The Girl Who Was Supposed To Die

Cady wakes up on the floor and quickly realizes that something isn’t right. She tastes blood in her mouth and feels the tips of her pinkie and ring finger on her left hand throb with pain. She can hear two men whispering, and she pretends to still be unconscious. She hears “something about no one coming for [her]. Something about it’s too late” (1). They nudge her with a foot to see if she’s awake, but she plays dead. She notes that the angrier, crueler man has oxblood-colored shoes on. The man with the oxblood shoes says they have to kill her, and when the other man protests that she’s just a kid, the former reminds the latter that they can both be incriminated if she talks. The reluctant man wakes her as the other man leaves. Cady takes in her surroundings as she’s walked/dragged toward what is presumably her death: a beat-up cabin surrounded by fir trees, overturned items that indicate someone’s been looking for something, and bloody pliers next to two fingernails with pink nail polish, which she realizes are hers and the reason her hand hurts: “I don’t know anything. What’s wrong with me, where I am, who they are.