The Pretty Ones (3 page)

Someone stepped into the break room.

Nell started, turned to see Adriana standing in the doorway. She shot Nell a smile, only making Nell want to scratch her eyes out that much more. She imagined Adriana sinking to her knees, her hands clasped over her bloodied face, crying out in agony while Nell casually walked back to her desk, took a seat, and began her day's work with blood beneath her nails.

A mauling. A vicious attack on the train. You should have seen it. I hardly made it in to work at all.

“Lamont wants to see you,” Adriana said.

Nell stood silent, picturing Adriana flattened against the third rail. Her body bloodied. Her arms severed. Her guts strewn across a subway platform. People standing around, laughing,
laughing
because, man, that Adriana Esposito was a
bitch
.

Nell lifted her mug from the counter and ducked around Adriana on her way to the supervisor's office, as though stepping into Lamont's office was no big deal. She even murmured a “thanks” to the girl who'd turned her in. A criminal showing appreciation to her own executioner. A Salem witch filling her own pockets with stones.

How many more for me to hit bottom?

How many licks did it take for the Son of Sam to snap?

“The world,” Nell whispered to herself, “may never know.” A ghost of a smile caught at the corner of her mouth, but it disappeared just as quickly as it came.

Harriet Lamont was intimidating. She sat behind a large desk surrounded by so many plants that it made Nell think of Vietnam. And in that jungle, Harriet Lamont was the tiger, ready to pounce on any girl not pulling her weight. Nell hovered in the door while Lamont finished up a call.

“Well, I don't
care
what you have to do, Dan.” She spoke into the receiver. Powerful. Confident. “Just fix it.” It was the way an important person ended a phone call—with a demand and an aggravated hang up. Lamont shot a look toward the office door, steadied her eyes upon Nell, and cleared her throat. “Come in,” she said. “Close the door.”

Nell did as she was told, certain she was going to burst into sloppy tears long before she managed to take a seat in front of the boss's desk. She didn't give a damn about Lamont, really. But if she got fired, what would Barrett think? What would Barrett
do
?

“You know we don't tolerate tardiness around here,” Lamont said, her tone flat. She retrieved a cigarette out of a little silver case, stuck it between her red lips, then lit it with the crystal Ronson tabletop lighter when a cheap gas-station Bic would have done just fine.

Nell said nothing.

“
Right?
” Lamont was waiting for a response.

“Yes,” Nell stammered.

“Yes?” Lamont lowered her chin, giving Nell a look that, up until then, only Nell's mother could have pulled off. It was stern, riddled with an impressive amount of impatience. Nurse Ratched. Cruella de Vil.

“Yes,” Nell said, more quietly this time. “I'm sorry. I got stuck . . .”

“Stuck.” Lamont seemed to grunt the word.

“At the train station.”

There was blood everywhere. Adriana was dead. I pushed her onto the—

Lamont looked both unimpressed and unconvinced. She'd heard that line a million times. “And why should I care about that?” she asked. “If I cared every time one of my girls got stuck at the train station, there wouldn't be anyone answering phones at R & B.”

Nell peered down at her coffee mug. It was burning her hands, but she didn't dare put it on Lamont's desk. She sat there, clutching it as fiercely as she was clenching her teeth. Because how many Bics could Lamont have bought with the money she'd spent on that fancy lighter? Didn't that giant varnished desk and having her name on the door make her feel important enough?

“Look, Nell . . .” Lamont leaned back, took a puff of her cigarette.
Sinner.
“This is between you and me, okay? You aren't like the other girls. I gotta say I appreciate that. Dare I say, I
like it.
God knows we need more girls like you around here. But I'm going to stop appreciating it if this happens again, you understand? If I let you slide, it makes
me
look bad, and I don't like looking bad. I've got a job to do just like everyone else. Just like you.”

What if Lamont said that, to keep her job, Nell had to smoke a cigarette? Had to light it with that fancy crystal thing too? What if, to keep her job, Nell had to compromise everything she stood for, everything she had promised Barrett she'd be? What if she had to become a Rambert & Bertram girl, like a Stepford Wife? Maybe that's why all the girls were so goddamn cruel. Their hearts gone. Souls empty. Brains washed. Robots. Nothing but pretty, high heel–wearing, lipstick-smeared—

“Hey.” Lamont snapped her fingers. “Earth to Nell.”

Nell blinked.

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Yes,” Lamont echoed, dubious. She exhaled a stream of smoke while studying Nell from across her desk. “I know you don't have many friends. None here, anyway.”

Rub it in.

“The girls here can be a little rough, but they aren't all bad. Maybe reach out a bit more, try a little harder to make a connection.”

A flash. A wince. Stress was bad for Nell's headaches. She wouldn't be surprised if she ended up nursing a migraine all night after this.

“It would make things easier,” Lamont promised. “Don't you think?”

“Yes.” Nell wanted to disappear into the orange and brown weave of the chair beneath her. Disappear, but not before bringing her coffee cup down on top of Lamont's skull first.

Yes,
she thought.
I've thought of that. I think of th
at every day, you condescending—

But she cut herself off mid-thought. Because Lamont was, in her own convoluted way, trying to be helpful. Lamont wasn't going to fire her, which she had all the right in the world to do. She wasn't going to force Nell and Barrett out onto the street. Pathetic as it was, at that moment, Harriet Lamont was the closest thing Nell had to what might be considered a friend.

Lamont sat quietly, as if waiting for Nell to say something, anything. When Nell failed to speak, Lamont shook her head and waved a hand at the door. “All right. Go on, get back to work,” she said. Nell rose, moved to the door. “But Nell . . .”

She froze, the door ajar, the trill of telephones and the metallic clap of typewriter keys disrupting the hush that had fallen over the boss's office.

“I just want to make sure all my girls are happy here. I want
you
to be happy here.” Lamont gave her that stern, motherly look once more.

Nell stared at her supervisor, her coffee mug continuing to scorch her hands.

“All I'm saying is, if you don't like the life you have, make the life you want.”

Another zing of pain.

“Yes, ma'am,” Nell whispered.

“Don't be late again.”

“I won't,” Nell said, her voice inaudible over the office din. She ducked out of Lamont's office before the woman decided to say more. Nell knew she meant well, but all her advice had done was make Nell feel smaller than she already did. It had done little but make her want to rage.

To tell Barrett and
rage.

.   .   .

Nell couldn't get Lamont's hard-nosed advice out of her head.
If you don't like the life you have, make the life you want.
There was no doubt in Nell's mind that Harriet Lamont had done her share of clawing up the corporate ladder, and she'd made it. She was a big-time boss at Rambert & Bertram, keeping the place running while
her
bosses putted down a perfectly manicured green. Lamont was a woman who lived by her own advice, and she had a private office with a view of East 44th to prove it.

Not that Nell wanted to be the boss of anyone. But the more Barrett went out, the lonelier and more desperate she felt. Barrett never revealed where he was going or where he had been. He never bothered to leave notes. Not even a simple
Be back soon.
He'd simply vanish like a ghost into the shadowed alleys of Brooklyn, then ignore her pointed questions when he returned.

And yet, despite his secret rendezvous with . . . whomever, Barrett was the one who told
her
to stay away from others, to not get too close to anyone, to forget the idea of having friends and going out. Those things were for other people. People who smoked cigarettes on their lunch break and had sex in building entryways. People who weren't like them—or at least not like her. He wrote long manifestos that he'd leave on her desk while she slept. Letters that, at times, spanned half a dozen pages.
The world is poison—a lion waiting to devour innocence, a whore itching to spread her disease.

Poetic.

Hypocritical.

Because despite his insistence that she stay in, he'd run off somewhere and do God only knew what. It seemed that his advice only applied to Nell, while he was free to do as he chose. It was enough to get the anxiety roiling around in her gut, the sizzle of another migraine popping behind the nerves of her eyes. If she continued to follow Barrett's rules and Barrett continued to do his own thing, Nell would be left to fend for herself. It was as though he
wanted
her to be alone.

Make the life you want.

Nell frowned down at the keys of her typewriter. She couldn't just sit back and let her world unravel. If Barrett left, if for some reason, one night, he
didn't
come back, she would be the one to lose everything. Her brother. Her only friend. Her mind. With no one to talk to, no one to run to, she'd scream herself into an early coffin, cut her own throat—no, cut her own heart out, put herself down.

If Barrett disappeared, Nell would have no one.

Even their own mother was a ghost, despite being very much alive.

Faye Sullivan was living somewhere in New Jersey. Nell guessed she was maybe only a mile or two from where she and Barrett had grown up as kids. But the last time their mother had moved, Barrett had burned the scrap of paper on which she'd written her new address. He had smirked as her phone number smoldered above the stove's gas burner and left the ashes he'd smeared across the walls for Nell to clean. Their mother was perhaps little more than an hour-long train ride away, but to them she was lost, because Nell had allowed it. She'd let their mother slip out of their lives in exchange for the love of her brother. It had been years since they had heard anything from Faye, and in those years, Barrett was happier than he'd ever been. Without her, Barrett could be himself.

But without their mother, and without Barrett, Nell was an island. Brooklyn was dangerous. If something happened to him, if someone . . .

She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought. Against the pain.

Don't even think it. If you think it, it may come true.

If Nell only had a friend, just one friend beyond her brother's company, things would be different. She had to kill her loneliness before it made her disappear.

She glanced up from her desk as Lamont skirted the call-center floor. Lamont was the mother hen, keeping her chicks in line. She was taking mental notes of who was doing what, separating the star players from the ones that could be let go the next time layoffs came around. Nell caught her boss's eye, and Lamont gave her a slight nod, a
go on
, as though wanting to see if Nell had the ambition—the guts to take her advice.

I've got the guts,
she thought.
Anything Barrett can do, I can do better.
A lie if there ever was one, but if it gave her a momentary spark of motivation, she'd make herself believe it.

Pushing her mousy brown hair behind her ears, she squared her shoulders and rose from her desk. She would show Lamont that she
was
different, that her supervisor hadn't made a mistake in giving her a second chance. Grabbing her Mr. Topsy-Turvy mug off her desk, she headed back to the break room for a fresh cup of coffee, heading straight for Mary Ann Thomas and her crew of pretty friends. Adriana Esposito was there, flanked by Savannah Wheeler and Miriam Gould.

Mary Ann was leaning against the break-room counter, picking colored sprinkles off a pink-frosted doughnut with manicured nails. She gingerly placed one sprinkle after the other onto her tongue as she chatted with her girlfriends. A sexy move. Way too sexy for the workplace.

Slut.

But as soon as Nell came within earshot, their airy giggles transformed into murmurs. Mary Ann made eye contact, and despite Nell's nerves, Nell forced a smile and dared to speak.

“Hi,” she said. As soon as the single syllable left her throat, Mary Ann looked to her friends and twisted her face up in grossed-out bemusement.

The whale, it speaks!

Nell caught her bottom lip between her teeth and looked away from them.

Both Adriana and Miriam had been brunettes up until a few weeks ago, just like Mary Ann. But a few days after Mary Ann had bleached her chestnut hair nearly white, Adriana came back a redhead. Miriam chopped off her long, dark hair into a sleek, angular, redheaded bob. Now, half of the office was either a bottle blonde or had cut their hair in an attempt to squelch their fears of being shot dead on the street.

Nell was one of the last girls to sport the Son of Sam's favorite hairstyle—long and dark. Sometimes she wished he'd come. Maybe, rather than killing her, they'd fall in love and run away together instead. Maybe, if he loved her enough, she wouldn't even ask him to stop. She'd help him pick out his victims, pinpoint girls who looked a little too confident, a little too bitchy, a little too much like the type of girl that made her life a living hell.