Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (31 page)

W
hen Mrs. McCracken informed Priscilla that she was about to be expelled for “gross misconduct” and lying, Priscilla became eerily calm.

“Then we have nothing more to say to each other, Mrs. McCracken,” she said.

“I’ll be talking to your parents soon, so I just wanted to prepare you.”

I’ll be gone by the time you speak to my parents
, Priscilla thought.

Priscilla walked calmly to her car, drove home, then went straight up to her room, where she sat on her bed and thought systematically about her options. As she surveyed her girlish surroundings—the clutter of nail polish and perfume on her dresser, the Our Lady of Sorrows throw pillows, the high-heeled, shoplifted shoes that dotted the landscape of her floor like pointy little islands—Priscilla reflected that everything around her already seemed like a superficial movie set that would soon be dismantled because the story was over. The person who had lived in this bedroom—the girl who was about to play the lead in the school play, who tutored her peers as a National Honor Society member, who received A’s in advanced-placement
courses and was probably going to attend an elite college in some exotic location: this girl had to disappear fast. There was no use mourning her; it was simply over.

Priscilla had to reinvent herself. Now she had to become someone who was on the run.

There was no point trying to convince her mother and Tom to argue her case with Mrs. McCracken or asking them to get a lawyer—the approach Nikki and Danielle would almost certainly take. For one thing, Priscilla suspected that her stepfather secretly
hoped
that something like this would happen to her so he could lecture her sternly about moral values while secretly gloating about her misfortune. And her real father was no help at all: the last she had heard, he was either in Switzerland or the South of France. She didn’t expect to hear from him until Christmas, when he would probably send a package of gifts from overseas. Well, she wouldn’t be around to open it this time.

Acting on an impulse to get moving, Priscilla jumped up, opened her closet door, and began stuffing pants and sweaters into a duffel bag. Rummaging in her closet, she pulled out her favorite winter and summer clothes—shorts, sundresses, a Calvin Klein bikini. As she dropped the clothes into the bag, ideas took shape—a vision of herself to replace the identity she had just lost.

I’m a star
, she told herself.
I should he in Hollywood
.

She imagined the story they would write about her in
People
magazine someday: “After being kicked out of a Catholic girls school in Michigan, Priscilla Barkley threw her Marc Jacobs sandals in the backseat of her car and made her way west—to Los Angeles. Within a week she was spotted by a brilliant young director who decided to take a risk on an unknown talent, casting
her as the lead in his new film,
Runaway Hottie
. All we can say is, thank you, thank you, Our Lady of Sorrows, for expelling Priscilla Barkley so we can admire her where she belongs—on the big screen!”

Within fifteen minutes, Priscilla had packed for her new life. She headed downstairs, dragging her overstuffed duffel bag behind her.

To her annoyance, Tom suddenly appeared at the foot of the stairs, heading toward her. What was her stepfather doing home from work so early? He stood aside and looked obviously impatient as he waited for her to pass.

“Running away?” he joked, eyeing the duffel bag.

“These are just costumes for the drama club,” Priscilla lied. “We have rehearsal tonight.”

At the bottom of the staircase, Priscilla noticed her mother’s purse perched in its usual spot on a side table next to an assortment of scarves and gloves.

Priscilla heard her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen. Glancing around to make sure Tom was out of sight, she carefully removed her mother’s wallet from the purse. She was in luck: her mother had been to the cash machine that day. Priscilla hastily grabbed a wad of twenty-dollar bills and a Visa card and stuffed them in her pocket. She imagined the argument that would ensue between Tom and her mother later: Tom would want to file a police report for theft. Her mother would protest, saying, “I’d rather have my daughter steal from me than from someone else. She could end up in jail!” Her stepfather would eventually win the argument, but by then she
would already be well on her way to her new life in Hollywood.

Priscilla left the house hastily and discovered that the weather had turned cold and winterish. A sleety mix of ice and rain pelted her face as she made her way to her car.

She opened the door of her aging Ford, tossed her duffel bag in the backseat, started the engine, and left her house without a backward glance.

She already felt free. She had to leave this place—this loser state with its icy rain and depressing gray skies and bad memories.

Priscilla briefly contemplated calling Nikki, then changed her mind. The last she had heard from Nikki was a terse message that said, “I’m not allowed to talk to anyone right now. I’m totally grounded. Danielle and I are both suspended from school.”

Priscilla knew that she herself had received the harshest discipline—expulsion—not so much for what she did, but for the fact that she
lied
to Mrs. McCracken about it. True, she had lied—but didn’t it mean anything to Nikki and Danielle that they had promised
never
to reveal anything about their secret club? At the first hint of pressure, they had caved. Neither one of them had a backbone.

Spoiled losers
, Priscilla thought bitterly.
Their parents have probably already hired about five lawyers apiece. They’ll probably slip a “special school donation” into Mrs. McCracken’s hand to make sure she doesn’t turn them in to the police
.

Nikki and Danielle had betrayed her, and Priscilla was done with them. She told herself that she would never again think about her false friends, the Ladies of the Lake.

But as she headed down traffic-clogged Woodward Avenue, Priscilla felt something disturbing—the momentary, but intensely
creepy, sense that reality was merely a movie projected through her eyes—that if she turned around too quickly to see where she had just been, there might be nothing behind her but the cold emptiness of space.

“Stop it!” she reprimanded herself aloud, turning on the radio to distract herself from her own thoughts. “Get a grip, Priscilla.”

In her haste to leave town, she had forgotten something important. She had no itinerary. Priscilla knew she was heading west, but that was all. Remembering that her mother had stashed a U.S. highway map somewhere in the car, she opened the glove compartment, found the tattered map, and shook it open.

A brown object landed softly on the seat. Priscilla gasped.

It was a large, dead moth whose desiccated body had probably been nestled in the folds of the map for months.

Bury all things you find dead
.

Three years ago, when Priscilla had made up the rule “Bury all things you find dead” for Dolores Lambert’s benefit, it had been partly a joke and partly a self-serving whim. She didn’t understand
why
being in an enclosed space with a dead creature—
any
dead creature—gave her a panic attack, but she was sick of seeing dead spiders lying around the freshman locker room, and making Dolores bury them was both sadistic and useful. Now Priscilla felt ironically compelled to carry out her own little ritual whenever she found herself sitting near a dead creature—a fly on a windowsill or a moth on a car seat. Something about the tiny, motionless bodies filled her with revulsion. Lately, it was all she could do to make herself drive past the squashed raccoons and squirrels that lay rotting on the shoulder of the highway. She longed to drag them off the pavement and cover them with dirt.

The moth lay brown and vulnerable upon the velour car seat, and Priscilla felt a familiar light-headed, nauseous sensation. She abruptly turned off Woodward Avenue and drove into the parking lot of a grocery store just as a mixture of ice and rain drummed against the windshield.

With a shaking hand, she gripped one of the moth’s thin, lifeless wings between her fingernails. She attempted to lift the moth from the seat, but only succeeded in detaching a wing from its body. For a second, Priscilla felt as if she might retch all over the steering wheel, so she pushed open the car door and burst out into the rain, where a cold downpour upon her scalp shocked her out of her panic.

I’ve got to get out of here
, she thought.

Braced and numbed by the cold, Priscilla reached back into the car and grabbed the moth’s body and amputated wing. She walked to a strip of grass between the parking lot and sidewalk, where she knelt down, raked her manicured fingernails through the wet dirt, and slapped the crushed moth down into the earth. After covering its body with mud and bits of grass, she looked up into the blurry, electric eyes of the rush-hour traffic.
I wonder if anyone from school is sitting there, watching me right at this moment
, she thought.
I wonder if Mom has realized I’m gone yet
.

Despite the fact that she was chilled and soaking wet, Priscilla felt better now that the moth was buried. For the moment, she was safe—ready to continue her journey into her new life.

Priscilla walked back to her car, turned the ignition, and slowly disappeared into the black river of traffic.

I
didn’t realize you’re a nurse, Mrs. Joyce,” Mrs. McCracken said jovially. “My mama was a nurse, so I considered that profession myself. But get me around a needle, and I faint right splat on the floor.”

Gilda pictured Mrs. McCracken lying unconscious on a hospital floor with a syringe in her hand. Mrs. Joyce offered a polite, rueful chuckle at the anecdote. She still wore her olive-green hospital scrubs and hospital ID badge, having just rushed over to Our Lady of Sorrows from work.

“I told myself, ‘Shirley, you are not going to do a patient any good if you are unconscious!’”

Neither Gilda nor her mother was particularly happy to be sitting in the headmistress’s office after school. Mrs. McCracken had given no reason for requesting a meeting at such short notice, but Gilda crossed her fingers that it had something to do with thanking her for her investigative work.

Mrs. McCracken clapped her hands together as if signaling that the time for small talk had ended. She pulled open a folder labeled
JOYCE, GILDA
.

Gilda sensed that something bad was afoot. Perhaps this would turn out to be a meeting about some unpleasant disciplinary matter rather than an exciting session filled with gossip and admiration of Gilda’s investigative skills.

“Gilda, sweetie,” Mrs. McCracken drawled, “there have been a few concerns about your performance in school recently.”

Gilda’s stomach tightened. Mrs. Joyce turned her head slowly to regard her daughter with an expression of stifled horror.