“Scarlet?” a soft voice called out.
“Yeah … ?” Scarlet asked cautiously, hoping she wasn’t so tired she was now hearing things … or worse.
It was Green Gary, with an unexpected invitation.
“Some of us are hanging out in the meeting room. You can join us if you want.”
Scarlet was drained but thought this might be a good opportunity to get some info out of the kids.
“Sure,” she said, opening the door and scooting through the hallway and down the stairs after him.
“What up, paleface?” Tilly asked, mocking Scarlet’s porcelain skin, which appeared even more translucent in her ghostly state.
Ordinarily, Scarlet would have been offended, but looking at Tilly, who resembled one of those puckered, peeling radiation zombies from a cheapo old sci-fi flick, her rigorously sunblocked complexion did pale in comparison. Tilly totally redefined “hot mess” and Scarlet didn’t feel the need to “burn” her any further.
“Can’t we all just get along?” Green Gary asked, coming to Scarlet’s defense.
“It’s okay,” Scarlet responded brusquely. “I’m not here to make friends.”
Polly looked Scarlet over and felt threatened by her casual style and natural beauty, not to mention Green Gary’s overattentiveness toward her.
“Well then, Tartlet,” she chimed in cattily, “what are you doing here?”
“Yes,” Blogging Bianca inquired, her hands poised over an imaginary keyboard like a bloggerazzi. “What is your purpose here?”
It was strangely surreal how Bianca froze after each statement, as if she were on a real-life vlog. The only thing missing was the “play again” arrow over her face.
“I’m looking for someone, actually two people,” Scarlet said softly. “And I don’t know how to find them.”
“Friends or family?” Bianca asked.
“Both,” Scarlet answered.
“Can’t be both. Friends are people you choose to be around and family are people you have to be around,” Bianca said, spinning the idea into a potential blog entry, but then realizing that she needed to at least try to be helpful. “I can post an alert,” she said semi-sincerely, overlooking the fact that everyone she could possibly alert was already in the room.
“What, no milk carton, dumbass?” Andy shouted at Bianca as he worked out some new freestyle tricks on his skateboard. “She needs to actually do something, like look for these girls.”
“I’m hoping the friend can lead me to the family,” Scarlet said. “And I’m running out of time.”
“I see,” Gary said. “Everybody is just a little disappointed. We were kind of hoping you were here for us.”
Scarlet looked around and saw sadness, frustration, loneliness, but not anger.
“I guess we all are waiting for someone to come and save us,” Scarlet concluded.
Scarlet settled under the heavy sheets of the comfy four-poster and had barely drifted off to sleep when her eyes opened again, forced by the moonlight that crept, like a false dawn, up the colored window pane. Her troubled conscience wasn’t helping much either, now totally immune to her Chinese sleeping chants.
The possibility of catching any shut-eye was looking more and more remote now, so she picked up right where she left off, obsessing about her rash decision. Wouldn’t she have been much more help at the hospital than she was trolling around between worlds? And what about all the anxiety she must be causing her mom? Damen? As she turned her face away from the moon’s icy glare, she noticed Charlotte’s old Deadiquette book sitting on the nightstand next to the bed.
Charlotte’s text, she remembered, was different than the rest. Older, if she recalled correctly. She pulled the book she’d been given from under the blanket and began thumbing through each, comparing pages and chapters. She came across the chapter on possession in Charlotte’s book, which was missing from hers.
“Been there, done, that,” Scarlet said, flipping right by the ritual.
She turned all the way to the end of each book, matching page for page, but it seemed the possession stuff was the only difference. Until she got to the very last page. In Charlotte’s book, there was one extra. It looked more like an order form or an application than actual text. Easy to overlook, unless you were specifically looking for it.
The heading on the page read: EARLY DECISION.
Chapter 10
This Is How I Disappear
Always remember that you are absolutely unique.
Just like everyone else.
—Margaret Mead
Timing is everything.
We let some people in and keep others out for all kinds of reasons, most of them having to do with timing. The difference between good timing and bad timing, between making friends or making problems, is usually just a matter of readiness. Dead, alive, or in-between, nothing is more futile than being in the right place at the wrong time.
Petula and Virginia both had taken seats on the bench but were not saying much. Petula noticed the girl looking down at her feet and made a preemptive comment.
“They took my polish off,” Petula said, pointing out the obvious hatchet job so that the little girl wouldn’t have a chance to point it out first.
“So?” Virginia said in her best who-cares tone of voice.
“Well, you can’t go around with ratty-looking feet,” Petula admonished. “If you don’t care about yourself, who’s going to care about you?”
“Aren’t there more important things to worry about?” Virginia asked.
She looked at Petula, some dark roots poking out from under her blond, frazzled hair extensions, and realized that there probably wasn’t anything more important to Petula.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Petula seethed. “When you look good, like I do, you make everyone else around you look good. Beauty matters.”
“I know all about it,” Virginia said a little wearily.
“Oh, really?” Petula spit back condescendingly.
“Yes, really,” Virginia insisted, mocking Petula’s grating voice.
The girls glared at each other, facing off.
“I don’t need a lesson from you about the importance of beauty,” Virginia responded. “You know that picture you get in the frame, the one of the little girl with the perfect face and smile, the one that makes you want to buy the frame?”
“Yeah,” Petula said. “Actually my sister used to keep those pictures in and pretend that she had another sister, not me.”
“Well, that was me,” Virginia said. “From there I went on to be one of the most winning pageant girls around.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Petula sniffed. “I never really had time for that kind of stuff. I was always too busy with my friends, you know, having a social life.”
Petula tried to play it off, but she knew she’d been trumped. She’d secretly wanted to be one of those pageant girls. It really suited her competitive personality, she thought, but her mom felt otherwise. Petula always thought it was some conspiracy Scarlet and her mom came up with to keep her from ever fully realizing her outer swan.
“You have friends?” Virginia asked with a mix of sarcasm and curiosity.
“I have two best friends, in fact,” Petula said, rubbing it in.
“How good for you,” Virginia responded, a little more wistfully this time.
Both girls had taken measure of each other, and after round one they returned to their “corners,” each with a bit more respect for the other. They had more in common than Petula would have expected and more than Virginia preferred to think.
“I take it you never won a Miss Congeniality title,” Petula said after a while, smiling at the tweenager.
“Actually, I don’t even know what I won,” Virginia answered indifferently. “I couldn’t care less anyway.”
“Oh, you care,” Petula said with a smirk. “I’m sure you could have quit any time you wanted.”
Virginia remained silent.
“But you didn’t,” Petula pressed, “did you?”
Petula accepted Virginia’s awkward silence as enough of an answer and turned her focus back where it belonged, on herself, especially her pedicure.
“Look, they didn’t even take it off the whole way,” Petula said, clearly distressed. “I’m never going to find nail polish remover … here.”
After a few seconds, Virginia came through with practical advice.
“You just need to soak your feet in some warm water, peel off the excess polish, and then soak your nails in some lemon juice for naturally white tips,” Virginia offered, easing Petula’s concerns.
“How did you know that?” Petula said in amazement.
“I know lots of stuff,” Virginia said mockingly. “Lots of mindless, unimportant stuff …”
“I think there’s a lot we can learn from each other,” Petula said with a gleam spearing off of her colored contact lens. “You’re going to be the little sister I always wanted!”
With that cold remark, the temperature in the room suddenly plummeted. Both girls tried to hide the unspoken fears that had been lurking under their conversation and slid closer together, each pulling her hospital gown down as far as it would stretch, which was not nearly far enough.
“Damn cotton!” Petula cursed, hunching over slightly. “It has no give.”
Dr. Kaufman, a hot young neurology resident who magically transformed Hawthorne Hospital into General Hospital, came into the room to examine both Kensington girls as Damen kept vigil between them. The doctor started with Petula, examining her as thoroughly as Dr. Patrick and the nurses before had.
Damen laughed a little to himself at the sight of the doctor running his hands along Petula’s arms and legs, checking her skin for rashes. This is the kind of guy she’d really go for, he thought, and was instantly hit by a wave of sadness, realizing she might never have the chance.
The doctor examined Scarlet as well, and Damen felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched Kaufman handle her, performing the required neurological and motor testing. Damen couldn’t help but think that he’d rather be “playing doctor” with Scarlet than watching the real thing. Kaufman held her lids open, shined his penlight in Scarlet’s eyes, and noted his findings on the ever-present clipboards hanging from each bed.
For Damen, these three-times-a-day examinations were almost like online updates tracking the arrival of a plane that had been delayed due to bad weather. If there was any improvement in either girls’ condition, it might mean that Scarlet had been successful, that she was closer to returning to him and closer to living than dying.
“So, what’s the verdict?” Damen said anxiously, pushing for a concrete answer to ease his mind.
“I’m going to be frank with you,” Dr. Kaufman said.
“Please,” Damen replied, picking up Scarlet’s hand and holding it tightly.
“I’m afraid their vitals aren’t as strong as they were yesterday,” Dr. Kaufman said. “And the neurological evaluation is unchanged.”
“What does that mean?” Damen asked naively, knowing damn well what it meant but not wanting to face it.
“It appears that both of their conditions are deteriorating,” Dr. Kaufman said cryptically as he initialed the exam sheet, turned, and left the room.
Damen hung his head over Scarlet and then thought of a million questions he wanted to ask, if only to feel like he was actually doing something. He bolted out of the room after Dr. Kaufman, and saw him dip into another patient’s room at the end of the hall.
He stopped short of the doorway when he heard soft whimpering coming from inside the room. He peeked in and spied Dr. Kaufman beginning a new exam. Then he saw an agonized couple, hovering hopefully over a beautiful young girl, not more than twelve years old, who appeared to be desperately ill. Damen may not have been a doctor, but he could tell she was in trouble. He felt himself on the verge of tears — for the little girl, for Scarlet, or for himself, he could not be sure.
Life’s not fair, Damen realized for the first time in his super-popular, super-connected, super-successful existence as he turned and walked back to Petula and Scarlet’s room.
Scarlet raised her hand just as Ms. Pierce was about to begin her lecture for the day.
“Yes, Scarlet,” the teacher said, acknowledging her.
“I was up late reading my Deadiquette book last night and I understand all of it, except for one thing,” Scarlet explained.
“What’s that?” Ms. Pierce asked.
“Can you please tell me about ‘Early Decision’?” Scarlet requested, preparing for a negative reaction of some sort from the usually genial school marm.
Ms. Pierce’s expression hardened slightly, and she seemed at a loss for words momentarily.
“Early Decision?” she muttered, clearly taken aback. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Tilly, Gary, Bianca, and the rest all looked over at Scarlet with bemused looks on their faces, curious about the fact that the new girl had been able to stump Ms. Pierce, who until now seemed to them to be all-knowing.
“It was in an old Deadiquette book in my room,” Scarlet explained. “The very last page.”
Scarlet held up the application from the back of the room for Ms. Pierce and the whole class to see.
“I know what it means,” Polly called out, breaking the silence and putting her two cents in. “It’s when you decide to leave a party before your boyfriend’s real girlfriend gets there.”
Polly’s analysis sounded a little more biographical than anyone cared to hear and was instantly dismissed by the other students.
“I think it’s when you have to decide if you’re gonna do a lip trick off a shark tank at the zoo,” Andy interjected, bringing his own daredevil perspective to the discussion.
“You are both right,” Ms. Pierce said surprisingly. “In a metaphorical way, of course.”
“Huh?” Scarlet said, voicing what the rest of the class was already thinking.
“Early Decision is a process by which a single student may bypass Dead Ed,” Ms. Pierce explained carefully.
“Oh, is that all?” Tilly asked, her famously impatient personality burning brightly like the harsh UV rays that killed her. “You mean I’ve been waiting around here for nothing?”