The Dollhouse (Paperdolls #1)

by Nicole Thorn

  “How’s everything been since the interview?” I asked.

  I’d talked to them since, but this was the first time I’d seen anybody. It was strange without Kylie here. We weren’t us unless we were all together.

  “Mom flipped,” Layla said, looking at her sister. “I guess parents don’t like it when you come home wasted after a party.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, my mom was making fun of me the morning after. She had a great time.”

  Adalyn frowned at her drink as she touched the condensation. “My dad wasn’t too happy. He gave me ice cream for breakfast in the morning, and we watched TV all day. Then he told me if I did it again I would be cleaning out the gutters for a year.”

  “I just slept,” Layla told us. “I’m never drinking again. Not even kind of worth it.”

  I stared at the healing cut on my hand, a thin pink line that reminded me of what made me forget to hurt for a little while. When I pressed on it, everything got quiet in my head. All of my thoughts were focused on one thing, and I liked that.

  Before I knew it, food was in front of me, and I couldn’t remember when we ordered. I started picking at the food without even being hungry. When did I lose my appetite? It didn’t really matter. I had a part I was playing, and that involved me eating, smiling, and being a normal human being.

  We were all halfway through a silent meal before Layla said, “Maybe we should check on Kylie. It’s not right that she’s alone and we’re here.”

  Adalyn nodded as she put her fork down. “We can all go somewhere. Maybe watch a movie if the rain doesn’t let up.”

  Melissa agreed. “I can drive you guys anywhere you wanna go. I don’t work ‘til later.”

  I decided more than half a meal was a suitable amount to eat. No one would think anything of the food left on my plate. Layla paid with some money her mom gave her to take us out. So at least one set of parents were okay with us seeing each other.

  When we got in the car, it was my job to tell Kylie we were coming. I texted and called her several times, but she wasn’t picking up. Even Adalyn tried and failed.

  “It’s fine,” Layla said while staring out the window. “We can just surprise her.”

  It was a little bit of a drive to get to her house. We all lived relatively close while being kind of far away. I wished we could all be in the same place. Would it feel too much like it did before?

  The first thing I saw when we pulled up were news vans. It wasn’t shocking since I was still getting the odd one at my house. Same as the girls. These vans blocked the view of the driveway until we were parked on the street. That was when time stopped.

  We all saw Kylie, but it took a second for us to know it was her. Her hair was gone without a trace. Everything about her right now read as panic, and she screamed at people standing in front of her house. I watched my sister crumble into a million pieces.

  “Oh, my God,” Layla gasped. “She has her dad’s gun.”

  She threw her car door open with the rest of us, and we got about five steps in before Melissa held us back.

  “What the fuck?” Melissa gasped.

  Her sister looked at her. “She’s got a gun. If we come running, something bad can happen. Don’t spook her.”

  “Kylie!” Adalyn screamed.

  Several of the men operating cameras turned them to us. Vultures. All of them. They wanted a story. And they didn’t care that we were all unhinged.

  Kylie didn’t look over at us. She swung her gun at the people who were holding microphones out. We screamed, and she screamed, and it didn’t matter at all. I couldn’t even hear her words. Not past the yelling in my head. It told me to go after her. Stop this from getting out of hand.

  “Kylie!” I yelled to her. “Go back inside!”

  She looked right at me, and I caught the tears streaming down her face. It was too much for her. All of this. The people in her face were asking her questions even now. Asking why she was doing this. How she felt.

  Sirens sounded in the distance, and a few heads turned to the end of the street. I could make out blue and red lights in my peripheral vision, and they were getting brighter the closer they came. I couldn’t make myself turn to look at what was coming for us.

  “Kylie,” a woman shouted at her through all of our voices. She ducked around the corner of her news van, and her camera man was beside her, keeping his shot on my sister. “Where did you get that gun?”

  “Kylie?” another person said, holding a microphone out. “What are you doing? Put the gun down.”

  “Kylie, are you on any medication?”

  Several of the gathered people started taking cover as Kylie stepped closer. A couple women huddled together, putting their things in the van and looking like they wanted to bolt. Only a few people didn’t try to find safety from the line of fire, and they remained where they were. One of the men holding a camera put it in his van and ducked completely behind the vehicle.

  “Kylie, what’s going through your mind right now?” one of the final people standing asked.

  Even more began to retreat.

  There was silence as my sister spoke.

  “You wanna know what I’m thinking?”

  She raised the gun, and we screamed for her again. She couldn’t hear us over the other people. It didn’t matter anymore. Those eyes were back on us, but I wasn’t sure what they saw.

  “I’m sorry,” Kylie said, still watching us.

  It was less than a second between when she put the gun under her chin and pulled the trigger.

  We all screamed and my ears rang with the gunshot. More blood than I’d ever seen shot into all different directions behind Kylie. The gun fell, she fell, and Adalyn fell.

  I started running just a split second after Layla did. I still couldn’t hear anything over the screaming and the sobbing. Adalyn was hysterical, Layla was pure silence, and I was nothing at all.

  I shoved past the crowd and dropped onto my knees so hard that I might have fractured something. It didn’t matter. How could anything matter when my sister was dead?

  Layla and I were on either side of her, choking on sobs and tears. Kylie’s eyes were still open, but the top of her head was just… gone. No. Not gone. Everywhere… Splattered on the garage door, the driveway, dripping in bloody chunks down to the gutter. High heeled women were stepping out of the way, directing camera men where to shoot with blank expressions.

  My body was shaking with violence that I couldn’t quell. I put my hand over Kylie’s, palm up on the ground. I held it tightly, praying that this wasn’t real. Just another awful nightmare that I would wake from. Kylie was fine. Kylie was fine. Kylie was…

  Adalyn was on her hands and knees, screaming at the ground in the middle of the street. Melissa was right there with her, crying and seeing real ugliness for the first time in her life. Her forehead was on Adalyn’s shoulder, crying so hard that it didn’t even sound human.

  My eyes found Layla’s, and I felt my expression turn to a perfect mask of stone. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. Just a dream. Kylie was fine. Her head wasn’t in pieces that were pouring against me, sticking to my dress and legs. She couldn’t be dead. We just got home. We got everything we never thought we would. Her parents were back together. She was starting her life with the opportunities that the interview promised us. School. A real shot at life. I was only seeing things.

  Layla was hyperventilating. Why was she so upset? This wasn’t real. She shouldn’t be this sad. Just a horrible trick of the mind. Making me think that I wanted part of myself die. There was so little left of me. How could Kylie be gone? What would remain?

  The front door of her house opened as the doors of several others did the same. I was just realizing the crowd that was gathering in this dream of mine. Parents hiding the faces of children, people in jammies, people in suits, people with dish gloves on. Such detail.

  Kylie’s mother came out of her house. Her eyes found us in a moment, and she screamed loud enough to nearly s
hatter glass. She flew down the stairs outside of her door, and she fell to her knees beside Kylie. Both of her hands were wrapped around the girl’s arm. It was so still. Everything about her was so still. Empty of a soul.

  Her mother screamed her daughter’s name, shaking her body. A gush of blood left Kylie’s head, soaking into my clothes and Layla’s.

  Too much blood. Too much stillness. Gonegonegone. No. This was a nightmare. It shouldn’t feel this real. Her hand shouldn’t feel lifeless. Kylie was always warm. Even when she was quiet, she was so alive. Her pain gave her life where it took mine.

  But there was no life in her. That life was pouring all over me and the stone beneath us. The blood was too warm. Like all of Kylie was leaving with it. She was gone, and I was covered in what was left of her.

  Those sirens sounded even louder as the world slowed down. I saw three police cars pulling up and officers threw their doors open. They started running to us, leaving their cars parked in the street, cockeyed and still on. A police woman tilted her walkie to her mouth and began yelling into it, calling for an ambulance.

  Two policemen started yelling at the reporters to move back, holding their hands out as some kind of signal to them. They listened, and everyone who wasn’t already with Kylie started taking big steps back. The camera men didn’t stop filming.

  My head came down on Kylie so that I could rest my ear on her chest. No heartbeat. She should have a heartbeat. Too alive to not have a heartbeat. I closed my eyes and listened. I couldn’t hear it. It was only screaming, crying, and bitter silence.

  e were all starting to get bags under our eyes from not sleeping for days. We would drift off now and then, but only for a few minutes at a time. Layla’s grandmother attempted to force food on us, but we weren’t hungry. She chose to focus on Melissa. She was far more pliable.

  I lay in Layla’s bed, facing Adalyn. She had dropped off a few minutes before. Her sleep, like ours, was tormented. Unconscious and looking petrified. I didn’t wake her. It would only get worse if I did. At least this way she could rest for a little while.

  Our dresses were hanging up in Layla’s closet. Someone else got them for us when we refused to leave the house. We hadn’t been apart for longer than five minutes since it happened, which meant I hadn’t been home in days. My parents had to come see me here, and they attempted to bring me back home, insisting I see a doctor or someone to talk to. I refused, and they eventually backed down. I hadn’t seen Wilson at all, but he was in the back of my mind for the most part. I still missed him, but this was nothing more than the proof I needed to have before I would know for sure that this was too much for him. He should get peace of some kind.

  Wilson had called me about twelve times since Kylie… since what happened. I couldn’t answer because I couldn’t talk about it. My hands still hadn’t stopped shaking, and I saw her face every time I closed my eyes. It wasn’t the face of the girl I loved. It was the face of the shell she left behind for us. How could she do that to us? We made a promise. All of us or none of us. We wore the proof on our wrists. We were linked. This world wasn’t a place we wanted to be if one of us was gone.

  “Answer the phone,” Layla groaned from behind me as my phone started vibrating. “Christ, put him out of his misery.”

  I flipped over so I could look at her. “He’s just going to ask me about her.”

  Layla’s eyes were puffy and ringed with red. An affliction we all had. She was so pale. Weary and gone. “I think he’s invested enough in you to deserve a phone call, Riley.”

  “You make me sound like I’m not a person.” Like I was some monster who didn’t care enough to let him know I was surviving.

  She shrugged on her side. “This is our reality. We’re heavy hearts, and anyone willing to carry us, even for a little while, should get a fucking gold metal. He’s going to think you don’t care about him, and I know you do.”

  “Kylie…”

  “I know. But our lives can’t stop just because hers did.”

  I winced. “I feel like there are more important things than answering a phone.”

  “Like lying in a bed, pretending to sleep so that my parents don’t have us sedated?”

  “Maybe.”

  Layla sat up and grabbed my phone, swiping it and putting it to her ear. “Wilson?”

  There was a pause.

  “This is Layla. Riley can’t come to the phone right now because she thinks it’s better for you if she pretends she doesn’t want to be friends.” Another, longer pause. “You’re right, that was a dumb question. No, we’re not okay. It’s very sweet that you called, and I’m sorry that Riley won’t talk to you.”

  She stared me down, and I glared back at her.

  “Just keep poking away, and she’ll cave. But today is the funeral, so it’ll have to wait. I’ll tell her. Thanks for calling.” She hung up, placing my phone down again. “He said that he was sorry for our loss. And if you came over, he would make you a bunch of mourning food.”

  He meant well, but he wasn’t what I needed right now. “I guess I’ll talk to him later.”

  “Yeah, you will,” she said harshly. “If a nice person is willing to want to know you, knowing all the fucked up stuff in our lives, then you should hold onto them. Nothing about our lives has been fair, so don’t throw away a miracle.”

  Wilson wasn’t the miracle I wanted. I wanted Kylie in this bed with us, not in some freezer with half her skull. But God didn’t smile on me. On any of us.

  Layla glanced at her clock. “We have about an hour before we have to get up.”

  I glared at the device like it betrayed me. “And we have to march into a church and stare at our sister’s coffin while people talk about her like they knew her. Even if they did, she wasn’t the same girl as before. The version of her they’re going to mourn isn’t a real one. She’s an echo. Like a star. The lights were still on, but she died almost a decade ago. I can’t listen to that.”

  Layla laced our fingers together, lying back down. “We’re all dead, but we get to choose if we want to be alive again. Living means doing hard things. We don’t have a master that rules us anymore. We’re free, and that means that consequences come with it. Kylie didn’t want to live, but I still do. I want to go to school. I want to get married and have lots of babies. I don’t want to throw it all away like she did.”

  Layla was losing it, but she was always so good at hiding. Her voice shook, but only just, and her eyes shined. “I’m so mad at her for what she did, and I’m going to make sure I do enough living for the both of us. And if you keep going like this, you’re just as dead as she is. Only difference is that you’re leaving your ghost to haunt all the people around you. Don’t leave them with a zombie that wears your face. It’s not fair.”

  Fair. Right. Cruel. Words that have haunted me since the day I came home. Killing myself would save my lost soul, but it would ruin all of the people in my life. So that wasn’t an option. Kylie chose something she had no right to. Us living wasn’t actually about us. We lived for the people around us. Layla was right. If I was just a zombie, I might as well be dead because I wasn’t any good to anyone.

  I sat up in one swift motion. I didn’t want to be dead. “I want to be alive. I want everything I shouldn’t want because it’s too selfish.”

  Layla sat up with me before she got off of her bed and stood. “Good. That makes three of us.” She walked over to her closet, pulling my dress out and throwing it to me. “Now, we just need to get past the ugly stuff first.”

  The church had so many cars around. We were all piled in a van with tinted windows so that they couldn’t see us. Layla’s father thought it would be a good idea. He and his mother were with us while Layla’s mother drove her sister. We wouldn’t separate, so this was the only way.

  Anger came when I saw the news vans. Fake women with fake smiles stood in front of the church, speaking into microphones while they were filmed. I could only imagine what they were making up. We were being kept f
rom the news, but it was impossible not to hear some of what was going around. People were saying she was taking all the wrong meds, that she was crazy, never very stable, even when she was younger. They said she was weak. That she should have been put away somewhere. She wasn’t meant to survive as long as she did…

  The stories were too much for me to deal with. They were all telling lies. Kylie wasn’t weak; she just didn’t know how to handle this. None of us did. The problem was that she was the one with a gun in the house.

  We parked around the back with the rest of the close family that had come. The front was far too crowded for us to go there. Since the day… since Kylie died, the news vans had been outside of each of our houses. My parents told me they wouldn’t stop calling or knocking on the door. It was the only reason they were okay with me not being home. Though it wasn’t much better at Layla’s house.

  When we entered the church, the seats were mostly full already. We had seats saved in the front row. Kylie’s parents were responsible for that. They were… doing about as well as one would think. We hadn’t spoken to them directly. Layla’s parents thought it would be best that way. All we knew was that no one had a clue how Kylie found the gun or unlocked the safe it was in. I suppose it didn’t matter much now.

  We greeted her parents, and each of us had the same numb expression on our faces. How could you know what to say in a time like this?

  Mrs. Michaelson hugged me last. “Thank you for coming.”

  The reaction in my head was not a kind one. It was a quick and sharp “how dare you.” Our parents were all under the impression they were the most important family that we had. They all seemed completely unable to understand that this ugliness they insist they’re shielding us from made my sisters and me all what we are. Sisters. That bond was forever and stronger than the blood we were claimed by.

  “Thank you.” I forced the words out of my mouth. I was trying to seem kinder than I was. “I hope to talk to you later.”