Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_03 (3 page)

“What breath,” Eric joked, fist-bumping his cohorts.
“Now, may I proceed?” Markov asked sarcastically.
“Proceed,” Eric proclaimed magnanimously.
Charlotte broke out into a wide grin at Eric’s nerve. She could never be as willfully rebellious as he was, but she had broken a few rules herself and could totally relate. Besides, she loved the way he slung his guitar over his shoulder and how his demo tape poked out of the top of his jacket pocket, ready to be handed over to someone who might give him his big break.
He still had dreams too, she thought. He glanced over at her and nodded a silent hello, locking eyes with her for just a second. To Charlotte, it felt like forever.
“Interns, your work here is done,” Mr. Markov said, uttering the words they’d been longing to hear.
A collective sigh of relief escaped the interns’ mouths.
“And just as we did upon your arrival here,” Markov added, “we will celebrate with a surprise.”
Markov gestured toward the doors and right on cue, they reopened, silently this time. Everyone was speechless, watching the new crop file through the doors.
“Your replacements,” Markov declared.
They marched in one by one, all familiar faces. A new class of Dead Ed graduates ready to man the phones.
“Green Gary!” Pam yelled, waving him over.
“Holy shiitake,” Gary called back.
Charlotte gave him a squeeze on his way over to Pam, and then noticed Paramour Polly, Lipo Lisa, Tanning Tilly, and the rest of them. She looked anxiously to see who would come in next. Her patience was rewarded.
The light that blazed through the doorway completely engulfed the last visitor, who stepped forward tentatively.
Charlotte watched as the light receded, little by little, exposing the petite, angelic figure passing through it.
“Virginia,” Charlotte sighed as they both ran toward each other, smacking into a big bear hug.
Pam joined the hug. Prue tried to resist, but quickly gave in, grabbing hold of the others as they rotated around and around like a supernatural ceiling fan.
“How nice to see you all,” Virginia greeted with total correctness, having internalized the formality that Petula had drilled into her during their short acquaintance.
She was quite the little lady now. Poised, polished, and pretty as ever. Maybe not older, but certainly wiser for her time with Petula and in Dead Ed. She was special.
“All right, people,” Markov belted out to the interns, interrupting the festivities. “Gather your stuff.”
“For?” Prue asked pointedly.
“A little trip,” Markov answered vaguely.
A little trip sounds good, Charlotte thought, and judging from the smiles on everyone else’s faces, they were thinking the same thing. CoCo began to plan her wardrobe immediately, and Call Me Kim, unable to restrain herself from spreading the good news, “dialed” her family.
“Vacation!” Pam yelled, hoping to kick things off spring break-style.
“Not exactly, Pam,” Markov continued. “It’s more like a business trip.”
“We’re going on the road,” Eric exclaimed, with Mike and DJ high-fiving each other behind him like some wannabe roadies.
“But,” Charlotte chimed in skeptically, “you said our work here was done?”
“That’s right,” Markov said, patronizing her just a little. “I said your work here was done.”
“Then where?” Charlotte asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“Pack your mental baggage, people,” Markov announced. “You’re going back.”
Chapter 3 Kill Your Darlings
Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
—Faith Baldwin
Keep the change.
Holding on to someone you know you have to let go of is not just a way to delay the inevitable for them, but for yourself, as well. It protects you from having to make the transition you are about to impose until you are good and ready. Like canceling on an out-of-town guest you’ve been longing to see, but never quite had the time to plan for, it is the convenient, easy way out—for you.
Don’t you need a car seat for her?” Wendy Anderson said, pointing to the inconvenient bundle on Petula’s lap.
“I don’t like the way the shoulder straps crease her clothes,” Petula replied, waiting until Wendy Anderson got situated in the backseat before speeding off.
“Where’s your kid?” Petula asked as if she were referring to an unwanted appendage.
“Day care,” Wendy Anderson snipped.
“Hey, put her socks on; they’re falling off. She needs that pop of pink or else her look won’t work,” Petula said to Wendy Thomas in the front seat.
Wendy pulled the baby’s socks up, but they weren’t straight or even an equal distance above each ankle.
“Do I have to do everything myself?” Petula asked in a huff as she carefully fixed them just so.
This baby doll assignment had become quite popular at Hawthorne as a way of teaching responsibility and counteracting at least a little of the rampant selfishness among students. Considering the battered and stained condition that most of the dolls were returned in, the jury was still out on the experiment.
“Did you write down in the log what your parasite ate last night?” Wendy Thomas asked Petula.
“No, because she didn’t eat. She barely fits into the clothes I just bought her, so she’s detoxing,” Petula said casually. “I won’t have a baby with a baby bump.”
The Wendys were surprised that Petula, in her own way, cared so much about her baby, at least about how she looked anyway. It opened the door to a discussion they’d been having.
“Funny you should mention the whole baby fat thing,” Wendy Anderson added.
“We were thinking that the next big trend could be baby lipo,” Wendy Thomas continued. “We could collect the lard and then use it as a renewable biofuel for cars and buses.”
“It addresses both our foreign oil dependency and epidemic childhood obesity,” Wendy Anderson added. “It’s eco-friendly too.”
Petula was unfazed by The Wendys’ industriousness; in fact, she was barely even listening to them. She was too distracted by the sight of a homeless woman lingering over a Dumpster behind the organic supermarket. Rather than speed away, Petula slowed down and eyed the vagrant as an archer does a bull’s-eye. The Wendys readied to ridicule. If Petula was going to take the time to acknowledge her existence, both girls surmised, they’d better be prepared to mock.
“That’s horrible,” Petula said.
“It rots,” Wendy Thomas said, using all of the protein-bar derived energy she could muster to stop her gagging reflex.
“At least she’s trying to eat healthy,” Wendy Anderson giggled cruelly.
“Shut it!” Petula commanded, pulling over even closer to the depressing scene. “You two couldn’t walk an inch in her shoes.”
“What shoes?” came the clueless query from Wendy Thomas, which was met by stony silence from Petula.
The Wendys locked eyes conspiratorially. The truth was, Petula had been acting very different since she “came back” from her near-death experience, and they were growing increasingly wary of her, even before this outburst. They expected some changes, but they were thinking more along the lines of a semi-dead accent or a more svelte figure thanks to the liquid-only IV diet that coma patients were lucky enough to require, not these wild mood swings, which weren’t obvious to a layman, but to Petula-acolytes like them were huge.
Still, they mostly chalked it all up to something she picked up while she was away, odd conduct that was most likely a direct result of her pseudo-passing. Besides, Petula didn’t talk about the whole experience much. They weren’t sure if it was because she didn’t remember anything or because it was part of a “what happens in the afterlife stays in the afterlife” pact.
Alternatively, it could just be P.P.D.—pre-prom delirium. The Wendys thought that was a more acceptable “diagnosis,”and they were confident that the few weeks they spent in and out of the hospital when Petula was a patient medically qualified them to come to such a conclusion.
Petula stopped the car, spritzed some sugary body spray on the bottom of her shirt, and pulled it up over her glossed lips like a surgical mask to defend against the smell of urine. She got out and approached the woman. The Wendys were amazed. They’d kept the windows rolled up tightly to keep the heat in and the stench out, so the brief chat was impossible to overhear. But the fact that Petula was talking to this person at all was really the issue. Evidence was mounting. Her condition was worsening.
“What is she doing?” Wendy Thomas asked.
“You know, when they diagnosed my grandmother with Alzheimer’s, all her other medical stuff disappeared. The doctor said that sometimes people forget they’re sick and so things resolve,” Wendy Anderson said.
“What are you talking about?” Wendy Thomas asked, quickly losing her patience. “What do you know about anything?”
“I know lots of things… like, there is a stunningly high suicide rate tied to reality TV show contestants, oh, and, you can wallpaper an entire room with the tissue of just one lung…,” Wendy Anderson spouted off proudly. “And, I know that my grandmother had diabetes, got Alzheimer’s, and then forgot she had diabetes and so did her body. It might be the same here. Petula’s near-death might have, you know, given her popularity amnesia.”
“That’s genius!” Wendy Thomas said sincerely. “I don’t know why everyone is so shocked that you were accepted to online college for next year.”
Petula got back in the car, fully aware of what The Wendys were thinking, and moved quickly to defuse the situation.
“What was that about?” Wendy Thomas asked accusingly.
“I asked her where she got that scarf she was wearing,” Petula spouted, feigning indignance. “It looked just like one that might have fallen out of my car last week.”
The Wendys accepted the explanation for the time being, but Petula was angry that she’d let herself get carried away like that. This kind of schizophrenic behavior was getting harder for her to keep under wraps. She could neither understand nor control it.
As soon as Petula pulled away from the curb, Wendy Anderson received a foreboding emergency text.
“Petula,” she said, “you aren’t going to like this.”
“Out with it,” Petula demanded.
“Someone spotted that transfer student, Darcy, wearing the same sweater that you have on now!” Wendy Anderson chirped, fishing for a reaction.
Petula made what she was wearing a status update on each of her social networking sites every day so that no one would wear the same thing that she had on. Everyone knew that, except, apparently, for the new girl. Or maybe, Petula was thinking, it was intentional.
“It’s the same color too,” Wendy Thomas added. “Reportedly.”
Petula had nothing but hate for Darcy, even though she didn’t really know her, and no one seemed to know much about the new girl, except that she’d recently come to Hawthorne from Gorey High. That on its own was enough to put her right at the top of Petula’s Out list, but she’d had a bad feeling about Darcy since she’d arrived at Hawthorne. It was a gut feeling, much like her instinctive aversion to buying jewelry from the home shopping channels. The Wendys, on the other hand, may not have liked Darcy either, but they secretly liked that Petula was threatened by her.
Petula pulled over, stopped the car again, got out, and opened the trunk, which was filled with plastic bags packed with clothes of all sorts. One more thing to alphabetize in the “crazy file,” The Wendys thought. It was becoming pretty clear that Petula was two garments short of a runway show.
“Was the dry cleaner’s closed?” Wendy Anderson called out the rear window.
“My closets are bursting and I think Harlot is stealing my clothes,” Petula offered. “I don’t want to leave anything lying around.”
The Wendys nodded in unison and waited patiently in the car. This seemed plausible. Scarlet had been looking better lately, they grudgingly admitted to themselves.
Petula rifled through the bags until she found a suitably fashionable and competitive change of clothes, pulled off her crewneck sweater, and right there on the street replaced it with a plum-colored cashmere cardigan. She was never worried about making a public display of her assets because Petula believed wholeheartedly that you should only be embarrassed if you had something to hide. She, on the other hand, was perfect and was always happy to flaunt it. The world was her dressing room. That much had not changed.
Scarlet was working feverishly as she stepped around her cluttered bedroom; piles of her weathered, worn, and otherwise “artfully destroyed” one-of-a-kind pieces of clothing were strewn everywhere. She’d decided it was time to cast off her old self, and she was making fast work of it to reduce the pain.
At first Scarlet had picked through her closets and drawers carefully, like a miner sifting for diamonds, but before long, she was grabbing armfuls of outfits that had once been precious to her and tossing them indiscriminately to the ground, prepping them for a trip to Goodwill. She could just about hear Petula walking by her open bedroom door and cracking yet again: “Is that your closet or a time machine?”
For a change, Scarlet felt, Petula might have a point.
“Sometimes vintage,” Scarlet thought to herself, “is just old.”
This was a realization that Scarlet had come by hard. She’d once crafted her outfits strictly for her own pleasure. The way she chose to dress had been a real act of pride, maybe even defiance. Not so much now, when everything she wore would turn up in knockoff versions on underclassmen a few days later, but not that long ago. She could remember being stared at, or worse, laughed at for her “look.” Oddly, she missed that part of it. Much like having a personal assistant to prescreen potential friends, it had helped her to weed out the people she would never want to associate with. Besides, she felt that girls in velour tracksuits with chain store logos splashed across their asses had no right to say she looked bad.
What those girls, especially the ones who could afford to dress well, would never understand is that there is a big difference between having a sense of fashion and a sense of style. One comes from magazines, from what you’re told; the other from your own imagination, what you feel, she thought as she added to the mound below her.
Revisiting all her old issues and foraging through her old clothes were becoming more and more commonplace for Scarlet these days. She wasn’t sure if it was an early spring-cleaning bug she’d come down with, her pathological fear of boredom, or something much deeper. With school nearly over and Damen away at college, she had much too much time to think. And one of the things she had been thinking about quite a bit was Damen. She would have much preferred to be cleaning up for his visit, but he had exams and couldn’t make it home for Valentine’s Day.