She gasped, utterly appalled. “Only the bad dolls.”
Oh, yeah, she was completely sane.
We found Rocket in one of the rooms in the medical ward. Which was by far the creepiest ward of them all.
“Hey, Rocket Man,” I said, easing up to him. He sat in a corner, curled into a ball. I seemed to be sending a lot of people into the fetal position lately. I knelt beside him and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head and curled further inside himself. I’d never seen him like this.
“Yeah, what’s wrong?” Strawberry said right before she poked him with a stick.
He slapped at it.
“Strawberry!” I said. “Don’t poke Rocket. Holy cow. Where’s his sister?”
Rocket’s sister went by the name of Blue Bell. No idea why. I’d met her only once. A tiny angelic thing with a short bob and overalls.
Strawberry shrugged and went to poke him again.
I took the stick from her. “I thought you wanted to brush my hair.”
“Oh, I do! I do!” She took off back down the hall, I could only assume to get a hairbrush.
“Okay, Rocket Man, what’s bothering you?” When he shook his head again, I enticed him with, “I’ll bring you a soda next time.”
He bit his bottom lip.
“A grape one.”
“With an umbrella?” he asked.
The last time I had to bribe him with a soda, I’d put a little umbrella in it, a leftover from Hawaiian night at Calamity’s.
“With an umbrella,” I promised.
He wiggled until he was sitting with his back against the wall, his arms folded on bent knees. “Okay, but you’re going to be mad.”
The SS showed up then with a brush she’d retrieved from God only knew where.
“Sit on your bottom,” she ordered. “And be still. I have a lot of work ahead of me.”
I sat down and frowned at her while pulling out my hairband. “There is nothing wrong with my hair.”
“I know,” she said, suddenly defensive. “It’s not really ugly. It’s just dumb.”
Well, that cleared that up. Next time I went to the hairdresser, I’d tell her what Strawberry thought of my hair. Maybe she could explain why it was dumb.
I gave her my back and let her take my hair into her fingers. She raked the brush through it, beginning at my scalp and ripping through it to the very tips of my tips. Hopefully I’d have a few locks left when she was finished.
I was always a little impressed with what Strawberry could do. Not all departed could move objects, much less carry them around and use them. I think the only reason she could was because no one had mentioned otherwise and the contrary had never occurred to her.
After another good scraping of my roots, I noticed a tiny hand sticking out from the wall beside Rocket. It was Blue’s. She was holding on to her brother’s arm like she was scared of me or scared for him.
“Rocket, why do you think I’ll be mad at you?”
“Because.”
“Do I ever get mad at you?”
“No, Miss Charlotte, but one time you got upset.”
“Okay, I’ll try not to become upset.” By that point, my scalp was on fire. Strawberry scraped and ripped and tugged until my scalp bled. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll have to show you, Miss Charlotte.”
Blue tugged at his arm, trying to pull him through the wall with her.
“It’s okay, Blue. She’s gonna bring us a grape soda with an umbrella.”
Rocket pointed behind my head. When I turned to look, Strawberry took a handful of hair and jerked.
“Ouch!” I grabbed my hair and pulled it out of her grasp. “Holy crap, Strawberry.”
“You moved,” she said, gazing at me as though I were an idiot.
I finally got a good look at the brush in her hand. “Where’d you get that?” It was oddly shaped with dirty bristles all the way around a broken plastic handle.
“The supply closet.”
There was only one kind of brush that I knew of that had bristles all the way around.
“Oh. My God.” I jumped up and screeched at her. “That’s a toilet brush!”
She lifted her tiny shoulders. “Okay.”
“Strawberry! That’s disgusting.” I swiped at my hair, trying to clean it. Maybe I had some Lysol in Misery. Or some hand sanitizer.
“Whatever,” she said, and I had to remind myself that she’d died sometime in the nineties, at the height of the whatever revolution. Her vocabulary was so different from Rocket’s, who’d died in the fifties.
I finally calmed down enough to look where Rocket was pointing. I walked over to the wall, swallowing back dry heaves. I would never live this down. I tried to find the name he pointed to, but just like always, name upon name had been scratched into the wall’s surface. It was hard to know where one name ended and another began.
“A little more,” he said, pointing past me.
I took another step and saw a cleared space with a name set apart from the others. I saw a W and an O. I inched closer until I could read the last name of three. farrow. I wavered, dived into a calming state of denial, then took another step. alexander. I stopped. My lungs seized as I stood there. My eyes tracked across the letters until they zeroed in on the first name. The only name I knew him by for over a decade. The name that meant so many things to me.