Dollface – Lindy Ryan

My phone lights up with texts from my sister, but I flip it face down. I’ve got six hours before I need to pick up Tanner, which gives me plenty of time to get some words onto the page, but time will dwindle quickly if I start gabbing with Kitty. My cursor blinks rudely at me from the blank manuscript page. If I don’t get started now, I won’t have time to idly scroll around and pretend to do research, regardless of how long I ignore my sister.

But the orange kitchen scissors are still on my desk from when I’d finished unpacking my office, and no matter how much I try to think about dolls in space, the only thing on my mind is how much force it would take to drive those blades through a human skull. So hard that scissors couldn’t do it? Or just hard enough that they could?

And assuming it could be done, why did whoever attacked Maribel stop before they could finish the job? Over my shoulder, my corkboard winks at me in the dark space on my monitor. I still haven’t managed to get anything up about either dolls or space, which means Darla’s Dollface business card and the Dream Bean Café pastry sack are the only things still affixed to my corkboard, like they’re the first beats of whatever it is I’m supposed to be writing. Maybe you could use it as inspiration for your next book, Darla had said, about all this weird crap going on around town, and as amped up as my editor is about dolls in space, a suburban slasher would be right up Charlene’s alley.

Screw it. It’s not the story I intend on writing, but the only way to get these beats out of my head is to poke holes in my own plot. Then atrophy will have its way, and I can finally get to work on my actual novel. I abandon the word-processing software and type ABC7 into my internet browser’s search bar, screenshot Barbara Shelton’s barely recognizable photo from her headline news story (no leads, the latest update says), and send it to the printer, then navigate to Brunswick Elementary’s PTA page on the school website and do the same to Maribel’s.

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OceanofPDF.com For M. OceanofPDF.com CHAPTER ZERO SUMMER 1998 My little sister collides with the open doorway of the master bedroom, skidding to a halt at the foot of the bed in a gust of chlorine and sunscreen and girl sweat. Remnants of last night’s homemade makeover from our slumber party for two still cling to the round curves of Kitty’s face— mascara smudged in purple-black bruises around her eyes, lip-liner residue crusted in damp red grit along the edges of her mouth.

Hours of late-night Blockbuster New Releases and Girl Scout Thin Mints have thinned the stain on my little sister’s lips from Fairuza Balk red to Alicia Silverstone pink, but even the chemically treated water from our backyard pool isn’t strong enough to wash the color away completely. The air-conditioning clicks on, and Kitty’s teeth chatter when the blast of too-high cold cuts through her black one-piece. She hugs her arms across her chest, eclipsing pinprick nipples that stab out against the faded white and yellow daisies on the hand-me-down swimsuit.

Dolphins coil around my sister’s legs in sun-bleached shades of neon pink, blue, yellow. Longleaf-pine needles stick to her wet forearm. She didn’t bother to clean the pool before jumping in. Adrift on my back in the center of the waterbed, I wait for Mom to say something maternal—Kitty, go dry off, or Katherine, you’re tracking pool water into the house.

But seated on the floor of the walk-in closet on the other side of the bedroom, her uncombed hair a wasp’s nest around her as she studies her reflection in a cosmetic compact mirror, Mom doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look up. “You’re dripping all over the carpet,” I tell my sister. Breathless, Kitty’s voice comes out shrill enough to shatter the tiny mirrors in our mother’s compacts, send them glittering onto the closet floor.

“Norman is dead!”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 9276a79ca1f93ca6
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,021,676 bytes (3.835 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 269
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 435.21 minutes
• Total Words: 87,042
• Total Characters: 488,396
• Average Words per Page: 323.58
• Average Characters per Page: 1815.6

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