Excerpt from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I down the pills and tell him about Nora. He listens, grinding his teeth back and forth. When I'm finished, he lights one of his Camels to relieve his tension, blowing the smoke toward the nicotine-stained ceiling. "That family ..."

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing." He shakes his head. "I'm sorry for 'em, but we got enough of our own problems."

He takes another deep drag from the smoke, the cherry electric orange. He's nervous and that makes me nervous, makes me afraid to find out what happened at the mall.

"How did it go?" I ask in a small voice.

He purses his lips, contemplating another drag before putting the cigarette out in the sink. He stares out the window before finally turning to me. "I gotta ask you something and I'm not going to be mad, but you gotta be honest."

"Okay."

"Okay," he echoes. "Uh, these pictures you took with this photographer—what kind—" He clears his throat. "What kind of pictures were they, George?"

The silence stretches uncomfortably between us.

"What do you mean?"

"They weren't anything ... special, were they?"

"What do you mean?" I ask again.

His hands go up, his fingers reaching for something, but I don't know what. "Okay, so you had your clothes on?" I cross my arms and look away, my eyes and face burning. "I'm sorry. I hate asking, but when I went down there, this guy was so obviously ..."

"So obviously what?"

"What kind of pictures were they, George?"

"They were just—" I wipe my eyes. "Modeling shots. Professional."

He exhales, says, "Okay," and then tells me how it went at the mall: the guy's willing to return a portion of the money in exchange for the prints because you can't expect a refund without bringing back the goods.

"So you got 'em?" Tyler asks, and my stomach flips, my mind frantic until I remember the last I saw the photos, I was shoving them in my bag, and the last I saw my bag it was crumpled on the side of the road. I left it there.

"No, no, we got it," Tyler says, when I tell him. "It's in the hall closet."

He moves to get it, but I head him off, the sudden rise to my feet wreaking havoc on my throbbing head. My bag is stowed next to the shoes, stained and tattered, dirt and grime embedded into its cloth, rough against my fingers.

The thing is, I don't want to give the photos back.

I want to keep them.

They are special.

They're me.

"George?" he calls.

Maybe they'd just settle for some headshots. I fight with the buckle, a little crushed now. When I finally manage it open, the photographs are gone.

Taken.

It scares Tyler enough he calls the sheriff 's about it.

I sit on the living room couch with my palms pressed against my eyes, wishing that shock of pink had caught anyone else's notice.

That anyone else had found her on that road.

"Useless motherfucker," Tyler mutters after he hangs up.

"What did Watt say?" He doesn't answer. I lower my hands. "Tyler."

"He says that if nothing's happened yet, it probably won't, but I gotta tell you, I don't love the idea of some sick fuck who raped and killed a little girl holding onto your picture—"

"Tyler, come on—"

"And maybe getting in their head they need to come back for the real thing—"

"You're freaking me out!"

"That's because I'm freaked out!" He pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a good minute to weigh all this new and terrible information. "Okay. You know what. If Watt says it's fine, it's probably fine." But I can tell he doesn't believe it. He glances at the bag on the table, then his phone. The door. "I could only take the morning off. I gotta go back to work—"

"Then go."

"So I gotta trust you to be smart."

"Nothing's going to happen to me."

Excerpted from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers. Copyright © 2022 by Courtney Summers. Excerpted by permission of Wednesday Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.