Page 94 of That's Not My Name

Everything in me crumbles, like I’ve been holding back an avalanche of emotion, and it’s finally too much to withstand. Grief buries me, and I drop to my knees.

“You’re not Lola,” I whisper.

The complete stranger before me glances down at the wall. I follow her gaze to a set of names scratched into the concrete. The freshest one feels like a punch to the chest.

Lola

The girl shakes her head, the fear in her eyes shifting to sadness.

“No…I’m not.”

TWENTY-NINE

MADISON

DAY FIVE

The boy stares at me like he’s breaking apart. Tears fill his eyes, and he swipes them away with the back of his hand. Before I can ask who he is, he climbs back to his feet.

“We have to get you out of here,” he says. “Quick. Before he gets back.”

The strange boy starts digging through the boxes on the workbench. I gape at him, trying to catch up. He must have come looking for Lola, but he found me instead.

One girl too late.

He pulls a pair of long-armed brush trimmers from the box. “This won’t cut through the big chain, but it might cut the little one on the handcuffs.” His voice is rough.

I want to thank him. I want to tell him I’m sorry I’m not Lola. I want to tell him how absolutely fucking grateful I am that he’s risking his own life to save a stranger, but I can’t find the words, so I nod instead.

“You’re going to be okay,” he says, wedging one side of the clippers against the ground and sticking the handcuff chain between them. “I’m going to get you out of here. I tried to call 911 when I saw him carrying you outside, but there’s no service up here, so I ran to the neighbor and told her to call the police—she has one of those old-school house phones. Help is on the way.”

“Mrs. Hooper?” I whisper.

He looks up at me, eyes wide. “You know her?”

“No. But the guy upstairs killed her husband.”

His face goes ashen and he moves faster, slamming the clippers with all his strength. The blades press lines into the metal, but it doesn’t snap. He keeps going, the metal giving a little more with every clamp.

“Are there any other girls here?” he asks, but the tone of his voice tells me he already knows the answer.

“No. It’s only me.”

He nods and clamps down again.

“Maybe Lola got away,” I offer, trying to give him some shred of hope back. “She could be—”

“Does that jacket have ‘L.E.S.’ sewn into the hip tag?” he asks.

I grab at the hem and fold it up. A tag pops out.

L.E.S. is stitched in rose gold thread.

“It’s hers,” he says. “Lola Elizabeth Scott. If she got away, she would have made it home by now, and if she had, I wouldn’t be here. So if she’s not here, and she’s not at home…she never left this place.”

The fabric feels like it’s crawling against my skin. Wayne gave me a dead girl’s jacket?

I knew the names on the wall were probably other victims, but the reality of Lola makes the others more real. More tragic. More awful. It’s proof of what happened here. And the look on this boy’s face as hecomes to that same conclusion is an image I’ll never get out of my head as long as I live.

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