GIRL?
Please help find my sister Hailey Pippering.
She comes here or she used to all the time.
If you see this flyer and you know anything, e-mail me PLEASE!!!!!
You don’t have to use your real name! I won’t call the police. I just want to know where she is!!!!
[email protected] (Trina Glatt: disappearance
unreported)
— 46 — THE house was waiting for me.
Always there, when nothing else was.
The girls were gathered—the newest of the girls, Trina, at their center. She was flashing something that caught the firelight. A blade of some kind . . .
sharp, silver. A knife.
No one knew how she smuggled it in, and everyone wanted to hold it, but when she said maybe it’d be for the best if they avoided getting their prints on it, they stopped reaching for the contraband and they stopped asking.
Trina told us that it all began when she got that knife. Before it came into her life, she felt helpless. She felt like a girl.
She spat out that word like it was the worst insult in the world, to be what we all were, and so she offended every one of us.
The knife itself was titanium, the blade and handle coated in a silvery finish. It was a butterfly knife that folded in on itself so it could fit in the crevice of a clasped hand.
Trina had stolen the knife from a boyfriend who’d himself shoplifted it from an army-navy surplus store. She couldn’t explain why she’d swiped it from his pocket while he was sleeping— better would have been to rifle through his wallet—but she wanted to take something from him that would really bother him. Something he’d notice, something he couldn’t replace. She’d planned to return it, maybe a week later, but once she had it she found she couldn’t part with it. The knife was so compact, it could be tucked into her front jeans pocket, and the secure sense of it under her pillow helped her sleep at night.
After she dumped him—all right, she admitted, he dumped her—she realized the knife was hers forever. She’d find herself playing with it, like in school or at home in full view of her mom’s boyfriend on the couch. What was to keep her from plunging it into someone who tried to mess with her? Nothing.
Not saying she did or would. Just having the weapon and knowing she could use it was enough.
The thing is, she never once made use of that knife. Not technically, because slicing incisions into the arms of her mother’s couch didn’t count. And making snowflakes out of loose-leaf paper for her little half sister didn’t count, either.
She never made use of the knife on a person.
That was her biggest regret. She could have done so much with it! When she leaped up while telling this part of her story, the other girls backed away. Not like they could get hurt in the smoky house, which was more charred and patterned by fire each time I visited— because this house held them close, kept them safe—but they remembered being hurt and reacted like they still could be.
Maybe it was talk of the knife that brought her out after all this time. She shifted from the curtains, and before anyone knew what was happening, Fiona Burke’s arm reached out and smacked the silvery butterfly knife from the new girl’s hand. It went sailing and landed with a thunk, spinning on the blackened wooden floor far across the room where no one could grab for it.
It doesn’t matter, Fiona Burke said to Trina Glatt, as if they were the only two lost girls in the room. You know it doesn’t matter, don’t you?
It matters, Trina growled. Give it back.
You can’t have that here, Fiona Burke said. None of us can have any of the things we had.