A GOOD GIRLS GUIDE TO MURDER ( oneshots ! )

Which Dolls Did and Which Dolls Didn't

trigger warning — suicide
please don't read this if that will affect you negatively ! take care of yourself !
🫶🏻
—————

Bad luck seemed to come in threes, for Pip.

Death, however, came like a wave — washing over her and pulling her away with the force.

Death was all around Pip, and for a long time, she was searching desperately for the source; there was too much of it around her for it to make sense.

Eventually, though, in the middle of another sleepless night with only a downpour of rain and a harsh breeze to lull her to serenity, she found herself tracing it back to her childhood.

Childhood, when everything was bright and sparkling, and girlhood, when she could be a princess in something as simple as a nightgown.

And then, of course, when it all started to fade and she began to grasp the concept of how fragile life could be.

It wasn't exactly something she figured out — it was more-so a realization of the fact that for four years, she had no father, and suddenly the kindest man she'd ever known was easing his way into that place that she'd been unconsciously saving for him.

The man who's photos were still on the fireplace mantle or hung on the wall of family portraits. She had asked her mother about him before, and she had gotten the answer she'd expected, but she just couldn't wrap her head around why the photos were there but the man himself wasn't.

All the other kids had a father, why didn't Pip? Why couldn't Pip?

Pip had been five and a half, sitting under her princess loft bed and playing with her dolls — all of her dolls had fathers that had been there from the start (Pip's doing, of course, because it was her world and those dolls were living in it), but the doll with the brown hair and the muddy-green eyes hadn't had a father for very long.

The doll with the brown hair and green eyes had a new father with a booming voice and crackling laugh, but he wasn't always there and he looked nothing like that doll had.

Pip wasn't really thinking about dolls, at that point. Five year old Pip was already reflecting herself onto something else and escaping in it and sitting under that bed, she began to cry.

Why didn't she get to have a regular family? She loved her dad, but why didn't she get to have him from the start?

She had gotten a second chance that she didn't want — she wanted the first chance and she wanted that one only. In fact, she didn't want chances, she just wanted the man whose name she could never remember and whose face she'd never know.

Five years old and crying into her dolls hair under her princess loft bed. Eighteen years old and crying into a stuffed animal on her memory foam mattress.

Some things never change.

She was certain, though, that through her landslide of a life, she had one companion to count on — death.

That reminder brought her back to the beginning, pulling her out of her haze of memories and sticking her right where she had started: who was the cause?

She was unraveling a murder board in her mind — red string connecting the lines, tracing the evidence, trying so desperately to make sense of it all, and there was that wave of realization again; so similarly painstaking as the one that had washed over her when she was five.

It was her father — he had been the source of it all. 

Not Victor, no, he had been a gift from heaven, a second chance — her father. The man she'd never met and who she never would. He had to be the cause of it all, right?

He had been the first death in her life, and sure, for a long time, none followed. A gap came before the wave — the calm before the storm.

Of course, then there was Andie Bell and Sal Singh, the murder case that was too quickly brushed off as a murder-suicide.

Pip was the one to uncover the truth about Andie and Sal — well, with the help of Ravi Singh, Sal's brother and the love of Pip's life...

God, so much happened in that short amount of time. Solving the case, falling in love...Barney.

The fourth out of... what was it, six, now? And somehow, all six of them seemed to be linked in one way or another.

All six of them were linked to Pip, in a way.

For her father and Barney, it was simple — they had been hers from the start. Her father helped to create her, and Barney was her sweet old dog.

As for Andie and Sal, they both knew someone who knew Pip, and that was enough to link them to her.

And then, of course, there was Stanley and his six bullet wounds embedded into the back of her head. He had been a journalist. She had interviewed him. Now, she had his blood on her hands.

As for Jason Bell, the man who haunted her nightmares, he would always be linked to Pip in some way.

She knew that, she just didn't like to think about it. Just like how she didn't like to think about her father, or about Barney floating in the river; or about how Andie had been missing for all those years even though she was just at the town's fingertips. There was a lot of thoughts cascading through her mind, storming through it, that she tried to push away.

She wondered, as she laid in her bed, if anything had really been worth it.

All of these losses, and for what? More losses? She had lost so much and she seemed to just keep losing things, and she wondered, in this moment, if she was losing herself, too.

In her single dorm at college, where nobody knew her name, where she silently observed thought did not speak.

Pip didn't really have to wonder for long, though. She knew she was fading. She knew she wouldn't be lasting much longer. She knew that she could end this cycle of death with herself.

She was Jason's sixth, but she could be her own seventh.

A sixth victim, a seventh death. Changing her own history to end her own story.

That was something that she could handle.

Truly, it was the best idea she'd had for a while.  She reminded herself of that as she pushed her blankets off of her legs and dug through the drawers of her desk.

She still had pills somewhere, she knew she did. Sure, she wasn't using them anymore, but maybe it was an unconscious decision because she knew she would need them later.

Her only regret as she swallowed the five pills she had left was that she didn't say goodbye to her family before she did this. That she didn't tell Ravi she loved him one last time.

But at least she could end the cycle here. Become nothing but another one of her own tally marks.

Maybe, after this, she could finally be at peace.

As she crawled back into bed and let the pills consume her, she let her mind regress back to that sparkly time when her only care was which dolls had a dad and which dolls didn't.

Goodnight, moon, she thought as she held her stuffed animal to her chest and let her dreams of girlhood — and those five Xanax — consume her.