The Girls I've Been: Chapters 1–15

She looks warily at Wes, then at me.

It’s a slow jolt to my chest, all dread and churning sick.

Red Cap—impulsive, shaky, and way too spooked—shoots before the guy can drop the lattes and reach for his stun baton.

Wes throws himself toward Iris and me to shield us, and we curl up tight until we’re this muddle of legs and arms and fear and hurt feelings that we really should be putting aside, all things considered...and me?

The anger in his voice. I’ve been waiting for it. Poised on a knife’s edge until I heard it.

Gray Cap grabs one of the heavy posts that holds a sign advertising mortgage loans, tears the sign part off, and threads the metal pole through the handles of the bank’s door, making it hard to flee and harder to breach.

One edge of her mouth quirks up so her dimple flashes, just for a second.

And I was pretty sure that was impossible, so basically, I was looking at a life of celibacy and misery and hiding.

Then there was Iris, with her poofy fifties sundresses and her wicker purse shaped like a frog and that fixation on fire that would be creepy if you didn’t know she wanted to be an arson investigator.

She slow-rolled a kind of subtle romantic warfare I didn’t even see coming, and then one day, I was on a date with her before I even realized what was happening.

It was a whole Mr. Darcy/Elizabeth Bennet I was in the middle before I knew I’d begun sort of thing, where I was Darcy and she was Elizabeth, and I do not have the gravitas or snobbery to pull a Darcy, let me tell you.

I fell like I was a star and she was the end of the world. A cataclysmic crash of two people, never to be the same.

His attention slides from her to me, and the relief knocks inside my ribs like that silly, ornate bee door knocker Lee put on our front door.

He laughs, and it’s a sound I know, just like the gun is a sight I know. It’s curling in its cruelty and condescension. Designed to snake around me and make me feel even smaller than the gun does.

Feedback lances through the parking lot. You can hear it clear inside the bank before her voice booms through the walls, magnified by the megaphone...

I should elaborate on my sister here.

Because yes, she is the type of woman who comes equipped with a megaphone. Also a shotgun that shoots beanbag rounds instead of bullets, and the kind of fist that feels like it’s full of goddamn lead even when we’re just sparring.

But I recognized something in her, something I wanted to be but couldn’t even articulate yet: free.

“Is she in a patrol car?” Gray Cap asks Red, who’s still flattened against the wall, peering out the sliver of window available to him.

The kid stifles a sob.

“You’re right,” Iris says briskly, her shoulders straightening like she’s wearing armor instead of splashes of watercolor on cotton over tulle.

Bank robbers have the ultimate leverage over the missing bank manager.

“I don’t think the bank robbers are gonna tell us their whole plan, Nora,” Wes says, and the frustration that’s been simmering in him since the parking lot leaches into his voice so fast it makes my cheeks heat.

She wears brown contacts and pencil skirts, and she calls people sugar with a little lilt to her voice that Mom doesn’t have.

He’s skimming from the company coffers—not that the insurance game isn’t already a huge racket, but that’s another conversation—and she’s got him paying her in a blackmail scheme quicker than you can snap your fingers.

I’m manipulating people. Figuring out what actions get the desired reactions. What kind of smile gets a smile in return.

Each step into Rebecca’s skin is a step out of my own, but I’m expected to snap back into myself as soon as Mom says the word, as soon as we’re alone, and I’m constantly reeling from the shift. Nothing’s steady. There’s no solid ground.

The manager’s office is three doors down and across from this one. I saw the placard earlier.

I don’t need to clarify that it’s Gray Cap I mean, not Red Cap, who’s bumbling and reactive and we’ve both noticed.

“They are going to kill some of us,” I say as quietly as possible, and he doesn’t blink and I don’t waver.

He may not have had a slew of bad men in his life like mine, but Wes has had to live with his for seventeen years, and the sheer endurance it takes to survive that brings skills, too.

When Lee facilitated my escape five years ago, her side of the con and her sacrifices kept me clean legally, but I almost messed it all up.

She made “friends” with the deputies at the sheriff’s department, and she never, ever slept without a knife in easy reach, because some traits you can dye away and some names you can forge fresh, but you can’t hide from your true self and the lessons you learned in the dark of night.

She’s staring intently, her hands on her hips, her skirt swaying in annoyance because she’s tapping her foot.

So either you changed your mind or you’ve gone insane and gotten all bigoted on me, and I swear to God, Wes...

He used to be where she is right now: on the precarious verge of finding out the truth.

“Okay, one of you needs to stop being intense and vague right now, or I’m gonna freak out more than I already am. And we’re already hostages in a bank robbery while I’m on my period, so my anxiety and desire for chocolate and revenge is kind of high right now,” Iris declares with a lot more harried foot-tapping.

“They need something in the manager’s office. They’ve only wanted to get into the basement and the office. So we can make the assumption that there’s something in the office they need before they get to the basement. Considering the safe-deposit boxes are down there, what do you think it is?”

Wes bends, linking his fingers into a foothold, and I step into it.

She wanted daughters who would grow up to be just like her. And she got Lee and me instead. Girls who were molded by her actions over her pretty words. Girls who grew up straddling this strange line between good and bad. In her work, Lee floats between the criminal world and the legal one.