The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  “My son told me you don’t hunt,” he says.

  “I don’t,” I say, setting aside the chicken legs and wings before splitting the breast into halves. I switch to a smaller knife to trim some of the fat off.

  “You sure know how to use a knife.”

  “I just know how to cook.” And then, in direct contradiction to my statement, I twirl the little knife. It’s showy and it’s bitchy and I shouldn’t do it, but I do. Because I want to throw him. Because I’ve already decided: I’m going to gut him my own way.

  He gets off the stool. “I should check on Wes.”

  My hand closes over the butcher knife to my right before the words are completely out of his mouth. His eyes fall to my hand, and mine stay on his. I don’t make a move to chop at the chicken or disguise the fact that I’m holding on, because he’s right: I do know how to use a knife.

  “That’s okay,” I tell him, that smile back on my face. That casual, naive smile. “You’re so busy, I’m sure you want to go straight to your office to relax. I can do it.”

  But he pushes. Because they always do. Because you draw a line, and they’ll walk right over it. I know you, something that’s maybe purely me whispers inside. I’ll end you.

  “If he’s sick—”

  “I’ve got it, Mr. Mayor.”

  It’s like time freezes and then backtracks between us, because the look he gives me has me feeling twelve years old again. But I don’t lose hold of my knife this time. I tighten my fingers around it. And I don’t run.

  “I do have a lot of paperwork to get done.”

  “I can let you know when dinner’s ready,” I say, wishing I could lock him inside and get Wes out before setting this entire place on fire.

  “You do that,” he says, before turning and leaving the kitchen. My breath tangles in my throat, half scared he’ll head right up the stairs to prove he’s in charge. But his steps continue to click against the stone tile that leads to his office; there are no soft thuds up the wooden stairs, muffled by the antique runners.

  I sag against the counter as the vegetables hiss and heat, on the edge of burning.

  I don’t let go of the knife.

  It takes almost two months for Wes to heal. We try to keep everything clean and bandaged, but with just Steri-Strips to hold everything together instead of stitches and staples, it all keeps breaking open again. It heals so much rougher. His shoulders are new terrain now; the old scar that taught me we were the same is bisected with sensitive tissue that’s purple-fresh and livid against his skin.

  He tries to shrug it off, what happened. He tells me he doesn’t want to talk about it. That he’s fine, even though he spends hours alone in the not-guest room, reading whatever books Lee gives him.

  His newfound reading habit gives me the time I need.

  I fall out of normal so easily, it’s laughable now that I ever thought it might stick. It’s naive to think a few years with Lee would undo anything. I just locked it up, but now I’m free.

  So I make two plans. I get leverage. But I don’t lie in wait.

  I go and find him.

  The mayor likes to go shooting on Sunday after church. He likes to go alone. Just him and his rifle and his thoughts up in the deer blinds as he picks off Bambi—badly, because of course he’s a shit hunter on top of being an abusive asshole.

  Until Clear Creek, I’ve never lived anywhere that had forests like this. Abby preferred cities when she was free, for obvious reasons. But hiking with Wes through middle school and high school had taught me not just the beauty but the value of the woods. They’re secret and silently loud, and the forgotten mining roads make the part of me born to run and hide settle sweetly. And now it’s proving useful.

  I feel kind of silly lurking behind the trees downhill from the deer blind, listening to the mayor’s bad shots and waiting for the beer to catch up with him and open my window of opportunity. Finally, the erratic shooting ceases, and I hear the thump and creak of the ladder. He’s on the move.

  I move when he does, watching him disappear through the trees to go pee somewhere away from his hunting ground. I hurry up the embankment, heading toward the trees he’ll pass on the way back to the blind. I tape the pictures against the trunk at eye level, where he won’t be able to miss them. Then I climb up into the blind, pulling the ladder up and inside behind me.

  Sitting back into the shadows, I wait, my heart ratcheting up with each moment that passes. His rifle is right there. I edge away from it. It’s not that I’m scared . . . and it’s not that I’m tempted.

  It’s that I know where things go if I touch it. So I don’t.

  His footsteps crunch through the underbrush, so loud they probably send any prey scattering for a half mile. My nails bite into my palms. I guess he found the photos. I hope he’s terrified.

  “Hey,” he shouts from below.

  I give myself a moment to breathe. Because a part of me is scared, but a part of me is gloriously excited. The kind of happy that little kids feel when they see their birthday cake. Gleeful in the I’m gonna win way, because this is what I’m good at. But I need to play it right. There’s too much riding on this to mess it up.

  “I know you’re in there!”

  I pop up into view in the doorway of the deer blind like the nastiest of surprises. “Hi, Mayor.”

  His jaw is probably still hurting, it drops so hard. It takes all the wind out of him, and he sags in shock, almost wheezing out my name. But in his hand is one of the photos I’d taped to the tree. It’s glossy and high definition. I’d splurged on the good paper for effect. It creaks and crumples as he fists it.

  “I’m gonna stay up here while we have this talk,” I say, taking great care to settle myself in the doorway and letting my legs dangle along the edge.

  He doesn’t sputter, but he takes a good ten seconds to respond. They tick by, because ten seconds is a long time when it’s just us two in the woods and there’s blackmail material taped to the trees. A little drama to get his blood pumping.

  “What are you doing here, Nora?” he asks, like that day in the kitchen where my hand curled around the butcher knife.

  There’s no running from this. I don’t want to. I came here for this.

  The mayor’s never liked me. I’ve always unnerved him, and I could never tell if it was because I wasn’t as girly as he’d like or if he somehow senses the grift in me.

  Besides preachers, politicians are the other acceptable kind of grifters, after all. I’ve known from day one that the mayor’s more than a little shady. And now there’s proof in his hand and on a few trees he missed on his run back here to get his gun.

  “Did your sister take these photos?” he demands. “Is she around here, too?” He looks over his shoulder, nervous for the first time.

  “I took the photos. Lee doesn’t know anything about your after-work activities. Just me.”

  His expression shifts, and even though I’ve been waiting for that, adrenaline has my heart knocking against my ribs as he steps forward, going from I’m fucked to fuck her up in a blink.

  “Uh-uh.” I press my thumb down on the stun gun that I take out of my pocket. Does he even recognize the jacket as Wes’s? Probably not. I wore it as a reminder. I wore it for strength.

  Electricity sparks, the zap crackle of it filling the space between us, and just like a dog brought to heel, he stops.

  His eyes narrow. He’s thinking it through. Putting it together. That afternoon in the kitchen when I stopped him from checking on Wes. All the little moments before that. What kind of girl would anticipate his every move? What kind of girl would do this? He’s getting there.

  “I’ve got backups of the photos,” I continue. “I hacked into your email, so I have all of those, too. You need better answers to the security questions. Now it’s all triggered to get sent to local news sources—and the sheri
ff—unless I enter a password every day. So you’re not going to do anything stupid right now, like try to kill me and bury me in the woods.”

  “You’re talking ridiculous, Nora. I think you’ve been watching too much television,” he says, and the ice in his voice is all cornered politician. He’ll try to wriggle out of this, but he can’t.

  There were a few things to choose from when it came to him. But I chose the one that would hurt him the most.

  Money is power. Mrs. Prentiss inherited a lot of it last year when her father died. If there is ever a time for a woman to leave her abusive husband, it’s when she has a lot of cash, right? It has to have crossed his mind.

  So I went with his cheating. And let me tell you, I couldn’t have come up with a better story if I’d written it myself.

  “This isn’t TV,” I say. “This is real life.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he declares, like it’s the only word he knows.

  “You know what gets me about you?” I ask, but I don’t even wait for an answer, I just forge ahead. “I bet you tell yourself it’s discipline. Am I right?”

  He goes a dull, middle-aged sort of tomato red as a vein in his temple pulses, telling me I am. It’s horrifying instead of satisfying. I wish he’d just have a heart attack and save me the trouble, and maybe I should be ashamed of that thought, but I’m not. Because you can’t rehabilitate a man like him, steeped in his privilege and his rage and all the shit he’s gotten away with for decades because that’s the way he is.

  Well, this is the way I am. He’s going to have to deal.

  “I bet you think it makes you better,” I continue, wishing my words were weapons or poison or something more than just words. “But guess what? It’s always been abuse. You’ve always been an abuser. You’ve just been better at hiding it than some people. But I see you.”

  “You do not get to tell me how to parent my son. You are a child,” he hisses, eyes narrowed.

  “I mean, I did ride my bike over here,” I say, and I’m playing so brave and flippant. I sound so confident when I feel like shaking, but over the years, I’ve tricked my body, just like I’ve tricked him. “But I do get to tell you what to do now. That’s why I went to all the trouble of gathering the blackmail material. Catch up.”

  “What do you want?” he asks. “What the fuck are you up to?”

  My laugh comes harsh and hard. It echoes in the branches of the trees, and birds scatter at the soulless noise. His confusion doesn’t bring me any satisfaction. It just makes me angrier.

  It makes me want to kill him. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Because we’d be so much better off without him. But I can’t be that. I won’t let him be the making of me into something new.

  I have become so many things for so many people. The daughter they never had. The wide-eyed adoration they always craved. The dangled temptation they didn’t even try to resist because the world told them I was fodder.

  I am done being fodder. I’ve become the cannon instead.

  “I want one thing,” I say. “It’s simple. You ready?”

  His hand twitches like he’s longing to wrap it around my throat. I’m grateful the deer blind’s so high up. I don’t think my warning about not killing me would be enough if I was on ground level with him.

  “I want you to stop beating your son.”

  “I do not—”

  “I have photos of Wes’s back.” It’s a complete lie. I would never do something like that. But I’ve been right about the mayor’s secrets, and that allows me to press into the power of his belief. Into the power I’m showing him. “They would be a useful tool in court for Mrs. Prentiss if she decided to divorce your cheating ass.”

  “She would never.”

  “You’d be surprised what public humiliation and ruination does to a woman,” I say. “And all of you should get tested. Your girlfriend isn’t the only one wandering outside the Thompkins marriage. Pastor Thompkins has been treated for gonorrhea twice in the last year. So I hope you’re practicing safe adulterous sex, because neither of the ladies deserve to get second- or third-hand infected with an STI.”

  The vein in his forehead starts throbbing again. “How—”

  “I have ways,” I say. “Which is why I know you made a deal with Pastor Thompkins to help with the rezoning of that land by the river he bought for his megachurch. Twenty percent of the tithe is impressive. Do you think he’d cut your percentage in half if he knew you were screwing his wife?”

  The mayor says nothing. His face is like stone. No more toothpaste smile. No more political sheen. Just pure rage racing through him, telling him to hurt the thing that could ruin him: me.

  “If you stop hurting Wes, this goes away.”

  “You’ll want money next,” he says.

  “I don’t need your money. I don’t care about zoning laws or people who throw their money at the whole God con. I care about very few things, and Wes is at the top of that list. So you have my full attention . . . and I can be very creative.”

  I look down. Climbing down a rope ladder will put my back to him. He’s big like Wes, tall and broad and powerful, but Wes doesn’t lead with it. That’s the only way the mayor knows how to; he muscles through life and gets his way.

  I push off the doorway of the deer blind like I don’t need the ladder. My hair ruffles as I land on the ground, trying to keep my body loose. I know how to fall, but hitting the ground on your feet from a deer blind is different—hit it wrong and you’ve got a broken ankle or leg or both. But I get it right. The impact jolts through my knees and ankles, but I bend at the right moment, using my hand on the ground to steady myself. He’s just a couple feet away as I rise, and his hand is twitching again. So it’s a tell. A murderous one. Did it twitch like that before he took that poker to Wes’s back?

  “It’s simple: You leave Wes alone, I leave you alone,” I tell the mayor. “Now I’ve got to head home before it gets too late. My sister doesn’t like it when I ride my bike after dark.”

  “You’ll regret this.” He’s trying to get the last word as much as he’s trying to make a threat that he can’t follow through on.

  “No. I won’t,” I say. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  That was true then.

  It’s true now.

  It’ll probably be true forever, because I’m not very good. But I do love full and reckless.

  There’s no standing in the way of that. Of me.

  — 34 —

  11:27 a.m. (135 minutes captive)

  1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys

  Plan #1: Scrapped

  Plan #2: In progress

  We sit in a little triangle, one of their knees touching one of mine and vice versa. Wes hands me the scissors because they’re poking him in the back. Iris leans up against the cabinets, letting them take her weight. I can feel it when she tenses up from the pain, the barely there tremors as she shifts, trying to find a position that’ll give her some kind of relief.

  “You okay?” Wes asks her. She gives him a tight and utterly unconvincing nod.

  “Who’s going to start?” she asks, arching her eyebrow, more dare in her than if she was flicking that damn lighter at me.

  “I’ve already been pretty truthful.”

  “For the first time, apparently,” she snaps, but then she breathes out, closing her eyes for a moment. Her lashes are dark against her skin, fanning out like spiderwebs. “That was mean,” she whispers.

  “I get why you’re mad.”

  She shakes her head. “No. No. You do not get anything about this. He probably does.” She nods at Wes.

  “Most definitely,” he says, and when I bump my knee against his, he says, “Hey, truth for truth.”

  “How gullible did you feel?” she asks him.

 
“Really fucking gullible,” he answers, and five seconds into this and it’s already my nightmare.

  From the instant the two of them met, it was like they’d each finally found the sibling neither had. They snipe at each other and they have the most complicated in-jokes they can never explain properly because they end up laughing too hard. And now they’re going to take all that camaraderie and unite to form a Nora lied to me support group?

  And I can’t do anything about it, because I did lie.

  The thing about conning someone is that if you do it right, you’re not around for the aftermath. The broken heart. The hurt. The betrayal. The working through all the lies. The questioning of everything.

  But when Wes found out who I really was, I couldn’t run away from it. I had to be there. For the broken heart and the hurt and the betrayal and the exposure of every single lie and the answering of every single question. That came with my own broken heart and my own guilt and my realization that this could never, ever happen again.

  But now it is, because what did I expect when I fell for someone like Iris Moulton?

  I know that it says something about me that I’m attracted only to people smart enough to figure me out. Maybe I just don’t know how to live without the risk. Every time I skate too close to the edge of exposure, I smell my mom’s Chanel No. 5 and hear the whisper of silk that always seemed to accompany her. It doesn’t spur me on; it jerks me back, makes me feel young, helpless, and spinning wild again.

  “Is Lee your actual sister?” Iris asks suddenly. Then she shakes her head. “She has to be. You look so much alike. Or . . . did you make yourselves look alike?”

  “She’s my sister. Same mom. Different dads.”

  “And where’s your dad in all of this?”

  “Where’s your dad, Iris?” It’s low. But the game is Truth for Truth, not just All of My Truths for No One Else’s.

  “Nora, come on,” Wes says in such a way that has me staring at him as heat crawls across my face. Not out of guilt, but out of the horrible dawning that he knows. He knows whatever there is to know about her dad. She told him, but not me.