woman running cons all over the place really wanted to be found? I asked because a part of me seemed to still hold out hope she would come back. Hoped she wanted to come back.

  The truth stared at me. For as messed up as Graham Kempner obviously was, she had cast a spell on him as well. I doubted he knew the reason he searched for her was because he was missing those little pieces of her, too. Currently, she was probably doing the same thing to some poor fool somewhere else in the world. Getting him addicted to the little bits she deigned to give him.

  “You loved her, didn’t you?” I ask, realizing that so far, we’d been having a one-sided conversation.

  “Does it matter?” he said, exasperation in his words and his eyes as he gave the chicken sandwich in front of him a dour look. There was a yearning when he glanced at my burger, and it almost made me laugh. Of course he loved her. He just looked at my burger like he wanted to fucking make love to it, when I knew for a fact that the Kempner family had an affinity for fine dining. Just like me, before Holland got ahold of me.