Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_03 (10 page)

“Out of all the places to do an internship, you picked here? You could be anywhere doing something really cool.”
Damen was stunned that Scarlet would diminish his achievement. They both loved the station and barely could have dreamed about working there. At the very least, Damen thought, she should have been happy that he was going to be home for the semester.
“I don’t want to be anywhere, I want to be with you,” Damen said. “I thought that was what you wanted too.”
Scarlet was now at a total loss for words, but her silence was speaking to Damen loud and clear. It didn’t get any better when she finally piped up.
“I am so tired of you thinking that you know what I want,” she said.
He felt like he was intruding on her, as if she didn’t want him around. It was now completely obvious to him, but he didn’t understand why.
“Scarlet, are you seeing someone else?” Damen asked.
Chapter 10 Nobody but You
Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
—Albert Einstein
We all fall down.
They call it falling for someone for a reason. Like some silent movie banana peel, love can trip you up and bring you down flat on your back when you least expect it. Either you will bounce right up, undaunted, or become paralyzed. Either way, you will carry the reminder of it forever. Whether it leaves a tiny scar or a permanent injury, only the future can tell.
That’s it,” Petula said calmly, despite the excitement of her eureka moment. “It is so obvious.”
It wasn’t exactly Stephen Hawking intuiting the theory of Everything, but it was as close to an epiphany as Petula was likely to get.
“That was hard work,” CoCo exhaled, acknowledging how tough it had been to burrow into Petula’s subconscious and leave a fashion mantra with her.
Petula needed some direction, some greater purpose for her late-night escapades, and CoCo was just the right soul to provide it. Suddenly, it all made sense to her.
“Look good,” she recited, with CoCo mouthing along from a chair beside her bed, “feel good.”
Her creative juices flowing and mind racing, Petula snuck into Scarlet’s bedroom and scooped up the last bit of possible giveaways piled on her floor. Petula planned to fulfill their potential and carried them back to her room, dumping them on top of her own stack. She winced slightly at the thought of her fine threads mixing with Scarlet’s but felt totally able to justify it as part of her new calling.
Then she headed for the guest room, which was next to her mom’s bedroom. It was typically spare, cheaply carpeted, and underfurnished, with a few old pictures, figurines, and paintings no one wanted. It was a holding cell for stuff with just enough sentimentality to keep, but not meaningful enough to display.
Petula walked over to the closet and stood before it for a few moments before reaching for the handle. She opened the door like a coffin lid, slowly and respectfully, and took very shallow breaths through her mouth, hoping to avoid the musty odor that wafted from the enclosure. The smell of mildew passed quickly, and she began rifling through the garments hanging in front of her: a rack full of men’s clothing, all but forgotten since her dad took off, leaving his wardrobe—and his family—behind.
As Petula pulled each piece forward—overcoats, cardigans, suit jackets, pants, shirts, ties, most still in the plastic from the dry cleaner’s—she realized that they hadn’t been forgotten at all. She could recall in greatest detail watching him walk slowly down the stairs wearing the cardigan on weekend mornings, the suit and tie as he rushed out the door to work each day, the pajamas he slipped into each night before reading her a bedtime story, the bathrobe he wore as she watched him shave with the old-fashioned brush and soap, and the powdery smell of his aftershave that filled the bathroom right afterward. As she pressed her nose to the collar, she wasn’t sure if it was the actual aroma or the memory of it that still lingered after all these years. It didn’t matter, she thought; she could smell it just the same.
When she was younger, she could remember arguing with her mother about keeping his things. Petula would accuse her mother of hanging on to the past, to bad memories that would only keep her from moving on in her life. To Petula, her father’s leaving was like a death—maybe even worse because it was voluntary. It was something to be gotten over and forgotten. But now, she was overjoyed and comforted that they’d kept everything. And not just kept, but preserved, like some kind of a museum exhibit of their family’s past.
Petula, however, was more into living memorials and decided, with some subconscious prompting from CoCo, that it was time to resurrect them. Enough time had passed that almost everything in the closet was back in style. She gently gathered the old suits from the wooden hangers and carried them to her room.
“I know just the guy for them,” CoCo thought as she watched Petula add the garments to the pile.
The scene was set. Wendy Anderson, Wendy Thomas, and their new best friend, Darcy, were parked and ready to catch the perpetrator. The Wendys brought Darcy along primarily for third-party verification. If any of this ever leaked, no one would believe them without her corroboration. They donned their undercover ‘70s Bond Girl outfits, an inspired choice, and were now waiting for Petula to arrive.
“She’s not the same,” Wendy Anderson said, justifying the snooping.
“I think she’s slowly trying to replace us, phase us out,” Wendy Anderson blurted. “Well, maybe she’ll be the one phased out.”
“You guys are so right,” Darcy spouted. “She’s probably down here auditioning dropouts for a new crew.”
It was something both Wendys had been thinking, but never discussed openly, until now.
“I can’t wait to see who our competition is,” Wendy Anderson said, but it was pretty clear from her expression that she didn’t mean it.
“That’s loser talk,” Darcy chided as the Wendys remained on high alert, much like betrayed lovers waiting to witness the cheating firsthand. “You are The Wendys! You have no competition.”
Both Wendys were so insecure about themselves and their friendship with Petula that they were always in a state of paranoia, and Petula liked it that way. She knew instinctively that both girls were strictly middle management, bereft almost entirely of leadership skills, so it was easy to keep them off-balance and constantly worrying about their place in her orbit. They supplied Petula with adulation and in return were allowed to sail along in her slipstream.
Their roles had become so entrenched, their social status—even their futures—so entangled with hers, they felt they had not just a right, but also an obligation to get to the bottom of Petula’s aberrant behavior. She might be fine turning all do-goody from her coma, but they were the ones who would have to answer for it. And they found themselves unprepared. If somebody had to get knocked off the popularity pedestal, it was not going to be them.
The Wendys were bolstered by Darcy’s pep talk and saw in her the motivational qualities that they were sorely missing. Darcy was ready to reign.
Pam and Prue watched this tentative mating ritual between The Wendys and Darcy with great curiosity. Darcy had a familiar air about her, and not in a good way. Pam and Prue had developed a fondness, if not a respect, for Petula ever since the Virginia situation and didn’t appreciate some new queen wannabe trying to exploit her at a vulnerable time.
“There she is!” Wendy Thomas yelled, as if she’d just discovered a rare, endangered species while on safari.
Living and dead alike watched as Petula made her way down the dark alley and toward a group of homeless kids. This amazed The Wendys, as Petula would never walk toward a group of absolute strangers without some kind of advance fanfare prepared. Pam and Prue, however, could see that she was not alone. CoCo was guiding her.
Petula plopped down the sea-green garbage bag she was toting and proceeded to size up each stranger with a tape measure. She sighed with relief when none of the haggard and undernourished girls measured bigger than a size two. Then, she reached into her bag again and again, like some kind of sartorial Santa, mixing and matching pieces of clothing into outfits for each slightly puzzled, but grateful, stranger.
“It’s drive-by styling!” Wendy Anderson exclaimed, convulsing ever so slightly as she reached to the dashboard to steady herself. It was as if it was something she’d been suspecting, something she’d dreaded, even.
“Looks like it to me,” Wendy Thomas said, dumbfounded.
“She’s recruiting a Petula army,” Darcy added, a tinge of grudging admiration in her voice.
“And we’ve been dishonorably discharged!” Wendy Anderson huffed.
This confirmed their worst fears. Petula was making these people into what she wanted, just like she’d done with them at first. She imprinted her brand, gave them a look and something to be proud of. They knew the feeling. They could still remember their own drive-by stylings, Petula showing up at their homes freshman year, telling them what to wear, what to eat, and when to talk.
For their basic training, Wendy Anderson remembered how Petula stripped them of their dignity, broke their spirits, and then built them back up again in her own image. It was like beauty boot camp. They did everything she said, and now look where it got them—staked out in a dark alley, watching their replacements being molded and sculpted by the master right before their false eyelashes.
The Wendys were hurt and jealous all at once. Petula was putting her personal stamp on these hard-luck cases, a blessing they had earned. Almost as importantly, she was giving away stuff they wanted, mostly anyway.
“She’s redefining streetwear as we know it,” Wendy Thomas hyperbolized, as if she were witnessing the birth of the universe.
Petula took care, as CoCo had “suggested,” not just to dump the clothes off, but to really think its placement through. She was there for almost an hour, doing and redoing the looks until she got them just right. Until her subjects were totally unrecognizable. She transformed them from homeless casual to Dumpster Chic.
“Nobody will ever believe this,” Wendy Anderson stammered.
“That,” Darcy crowed, pulling out her digital camera, “is what night vision is for.”
Darcy began snapping away with far more success than The Wendys had the night before, documenting the event like a crime scene photographer, reviewing the JPEGs in the viewfinder, and deleting shots she couldn’t “use,” whatever that meant.
The bad vibe Pam and Prue had gotten from Darcy initially was turning seismic. She seemed to them to be absolutely giddy as she saved shot after shot.
“Check that out?” Darcy said, focusing her lens on two teary-eyed but suddenly quite fashionable young girls locked in an embrace with Petula.
“They’re touching her.”
The Wendys gasped in unison at the whole skeevious affair.
Petula was treating these charity cases as equals, which made them peers to The Wendys, as well. It was this involuntary downward mobility that was the last straw.
“After all you guys have done for her,” Darcy said, her voice laced with pity.
“Yeah, after all we’ve done for her,” Wendy Anderson repeated groggily, as if she was just emerging from a state of mourning.
“Yeah,” Wendy Thomas agreed, shaking off her malaise as well.
“Time to make a change, girls,” Darcy offered, putting her arms around both of them, as they walked back to the car. “Petula already has.”
Chapter 11 The Marble Index
I saw it glitter as I grew and love did what I never knew
I thought this place was heaven sent but now it’s just a monument
—She & Him
Past lives.
There are many ways to be haunted, not all of them supernatural. From photo albums to love letters, the memory of bad choices, broken promises, lost loves, and shattered dreams can often linger far longer than the glow of satisfaction from our greatest accomplishments. Indeed, the most frightening ways to be haunted may be in the many ways we haunt ourselves.
Scarlet manipulated her old key and wiggled it just so, prompting the heavy wooden door with lead glass to open slightly. She jammed her recently unretired boot in the door, gathered her bag and the rest of her stuff, and pushed herself inside.
It was such a pain opening IdentiTea by herself on Saturdays, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She got to take advantage of the acoustics without anyone else around. During her shifts, she often did sets that became wildly popular, but she much preferred to play guitar to an empty house. In fact, before Damen went off to school, they would meet up and play together, the only two souls in the joint, but to them it felt like they were the only two in the world.
She loved how dramatic the room was with its majestic chandeliers and large carved wood features. It was such a gorgeous open space with daylight filtering in through floor-to-ceiling lead windows, illuminating the canvas artwork, crushed velvet jewel-toned booths, wooden chairs, and intricate beamed cathedral ceiling that cast incredibly expressive shadows. The café was her place, a direct reflection of her style. It looked, she felt, the way the Dead Ed kids always saw it.
People loved it too, and came to get turned on to different music, films, and clothing. However unintentional, Scarlet was becoming a big influence in school and outside, as kids from far away carpooled to spend their Friday nights wherever she went. She was like a local celebrity, in that respect, and definitely had her followers.
Scarlet threw her bag on the counter and flicked the chandeliers on. One by one, they lit up, each with mixed jewel-toned crystals that reflected around the entire room. It made for the most amazing light show in town.
Scarlet headed up to the stage and got her guitar out—she had been neglecting it as much as she’d been neglecting everything and everyone else in her life. Then, after putting her leather-studded strap around her neck, she started thinking about Damen. She was angry with him for sharing her song with the world, or at least with the radio station, but also flattered that he thought it was good enough to enter. It was a deliriously romantic thing to do, and it showed that he really did believe in her. The thing was, Scarlet liked to do things on her own terms.
She plopped herself down on a carved wooden stool with a deep-red crushed-velvet cushion and started strumming. She hooked her iPod up to the PA system and scrolled through her playlist until she found the perfect six-string workout. She started into Agent Orange’s surf punk classic “Too Young to Die,” an old favorite that she’d been listening to a lot lately. As Scarlet shredded away with gleeful abandon, she could feel the tension begin to leave her body.