The Girls I've Been(44)

I walk for what seems like forever. I’m soaked by the time I get to the twenty-four-hour laundromat. There’s only one person inside, a college-aged girl with headphones who doesn’t look up when I come dripping inside.

There’s a pay phone in the back, but I don’t go straight to it.

I go into the dingy bathroom instead. It’s trashed, like most public bathrooms. I lean against the sink anyway. My jacket gapes open. I look down at my once-pristine white button-down. The buttons are askew, off by one. I didn’t notice until now.

I had to fasten on the run, my fingers slipping on the buttons as I bolted. My hands shake as I stare at my reflection in the mirror, and then I’m clawing at the shirt, frantically trying to get the buttons right. It becomes the most important thing. They have to be right, and then that frisson of fear and hysteria flashes wide and true. It crashes in me, and I can’t stop it.

I finally get the buttons right, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.

I could go back. Already, the idea is tugging at me. I want to curl up in her arms and cry. Mom will be home soon, and what she’s going to find . . . She’ll be worried. There might be police. She’ll hate that.

I could tell her. I could trust her to be on my side.

But I don’t think there is a my side. I think there’s only a her side. That’s what being Haley taught me . . . and I have the scars to prove it.

It isn’t just that I don’t know if she’ll believe me.

It’s that I don’t know if she’ll believe me, and tell me to deal with it. That’s the way the world is, baby.

How many times has she told me that? That’s the way the world is. That’s the way men are. That’s the way it works, so make it work for you.

Would she tell me to make it work?

Can you handle this? she’d asked when I was Haley, and I’d said yes, and bled for it.

Had I been saying yes to everything?

To giving up everything?

To having it taken like this?

Is my mother a monster?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

This is what my sister’s distress signal is for. This moment. I’ve understood for years now that she wants to protect me. I thought I knew from what.

I didn’t know all of it until today.

Zipping up my jacket to my neck, I wash my hands in the sink and dry them before making my way out of the bathroom and through the laundromat.

I have emergency cash in my jacket, so I push five dollars into the coin machine for the phone. I’ve had her number memorized for years, the card she’d scribbled it on long ago disposed of so our mother would never find it.

Feeding the coins into the phone, I try not to feel like I’m betraying everything I’ve been taught, because maybe what I’ve been taught is wrong.

The phone rings for a long time. Too long. My heart rachets up with each bring-bring in my ear and then, finally: “Hello?”

It’s been building in my mind, a picture forming, and for the first time, it really looks like rescue, because for the first time, I’m admitting I need to be.

It all comes crashing down when a woman who is not my sister answers the phone. Reality hits me so fast I’m shocked by the vertigo.

“Hello?” says the woman who is not my sister again. Her voice is low, husky, like she’d been woken up. “Who is this?”

“Who are you talking to?” She must have the phone on speaker, because I can hear my sister clear as day. “Wait—where did you get that?”

“Why do you have a second phone?” asks the woman.

“Give it to me,” my sister demands.

“Answer me!”

“Give me the fucking phone!” She shouts it, and then there’s a thump and a scuffling sound that has me gripping the pay phone like it’s the only thing keeping me up.

Then, breathless and panting: “It’s me. It’s me. Is it you? Are you okay?”

My sister has a life. She won’t talk about it with me, but I know she has one. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that she might have someone.

I haven’t seen her in a year. Mom doesn’t see her when we’re on the take, and Haley was the longest con we’ve pulled.

She could have changed her mind. She could have decided I wasn’t worth it. I would mess up whatever life she’s managed to build.

I mess everything up.

She says my name into the phone urgently, emotion bleeding off the syllables.

“Just say it,” she whispers.

It would be so easy. Olive. She’ll come. She’ll hold my hand. She’ll let me cry.

Her life would change. I’d change it.

She’d resent me. I’d owe her.

We’d be trapped. And I can’t trap the freest person I’ve ever known.

I cup my hand around the mouth of the phone. “Sorry,” I say in a low voice. “Wrong number.”

I hang up before she can protest. And when the pay phone starts ringing a minute later, I force myself to walk away.





— 38 —


11:40 a.m. (148 minutes captive)

1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors (currently stuck inside bank robber), 2 safe-deposit keys Plan #1: Scrapped

Plan #2: Fucked

Plan #3: Stab