Girl One(74)

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Isabelle said, and I was about to push her until I remembered how long it’d taken me to admit what had happened at the motel, even to myself.

The days dragged by, surreal, each one a day that I technically shouldn’t have even experienced. Commercials blared and jangled from the TV set. With the blinds drawn, it was hard to tell the time of day. I kept remembering the period after Bonnie’s attack, hiding out with my mother in a motel on the edge of town, fearful of copycat attacks.

Bonnie. Every time I thought about her, there was a scratch at the back of my head. I remembered that scar running across her face.

We were in a small town in Pennsylvania. When I ventured outside, I understood why the others had chosen this motel. It was isolated, forests huddled in close. Something about the dreary midday light reminded me of wintertime. Only one other car besides Tom’s Volvo sat in the lot. This was a place where people came to be alone. Nobody would bother us here.

I hesitated, then went over to the graffiti-scrawled pay phone, fishing in my pocket for a quarter. I punched the zero button. When the operator answered, I asked to be connected with Bonnie Clarkson in Minnesota. I didn’t even think she’d answer, but then suddenly her voice arrived in my ear, bored and casual: “Yeah? Who’s this?”

“It’s Josephine,” I said, picturing her in her vast, marble-cool house. “Morrow.”

“Girl One,” Bonnie repeated, some of the boredom falling away. “I didn’t expect to hear from you again.”

“Remember when you asked me if I’d ever acted strange? My answer has changed.” Bonnie didn’t speak, but I could hear her breathing shift, the catch of interest. I told her about the man at the motel in Iowa or Missouri or wherever we’d been after we left the Clarksons, what felt like decades ago. The way he’d cornered me. Grabbed me. “I hurt him. I told him to pick up a piece of broken glass and hold it against his throat. I just wanted him to feel what it was to be helpless, the way he’d made me helpless. And I enjoyed it.”

She was silent on the other end for a moment. “You made him do it? How?”

“He did anything I said.”

“Wow,” Bonnie said. Her lack of surprise was exactly what I’d expected. “Crazy.”

“Listen,” I said, “I need to know what happened to your attacker, because I need to know who’s following us. If you know something that you didn’t share with me, then—”

“That’s why I tried to tell you it would be a waste of time, Josie,” Bonnie interrupted, frustrated now. “My attacker wasn’t the one who burned your mother’s house down. He’s already dead. I took care of it a long time ago. I would’ve told you that night, but my mother never wants me talking about it. It’s the one promise I try to keep.”

I inhaled. Of course. “What did you do?”

“How much detail do you want? For years, I obsessed over him. I pretended to my mother I was okay. I pretended that all the therapy worked. But every night I just lay there remembering the attack, so he would be fresh in my mind when he came back. Because I knew he would, and he did. I was thirteen and I’d just been in some god-awful Christmas special.” I remembered watching this special on TV while my mom was in the other room, volume muted so she wouldn’t catch me in the act, enraptured by Bonnie wearing a Santa-red, fur-trimmed minidress and singing along with a host of C-listers. “I guess the guy had a thing for carols because he got in touch. I wrote him back and he finally included a picture. There he was. That same crooked grin. I told him to come to my house on a night when I knew my mother would be out late. When he got there, I was waiting in a little slinky dress and Cherries in the Snow lipstick.

“He said he was obsessed with me because I was the prettiest of all of us. He told me this like I’d be fucking flattered. His excuse for hurting me was that if I was less pretty, all scarred up, he wouldn’t be tempted. You know, I don’t give a shit that people think that scar is ugly. What bothers me is that it means I don’t look like my mother anymore. He took that from me.”

I leaned against the cool brick, sick to my stomach, imagining this man summing us up with our gap-toothed smiles and choosing Bonnie, marking her with something she’d never asked for and couldn’t escape.

“So I’m sitting there across from him. The guy’s getting ready to make his big move. He has flowers and wine. I’m thirteen, remember. He asked me to get on his lap. I didn’t. He—he started coming toward me, and then he stopped. He was looking around, wild-eyed, calling my name. I looked down and I couldn’t see myself anymore. I was right there, but I also wasn’t there. I saw the marble floor. I saw my mother’s big ugly floral arrangement on the sideboard. I went to the mirror and I couldn’t see myself at all, just the room, and that creep running around yelling for me. It was like a dream. Meanwhile, he was getting angrier and angrier, thinking I’d tricked him on purpose.

“I just went with it. Once I realized what was happening, I moved as fast as I could. I knew where my mother kept the gun. I knew what to do. He was still looking for me, hunting all over the house. I followed him. I watched him. And then I—I did it.”

That scar, sloping along Bonnie’s face. Maybe every girl hid a different version of herself buried under the surface, waiting to become necessary.