T, My Name is Tonya

But not really. It’s a nickname, something my sister used to call me. You wouldn’t know my real name. He never did.

I wasn’t the first one he killed. I wasn’t the last. Not quite. I was part of the long fade but not the final coda. He was shooting for 100. I was #94.

He liked to brag about how smart he was, how dumb the cops were. Of course, he started in the seventies, before DNA evidence. He told me about #21, found in a hastily scooped-out roadside ditch. Pants pulled down to her ankles, like a candy wrapper ripped by an excited kid who can’t wait for the first bite.

Struck by lightning, police decided. He laughed for days.

He told me this while his hands were around my neck.

I got an eye for them, he said. The girls nobody misses.

* * *

When we were kids, my sister and I fell through ice in a February pond. We were skating—pretend skating, because we couldn’t afford real skates.

That might have saved our lives. Ice skates are heavy. They can’t be kicked off the way-too-big sneakers can. I kicked my feet free, grabbed my sister’s hood, and swam to the edge of the pond, where a tree root poked through feathery snow.

One hand holding that tree root. One holding my sister’s hood, a quilted white parka with fake fur trim like a half-drowned squirrel.

In so many nightmares after that, I felt the fabric slide from my hands, saw my sister’s face sink under black water.

But that didn’t happen. Hold on tight, she said. And I held on.

It was my fault the ice broke. We were playing Olympics, and I had to try the triple axel. My little sister watching me like she was taking notes on who to be. I jumped and twisted and saw her face fly by once, twice, saw her eyes get wide, and just for one moment, before the ice cracked, I was flying.

* * *

I could fill a book with them, he said. All my Jane Does.

His arms were around my neck and I grabbed his collar and he laughed and said it was cute that I fought back, but he had no idea who I was, no idea I could fly, no idea I was the one who’d finally take him down, the hair I pinched from his head held in my hand, my fist squeezed tight around it. He had no idea how hard I could hold on.