The Girls I've Been(28)

“My sister is Lee—she’s the one outside with the megaphone,” I tell Casey, handing her the note. “Tuck this into your shoe. Give it to her when you’re safe. And tell her something for me: Tell her that the guy in charge, the one she’s talking to? Tell her he’s a Raymond.”

“I—”

“She’ll understand what it means,” I assure her. “Can you do this?”

Her eyes are huge, the pupils blown wide from fear and adrenaline, almost swallowing up the blue-flecked hazel. She takes a breath, and then gives a shaky nod.

“Great.” My hands grip her shoulders a little too tight, and when she stares up at me, eyes shining with tears, I want to be the kind of person who hugs people she barely knows in a crisis. But I’m not. That’s Iris. Or Wes. They’re snuggly, and I’m just sharp. The kind of person who can count on one hand—on four fingers—the people she’s hugged genuinely in her life.

“You’re gonna do great. You’ll get through this, and I promise, your mom is not going to be mad about you forgetting your bag.”

That draws an almost-smile from her, but it flicks out when I continue:

“Remember: Don’t run away from them. Do what they say.”

“And give your sister the messages.”

I squeeze her shoulders. “It’s just a few minutes of walking, and then you’re safe.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding. Then she gulps. God, this is not fair. I see myself in her. I see the steel wrapped in fear that all little girls find on the spike-strewn road to womanhood. I hate that this is where she finds it.

I look over my shoulder at Iris and Wes, and I don’t even want to start to figure out what their expressions mean. “You two need to act upset when he takes her. Like you don’t know why she’s going.”

The now-familiar scrape of the table blocking the door being drawn back creaks through the walls, and we all move back into the corner.

Red Cap comes in first, followed by Gray.

“Get her,” he tells Red, and Iris lets out a cry of protest when he grabs Casey way too roughly by the arm.

“Hey!” I snap as Wes jolts forward.

“Don’t touch her,” he says.

“Where are you taking her?” Iris demands, but they’re silent as they shuffle Casey out of the room. I fight the urge to grab Casey back, because letting her go . . . It’s for the best, I remind myself. They’re not going to hurt her. They need her; they just don’t know why or how bad, and if I can get her out before they do, then she’s safe.

Iris sags against the wall as the door closes again. Her hands are shaking. Her lip gloss is smudged. She’s so pale. And the worry creeps up inside me until her eyes flash and meet mine, and there is that inferno of a girl wrapped in seventy-year-old tulle that I fell for. Her eyebrow arches and her arms cross as she keeps leaning against the wall for support.

“You made that happen,” she says. It’s not even remotely a question.

“Until we hear honking from the parking lot, we don’t know they actually let her go,” I say, because I really don’t know how to not try to avoid this. My therapist would probably call me pathological or something, but I just call it sheer survival.

“You’re a con artist,” she says.

“She’s not on the take anymore,” Wes points out.

“Now you decide to defend me?” I ask him.

“I just mean, you’re not going around conning old ladies out of their pensions,” Wes continues, like that’s going to help.

“I didn’t con any little old ladies ever!”

This is technically true. But what’s also true is that I’ve left behind a string of crimes. They’ve stacked up, and they got worse and worse. The older I got, the deeper my mother drew me in, the more girls I had to be. And all the terrible, inevitable things that you think of when you think of a little girl growing up in that kind of life? They happened. And it built and built, until that night on the beach, with Raymond pushing me forward, Go, get it, now! and when it exploded, the sand went bloody and I walked free, but never clear. Never clean.

It’s not like I’ve fully given it up since moving to Clear Creek. I’ve just winnowed it down to the essentials.

“What did you do, then?” Iris asks. “Because from where I’m standing, you somehow mind-jacked the bank robber into giving up his best hostage for a welding machine before he realizes she’s his best hostage.”

“That’s exactly what she did,” Wes says.

“That’s . . .” Her lips press together, smudging her lip gloss further. “Your name isn’t even Nora O’Malley, is it?”

I shake my head.

“And that’s not your natural hair color, is it?”

I have to lick my dry lips before I croak out the answer. “It’s dyed.” I gesture to my hair and eyebrows, and my cheeks burn. It’s almost worse that this is happening in front of Wes. The one person who knows all the answers, who’s been in her shoes. Maybe it’s better for her, though, that she has someone who gets it.

I love her, and that means putting her first in this moment. Because I have lied like it’s truth so much that the lines blur scarily even for me. And I know what it’s like to love someone like that. It’s too hard. You can’t hold on to them. There isn’t enough them to hold on to.