Girl One(101)

“Well,” Orange Shirt said. “Look at this. We’re evenly matched.” He glanced around appraisingly. “Where’s your little knight in shining armor?”

Junior. He meant Junior.

“That’s not your concern,” Isabelle said.

The men hadn’t even noticed the dead birds strewn at our feet. They were too focused on the three of us.

Orange Shirt looked at me, and I could see myself captured inside the lenses, small and distorted. “Shouldn’t you be dead?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I should be.” I pulled myself a little taller.

His mouth twitched, and with his eyes hidden, I couldn’t tell whether he was afraid or not.

“Hey, I recognize that,” Orange Shirt said, and I realized that Cate had withdrawn the gun from her waistband. “That’s mine.”

“Sounds like we all have things that don’t belong to us,” Cate said, and one of the men grinned at this. Reaching to his hip, he languidly produced a pistol, holding it casually. The possibility of violence deepened, all of us straightening a little.

“Whoa, calm down,” said Orange Shirt. “No need for gunshots in city limits. We’re just here for a parley.”

“Do you have it?” Isabelle asked. “What we agreed upon.”

“Oh yeah, we got it,” Orange Shirt drawled. “Your freaky little film? Thing is, I’m not sure we should hand it over. That’s the dead girl, isn’t it? The little redhead. It’s proof of what you really are.”

“And we can share Delilah’s story just as easily,” Isabelle said. “People will know exactly what you did to her. It’s proof of who you really are.” Her smile was cast with the strange glow of the sky before a tornado. “So why don’t we just trade?”

“I know why you’re so fucking scared of this movie.” Orange Shirt took one step closer. “Because no one will want to be part of your sick bullshit once they see you for the monsters you are.”

Cate spoke up, her voice clear. “Better a monster than a man like you. Honestly, you’re the ones who are running scared. Because the more of us there are, the less we’ll want of your sick—”

“Shut up, freak,” said Orange Shirt, careless. The hurt blazed through Cate’s eyes. I squeezed her shoulder, and Cate turned her head to lightly kiss my hand where it rested on her shoulder. One of the men glanced at us, staring right at the spot where her lips touched my hand. I saw the knowing disgust in his eyes, tilting on a leer, like he’d caught us doing something dirty and pathetic. Like he understood everything about us. They looked down on us for being fatherless, for being freaks. But the revulsion they’d just shown was well-worn and mapped out. It had just never been directed at me before.

“Are you willing to trade or not?” Isabelle asked, voice direct and almost sweet. “It seems like a waste to come all this way and walk away empty-handed.”

The men smiled at this, unthinking, a shared current of amusement. My skin prickled.

“Yeah,” Orange Shirt said. “Hand it over. You first.”

I expected that Isabelle would refuse. Wait until we confirmed they even had the film. But Isabelle extracted the diary from her satchel and held it up so they could see it. The notebook had a cheerful print of cartoon dolphins, Technicolor and exaggeratedly happy: it tugged at me, this innocent remainder of the dead girl. The witch. Orange Shirt’s jaw spasmed slightly, and I wondered if this memory had managed to bring Delilah back to life for a second. The way she must’ve been to him, once. A real woman, someone he loved.

“Bring it over,” one of the men called.

Only three yards separated us, but it may as well have been a vast and hostile desert. Isabelle walked forward, spine in elegant alignment, not a quiver of hesitation in her muscles. The men watched her as she approached, the lenses of their sunglasses dark and blank. Like a herd of deer alerted to an approaching wolf, or lions catching the scent of wounded prey. I couldn’t tell which.

Next to me, Cate shifted nervously, clutching the gun with both hands.

I thought Isabelle would head to Orange Shirt, who took a step forward, his hand held out, impatient and authoritative. But at the last second, Isabelle veered away from him and moved to the man with the gun. She stood right in front of him—too close, I thought, too close—and held out the diary. Her posture was obedient, a child with an adult.

The man glanced at Orange Shirt, who shrugged and gave a barely perceptible nod. It was hard to read his expression with his eyes shielded. The man reached out one hand to accept the diary, and Isabelle hesitated. My stomach squeezed. They’d destroy Delilah’s words too.

Isabelle dropped the diary to the ground. In one neat, almost casual motion, she grabbed the man by his arm. Both of her hands wrapped around his bare skin. He startled, then laughed, and I understood why. It looked like such a tiny, pointless gesture. She was so small next to him. The sun was starting its descent now, warmer and deeper, slanting into Isabelle’s black hair. The insects screamed and shrilled around us.

Then the man dropped his gun.

Orange Shirt said the man’s name. Isabelle was bearing down now: even from this distance, I could see the way his flesh blanched white where her fingertips pressed down. She was clutching him, clawing at him with an intensity I hadn’t seen when she’d touched the cashier or Junior. The effects were immediate, a small bomb going off in our midst. The man fell to his knees, coughing out an arc of blood that landed on the grass. His skin was glassy white. Isabelle was unraveling him, pulling him apart piece by piece, so quickly that he’d be gone soon. His eyes rolled back in his head.