The Dollhouse (Paperdolls #1)

by Nicole Thorn

  She tackled me, knocking me flat on my ass while she wrapped her arms around me. Her knees were planted tightly at my sides as she held me like it was my job to keep her together. So I did.

  “Riley,” I said again, petting her hair and then rubbing her back. “What happened?”

  She sniffled, sitting on me. I swept my thumbs under her eyes while she sobbed out a few last sounds of misery before she tried talking. “He’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  She whimpered, taking a hand from me and holding it at her chest. “Kermit. He’s gone.”

  Dammit.

  I used my free hand to hold her face. “Did he die, baby?”

  She shook her head. “No. I got up this morning, and he wasn’t in his house. I looked all over for him, but he’s not anywhere. Mom said he must have gotten out and hopped away.” She broke down before the words were even out.

  I pulled her in, pressing her head under my chin and holding onto her. “Well,” I said, getting ready to lie to her. “Maybe he’s outside. Did your mom look with you?”

  “No,” she whispered. “She didn’t think I should look. She said he was long gone.”

  Huh, I bet she did.

  Fine, then. I could make this right. I tilted Riley’s chin up so she had to look at me. “I’m going to go out and look for him. I promise you that I won’t come back without him.”

  Her ears lifted up with her eyes. “Really?” she squeaked with hope.

  I smiled at her, pushing my fingers until they were in her hair. “I promise you that I’ll fix this. And I’ll keep Kermit over at my house. That way it’ll be impossible for him to escape again, and you can come see him any time you want.”

  She hugged me again, catching her breath. “Thank you, Wilson.”

  I kissed her cheek. “You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

  I got us off of the ground and set her on the bed. God, it killed me when she looked at me like that. Her eyes were fixed on me like I was something wonderful. Her savior. She made me feel like I was worth more than I was.

  When I forced myself out of her room, I heard her mother whispering. I’d never been this mad at her before. She’s helped me so much over the years, and I couldn’t understand why the woman was doing this. She falsely thought that she was helping.

  “It could have given her diseases,” she whispered. “Trust me, it’s better this way. She’ll forget about it in a couple days, and we’ll go let her pick out a puppy.”

  Mr. Cain sighed. “I hope you’re right about this. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on her face.”

  “That thing was in our bed this morning,” Mrs. Cain snapped. “Once it starts getting out of its little box, then it’s outside. That was what we agreed on.”

  I rolled my eyes and left the house before I said something I would regret. Risking my time with Riley wasn’t an option.

  I spent about a half hour checking all around our houses for the toad. Mrs. Cain would probably have just dumped him out here somewhere. Sadly for me, he wasn’t around. His little toad legs hopped him right away from Riley and me. That was fine. I had something else I could do.

  When I thundered into my house, I was fuming enough to make my father look worried. With a little silver top hat in his hands, he froze and looked at me.

  “Problem?”

  I somehow got through the story and my plan without yelling. Dad seemed just as offended as I was. He patted Jude’s shoulder.

  “Go get the keys, buddy.”

  My brother got up and took off for the kitchen.

  I looked back at my father. “This is your day off; I don’t want to drag you all over town looking for something we might not find.”

  He smiled when he got to me. “I would love to spend the day with my sons going on a wild goose chase for a toad. This is going to be a special day for you when you look back on it. I’d love to be a part of it.”

  “How is it special? Riley is miserable.”

  “For now. But the day isn’t going to end like you think it is. Not for you.”

  I stared blankly. “Why?”

  “Son, you want to go around to pet stores and search for a toad.” He said the words as if they were enough to explain.

  “And?”

  He laughed. “Come on. You’re smarter than this.”

  Jude came running up behind Dad, holding out a keychain. “Got ‘em!”

  Dad took them, mussed his hair, and thanked him before we got going. Dad was the one to drive us around, and I was forced to sit in the back of the car while Jude rode up front. He was just excited that he was finally tall enough.

  When we got to the first place, I went to the man behind the counter and showed him a picture on my phone that I had of Riley and the toad. I was hoping he’d see it and know if he had any that looked like him.

  I had to go look at about seven toads myself when the man couldn’t tell me. Not one that could pass for Kermit. They were all the wrong shades.

  It wasn’t over. I promised I wouldn’t come back until I had Kermit, and I wouldn’t show up just to disappoint Riley. I had to make her happy. Everything in my soul yelled at me to earn the looks she gave me.

  We went from pet shop to pet shop in our search for a toad. Jude found an animal that he wanted to take home from each place, but Dad told him he needed to be a little older for a pet. Jude wasn’t all that upset by it. His attention span was about three minutes.

  “Off to the next one,” Dad said as we walked out of the fourth store. He gave me a supportive look and a pat on the shoulder as I walked, already feeling defeated.

  Every place in the city, and it wasn’t until I was at the very last one that I found a passable toad. He was in the corner of his terrarium, glaring hard at his toad friends.

  “Him.”

  I pointed him out to the woman who unlocked the thing. She scooped him up, and I followed her to the counter while she rang him up. He got a special plastic container thing to sit in until I could get him into his permanent home.

  It felt like a boulder was lifted off of my chest. Riley would be happy when I brought this damn toad to her, and I could feel like I was worthy of her for a moment or two. She would express how she felt, and it was always nothing but real. She would never lie to me. Not about that. She wasn’t capable of faking the kind of affections she showed me.

  Once we were outside, Dad shuffled Jude off to the car. He brought me around to the other side, smirking while he leaned on the car. “Happy?”

  I sighed and looked at Kermit 2.0. “I am. Riley is going to probably jump up and down and attack me.”

  Dad smiled knowingly and I didn’t like it one bit. “It’s nice to see you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “To see you happier. I like what that girl brought out in you. You wear being in love almost as well as your mother did.”

  I was sure I heard him correctly, so I went over his words again. And again. And again. No. “Why do you think I’m in love?”

  He stared at me like I was an idiot. “Well, we can start with the obvious if you want.” With a point to my full hands, he said, “We just spent almost three hours going from store to store so you could find her a toad. Tell me why.”

  It was simple. “Because it would make her happy.”

  Dad nodded. “Yeah… Because it would make her happy. And why do you want to make her happy?”

  Again, it was simple. “She makes me happy too. When she gets excited about something, her eyes get huge and her ears wiggle. She squeaks when she gets scared of something and when she’s happy, she looks like an angel. When she smiles right at me, I feel like I matter. No one’s made me feel like that since Mom. Even then… it wasn’t like this.” By the time I was done, I was talking to myself, having forgotten that my father was even here.

  Oh no. Was this what love was? Searching high and low for something as unimportant as a toad because it was actually the most important thing in the world? All because it would
make her smile? Was it the little kick my heart got when she put her skin on mine, even when it was only an accidental bump? Maybe it was. Maybe it was everything. The little things and the big ones. How she made me ashamed each time I even thought about smoking. How it felt to wake up with her in my bed. The way it made me feel when I thought about if she were to do it again. A lifetime of waking up with her…

  A horn went off, and I was brought back to the parking lot. It would seem that my father got back in the car without me. He leaned his head out of the window.

  “Come on, kid. Happens to the best of us. Hop in and let me take you back to her.”

  Robotically, I did as I was told. I got in and buckled up. Then I stared at the toad and wondered how this happened to me. I also wondered when it happened. Since I met her, I’d felt better with her around. I never really questioned why. I just accepted it as fact. She was fire, and I was nothing but a moth.

  While we drove, I was quiet in the back seat. Quiet enough to make Jude turn around.

  “What’s wrong, Wilson? You look like someone threw a dead chicken at your face.”

  Dad laughed. “Just let him think, buddy. Your brother is having a real hard time right now. One day, you’ll be lucky enough to be just as screwed as he is. I hope you’re smarter than him and don’t decide to try and be a hero or something and let the girl think you’re not nuts about her.”

  I brushed that one off, going back to wondering how I screwed up so bad. I promised to be her friend. I failed at that almost instantly. I started seeking her out to spend time with her. Then I started getting careless. Letting her touch me and touching her as well. Great, now I was thinking about touching her. Like when I helped her catch Kermit in the first place. She fearlessly let me hold her up while she reached for the toad. Maybe I should have known then.

  Without any warning, I was in front of her door, knocking. I couldn’t remember how I got there, but being there gave me peace. Until Mrs. Cain opened the door.

  Her smile faded when she saw what was in my hand, and I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice.

  “Don’t worry. I’m keeping this one at my house. And I’m telling Riley that I found him in the yard. That way I don’t have to watch her heart break twice.”

  I stepped in without being invited. Mrs. Cain was speechless at my rudeness, but I didn’t care very much. Not when I had a girl to take care of. Her husband was just behind her, and I prepared for him to say something harsh to me. He didn’t, shockingly enough. His eyes seemed to give me permission to do what I was going to.

  I knocked on Riley’s door, and it opened about three seconds later. I watched her expression change like it was in slow motion. It was utterly hopeless, and then it was joyous.

  “You found him!” she squeaked.

  We walked into her room, and I set him on the dresser. “Yup. He was just sitting in the yard. I don’t know why it took me so long to find him.”

  As I guessed, Riley jumped me. Her arms went around my neck, and she thanked me about a hundred times. With each one, I told her she was welcome.

  She didn’t let go of me, and I was more than grateful for that. She was warm and soft in my arms. I shamelessly buried my face in her neck and held on tight.

  Oh, God… I’m in love with her.

  When Riley pulled back and broke apart from me, I had to make peace with this new pit in my stomach. She greeted her toad, not even noticing how she destroyed me. How could she? Too innocent to see that I was utterly hers.

  It was… odd, this feeling. It left me happier and sadder than I’d ever been. She made me feel so much like I was worth the adoration she had for me. But I knew this was as much as we would ever have together. I couldn’t touch her the way I wanted. I couldn’t love her the way I wanted…

  She turned back to me with that look again. The one that tricked me into thinking I was a good man.

  “Thank you so much, Wilson. This means so much to me.”

  I pulled a smile out of thin air. “You’re welcome, Cookie. I oughta head home, but you can come see Kermit any time you want.”

  She smiled brightly. “Okay.” With a lift to her tiptoes, she kissed my jaw line, missing my cheek. I didn’t mind at all.

  I grabbed the damn toad and got out of that bedroom as fast as I could. It was that or I’d end up pushing her against that dresser. She’d like that, but I was trying to be a good guy.

  I stepped onto her porch and closed my eyes, taking the deepest breath I ever had in my whole life. The chilly air burned my throat and I let the pain come. It was only the start of what would be a hard night.

  I felt something land on my foot, and it forced my eyes open. When I looked down, “You motherfucker…”

  I knew it was him. That fucking toad was sitting on my foot like he didn’t do anything wrong. He looked around, doing nothing but breathing. Well…

  I looked at the toad in my hands. “I guess you’re Fozzie now.” I opened the container and put the traitor toad in with his new brother. The things you do for a girl. They looked just alike, and I hated the both of them. But I loved their owner.

  sat on Adalyn’s bed while the girls looked over some pictures that she’d painted. Her father bought her some kind of special tablet thing where she could draw and make it look clean and perfect. As much as she loved that, she really liked getting her hands messy with paint. Her dad made her a studio out of an old storage room downstairs. He waited ‘til we were with her to tell her. That way we all got to see how happy she was.

  “I like the ladybug one,” Layla said. “The colors are so pretty.”

  “The gecko is my favorite,” I threw in. “The blue one.”

  Adalyn appreciated our compliments and blushed at them as she put her drawing book down. “Felicia’s contact and I have been talking. She likes the idea I have for a book. The one about the cloud and the scorpion.”

  Layla smiled. “Oh, I like that one.”

  Adalyn used to tell us stories on the bad days. Worse days. We would huddle up together in the Clean Room, and she would tell us stories that she made up until we all fell asleep. She was better than she thought she was at comforting people.

  The sound of Felicia’s name was still hard to hear. The woman had been calling all of us since the day Kylie killed herself. She wanted another interview. My mom had deleted about a dozen voicemails that promised to go bigger and better for the next one. National. She threw in more words like multi-book deal, TV pilots, film rights. It was insane of her to think that we would go for it. The only good thing to come of this was that Layla was finding lots of schools that wanted her. She just had to get her GED first. The schools thought that she would make for a good public speaker. Someone they had the idea that she’d go around and tell her story to people. Layla wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but a school offered her a scholarship if she did a few events and talked to some trauma victims.

  “You’ve been a little wobbly,” Layla pointed out after we had lunch.

  The girls sat on either side of me while the TV was low in front of us. We were supposedly watching a movie we all liked when we were little. But we didn’t really care for TV anymore.

  I sighed. “Just a little confused about Wilson. Sometimes I think that he wants to be with me, and then I have to hear him go on about how it would be better for me if he wasn’t. What the heck does that mean?”

  “Boys. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t get off without ‘em. Well…” She said, rolling her eyes and tilting her head. “I guess you can.”

  Adalyn laughed so hard that she snorted. “Layla!”

  Our sister shrugged. “It’s true. I cannot tell a lie.”

  I shook my head. “Well, Wilson doesn’t seem to want to continue what he started the other night, so I don’t think I’ll be having any fun anytime soon.”

  Layla scrutinized me. “Why?”

  I blinked. “I just said. Because Wilson won’t touch me.”

  She scoffed, and her eyes were wide
with shame that I didn’t catch on. “You know that you can just do it yourself if you want.”

  Adalyn went bright red. “Jeez, Layla.”

  “What?” Her head whipped around. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good for a little while. It relieves stress and kills fifteen minutes.”

  Adalyn’s mouth scrunched to the side. “You say it like you know firsthand.”

  Without any embarrassment at all, she said, “Because I do. Duh.”

  “Oh…”

  “Really?” I asked

  She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t see any problem with it. Adalyn”―she smirked at her―“don’t get all blushy on me now. You know how pissy I am on a daily basis. Imagine how I would be if I didn’t get off once in a while.”

  Adalyn’s eyes were distant as she thought. “Oh God… the world would end.”

  She was promptly shoved, and we all started laughing. I sat up, holding my hands out.

  “Wait a minute. So you can just do that all by yourself, and it feels the same?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she reminded me. “You’re the only one of us who’s even kissed someone. But I enjoy it on the occasion I partake. You probably would too.”

  Adalyn about had a heart attack. “Oh, my God. Are you going to try it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d rather Wilson do it.”

  Layla patted my head. “Yeah, we’d all rather have someone else do it. Doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Do you know how to do it?”

  “I remember how he was doing it.” I blushed. Even when I was mostly sleeping for it. I remembered the way it felt when the pleasure was taking me over, making me never want to wake up. I doubted I could do that alone.

  I’d never even tried. And I was guessing Adalyn hadn’t either. It wasn’t a shock that Layla did. She was always the brave one. She would take risks and do what she felt like. I wished I were more like her.

  Layla nodded. “Then you should be fine. Just make sure you lock the door while you’re doing it. I can’t imagine it would go well if someone walked in on you.”

  Adalyn raised her hands up. “Can we talk about something else please? Like maybe the fact that I’m not moving anymore.”