He listened for a moment. “She sounds more angry than anything else.”
“You can’t hear her, Lindsey. Not another one, not another one, not another girl. She just keeps repeating it and it’s scaring me,” Penny said. She stood over him in the dark of his room at some obscene hour just north of three AM. She never could sleep, and the sounds that carried through the thin apartment walls always seemed to reach her, no matter how late it was.
“Something bad happened before and whatever it is, I don’t want it to happen again. Can you go see if they’re okay?”
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
“You’re a big, intimidating looking guy.”
“And you know for sure my neighbor isn’t bigger and more intimidating?”
“Lindsey, please,” she said. “You can’t hear her…”
“Okay, okay.” Lindsey stood up, dragged a hand through his hair and pulled a jacket on over his pajamas, despite the fact that he was only going across the hall. Penny seemed to float behind him, wringing her hands. When she opened the door, the girl looked as angry as Lindsey thought she sounded.
“Hi,” he said. “I live across the hall—”
“I knew it!” Penny shrieked. He held up a hand so that she would let him talk. The girl in the doorway looked confused.
“I heard yelling. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” he said.
“We—”
“We’re fine, thanks,” the man said curtly, pushing his girlfriend aside before she could answer. He was big, yes, but Lindsey had seen more intimidating. Without a second thought he moved to stand between this brute and the girl. Lindsay had always known how he looked to others: a tall, broad-shouldered man with an unfortune case of hostile resting face not helped by the scarring around his bad eye. Angry girls, scared girls, whatever combination, they weren’t going to look at him and immediately be at ease, and because of that he’d always worked so hard to read as a “non-threatening cis man.” It was easier with Penny by his side, she’d always sworn up and down that no one could be scared of him with her hanging off his shoulder, but he’d never been quite so sure.
“If you’re sure…” he said with the most civil tone he could muster at this hour.
“Lindsey, please, look past him!”
“It’s almost three in the goddamn morning,” said the boyfriend. “I know why we’re up, why’re you? And what are you looking at?”
Lindsey was no longer listening, instead he was looking over the man’s shoulder to where Penny was pointing. Another girl—the scared one, invisible to everyone save for him—would’ve been pretty had the clotted blood at her scalp not turned her brown hair black. Her lips moved wordlessly—Lindsey could never hear these poor souls, only Penny still spoke to him—but thanks to Penny he knew what she was saying.
“Not another one.”
Part of her face seemed to have folded in on itself, probably the result of meeting the bad end of a kitchen counter or the corner of a fireplace. It reminded Lindsey of an eggshell, one that hadn’t been dropped from enough height to shatter and spill but too broken to be alright.
It reminded him of Penny’s face, after the accident, the accident she wouldn’t have been in if he’d stuck to his guns and insisted they just stay home that night. But he hadn’t insisted. He’d given in to her wheedling because it was Penny, the girl he loved. Not in any romantic sense, though Penny had been the first to embrace him wholeheartedly when he told her he couldn’t love her that way, any woman that way. She was the one who was supposed to stand at with him for the rest of their days, his eventual husband on one side and Penny on the other. But her days had been cut short, and the last time he’d seen her not as she was now was when her whole body had crunched in on itself, shattered and spilled. The doctors said said he was lucky it wasn’t worse than his eye, that Penny had taken the brunt of it, shielded him. That seemed impossible, Lindsey was constantly mistaken for a football player in high school and Penny was maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. He could toss her over his shoulder and carry her like a fireman if he wanted, he had countless times, nobody thought that tiny little girl could shield him from anything.
But she had, his fierce, brave girl who always looked out for everyone else first. Just like she did tonight, for both the girl still alive and the one it was too late for.
He moved to put the living girl more firmly behind him and away from her boyfriend, only now catching sight of the bruises around her wrist. Penny floated at his side, unchanging and invisible, not the way she was meant to stand beside him. Tonight, fuck nonthreatening; his size, his face, he knew how he looked and he would use that because any bastard who would hurt a woman—hurt anyone really, but especially these girls—deserved to look at him and feel scared, as scared as the girl on the receiving end of that brutality had been.
“Call someone, anyone, just get yourself out of here,” he told the girl. Then to her boyfriend, added, “I bet someone’s gonna be real interested in what happened to your last girlfriend. Did she fall and hit her head?”
The brute looked like he’d seen a ghost when Lindsey said that, but of course he hadn’t. As far as Lindsey knew, he himself was the only one who could.
Two dead girls with faces like broken eggshells was two too many. Two girls who could never return home. He wouldn’t let there be a third, not if he could do anything about it.
Alice Scott (She/They) is a queer author and bookseller who may or may not be a ferret turned human by a kiss from a prince. She has a BFA in creative writing from George Mason University and is the author of a number of short stories including Eggshell Girls. Follow them on Twitter @Allyscottauthor for more!
