Bury Me With Barbie Read Online Free PDF Page A

who’s supposed to be a toddler but who’s more, like, in kindergarten now, and then there’s infant sister Krissy. Of course, they’re different sizes. If you take Barbie, she’s eleven and a half inches tall. Then you’ve got Skipper at nine inches, Stacie at seven, Kelly at four and a half, and Krissy at less than two.”
    “They’re all the same age?” Busy playing footsy with her under the table, Todd wasn’t listening carefully.
    A hot flush started to spread across her face. “Well, I hope not. You know, Barbie has always been a well-developed teenager. And Skipper is probably—well, Skipper is getting a little older. She’s developed somewhat over the years from totally flat-chested into—do you really want to hear about this?”
    “Sure.” He shrugged. “Why not?”
    She scooted her butt around in the booth to get more comfortable and smiled at Manda, who had brought them a basketful of tortilla strips.
    “She’s gone to being somewhat more endowed. And Stacie and the younger ones will probably always be just scrawny little kids.”
    Todd bit into a chip. “And why is it so important that she be well-endowed?”
    “Barbie?”
    “Yeah. I mean, was that a conscious effort on the part of the designer?”
    “Uh, well, now you have to go back to how Barbie was originally designed. This woman, Ruth Handler, watched her daughter play with paper dolls and saw a need for something more substantial than paper clothes and cardboard dolls. She thought if she could make a 3-D fashion doll, she would have a market there. When it came to designing, Barbie had to wear clothes well. If you design a doll that has a straight, flat figure, clothes are just gonna hang on her. Hence, the shape.”
    Todd stood up across from Caresse. With barely a moment’s hesitation, he came over to her side of the booth and sat down next to her. She didn’t miss a beat. She scooched right up against him and let the fire start.

8
    The first thing P.J. did when she arrived at Darby’s apartment Tuesday afternoon was take the bloody tack hammer and toss it in the building’s dumpster. She had rubber-banded it inside two micro-cotton luxury towels and placed it inside a large Hefty bag with used sanitary napkins to disgust and discourage garbage pickers from investigating the trash bag’s contents.
    Darby had a space for a car, but since he only had a beat-up 150cc classic Vespa-style moped scooter, he parked it parallel to the concrete space bumper and chained it through the front wheel to street-level grill work, which offered a glimpse of dusty scrub between its metal bars. He “sold” his parking space, which was included in his rent, for a hundred dollars per month to his neighbor Michael Hornberger, an Adam Sandler look-alike with flaming red hair. Hornberger had no problem paying Darby for the favor. He was just grateful he didn’t have to choose whether to park his shiny black Ford Explorer or his primo silver and blue Harley Fat Boy on the street.
    With the hundred he got from Michael every month, Darby rented a storage space in the garage, which was nothing more than a parking slot enclosed between the back wall of the laundry room and the walled-off dumpster. The chain-link gate, which swung wide with a shove, had two combination locks.
    Darby had given his half-sister full permission to use the storage space for her hauls, which she dared not keep at home. Why he would risk being an accessory to her crimes had more to do with his affection for her than any lack of fear of returning to jail.
    Today, P.J. carried her new Midge dolls—and recollections of her trip to Arizona. Darby’s scooter was missing, but she suspected he hadn’t gone far.
    Both combination locks opened to 36-24-36, in homage to Darby’s obsession with curvy women. She peered through the chain-link as she spun and unfastened both combination locks. The white Rubbermaid stacking storage bins lined both sides of the stall as well the back wall,